Pre-Hitler Jewish intellectual life featured open fierce debate over the Jewish Question

Evidence

None of this is to say that, among the Jewish intellectuals of these tumultuous times, there was any kind of agreement on what to do about the persistence of anti-Semitism. In the decades before Hitler synonymized Judaism with trauma, and before dissent was supplanted, in many corners, with terrified conformity, Jewish intellectual life roared with drag-down debates over what was then euphemistically called “the Jewish Question.” (Today’s equivalent might be called “the Identity Politics Question” or “the Race Versus Class Question.”) The Cornell University professor Enzo Traverso, who has extensively researched this intellectual history, describes the Jewish Question as “a set of problems related to emancipation and anti-Semitism, cultural assimilation and Zionism”—and among Jewish Marxists and socialists, there was nothing approaching consensus about the possible answers. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 950

Categorization

• DEFINE: Traverso’s definition of the Jewish Question — the chapter’s load-bearing concept — is pinned here with a contemporary analogue.
• XREF: Raises the exact Race-versus-Class debate Klein stages with her own left; connects to contemporary identity politics arguments.