Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

DOI 10.1007/s11186-013-9190-3

Powerful emotions: symbolic power and the (productive

and punitive) force of collective feeling

Dawne Moon

Published online: 22 March 2013

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract This article argues that emotions can be a medium of social power. Using
qualitative interview material from American Jews discussing anti-Semitism and its
relationship to contemporary politics, it engages recent scholarship on emotions and
political contention and shows how emotions make effective the various forms of
symbolic exclusion by which group members exercise what Bourdieu calls symbolic
power. It also explores the emotional connections to group membership by which
some “excluded” members can engage in symbolic struggle over “the principles of
vision and division” Bourdieu (Sociological Theory 7(1), 14–25, 1989) that define
the group. Finally, it shows how emotions work to incite discipline in some group
members, inspiring them to conform to dominant definitions of group membership so
as to avoid both symbolic struggle and exclusion.

Keywords Social movements . Identity . Community . Exclusion . Discipline . Jews

On 8 November 2010, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the keynote
address at the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly in New Orleans. No doubt he
knew that some people identifying themselves as “young Jews” planned to disrupt
him; at one point, he remarked:
The assault on Israel’s legitimacy is another danger. We know from our history that
attacks on the Jews were often preceded by attempts to delegitimize the Jewish
people, to portray them as vile criminals, as the scourge of humanity. And this is
why the attempts by our enemies, and their misguided fellow travelers [laughter
from audience] to delegitimize the Jewish state must be countered. [Applause]
As if on cue, the first protestor stood up from her seat in the dark of the large
auditorium yelling, “Young Jews say, ‘The loyalty oath delegitimizes Israel!’” and
holding a sign that said the same as sheriff’s deputies escorted her out and the
audience booed. Netanyahu joked, “I’m going to talk about delegitimizing Israel,

D. Moon (*)
Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Marquette University, Lalumiere 340, PO Box 1881,
Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881, USA
e-mail: dawne.moon@marquette.edu
262 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

but they really have the wrong address,” and the crowd laughed, hooted, and
applauded him. He resumed his speech, saying, “For too many, Israel is guilty until
proven guilty, and the greatest success of our detractors is when Jews start believing
that themselves. We see that today.” The second protester arose, shouting, “The
Occupation delegitimizes Israel!” As sheriff’s deputies removed him, the crowd
called him scatological names and drowned out what was to them his illegitimate
claim. When the third, fourth, and fifth began their disruptions, the crowd became
even more animated and angry, yelling to mask the protests. “Get ’em out of here!”
and “Get out of here, you bitch!” were audible over the general roar (Associated Press
2010; Burdeau 2010; Jewish Voice for Peace 2010). As the crowd grew more
physically confrontive, the fourth protester’s shirt was torn open and an audience
member pulled the last to the ground in a headlock (Abileah 2010; Berkman 2010).
This event captured many of the themes that emerge when any group confronts
internal dissent about an issue that threatens the very meaning of what it means for
members of the group to exist at all, complicated by a history in which the meaning of
group membership has been used by outsiders to legitimate extreme discrimination,
violence, and even genocide. For Jews, public criticism of what critics consider Israel’s
illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is just such an issue (Benski 2005).
Ridicule, hostility, and accusations of abetting those who would destroy them accom-
pany visceral feelings of anger, betrayal, and indignation. For people on all sides, this
issue provokes a sense of danger, threatening the feelings of comfort, safety, and home
that one might think “should” come with being with others in one’s group.
Events such as this are powerfully emotional. The concept of “powerful emotions”
usually implies the intensity of visceral affect, but I contend that emotions can also
serve as a medium for actual social power: to silence, to incite discipline, to
“articulate the principles of vision and division” for a particular group (Bourdieu
1989, p. 19). Indeed, some sociologists have pointed to the distortion that happens
when sociologists bracket or marginalize emotions in our studies of social processes
(for instance, Calhoun 2001; Collins 1975, 2001; Kemper 1990).1 Sociologists do not
tend to see emotions (or even non-conscious, bodily affects) as solely individual
phenomena, and much recent scholarship in social movements discusses the roles of
emotions in sparking and sustaining dissent, mobilization, and change (Aminzade
and McAdam 2002; Goodwin et al. 2001; Flam and King 2005; Jasper 1998). Some
of this scholarship still treats emotions as internal to individuals, but Emirbayer and
Goldberg (2005) argue that Bourdieu’s conceptualization of habitus can help to
explain “collective” emotions, without returning to the dismissive “mob mentality”
explanations of the 1960s.2 Like many sociologists who study emotion, they posit
emotions as “transpersonal” rather than “internal.”3
1
While much sociological work on emotions distinguishes socially-defined, conscious emotions from pre-
linguistic, non-conscious affects, the distinction is not germane for my purposes here, so I use the term
emotion to refer to the entire spectrum from non-conscious to consciously recognized and named states of
bodily responses to one’s situation (Hochschild 1979, 1983; Gould 2009; Massumi 2002).
2
For some analyses of the place of “mob mentality” approaches in the sociology of social movements, see
also Armstrong (2003), Goodwin et al. (2001), and Gould (2009).
3
Like many sociologists, they thus challenge the perspectives of many social scientists, including Petersen,
who attends to and respects the role of emotions in collective action, but, echoing “collective behavior”
scholars of the mid-twentieth century (for instance, Gusfield 1970, Klapp 1969, Smelser 1968) still posits
emotions as individual “compulsions” (Petersen 2002, p. 3).
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 263

