ABSTRACT
In the period following Auschwitz, the questions of Jewish identity and the concept of “race” have become key issues in critical thought. Most particularly in France, starting with Sartre in the immediate postwar period, and continuing into the 1990s with the postmodernist thought of Derrida, Lyotard, and Nancy, a number of intellectuals have addressed the questions of Jewish identity and how the subject position of the Jew may be constructed. In this essay I shall focus on a number of exemplary self-portraits written by Jews (Memmi, Finkielkraut, and Derrida) and a portrait of the Jew in one of the most provocative and influential philosophical inquiries on the so-called Jewish Question, written by a non-Jew (Sartre). At stake in each of these critical exercises is the representation of the image of a Jew who is identifiable as different, and whose self-image is inscribed in a rhetoric that is tied to history, memory, or myth. If cultural or ethnic differences are foregrounded in these portraits, it is because they are represented in a language that discloses the otherness of Jewish identity as a phenomenon to be either transcended or simply reinforced.
