“Israel Has a Jewish Problem,” tells stories about the multiple ways that Jews struggle to be Jewish in Israel. Some of the stories are amusing, others frustrating, but all seem counter-intuitive. Dalsheim argues that struggles over Jewishness are part of the process of producing the ethnos for an ethno-national state. But the paradox is also about how nationalism limits popular sovereignty. Self-determination can become a form of self-elimination, narrowing the possible forms of Jewishness and reproducing Europe’s classic “Jewish Question” in new ways.

Joyce Dalsheim, is a cultural anthropologist and professor in the Department of Global Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She earned a doctorate at The New School for Social Research in New York. Dalsheim’s work interrogates some of the social and political categories through which everyday life is navigated. Her ethnographic research has focused primarily on what it means to be Jewish in Israel, the self-proclaimed Jewish State. Considering Jewishness in its broadest sense, she has explored the relationships between multiple Israeli Jewish communities in their struggles with each other and with their Palestinian neighbors. Employing critical and postcolonial theory, she has used the case of Israel to speak to broader issues of identity categories and conflict, temporality, historical narratives, religion and the secular, nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty.