Call for Papers: “Revisiting the Jewish Question” on April 20, 2026
UC Irvine
Keynote speaker: Sarah Hammerschlag (Chicago)
This conference, organized by graduate students in the UC Irvine Comparative Literature department, invites submissions from graduate students as well as postdocs, faculty, and independent scholars at any stage in their career, in the interest of creating a non-hierarchical environment for discussion.
Deadline for abstract submissions: February 16, 2026
Description:
In the pivotal text “On The Jewish Question,” Karl Marx responds to Bruno Bauer’s suggestion that Jews should surrender their identity as Jews, in order to emancipate themselves and participate in universal humanism. The topic of this conference picks up Marx and Bauer’s debate at the moment when “Jewishness” remains preserved as a category: why is it that we can deconstruct concepts such as ethnicity, nation, and religion, while the concept of Jewishness and Judaism remains? We are fascinated by the ways in which “the Jewish question” becomes metonymical for a certain conversation about disputed political (or non-political) categories such as race, ethnicity, and religion.
Beyond “the Jewish Question” of the relationship between the particular and universal, this conference also would like to take this question at its most radical, given the etymology of “radical” as “root:” What type of questions are Jewish ones? If as Paul North suggests, Marx’s discussion within “On the Jewish Question” is related to the “split” identity of the Jew in the modern nation-state, how does this splitness lead to the position of “Jewishness” as that of a split subject, privy to the doubled nature of ideology as such? What other types of “questions” pertain to this Jewish position within the social link?
This conference invites submissions that attempt to address, restate, or critique the Jewish question itself. We also invite papers that historicize and critique how the Jewish question has been asked and leveraged in various literary, philosophical, and theoretical projects. How does the figure of Jewishness, or the figure of the Jewish question, facilitate concepts and conversations both within and outside Jewish institutions? How do the question’s metonymic implications appear in representation of Jewish characters and Jewish ideas? What is the question of the Jews? Why are people asking?
Specific suggestions for submissions include:
- Reflections on Marx’s text “On the Jewish Question”
- Studies and/or critiques of left-Hegelianism
Call for Papers: “Revisiting the Jewish Question”
on April 20, 2026
UC Irvine
Keynote speaker: Sarah Hammerschlag (Chicago)
- Jewishness and split subjectivity (psychoanalysis)
- Literary analysis of Jewish representation
- Yiddish modernism
- 20th century Jewish political thought (e.g. Bundism, Zionism, anarchism) - Treatment of the Jewish question by Jewish authors
- Jewishness after the destruction of Gaza
- Relationship between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism - German-Jewish philosophy, (e.g. Cohen, Rosenzweig)
- Social formations of Jewishness via capitalism
- Jewish contemporary communist, anarchist, radical thought
Instructions to submit:
Abstracts (300 words or less) should be sent by email to morrelli@uci.edu before February 16, 2026.
