Results by title

This book analyzes the different conceptions of authenticity that are behind conflicts over who and what should be recognized as authentically Jewish.  Although the concept of authenticity has been around for several centuries, it became a central focus for Jews since existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre raised the question in the 1940s. Building on the work of Sartre, later Jewish thinkers, philosophers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists, the book offers a model of Jewish authenticity that seeks to balance history and tradition, creative freedom and innovation, and the importance of recognition among different groups within an increasingly multicultural Jewish community.
 
Author Stuart Z. Charmé explores how debates over authenticity and struggles for recognition are a key to understanding a wide range of controversies between Orthodox and liberal Jews, Zionist and diaspora Jews, white Jews and Jews of color, as well as the status of intermarried and messianic Jews, and the impact of Jewish genetics.  In addition, it discusses how and when various cultural practices and traditions such as klezmer music, Israeli folk dance, Jewish yoga and meditation, and others are recognized as authentically Jewish, or not.
 

Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—Blind to Sameness answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing Friedman to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.

Losing her smile to synkinesis after unresolved Bell’s palsy changed how Faye Linda Wachs was seen by others and her internal experience of self. In Metamorphosis, interviewing over one hundred people with acquired facial difference challenged her presumptions about identity, disability, and lived experience. Participants described microaggressions, internalizations, and minimalizations and their impact on identity. Heartbreakingly, synkinesis disrupts the ability to have shared moments.  When one experiences spontaneous emotion, wrong nerves trigger misfeel and misperception by others. One is misread by others and receives confusing internal information. Communication of and to the self is irrevocably damaged. Wachs describes the experience as a social disability. People found a host of creative ways to reinvigorate their sense of self and self-expression. Like so many she interviewed, Wachs experiences a process of change and growth as she is challenged to think more deeply about ableism, identity, and who she wants to be.

In Uncertain Perceptions, Robert McCalla examines the role of misperceptions in decision making by U.S. officials during five major Cold War crises.To suggest that misperceptions have played an important role in U.S.-Soviet relations will surprise no one. Most people, including scholars and decision makers, will agree that the potential for misperception and miscommunication is high, and the dangers of the nuclear age simply compound the risk. What has been missing is a consideration of the role of different types of misperception in crisis decision making and the impacts of those different types of misperceptions on the dynamics of crises. Different types of misperceptions can occur during a crisis; and the type will influence the nature and duration of the crisis.McCalla shows that the crisis dynamic is sensitive to the sources of misperception and that the most important influence on misperceptions is the flexibility of a decision maker’s worldview. In contrast with previous studies, McCalla’s work provides evidence that decision makers are not necessarily firmly wedded to their views. He refines the concept of misperception by identifying two types: “situational misperception,” which stems from the ambiguities and uncertainties that can surround another state’s actions, and “dispositional misconception," which has to do with the attitudes and images that a particular decision maker holds. Crises rooted in situational misperceptions will tend toward resolution when more information is provided to the decision maker, while crises that originate from dispositional misperceptions will be less affected by additional information. With the end of the Cold War, historians and political scientists are reexamining the history of U.S.-Soviet relations away from the glare of Cold War politics and rhetoric, and in doing so advancing new ways of understanding past conflicts.Uncertain Perceptions offers students of American policy, both generalists and specialists, a new lens for understanding American decision making during U.S.-Soviet crises and the role that perceptions and misperceptions played in those decisions.

A new, ethically based theory of identity by a major scholar.

Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement-that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition-this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and subjectivity based on Hegelian notions of recognition. The author’s critical engagement with major texts of contemporary philosophy prepares the way for a highly original conception of ethics based on witnessing.

Central to this project is Oliver’s contention that the demand for recognition is a symptom of the pathology of oppression that perpetuates subject-object and same-different hierarchies. While theorists across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences focus their research on multiculturalism around the struggle for recognition, Oliver argues that the actual texts and survivors’ accounts from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery are testimonials to a pathos that is “beyond recognition.” Oliver traces many of the problems with the recognition model of subjective identity to a particular notion of vision presupposed in theories of recognition and misrecognition. Contesting the idea of an objectifying gaze, she reformulates vision as a loving look that facilitates connection rather than necessitates alienation. As an alternative, Oliver develops a theory of witnessing subjectivity. She suggests that the notion of witnessing, with its double meaning as either eyewitness or bearing witness to the unseen, is more promising than recognition for describing the onset and sustenance of subjectivity. Subjectivity is born out of and sustained by the process of witnessing-the possibility of address and response-which puts ethical obligations at its heart.