ABSTRACT
Why is it that British cultural studies, in particular that strand of it which has a history in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, has had no Jewish voice? In one theorisation of the historical production of British cultural studies it is understood as the effect of the enunciation of speaking positions by the silenced and the marginalised in Britain.1 If, indeed, this was a formative concern then it is the case that, in spite of their obviously continuing marginal position in Britain as members of the national culturewitness the National Front’s anti-Semitism for example-there has been no expression of a Jewish speaking position. The only place in which the problematic of Jewishness has been raised, and then not in relation to the question of Jews and Jewishness in Britain as such, is Philip Cohen’s discussion of anti-Semitism in his co-edited book entitled MultiRacist Britain, published in 1988.2
In this chapter I want to use the trope of British cultural studies to address a much broader problem. Why is it that in post-Second World War-it may be more significant to say post-Holocaust-western intellectual discussions about ‘race,’ minorities, subalternity and so forth, the situation of the Jew in the west, in western nation-states, has been so absent? In particular, why is it that Jews themselves have been so silent about their own situation?3 As soon as these questions are asked we have to recognise that they immediately press on us a host of further problems, most importantly who, or what, is a ‘Jew.’4 While this is directly relevant to the issue at hand it is also in an important sense secondary to the problematic of a Jewish voice and a Jewish speaking position. Like all subjectivities that of the ‘Jew’ is discursively constructed. What interests me in this chapter is the lack of interrogation of that construction, and the silence of ‘Jews’ themselves about their position in the post-Holocaust west.
