Shortly after his introduction, Leopold Bloom visits Dlugacz a “ferreteyed porkbutcher” to buy some sausages and kidneys for breakfast.Footnote ¹ Dlugacz is of supposedly Hungarian-Jewish descent, like Bloom’s father, and has obvious Zionist sympathies. In the butcher shop, he wraps Bloom’s sausages in a page that advertises a “model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberius.”Footnote ² Bloom reads the advert and, echoing Marlow’s version of European colonialism in Heart of Darkness (1899), surmises, “Nothing doing, still an idea behind it.”Footnote ³ Later on in the chapter, Bloom remembers some of the other Zionist propaganda sheets that are used to wrap up his meaty breakfast: “Agendath Netaim: planters’ company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees.”Footnote ⁴ But, at this point in Ulysses (1922), Bloom’s mood changes and he dismisses Dlugacz as an “enthusiast.”Footnote ⁵

In a letter to Padriac Colum, concerning the Celtic Revival, James Joyce stated that “I dislike all enthusiasms.”Footnote ⁶ As Joyce knew better than most, “enthusiasm” had a particularly long history as an insult. An “enthusiast,” historically, mistakes the volatility of human emotion for the timelessness of God’s message. Dlugacz’s “planters’ company,” from the Hebrew, was actually Agudath Netaim, but Joyce preferred to enclose Dlugacz’s Zionist “agenda” (as well as his sausages and kidneys) in the pun “Agendath.”Footnote ⁷ All enthusiasts have an agenda.

I realize that by starting with Joyce’s Ulysses I may be accused of promoting a “literary-centered analysis” as if the imagination were mere “rhetoric” (contra Steven Robins).Footnote ⁸ But what we learn from even a cursory reading of Ulysses is just how deeply imbricated Joyce was in the politics of his time. Joyce rejected a nationalist response to English colonial rule as he understood better than anyone the dangers and subtleties of European racism and anti-Semitism. He was well aware that Irish nationalism, drawing deep from its European roots, was profoundly suspicious of national outsiders (often figured as “Jews”) that merely replaced one form of (colonial) racism with another. Joyce’s response to the impasse of anticolonial nationalism was to engage with the kind of Mediterranean Jewish diasporic experience (Trieste rather than Marseilles) that, as Nils Roemer notes, contained “Europe, Asia, Africa” just as Molly and Leopold Bloom did.Footnote ⁹ For Joyce, the diasporic Blooms, the very embodiment of ambivalence, transgressed the certainties of sexuality, race, religion, and nation. What was left, after such transgressions, was the messiness of Leopold Bloom’s consciousness that moved from “an idea” that might resolve such uncertainties to the suspicion that such too-easy resolutions could only be the work of an “enthusiast.”

Mood affects politics. Michael Rothberg’s response ends with a call to “bridge those spaces in our own thinking actionism and activist thought”: “We need to be in the streets, in the classrooms, and in the libraries,” which I can only describe as a form of activist sublime.Footnote ¹⁰ To be sure, “enthusiast” in sceptical Europe has a different meaning from that in the United States where “enthusiast” has never been an insult. Adorno might well have been the most pessimistic of thinkers, who focuses on failure (Stalinism, Nazism, US globalism) as Vivek Freitas notes (after Frederic Jameson).Footnote ¹¹ But Adorno also regarded an unresolved theory/praxis as a marker of “humaneness.” My essay focuses on this all too ordinary “humaneness” in contrast to a range of binaries that diminish the human.Footnote ¹²

The work of Edward Said, as global humanist, enriches greatly the dialogue between Jewish and postcolonial studies. Why else did Said evoke Adorno in his much-quoted final interview, where he described himself as the “last Jewish intellectual”? “You don’t know anyone else. All your other intellectuals are now suburban squires. From Amos Oz to all these people here in America. So I’m the last one. The only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: I’m a Jewish-Palestinian.”Footnote ¹³ That is why Said’s late work turned or returned to other “last Jewish intellectuals” such as Freud in Freud and the Non-European (2003), Erich Auerbach in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), and to Adorno in On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006). Adorno, Auerbach, and Freud are all radically unhoused from a European culture that has been destroyed. Here the affiliations with Said, exiled from Palestine, are obvious. In foregrounding these Jewish intellectuals, all in the name of exilic singularity and dissidence, Said highlights those aspects of postcolonial studies, especially the histories of European fascism and anti-Semitism (and by implication their impact on the Palestinian people), which had hitherto been missing. But the journey from the “last sky” in Palestine to the “last Jewish intellectual” in New York is not straightforward.Footnote ¹⁴

Said’s self-designation as a “Jewish-Palestinian” rather than “new [Palestinian] Jew” refuses a supersessionist narrative precisely because such a narrative would reinforce the primacy of Jewish history. Aamir Mufti’s use of “fascist” (following the “German” model) as applied to Israel (as Jewish State) could not be further from the spirit of late Said. It is a form of supersessionism tout court. Rothberg does not address the “fascist” question directly except to argue that it is part of a wider critique that includes the Palestinian leadership and accounts for the asymmetrical and overweening power of the State of Israel. But the German model of “fascism,” as applied to Israel (as Jewish State), is not critique.Footnote ¹⁵ At his weakest, Rothberg notes that “Mufti’s responses” are “after all, in an interview and not an essay or book” as if this matters when “thinking actionism and activist thought” are supposedly one and the same.Footnote ¹⁶ My focus on the interview is precisely because it is a form of actionism and is in stark contrast to Mufti’s and Rothberg’s exemplary scholarship.