These authors argue that Bourdieu’s conception of habitus points to how social
structure systematically instills in individuals dispositions to use reason and interpret
affect within socially intelligible parameters as established by their field, the “rules of
the game” that are open, to a certain extent, to intelligent improvisation. They suggest
we use Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to examine how power works through emotions.
Implicitly, like Bourdieu, they envision power as being located in the social structure,
for example, such that groups of people may share a structured disposition to feel
apathy in spite of their own exploitation. Bourdieu’s habitus captures how social
power works through the dispositions that orient people in a particular social position.
But while Bourdieu focused on the role of habitus in social reproduction, he did not
see it as purely mechanistic or straightforward. He wrote:
Habitus is not necessarily adapted to its situation nor necessarily coherent.…
Thus it can be observed that to contradictory positions, which tend to exert
structural ‘double binds’ on their occupants, there often correspond destabilized
habitus, torn by contradiction and internal division, generating suffering
(Bourdieu 2000, p. 160).
Also highlighting the role of emotions in politics, Gould emphasizes the “virtualities,
potentialities, eventualities” (2009, p. 36; quoting Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p.135)
of habitus rather than its strong capacity for social reproduction. Developing the concept
of “emotional habitus,” Gould points to the social construction of affect, which she
defines as prelinguistic, nonrational sensations that are approximated but also shaped
when they are labeled as socially conventional emotions. She remarks:
An emotional habitus contains an emotional pedagogy, a template for what and
how to feel, in part by conferring on some feelings and modes of expression an
axiomatic, natural quality and making other feeling states unintelligible within
its terms and thus in a sense unfeelable and inexpressible. A social group’s
emotional habitus structures what members feel and how they emote. It is
structured as well … (Gould 2009, p. 34).

Thus, Gould focuses on social movements’ potential to cultivate “outlaw emotions” and
“outlaw affects” to inspire and sustain people as they work for social change.
These ways of conceptualizing the relationships between emotion and politics are
helpful in many circumstances, but I focus on emotions at a different point in political
struggle. Here, I show how emotions help to constitute symbolic power and its efficacy
in struggles over classification, struggles to police, reproduce, and change how people
define themselves in relation to their own group and those whom the group has long
deemed “other.” Classificatory struggles can have ontological consequences, which
makes them deeply emotional. For Bourdieu, struggles over classification are central
to social life and a major site for the enactment of social power. He writes:
Principles of division, inextricably logical and sociological, function within and
for the purposes of the struggle between social groups; in producing concepts, they
produce groups, the very groups which produce the principles and the groups
against which they are produced. What is at stake in the struggles about the
meaning of the social world is power over the classificatory schemes and systems
which are the basis of the representations of the groups and therefore their
264 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

mobilization and demobilization: the evocative power of an utterance which puts

things in a different light…or which modifies the schemes of perception, shows
something else, other properties, previously unnoticed or relegated to the
background….
Only in and through the struggle do the internalized limits become boundaries,
barriers that have to be moved. And indeed, the system of classificatory schemes is
constituted as an objectified, institutionalized system of classification only when it
has ceased to function as a sense of limits so that the guardians of the established
order must enunciate, systematize and codify the principles of production of that
order, both real and represented, so as to defend them against heresy; in short, they
must constitute the doxa as orthodoxy (Bourdieu 1984, pp. 479–80).
Emotions are missing from this discussion, but as I show here, symbolic power
actually relies, at least in part, on emotions for its efficacy. First, I show how emotions
can motivate classificatory struggles by breaking “bonds of complicity” (Bourdieu
2001). I then show how, when doxa is constituted as orthodoxy, emotions can
motivate and give power to what I call symbolic exclusion, symbolic efforts to assert
performatively the boundaries of the collectivity and thus, the definition of the
persons within it. Because belonging to a group defines individuals’ self-concepts
as well as the group’s, emotions ensure that such struggles continue. Finally, I show
how emotions can inspire discipline in which people manage their intake of new
information so as to avoid new understandings, new alliances, new subject positions,
and to ensure compliance to the feeling rules that define group membership. The fact
that conformity is not guaranteed by habitus (as Bourdieu acknowledged) but must be
managed and produced in interaction yields possibilities for social change that
Bourdieu did not discuss.

