UC Irvine

“A scarecrow to the nations:” Engulfment and Historicity in Jewish Writing takes up Jewish writing in the United States and Israel-Palestine from the perspective of how it understands temporality and history. Drawing on examples from American sociology and poetry, as well as historiographies of Zionism and the academic field of Jewish Studies, I trace a discourse in which historical thinking is imbricated in Euro-American hegemony, thus inspiring a certain level of ambivalence. At the same time, this dissertation also attends to moments of anti-historical thought in Jewish writing. In the second half of the dissertation, I address the context of Israel-Palestine. This move provides a compelling point of comparison to the American case, as Zionism was/is often thought of as the only genuine version of Jewish politics in the modern era. Zionism thus presents other unique discursive intersections of historicity and power.