Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish question : anti-antisemitism and the politics of the French intellectual

?All serious readers of Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew should read Jonathan Judaken's Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question in order to understand its place in Sartre's oeuvre. Judaken has taken our understanding of this important text to a new level."?Robert Bernasconi, author of How to Read Sartre?Jonathan Judaken's book takes commentary on Sartre to a new level and simultaneously provides a thought-provoking example of what the author terms?the cultural history of ideas,? that is, a study of thought that both attends to its conceptual complexity and situates it within a larger sociocultural and political matrix. It also offers the first investigation of Sartre that systematically takes as its guide the pivotal importance of his influential reflections on the Jewish Question.??Dominick LaCapra, Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies, Cornell University Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question examines the image of?the Jew? in Sartre?s work to rethink not only his oeuvre but also the role of the intellectual in France and the politics and ethics of existentialism. It explores more broadly how French identity is defined through the abstraction and allegorization of?the Jew? and examines the role anti-antisemitic intellectuals play in this process. Jonathan Judaken reconsiders the origins of the intellectual in France in the context of the Dreyfus affair and Sartre?s interventions in the parallel Franco-French conflicts in the 1930s and during the Vichy regime. He considers what it was possible to say on behalf of Jews and Judaism during the German occupation, Sartre?s contribution after the war to the Vichy syndrome, his positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the ways Sartre?s reflections on the Jewish Question served as a template for his shift toward Marxism, his resistance to colonialism, and for the defining of debates about Jews and Judaism in postwar France by both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. Judaken analyzes the texts that Sartre devoted to these issues and argues that?the Jew? constituted a foil Sartre consistently referenced in reflecting on politics in general and on the role of the intellectual in particular. Includes bibliographical references (pages 291-368) and index. xi, 390 pages ; 24 cm.