Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking [Hardcover]

Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking explores the relationship among geopolitics, religion, and social theory. It argues that during the postcolonial and post-Holocaust era, Jewish thinkers in different parts of the world were influenced by Global South thought and mobilized this rich set of intellectual resources to confront the assimilation of normative Judaism by various incipient neo-colonial powers. By tracing the historical and conceptual lineage of this overlooked conversation, this book explores not only its epistemological opportunities, but also the internal contradictions that led to its ultimate unraveling, especially in the post-9/11 world.

Introduction: The Past Was Worse (and We Miss It) 1. Jewish Thought, Postcolonialism, and Decoloniality: The Geo-Politics of a Barbaric Encounter 2. The Narrative of Barbarism: Western Designs for a Globalized North 3. Negative Barbarism: Marxist Counter-Narrative in the Provincial North 4. Transitional Barbarism: Levinas's Counter-Narrative and the Global South 5. Positive Barbarism: Memmi's Counter-Narrative in a Southern Network 6. Barbaric Paradoxes: Zionism from the Standpoint of the Borderlands 7. After 9/11: New Barbarism and the Legacies in the Global South Epilogue: Duped by Jewish Suffering (Analectical Interjections)

Decolonial Judaism is both an intellectual tour-de-force and a pointed critique of the Jewish historical story presented primarily as a Western European event & . In the contemporary moment where colonialism still hovers in the background and decolonialism continues to chart a new and richer redirection in Western thought, Slabodskys Decolonial Judaism is an important contribution to this project. (Steven Leonard Jacobs, Religious Studies Review, Vol. 43 (04), December, 2017)

This is an extraordinary book. Its perhaps even ironic and poignant, given the rising antisemitism unl#à