Why the Jews are good to think: Reflections on Chad Alan Goldberg’s Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought

Abstract

This article offers a critical but appreciative reading of Chad Alan Goldberg’s Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought. It frames that reading around the section of the book titled “Why the Jews Are Good to Think,” a phrase that is a take on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claim that totemic emblems are chosen, “not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think’.” The article contends that the book is predicated on a view that, at least for the scholars Goldberg scrutinizes, Jews were considered to occupy a unique social space in western Europe and North America, one in which they constituted an Other unlike any other Other. As such, they offered unique insights into specifying the meaning and significance of the premodern and modern.