Methods

While many identity-based groups could provide a site in which to examine these
processes,4 I do so here examining the fierce contention among American Jews over
the Arab-Israeli conflict (Gamson 1992) and the place and meaning of anti-Semitism in
that context. Due to the profundity of attacks on Jews in living memory and the ongoing,
large-scale violence of the situation in the Middle East, this case provides vivid examples
of how people deploy punitive and disciplinary power through emotions, in their
struggles to define the collective self and the normative requirements for continued and
unquestioned membership in the category. Both anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli
conflict are sensitive topics, of course, but how social power travels by way of emotions
is most clearly visible where emotions run high. Looking at such a heated issue gives us
an opportunity to see how emotions work in social groups, to produce and police people’s

4
For instance, feminists (Stein 1993; Vance 1984; Hirsch and Kellner 1990), student activists (Balser
1997), civil rights activists (Balser 1997; Morris 1984; Polletta 2002; Robnett 2005), LGBT activists
(Armstrong 2003; Gamson 1996; Ghaziani 2008) and AIDS activists (Gould 2009). For discussions of the
factors that can shape which of multiple, overlapping identities become salient as group identities in the first
place, see Laitin (1986) and Tilly (1998).
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 265

subjectivity, their conceptions of themselves, and the meaning of the group as a whole,
which guides members’ actions.5
This article is part of a larger study that included intensive interviews, participant
observation, and focus groups, and is based largely on the 32 intensive interviews I
conducted with American Jews, who were recruited to participate in a study of
American Jews’ understandings and experiences of anti-Semitism and its relationship
to contemporary politics. This is by no means a random sample, since my goal is not to
assess anything like American Jewish “general opinion,” but to understand how internal
conflicts shed light on social power within groups and its effects on individuals.
Announcements were circulated through email listservs and by word of mouth, and
respondents volunteered to participate. This network technique generated a body of
respondents who were similar in many aspects, tending to be highly-educated and
middle-class or wealthier; they tended to be in, retired from, or preparing for middle-
class professions: lawyers, business or health professionals, rabbis, professional orga-
nizers, mental health workers, and teachers.6 Furthermore, having volunteered to par-
ticipate in this particular study, they were very likely to identify strongly as Jewish,
which we see reflected in the responses. They were all descended from European Jews,
and differences in responses to the questions at hand did not map onto whether the
respondents were descended from Central and Eastern European Jews who tend to be
Conservative or Orthodox, or Western European Jews who tend to be Reform. Since I
myself am not Jewish, my data were clearly limited to those who would be comfortable
discussing such issues with an outsider.7 Respondents’ views did not reveal any
systematic variation with regard to Jewish heritage (for instance, Western vs. Eastern
European) or level of observance. I conducted semi-structured interviews from 2005 to
2007, in locations chosen by the respondents, such as their home, private office, or a
coffee shop. Interviews took from one to four hours, with most falling in the range of one
and a half to 2 h. These discussions were guided by very general questions, such as
“Would you say you have experienced anti-Semitism?” and “How did you get involved
with [organization]?” which were elaborated as the conversation progressed; they were
audio-recorded and transcribed, and the transcripts were coded thematically.
While the broader study included participant-observation, these data include no
direct observations of face-to-face conflicts between people with competing perspec-
tives. This may seem a liability, until we recall that often such exchanges are either
too painful and personal for their interlocutors to want to be observed, or else entail
the hurling of insults, such as those Benski (2005) catalogued in her observations of

