The hyphen in hyphenated Jewish identities marks hybridity’s critical potential

Evidence

The Abrahamic breaks and tears as it utters words that break from their context, finding again a speech that cuts and unbinds. The Abrahamic also affirms a certain silence. It surrounds and articulates an insufficient comma (“the Jew, the Arab”), sometimes a hyphen. It is a hyphen that does not bridge anything, the silence of which, we have seen, “does not pacifY or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture. It will never silence their memory. It could even worsen the terror, the lesions, and the wounds. A hyphen is never enough to conceal protests, cries of anger or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 336 (#complicates, via linked claim)

At the close of the twentieth century it is the turn of the Turks. Can Turks, even hybrids like the narrator, really become Germans? According to Heinrich, “The Germans have learned nothing from history … now they have brought the Turks here. And they never came to terms even with the Jews” (82). Physical assimilation through surgery or intermarriage seems to be no prophylaxis in Senocak’s world. Hybridity, such as that of the protagonist, means only that one is exposed to a double risk. One is at the end an oriental, no matter what one’s identity or language. Being hybrid only reinforces this. The protagonist desires not to be cosmopolitan, just “simply” German. Yet this definition is denied to him by his Turkish identity; and, in his own estimation, his Jewish ancestry reinforces the denial. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 780 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Jew-Arab hyphen marks an unresolved wound rather than a reconciliation — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 336; Hybrid identity in Germany doubles rather than relieves exclusion — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 780; Hybridity discourse symbolically excluded non-European diasporas from national claims (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The Jew-Arab hyphen marks an unresolved wound rather than a reconciliation #complicates (0.85) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 336
• Hybrid identity in Germany doubles rather than relieves exclusion #complicates (0.82) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 780
• Hybridity discourse symbolically excluded non-European diasporas from national claims #complicates (0.75)