Exchanges with Atalia Omer: ReOrienting Jewishness

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.7.2.0182
• Published date: 14 December 2022
• Date: 14 December 2022
• Pages: 182-191
• Author: Santiago Slabodsky

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

Hofstra University

EXCHANGES WITH ATALIA OMER:

REORIENTING JEWISHNESS

Santiago Slabodsky

This introduction to the contributions of Atalia Omer, and to the commentators of

her landmark book Days of Awe, starts with a question that might already be on the

reader’s mind. Why is ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies exploring

the lessons from an ethnography of American Jews? For those well-acquainted

with the journal, this should not come as a complete surprise. Since its inception,

ReOrient has been challenging disciplinary and identity silos in order to both

understand global hegemonies, and to contest them. One of the crucial contribu-

tions of ReOrient is to constitute a critical space in which to deeply interrogate the

reified binaries created by scientific positivism and by secularist narratives. The

intellectual project of this journal enables us to ReOrient epistemological inter-

ventions, so as to collaborate in bringing in a decolonial future beyond the omni-

present “redemptive” modern/colonial “telos of the West” (Sayyid 2014: 11–14;

Editorial Board 2015: 5–7).

This forum seeks to explore how Omer’s sophisticated and ground-breaking

“critical caretaking” of the social movements emerging in one of the centers of the

world, led by one of the most allegedly uniformly “successful” Westernized popu-

lations, can help us break down geopolitical barriers (Omer 2019: 122–42). After

all, before reading Omer’s innovative text, a reader may have difficulty disagree-

ing with the fact that Jews in North America (historically anteceded by British and

Dutch Caribbean Jews [Rosenblatt, 2022]) have for centuries been a test case for an

(often difficult) assimilation of normative Jewry into whiteness. In addition, since

the Holocaust – when the center of Jewish normativity definitively left Europe

– North America has become without question one of the leading spaces, along

with occupied Palestine, of both Jewish Westernization and of the consolidation

of a hegemonic model of Jewishness across the world. This is particularly impor-

tant when many readers of ReOrient (including Omer, the commentators, Editorial

Board members, and this writer) are deeply suspicious of theory that is universal-

ized from centers of power/knowledge without considering geopolitical conditions.

This is precisely where one of the crucial contributions of Omer’s book, sub-

titled Re-Imagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, emerges with

DOI:10.13169/reorient.7.2.0182