5
For more on how these struggles shed light on group identification, see Moon (2012).
6
It is not likely that my findings would have been significantly different if I had interviewed respondents
with lower education or income levels. Scholars who study American Jews tend to find that while education
and income have slight and opposing effects on political views in the general public, the effect is even
smaller among Jews (Cohen et al. 2008). With regard to views of the Middle East peace process, there
seems to be some evidence that income has significant, negative effect on “hawkishness,” though this
relationship is not as strong as that between views of the peace process and many other factors (including
denomination, Jewish education, and being male) (Kotler-Berkowitz and Sternberg, 2000: Table 6 [no
pagination]).
7
Those who have had the greatest experience with ethnic violence, such as immigrants from former Soviet
countries or Israel, may have been least willing to participate in a study of experiences and understandings
anti-Semitism conducted by a non-Jew, but it is likely that their comments would amplify, rather than
transform, the findings presented here.
266 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

the peace group Women in Black and their public vigils in Tel Aviv. By examining
retrospective accounts of such exchanges, we benefit from each respondent’s rela-
tively calm reflection on his or her own reactions as well as respondents’ accounts of
others’ motivations. The latter may not give an accurate account of the motivations
they seek to explain, but they do give us a window into the speaker’s own worldview.
In the analysis that follows, I focus on members or supporters of mainstream
American Jewish organizations such as their local Jewish Federation, the Anti-
Defamation League (ADL), and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC). I also focus on members or supporters of two organizations that take exception
to these mainstream organizations’ approach to anti-Semitism and Middle East geopol-
itics: Jews for a Just and Lasting Peace (JJLP), and the Palestinian-Jewish Reconciliation
Circle.8 JJLP is a local branch of a national political organization of largely American
Jews that seeks to promote justice for the Palestinians in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The
Reconciliation Circle is a loose network of community groups organized in people’s
homes, in which Jewish and Palestinian Americans gather to listen to each other’s
stories. In the group’s general philosophy, the act of listening itself helps to build trust
and friendship by bringing down the psychological defenses that keep people in
historically antagonistic groups at odds with each other. As I show below, much intra-
group conflict occurs at the boundaries between mainstream organizations and smaller
groups that challenge their approach.

The American Jewish civil religion and Israel’s place in it

To understand American Jewish conflicts over the Middle East, we need to understand
what the State of Israel has come to mean in American Jewish community life. Drawing
from Bellah’s (1967) conceptualization of civil religion, Woocher (1986) argues that
throughout the early- to mid-twentieth century, American Jewish organizers
unintentionally but effectively developed a set of unifying principles that he calls the
American Jewish civil religion, or civil Judaism, highlighting the significant points on
which most American Jews could agree. Regardless of religious views, immigration
experience, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, political ideology, and the like, Woocher
argues, American Jews through the mid-twentieth century coalesced in secular organi-
zations around principles that included:
1. The unity of the Jewish people
2. Mutual responsibility
3. Jewish survival in a threatening world
4. The centrality of the State of Israel
5. The enduring value of Jewish tradition
6. Tzedakah: philanthropy and social justice
7. Americanness as a virtue (Woocher 1986, pp. 67–68)
While Woocher argues that these principles emerged out of debate and negotiation,
he describes them has having become nearly doxic, which is to say that to many, they

8
For groups like these that are smaller and more locally-based, I use pseudonyms to protect respondents’
confidentiality. All personal names and identifiers have been changed for the same reason.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 267

have become the rules and stakes of membership and simply go without saying. In this
sense, the American Jewish civil religion—including its principle of defending the state
of Israel— rooted as it is in the material conditions of Jewish existence, contributes to
what we can consider American Jewish habitus: the range of dispositions produced,
without conscious intent, in the course of being consciously raised as part of an
American Jewish family and community.9 Summing up Israel’s role in civil Judaism
in the 1980s, he writes:
The role which Israel plays in the civil religion is indeed central, though complex.
In practical terms, an enormous proportion of the energies of the institutions of the
Jewish polity is devoted to work of one sort or another on behalf of the state and
people of Israel. For many activists, Israel is the prime motivator and focus of their
involvement. It remains the central theme and cause in communitywide fundraising
campaigns. Jewish unity, mutual responsibility and Jewish survival all come
together in Israel; its is the symbolic center of the civil Jewish universe, the place
where the lines of Jewish existence—of Jewish history and tradition, of the modern
Jewish condition and the response to that condition—intersect (1986, p. 77).
There is some debate as to the extent to which civil Judaism remains doxic for today’s
American Jews. Cohen and Eisen found “retention of most of the principal tenets of
‘civil Judaism,’” (2000, p. 35) but argued that contemporary, moderately affiliated
American Jews have a much more fluid conception of what it means to be Jewish—
with more “picking and choosing”—than was the case for previous generations, whose
members had been held apart from American society by discrimination and economic
struggles. But while in-marriage or attending religious services may be more optional
than they were for previous generations of American Jews, other studies seem to indicate
that identifying with the state of Israel is not so optional. While Cohen and Eisen found
identification with Israel to be diminishing among American Jews (2000, pp. 142ff),
others find American Jews to identify strongly with the Jewish state and its policies. The
2000 National Jewish Population Survey found “proportionally as many Jews age 35–
44 as those age 55–64 have gone to Israel, maintain social networks there, and believe in
the common fate of American and Israeli Jews, suggesting stability and strength over
time in many types of connections to the Jewish state” (United Jewish Communities
2001, p. 12). More recently, fully 96 % of American Jews in a survey sponsored by the
American Jewish Committee said that the Palestinians should be required to “recognize
Israel as a Jewish state” in any future peace agreement, 76 % agreed with the statement
that “the goal of the Arabs is not the return of the occupied territories but rather the
destruction of Israel,” and 59 % said that Israel should not “be willing to compromise on
the status of Jerusalem as a united city under Israeli jurisdiction” (American Jewish
Committee 2011).10 Many scholars in this area discuss how the state of Israel has come

