Gendering Modern Jewish Thought by Andrea Dara Cooper (review)

Reviewed by: Gendering Modern Jewish Thought by Andrea Dara Cooper Nechama Juni Andrea Dara Cooper. Gendering Modern Jewish Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. 270 pp. This book is an analysis of key figures in modern Jewish thought through a gender lens, with particular attention to the power imbalances therein. Cooper shows how these thinkers, in particular, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, cast the fraternal relationship as the central structure that enables ethical and political society. In her analysis, this idealization of fraternity is both harmful and limited. It is harmful because it relegates femaleness and femininity to the subordinate role: submissive, contingent, a state of being that must be overcome, or one whose value lies entirely in what it helps men achieve. And it is limited because it assumes as normal a kind of unity that is inhospitable to difference. Through a series of intricate close readings, Cooper reveals the way that harmful and limited notions of womanhood structure many of the major achievements of these thinkers, but rather than suggesting we abandon them wholesale, she uses her critique to point a way forward beyond the limitations of the canon. In chapter 1, Cooper shows how fraternity is the ultimate communal relationship for Rosenzweig. Through her reading of Song of Songs and its place in the Star of Redemption, Cooper shows how fraternity overcomes the doomed particularity of the erotic relationship. While the heterosexual lovers in the Song are in their own private world, their relationship is entirely erotic. But they long to be united as siblings in order to transition out of that world and into the public sphere. Rosenzweig maps this longed-for sibling relationship onto the fraternal model, thereby effecting, in Cooper's analysis, the "sublimation" of the female End Page 237 lover into a male brother. So the constitution of fraternity out of eros effects the elision of femininity and the female body. In chapter 2, Cooper shows how Levinas's work on femininity and fecundity follows this same movement of positioning womanhood as entirely particular, and therefore necessary to overcome in order to reach universality. The heterosexual dyad, for Levinas, is similarly privatized. Eros only becomes ethics through the fecundity of the mother, which produces a child and thereby brings into being the father-son relationship. Chapter 3 is an exploration of fraternity and its exclusionary structuring of the political realm. Cooper shows how Levinas and Rosenzweig converge on heterosexual marriage and the production of children as the mechanisms that give rise to the fraternal society of ethics and politics. In this way, filiality breeds fraternity. Filial fraternity both privileges insiders over outsiders and imposes a hegemonic sameness on the members of the fraternity, one that excludes gender, racial, and religious difference, including the religious difference of Rosenzweig and Levinas. Chapter 4 explores how Hegel and Rosenzweig cast the sibling relationship as consummated in fraternity, thereby eliding femininity and foreclosing on alternative possibilities for gender and relational dynamics. Drawing on Derrida's readings of Hegel and applying them to Rosenzweig, Cooper shows how elements of both Hegel's and Rosenzweig's biographies and philosophical systems led them to their fraternal conclusions, but how their source texts point toward alternative possibilities. In particular, Cooper draws on Bonnie Honig's excavations of the sororal dimensions of Antigone, setting up Cooper's own intervention in the final chapter of the book. In chapter 5, Cooper examines episodes from contemporary popular culture alongside her analysis throughout the book, to argue that a way forward lies in sisterly bonds. She shows how Levinas responds to the troubling thread of paternal filicide in the Jewish and Christian traditions, with his notion of substitution, which inverts the dynamic and upholds one's own sacrifice for another. However, she argues, Levinas's paradigm relies on maternal sacrifice. Building on substitution but leaving aside the problematic positioning of feminine subordination, she gestures toward the sororal bond as a potential solution. This book makes novel inroads into the fields of modern Jewish thought and gender studies. As Cooper shows, key figures in modern Jewish thought, particularly Rosenzweig and Levinas, are responding to the tradition of disembodied, abstracted universal reason bequeathed to them by German...