Conclusion, or Not Not Anti-Semitism

This chapter offers a conclusion to the book by retracing the premises and arguments contained in the preceding pages. This is followed by reflections on the writing process and the work as a whole, and engages in dialogue with the scholarship of Daniel Boyarin, Emmanuel Levinas, Daniel Mendelsohn, Elad Lapidot, Vivian Liska, and Theodor W. Adorno. Strosberg reflects on the difficult questions that arose in writing the book and calls on scholars to stay with difficult questions about anti-Semitism and Jewishness as a force of resistance to destructive solutions. It is not enough to acknowledge that anti-Semitism is still a question for our time that must be answered by urgent action, since too often efforts to achieve social justice unwittingly perpetuate the very thing those efforts strive to dismantle. The concept of proteophobia can help in addressing anti-Semitism without neglecting other marginalized groups or reinforcing anti-Semitism by collapsing Jewish forms of life into oversimplified categories.