9
To be sure, habitus varies with factors such as religion; what is doxic to an Orthodox Jew may not be
doxic for a Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, or secular Jew, for instance. However, the principles
of civil Judaism themselves unite members of these disparate groups and other Jews, anchoring what I refer
to as American Jewish habitus while providing sites for classificatory struggle.
10
The 2010 Current Jewish Population Reports (Sheskin and Dashefsky 2011, p. 32–33) found local
communities varying widely with regard to the percentage of respondents reporting that they feel “ex-
tremely or very” emotionally attached to Israel (32–62 %), suggesting that national surveys may mask
much regional variation; however, it is not clear exactly what these responses mean.
268 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

to symbolize redemption while symbolically or actually serving as the one reliably safe
haven for the world’s Jews (Aviv and Shneer 2005; Cohen and Eisen 2000; Goldberg
1996; Liebman and Cohen 1990; Rapaport 2005; Rosenthal 2001, 2005).
Certainly not all Jews identify very strongly as Jewish, but for those who do, like
my respondents, we can say that there is an American Jewish habitus, a set of
dispositions and “rules of the game” in which they are fluent and able to improvise
intelligibly. This concept builds on Cohen and Eisen’s findings, as their respondents
largely seem to be doing just such intelligible improvisation. Indeed, as I show below,
feeling that one lacks deep connections and the ability to improvise may foster
conformity among those who do not wish to be excluded. In contrast, dissent from
the tenets of major Jewish organizations can be seen as improvisation among those
who have the fluency to assert their actions and interpretations as consistent with their
Jewish heritage.
Understanding the conflict among American Jews over the state of Israel requires a
bit more context. Roughly 60 years after the Nazi holocaust was revealed by Allied
forces and nearly as many since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, genera-
tions of American Jews have grown up learning about anti-Semitism throughout
history, but feeling relatively secure in their own lives. It is widely observed that the
late-twentieth and early twenty-first century United States offers Jews more than
many places and times in terms of safety, political rights, social acceptance, economic
opportunity, and so on (Cohen and Eisen 2000; Goldberg 1996; Liebman and Cohen
1990). This security has made it possible for some Jews to see hostility against Israel
as resulting from ordinary conflicts over real events, rather than rooted in chimeric
hatreds based on fantasy (Smith 1996).11 While it is still embattled, the very success
of Zionism to create a Jewish nation-state with a stable government, strong military,
and thriving economy, along with its policies towards Palestinian citizens and
residents of the West Bank and Gaza, have made it possible for the state of Israel
to be criticized by the Left as a regressive, nationalist project (Julius 2007).
Meanwhile, criticism from the United Nations and other international bodies and
violent conflicts with the Palestinian organization Hamas, as well as with nearby
countries, make the state’s footing seem to others as tenuous as ever. We can see these
social structural conditions as laying the ground for ambivalence in those who, in one
way or another, identify with the Jewish state.

Jewish challenges to civil Judaism

Observers of American Jewish life, including Woocher (2005), have noted the decline
of civil Judaism’s consensus since the early 1990s, pointing out that some American
Jews’ feelings about the state of Israel have become more conflicted (Rosenthal 2001,
2005; Cohen and Eisen 2000). For a number of my respondents, the continued
violence in the Middle East seems to be making Israel itself an unsafe place for

11
What Smith would call chimeric anti-Semitism might be seen today in the circulation of the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion as reality, stories about Jews eating Arab children, and the like; see Hirsch ([ca. 2007]).
There are still examples of chimeric anti-Semitism in the world, but these are currently highly marginal in
the United States.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 269

