Anya R Topolski

Born in Eastern Europe, educated in the West under the guidance of Martin Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition, and forced to flee during the Holocaust because of their Jewish identity, it should come as no surprise that Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt’s ideas intersect in an important way. This book demonstrates for the first time the significance of a dialogue between Levinas’ ethics of alterity and Arendt’s politics of plurality.

Anya Topolski brings their respective projects into dialogue by means of the notion of relationality, a concept inspired by the Judaic tradition that is prominent in both thinker’s work. The book explores questions relating to the relationship between ethics and politics, the Judaic contribution to rethinking the meaning of the political after the Shoah, and the role of relationality and responsibility for politics. The result is an alternative conception of the political based on the ideas of plurality and alterity that aims to be relational, inclusive and empowering.

In this contribution, I examine the Catholic political practice of “intercessions” (shtadlanut) as a means to control and manage relations between state power and Jewish communities by means of a privileged elite. While governmental techniques or mechanisms of minority management are only part of a broader question of majority–minority power relations, the theological-political roots of such “management” strategies are often overlooked because the problem is assumed to be secular. In my analysis of shtadlanut, I show how Jewish communities were internally divided between “good” and “bad”, “managed” by the ruling powers, and homogenized. It is precisely this type of enforced collaboration with power, in combination with reduced agency and de-politicization, that I claim goes beyond the “Jewish Question”. Rather, we must turn our gaze on Europe and consider how, and why, it continues to make 'others' into problems. By doing so, we can challenge the frame of the contemporary "Muslim Question".

This paper is a first step in making visible the hidden race-religion constellation in Europe. By the race-religion constellation I mean the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term 'religion', which calls for a consideration of European history and more specifically the topic of political-theology. I contend that the latter serves as the horizon of past forms of racism in Europe, such as antisemitism, as well as present forms of racism, such as islamophobia. This paper aims to provide an alternative non-secularised or biological account of the origins of the socially constructed category of race in Europe. The alternative story begins in the 17th century when the category of 'religion', as a means for classifying peoples, was both constructed and politicised. I then trace the shift these categories take through the realm of philology to that of biology. In tracing this alternative story, this paper takes the first step to create an intellectual and political space in which it will be possible to better understand the rather muddled contemporary debates about the categories of race as well as the means by which they are mobilized and politicized in contemporary practices of racism.

This  article  digs  into  the  conceptual  history  of tzedakah  to  consider  it’s  relationship  to Spinoza’s  definition  of  true  religion  as justitia & caritas  in  the  TTP.  I  provide  a  brief explanation of Hebrew and Spinoza’s grammar. Next, I consider the original meaning of this term in order to show it came to be redefined and associated with a particular idea of charity  by  way  of  contact  with  Christian  notions  of  sin.  Next,  I  turn  to  two  major thinkers  in  medieval  Judaism  –  Rashi  and  Maimonides,  both  of  whom  contributed significantly  to  the  formation  of  the  notion  of tzedakah;  and  finally,  I  consider  the intellectual milieu in which Spinoza wrote. This conceptual history prepares the way for a reconsideration of the meaning of true religion in the TTP.

Reviews of:
Élisabeth Roudinesco, Revisiting the Jewish Question, translated by Andrew Brown, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014 280 pp., $24.95 US (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-7456-5220-7.
Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Columbia University Press, 2012, 256pp., $27.95 US (pbk), ISBN 978-0-2311-4610-4.
In: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.

In this chapter, Topolski explores the idea that Levinas did not, in fact, write in two separate ‘languages’, one so-called confessional and the other so-called philosophical. Rather, it is her contention that Levinas communicated in a ‘language ' that he created as his thought developed, which she labels as ‘Judeosophy ’. It is a language that allows for a dialogue

:In this essay, the author, raised a secular Jew who is returning to Judaism, rereads the biblical story of the matriarch Rebekah and finds in her story a new hermeneutics of the meaning of Judaism as struggle. Rather than associate Jacob, Rebekah's younger son, with "struggle" (the meaning of the name Israel he is given by the angel), she urges

It was during the Protestant Reformation when terms such as faith and religion became contested that Judaism and Islam were first identified as ‘religions’ in relation to Christianity, which was defined as the ‘true religion’. What is however less well known is how Judaism and Islam became ‘races’. While this claim is itself highly, and rightfully, contested – it is clear that there is an ambiguous link between racism and antisemitism as well as racism and islamophobia. The goal of this essay is to explore the genealogy, to tell the convoluted story, of this shift from religion to race with regard to Judaism and Islam.