The politics of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Edward Said’s subtly political late work both demonstrate, in their very different ways, what has been called the “powers of diaspora.”Footnote ¹⁷ As John McLeod rightly notes, diaspora can be deeply conservative and imbricated in historical narratives concerning a timeless exile from an autochthonous “homeland.” As my longer work shows, however, “diaspora” can also be understood as a disruptive state that challenges fundamentally categorical thinking.Footnote ¹⁸ What is at stake here is the extent to which “diaspora space” (after Avtar Brah) is permitted to both Jews and postcolonials in the “colonial present” (pace Derek Gregory). McLeod expresses succinctly why diaspora is contested as a consequence of “privileging the frame of the nation as the proper concern of a politicized postcolonialism.”Footnote ¹⁹ The potentially revolutionary nation leaves little room for diaspora, which is always already deemed politically deficient. In stark contrast to the mass national uprising against colonialism, which characterizes nationalist anticolonialism, those in the diaspora are perceived as elitist, detached from the fray, and unable to engage with revolutionary politics. Such deracinated diasporic figures were part of the history of anticolonialism as can be seen in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). As I argue in Diasporas of the Mind, Fanon was haunted by the (self-)image of the rootless cosmopolitan that he contrasted with reborn intellectuals who were to lead the anticolonial revolution. In contrast to Robins’s rather reductive reading of Fanon, this meant that Fanon always had deeply ambivalent feelings toward “the Jew” and was himself Judaized by others.Footnote ²⁰

I do not believe that a lack of political clarity and moral certainty are virtues in themselves. But the search for political clarity and moral certainty does, I argue, tend to lead to moralized and binary thinking. Rothberg, for instance, cites Primo Levi’s understandable disavowal of Liliana Cavani’s sensationalist film The Night Porter (1974), which relativizes murderer and victim. But that is not the end of the story. Levi’s “ethical uncertainty” was a product of the camps. He understood, from the very beginning, that even he, in his memoirs, was forced to work within the very categories that decide who is, and is not, human. At one point in The Periodic Table (1975), he views himself again from a “distance of thirty years”:

The “strange callousness” that Levi needed to survive as part of the “Lager system” also enabled him to write his memoirs. For that reason, he tells the story of someone who understands, only too well, his own potential to dehumanize, which is why Levi does not assign a “moral code” to survival: “The worst survived—that is, the fittest; the best all died . . . we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses.”Footnote ²² This does not make Levi a “murderer,” as Rothberg rightly notes, but it also does not make Levi (in his own understanding) a victim devoid of the “Lager system,” however “guiltless.”Footnote ²³

As Roemer reminds us, the history of Jewish studies and the history of the diaspora are one and the same. It is a history, as Robins notes, of power and powerlessness.Footnote ²⁴ Jews, not unlike all humans, both collude with state power and (in historically smaller numbers) actively oppose it. Robins is particularly indebted to Enzo Traverso’s The End of Jewish Modernity (2016) for the linear narrative of nonwhitened, progressive Jews becoming (over the twentieth century) mainly Westernized colluders with the worst kind of state power (colonial Zionism and apartheid racism).Footnote ²⁵ One of the ironies of this supersessionist narrative is that it reinforces an extreme Jewish nationalism that thinks of itself as redeeming a destroyed European diaspora where the hopeless utopianism of misguided left-liberal Jews led only to their deaths. As all of the respondents have pointed out, diaspora Jews are under renewed threat in the United States and Europe and, for this reason, need to show solidarity with other victimized groups under even worse threat (not least Muslims in the west, African Americans, and the millions of global refugees from Africa and the Middle East).Footnote ²⁶ In these dark times, supersessionist narratives of all kinds also need to be opposed.

As Rothberg states, “our difference . . . may be more one of emphasis than essential opposition,” and I certainly believe that I have much more in common with all of my interlocutors than not.Footnote ²⁷ I have been deeply moved by Catherine E. McKinley’s story of transracial adoption in McLeod’s response; by Christina Sharpe’s experience of lethal racism in the United States in Freitas’s response; by the multiple narratives of French colonial racism in Rothberg’s response; by the diasporic encounters in Marseilles in Roemer’s response; and by Robins’s transnational family history in his response. All have thwarted a reductive supersessionism with an enriched lived experience that straddles the academy and the public sphere. I am most grateful for their time and critical engagement.

Before entering the academy, I was a political activist for more than a decade. I look back on these days with mixed feelings (rather too many unthought-through enthusiasms for my present taste). But this experience has meant that I have always attempted to bridge the academy and the public sphere and am all too aware today how this gap has widened in the twenty-first century.Footnote ²⁸ To be sure, it is no longer an option to rely on the liberal embrace of the academy and of disciplines that know more and more about less and less. Civil society is under concerted attack globally, and I can only hope that our current dialogue will inspire others to defend those individuals and institutions (inside and outside the academy) that work for peace and justice. Neither a sublime goodness nor an irredeemable badness will help us in this task but, rather, a messy, contradictory humaneness trying, as best as it can, to straddle the differing spheres of theory and praxis.