Jews, and some of my respondents held Israeli policy at least partly responsible for
this danger, seeing Israel as the more politically, economically, and militarily power-
ful party in its conflict with the Palestinians. As Todd (2005) suggests, such new-
seeming analyses are rooted in the same American Jewish habitus as those they
challenge and thus can lead to ontological conflicts over what it means to belong to
the group.12 People develop these new understandings of reality in moments of
emotional trauma that produce “outlaw emotions” that can disrupt their lives, re-
lationships, and self-concepts, and may even cause them to redirect their lives.
Karin, for instance, was a 59 year-old organizer with Jews for a Just and Lasting
Peace (JJLP), and told me about the moment when she lost her Zionist commitment,
and how she developed a new analysis:
So briefly, for a couple of years I became a very ardent Zionist. And felt very
self-righteous about it, which was a really strong part of my politics at that stage
in my life. [Then I saw a play, that was based on a letter written by a] nurse, who
happened to be Jewish. This is a letter that this woman Ellen [Siegel], […] had
written from Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. And she was taking care of
Palestinian children who were dying. And of course the camps were attacked
brutally by the Christians, the Phalangists, but the Israeli military encouraged
them and stood by and let them do it so it was a big complicity by Israel. And I
just started sobbing because seeing this nurse taking care of these children, you
know, it just broke through the self-righteousness and this fear and this, I
remember sitting there on the ground […] and just sobbing and thinking I don’t
know how to make this all come together. I know I can still feel good about
being a Jew and what the Israeli government is doing is reprehensible to me, as
a human being and I have to deal, I have to accept that and figure that out. And
that was the start of my journey. […] I went to Israel and Palestine with my tape
recorder [as] a radio journalist and started interviewing […] Israeli peace
activists and Palestinian activists, and stayed in homes and refugee camps
throughout Gaza and the West Bank. And [I] felt such a commonality with
these people, you know. The food, the ideas, the arguing, the emotion. I felt at
home, and I just felt like I have to do something to help people understand that
these people, they’re not terrorists, they’re human beings; put a human face on
it. […] So it just breaks my heart that the way that the trauma has hit so many
Jews has been […] to go the other side of it […], white knuckling it, “Never
Again,” “This is never going to happen to us again; we’re gonna have the
biggest army in the world. We’re gonna build the biggest walls we can,” as if,
as if that can keep people from killing them. I mean more people have been
killed, you know, Israel’s less safe now than— [it’s] probably the most unsafe
place for Jews.
Like Karin, many members of JJLP and the Reconciliation Circle cited a book or
artistic work that caused them to see Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands as brutal
and profoundly unjust. Fifty-year-old Julia, for instance, was an artist who had loved

12
Jewish solidarity with the Palestinians is nothing new (see, for instance, Arendt (2007 [1944]), Magnes
and Buber (1947), and Buber (1983)), but having not been incorporated into civil Judaism, it can seem new.
270 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

traveling to Israel when she was younger, and then read Israeli geographer
Benvenisti’s (2002) Sacred Landscape. She remarked:
There are a whole bunch of new Jewish Israeli […] professors that are coming
out with more and more books, but his was one of the first that was actually
written by a Jewish scholar. And he had access to a lot of records that had just
become available on the 50th anniversary of the state, […] that showed that,
that—even the word ethnic cleansing was, is, I, it’s so disgusting. One of the
sad things is you grow up Jewish and you’re told that Jewish people are morally
superior, you know, like so we’re different from everyone else. Right. No, but
because we’ve been the victims, for 2000 years we never had the opportunity to
be the perpetrators. And it’s just devastating to discover your whole world fall
apart. These lovely, perfect, highly moral people would never cause any trouble.
Because you hadn’t the opportunity! [laughing] Nobody giving you a whole
state to run and be just as bad as everybody else. Yeah, it was life changing.

