Luxemburg’s universalism deliberately rejected particularist Jewish identity

Evidence

Rosa Luxemburg, years earlier, had sparred with the Bund and advocated a universalism unbound by her Jewish identity. “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’?” a friend asked in 1917. She replied, “I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch … I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” Those lines led her detractors to claim that she minimized Jewish suffering at a time of great hardship. I prefer to see her reaching, however idealistically, for a vision of human solidarity that transcended identity and national borders. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 953

Categorization

• XREF: Luxemburg’s position is the anti-identity-universalism that foreshadows the ‘wandering yet at home everywhere’ stance Klein connects to her own family’s ambivalence about Jewish identity. — connects to: Lukács defended universal historical identity over particularity — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 120