Mick Hartley

Sonali Thakkar is an Assistant Professor at New York University, with research interests listed as: Postcolonial literature and theory; anticolonial thought and politics; comparative racialization and histories of antiracism; race science; human rights; Jewish studies/Holocaust studies; memory studies; theories of diaspora; gender and sexuality studies. Phew. "My current work sits at the intersection of postcolonial theory, Jewish studies, human rights, and race and ethnic studies".

And she has a new book out – The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought.

In this book, Sonali Thakkar tells the story of how UNESCO's race project directly influenced anticolonial thought and made Jewish difference and the Holocaust enduring preoccupations for anticolonial and postcolonial writers. Drawing on UNESCO's rich archival resources and shifting between the scientific, social scientific, literary, and cultural, Thakkar offers new readings of a varied collection of texts from the postcolonial, Jewish, and Black diasporic traditions. Anticolonial thought and postcolonial literature critically recast liberal scientific antiracism, Thakkar argues, and the concepts central to this new moral economy were the medium for postcolonialism's engagement with Jewishness. By recovering these connections, she shows how the midcentury crisis of racial meaning shaped the kinds of solidarities between racialized subjects that are thinkable today.

No, me neither – but I'm guessing it doesn't bode well for "Jewish difference and the Holocaust" as "enduring preoccupations". Jews, you see, have a "plastic identity".

David Mikics at Tablet – More ‘Anti-Zionist’ Insanity Your Kid Will Learn at NYU:

The fact that Jews can hide their identity, and have often been forced to do so in order to survive, means that they are “plastic”—the term used by NYU professor of literature Sonali Thakkar in her new book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought. Thakkar sees plasticity as proof that Jews, like Asians, are a “model minority,” “educable,” and ripe for assimilation. These are, for the progressive academic, dirty words. For Thakkar, Jews’ plasticity means that, unlike Blacks, they can become “white” and so climb the ladder of success….

Thakkar’s thesis about Jewish whiteness ignores the fact that more than half of Jewish Israelis come from Middle Eastern families, driven out and persecuted by Arab countries and Iran. Jews who lived in Arab lands for thousands of years are called white, while Palestinians are people of color. Such is the plasticity of the Jew, who can instantly be converted into a colonial oppressor after having been oppressed for centuries. Ashkenazi Jews faced a genocide committed by European whites who designated them an inferior race; but now that “whiteness” is bad, Jews are white.

Like all racism, the left’s neo-racist essentialism relies on imaginary slots that can be manipulated at will—the power of the postcolonial theorist is that he or she decides who gets to be a person of color and who is condemned to whiteness, who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. Muslims, members of history’s most successful group of conquerors, are of course permanently oppressed; the victims of Muslim empires are of course oppressors. In Thakkar’s telling, the plasticity of the Jews means that they are uniquely suitable to move—or be moved—from victim to persecutor status in the blink of an eye. Even when they are murdered and kidnapped, it is somehow their fault….

You might be tempted to think that her book is just another near-unreadable academic treatise. But she is at the forefront of the new wave of anti-Israel propagandists and teachers at elite universities whose graduates will populate America’s government and leading institutions. Her theories—muddled, bizarre and obscure as they may seem—are therefore significant. Thakkar is where Jewish studies is headed, toward a fierce antipathy to the existence of Israel, which has become the epitome of evil white colonialism.

Worth reading in full.