Julia’s comments reveal the extent to which Israel had symbolized what it meant to
her to be Jewish. New information about Israel “disgusted” and “devastated” her; she
felt a visceral sense of revulsion and being laid to waste, precisely because her sense
of herself was affected by Israel’s actions.
For others, visiting Israel itself provided that emotional spark to transformation.
For instance, forty-two year-old Lisa was raised fully within the tradition of civil
Judaism, having grown up in a deeply committed Zionist family in the United States.
Family members had been lost in the Holocaust, and her grandparents raised money
with Israel’s first leaders to support the founding of the new state in 1948, which she,
like the rest of her family, had regarded with pride as an ideal state, one institutionally
committed to justice for all people from its beginning. She also grew up knowing of
her grandfather’s leadership for civil rights in their East Coast city, and saw that
tireless work for justice and respect for all people as defining what it meant to be
Jewish. She remarked:
[The first time I went to Israel] I’m sitting on El Al airlines, next to a young
Israeli professional couple. They’re Ashkenazi Jews, their grandparents were
from Poland, like my family. [… W]e were chatting, you know, blah blah blah.
And they start talking about Arabs, in a way that—it was just unbelievable to
me, the racism. To this day I have never repeated what they said because it was
so humiliating. You know, I grew up around a lot of racism, so I’m used to
racism, but this was like, you’re at a professional party, a cocktail party, and
because the both of you are white it’s just okay to start talking about black folks
as though they were animals, that’s how these people were talking, and I
thought, I recognize this language. This language is like white people talking
about African-Americans in the '60s, you know, with no shame. And it was like
getting kicked in the stomach. It was horrible, I was so shocked. I couldn’t even
challenge them on it because I was so shocked; I was shocked, the things they
were saying. […Once I got there] I had this experience that I can best describe
as, all these things kept happening on the trip that I wasn’t looking for. That
experience was, I can best describe it as an encounter with a kind of supremacy.
The Jewish supremacy without shame. That the way people talked was, “Of
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 271

course we’re better than the Arabs—we’re better, we’re smarter, we’re this…”
you know all these things that weren’t even rational, none of it was rational and
what was shocking to me was the lack of shame about it. […] And that was so
profoundly upsetting to me. And then I saw implemented in policy, I saw it
wasn’t just people sitting in a room, you’d see how that attitude pervaded,
everything, and it was a very upsetting experience for me.
For these speakers and others, new social conditions (Jews’ relative security) and
new knowledge (of Israelis’ treatment of the Palesitinians) demanded reconciliation
with their doxic knowledge about what it meant to be Jewish. Bourdieu’s work
recognized such transformations, but describes such struggles over “classificatory
schemes” so colorlessly as to displace the emotional content that animates these
struggles (Bourdieu 1989, p. 19; also see Bourdieu 1991). The demands of old and
new knowledge, quite clearly, were experienced as emotions: sobbing on the ground,
feeling “consumed,” “kicked in the stomach,” angry, hurt, disgusted, devastated,
shocked, humiliated, ashamed. Such feelings could have led these individuals to
dissociate from the group, but Jewish habitus was too central to who each speaker
was; it could not simply be jettisoned. Karin’s desires to keep Jews safe and for
human beings to all be treated with love and respect, Julia’s sense of morality, Lisa’s
understanding that being Jewish means working against all racism and her shame at
those she saw as racist—their desire for justice for the Palestinians was rooted in their
doxic Jewish values. They thus felt compelled to engage in struggle over the meaning
of being Jewish (and the meaning, for Jews, of other people being Palestinian).13
Karin expressed this relationship explicitly when she said of JJLP:
We are very proudly Jews. […] We use our tradition. That’s why we’re doing
this, because the Jewish tradition says that you do justice. And so that’s what
our mission is.
Similarly, 67 year-old Ken, a retired pediatrician who organized a local Reconcilia-
tion Circle group, cited a Jewish prayer when he remarked:
And so, I think, anti-Semitism can best […] best atrophy by not breeding
contempt for others. By not elevating ourselves by diminishing the other. By
joining the human race. And by listen—teaching our kids and ourselves to listen
to everybody’s story and excluding no one. And this is in the tradition of our, all
of our teachings. In the Shema, which is our greatest teaching: “Hear, O Israel,”
Hear. Listen. It’s our foremost prayer for a very good reason. We have to listen
when it’s not easy, when the wind is blowing a hundred miles an hour, not just
to ourselves, but to the Other, even our enemies.
Bourdieu acknowledged that internal conflicts can emerge in the face of new
circumstances or new information. But his framework does not go far enough; he
did not attend enough to the constitutive role of emotions in struggles over symbolic
power, struggles that come about because emotions work to orient people toward
investment in their particular way of classifying, of defining what it means to belong
13
For some critics, the very concept of a “Jewish state” contradicts the notion of Israel as a democracy,
especially given that 20 % of its citizens are not Jewish and are subject to double standards in public
services and attitudes like those Lisa witnessed.
272 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

to a group. Here, emotions can provoke such struggles; as we shall see, they can also
be a medium of social power animating these struggles.
For Jews, the choice to publicly express solidarity with the Palestinians is, as
Todd (2005) observes in the case of Ireland, not “costless;” indeed, these
speakers have done so sometimes at considerable cost—to their family relations,
jobs, and senses of comfort, belonging, and if they are American, home within
the mainstream American Jewish community. They evince social change by
breaking what Bourdieu (2001) called “relations of complicity,” not with the
group that oppresses them, but with the group that has oriented them. Compared
to, say, the Third Reich, civil Judaism does not oppress Jews who disagree with
some of its tenets or the dominant understanding of those tenets’ meaning.14 But
examining the intragroup conflicts that follow when new information confronts
lifelong assumptions, we can see the kinds of intragroup processes that can
contribute to or impede social change. The experiences Karin and Lisa described
threatened their sense of their own and their group’s very existence.

