Review: Babel and the Wilderness

Over the course of a nine-part essay entitled “Against Antisemitism” as well as suites of verse and short fiction, Julian Langer’s Babel and the Wilderness constructs a tesseract landscape fusing a theoretical terrain with existent eco-relational presence. With the biblical tale of Babel as conceptual framing, a metaphysical topography unfurls as he explores the very real modern-day issues of antisemitism, state-Zionism, and Jewish and anarchist resistance to these forces.

The biblical Babel is a story of humans, all speaking a common language, who engage in an unending project: building a tower to “heaven.” In Langer’s telling, the single spire of Babel becomes the emblem of totality, and the ultimate collapse of Babel into a fractured-language “wilderness” is no longer rendered as divine punishment but as an inherent feature of the unstable concept.

Babel and its collapse/metamorphosis into wilderness acts as a critique of empire/totality yet is also used to describe a path forward. Collapse becomes a revolt and a potential for resolution that is not simply through this wilderness but of it. The looking glass of Babel allows Langer to introduce readers to the “irreducible and inexhaustible terrain of possibility” which is his wilderness; a space of potential relief from the brutalities of state violence, repression and ultimately, antisemitism.

It is hardly possible to discuss Langer’s work without addressing a question that will undoubtedly be foremost in many reader’s minds, as it was in mine: can/should we still talk about antisemitism in the face of the genocidal slaughter of Palestinian people by the state of Israel? Langer immediately unpicks the threads of this convolution. He locates the vortex of antisemitism as “ready-made myth through which peoples displaced by capitalism, state power and social fragmentation can project their anxieties onto an imagined outsider… Its appeal endures not because it offers truth, but because it channels alienation into identity, resentment and fantasies of collective purity.”

Using this formulation, Langer ably conveys the power of this appealing myth to metastasise into the repeated structural and interpersonal violations. For Langer, revolt against antisemitism is “revolt against assimilation, inclusion, captivity… against expulsions, erasure and annihilation.” Thus, antisemitism becomes not as-compared-to the violences of empire, state-Zionism, capitalism etc., but rather intrinsic to those very forces. Through rejecting the totality of Babel in favour of “wilderness,” Langer posits resistance to antisemitism as resistance to authoritarian desires.

Langer speaks of the state of Israel holding both Jews and Palestinians in “captivity” and “captivation.” He theorises the captivity as a physical fact of life and death for Palestinian people as they are forced to interact with, and be acted upon, by the state of Israel. This captivity is “existential dependence, militarisation, bureaucratic integration and enclosure,” which, Langer insists, affects both Israelis and Palestinians. The spectacularising effect that the state displays on the psyche of both peoples and the de facto othering of relationships between and among these peoples is named as “captivation.”

Langer leans on Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” formulation to infer how these actual and theoretical enclosures affect our abilities to speak about the destructive forces of both antisemitism and Zionist violence with real empathy and understanding. In answer his own question, “Can we grieve, together, the devastation that statist-violence and antisemitism have brought us to?” Langer suggests that in the wilderness we may be able to relate as “I and thou”. Stripped of common language, yet free of totalising boundaries there is opportunity to hear and receive more expansively.

To my initial query, I found reading Langer’s work to provoke a sort of “I and We” inversion, wherein I found it necessary to contend with my own relationship to a deep sense of collective shame over the actions of the state of Israel, which has at times complicated my ability to integrate the material. I was able to put aside my entirely personal shame-sense in favour of the more useful feelings of ethical-anger and revolt by connecting with Langer’s personal expressions of grief and revolt, and his insistence that speaking about antisemitism “means to speak about the violence of colonialism, statism, ecological devastation.”

To my mind, the strongest textual exploration comes as Langer addresses some of the most complex particulars of modern antisemitism in parts four and five of the book. This includes a thorough deconstruction of the role of the state as it weaponises antisemitism to its own ends while fabricating the lie of a national-bureaucratic solution. He rightly points out the hypocrisy of statist-Zionism which “accepts the antisemitic premise that Jews do not belong in Europe or in other parts of the world and rejects diasporic Jewish culture as defective.” He argues that the foundational myth of Israel echoes the violently separatist logic of racial exclusion from which it supposedly sought respite.

Langer’s response to the problem of current antisemitism is offered via the notion of “radical presence” and a return to ethics. He actualises these concepts by gesturing towards “Yavneh,” an idea pioneered by Hillel Zeitlin. Langer understands Yavneh is a sort of affinity group grounded in ethical responsibility and dialogue which he hopes will provide an opportunity to deconstruct antisemitism, among other ethical dilemmas. To those who doubt this approach, Langer ably defends himself against charges of intellectualism, pseudo-intellectualism, sectarianism and naivete.

Beyond radical encountering and Yavneh, Langer also offers the potential for Jewish-anarchist praxis centred in “ecological care” as described in the stories of creation in the Torah. While these praxes are not fully described, his assertion of their importance and possibility reflects his deep ecological orientation; there is no separation of thought and construct from ecology. His embrace of wilderness as a space of potential includes both the theoretical and real ecosystems of the wild.

It would be remiss to write about the book without discussing the poetry and fiction that make up its latter third. Where his critique and theory are full to bursting with reference, digression and concept, Langer’s creative verse and prose are remarkably spare. The poems themselves offer little or no linguistic flourish – relying instead on imagery and the melancholy of the unsaid.  Langer writes from his own experience, and while this can sometimes feel somewhat niche and exclusionary, his poems offer a cosmology of thought which feels both particular and personal. This also allows for the reader to encounter Langer the writer in the “I and Thou” mode of empathic and radical presence which he champions.

“Against Antisemitism” presents a definitive critique of the current understanding of antisemitism. Langer makes the case that speaking about antisemitism is not to privilege this prejudice above others, but rather to understand that its underpinnings are central to the forces which are often attributed to its cause. To speak of antisemitism in the face of extraordinary Palestinian suffering is to acknowledge that human suffering born of empire and repression is both particular and inextricably linked among and between peoples. And yet, there is difficulty and discomfort in doing so. As tonic, Langer offers us his wilderness – the terrain of the possible – in which we encounter each other in all the messiness of our humanity, allowing us to speak and be heard, to argue but also to listen and to understand. In part of a discussion about anti-racist work, Langer makes mention of the concept of race as something which “exists but is not real.” Langer’s Wilderness is the foil to this – something which is real but does not yet exist.

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