Symbolic exclusion: techniques of symbolic power

Meanwhile, the preponderance of American Jews maintain their public support for
Israel and continue to define it as essential to continued Jewish survival in the world.
Some critiques of that state can provoke deep concerns in this regard. From this
perspective, other Jews’ faltering support and identification with it can appear as
either a profound betrayal or a dangerous naïveté. Such dangerous emotions and
expressions indicate to some that Jewishness—the category, the people, and what it
means to be a Jewish self—is under attack from within, as we saw in Netanyahu’s
comments in the face of protest. Defenders of what Bourdieu would call the
established order use symbolic exclusion, by which I mean efforts to codify the
“principles of vision and division” that define the group by working performatively
to cast some out—to manage how people define what it means to be Jewish. Because
group coherence cannot be physically forced, it depends on individuals to consent to
its principles and discipline themselves, and each other, to reproduce those principles
and thereby reproduce the group as they know it. Struggles over the principles that
define the group are transacted, at least in part, in the medium of emotions.
The respondents we hear from below were engaged citizens whose doxic view of
history and politics led them to see it as crucial that the United States give military
and financial support to the state of Israel. For instance, 44 year-old Rick was a
children’s advocacy lawyer who worked with an organization called Americans for
Israel, which advocated for Israel to remain a strong, Jewish state. He argued that
events including the 1929 pogrom in Hebron, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s 1936
letter in support of Hitler, the Hamas Charter’s anti-Jewish language, and Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel rhetoric and sponsorship of a 2006
14
Bourdieu (1989, 1991) would beg to differ; as he considered symbolic violence—the power of the state
to define group membership and reality and have its declarations accepted—a form of oppression affecting
everyone touched by the nation-state. This concept certainly has some bearing on the topic at hand, but is a
subject for a different article. Clearly, the state of Israel is widely seen as a solution to some major problems
of Jewish oppression, including the Nazi Holocaust and subsequent attacks on Jews around the world.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 273

Holocaust-denial conference—led to the conclusion that Arabs and Muslims hate

Jews, either fundamentally or as a result of political manipulation.15 For Rick and
others who saw things similarly, revising or expanding the American Jewish civil
religion to allow questioning whether Israel should remain a Jewish state would risk
collective self-destruction—in Woocher’s terms, it would negate both the principle of
mutual defense among Jews and that of the centrality of the state of Israel to Jewish
life. That Jews would do such things could feel profoundly threatening and nearly
inexplicable. As with any boundary breech, members asserted the boundaries of the
“we” to restore a sense of security and order (Berger 1967, Durkheim 1982 [1895],
Erikson 1966, Lamont 1992, 2000).
Rick commented on the refusal of Jews for a Just and Lasting Peace (JJLP) to endorse
any particular resolution to the question of national boundaries in the Middle East,
remarking:
We can have lots of disagreements but we agree on the same basic tenet.
Everything else is negotiable. If you don’t agree with that statement [that Israel
has the right to exist as a Jewish state], which is a very simple one, then I’m
sorry, then you’re on the other side. You’re in the tent or you’re out of the tent.
And that line is the entrance to the tent. I mean JJLP’s not in the tent. JJLP, for
example, has tried for years to become a member of the Jewish Community
Organization [an umbrella organization comprising most of the Jewish organi-
zations in the region]. And they’ve not been allowed to do so because they
won’t accept that and that’s a fundamental tenet of the Jewish community. And
they’re not allowed in. And they’re ticked off at that.
Rick’s “we” stakes his own position in “the Jewish community,” while drawing the
line to keep out those Jews who refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,
which he described as “a central tenet of organized Jewish communities anywhere in the
world. Whether it be here, Europe, Australia, wherever.” For Rick, drawing the line was
crucial, since disagreeing with the tenet that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, in
his analysis, amounted to denying Jews a safe place on earth. He added:
… do you accept Israel’s right to exist in peace as a Jewish state, free from
attacks? If you accept it, that’s fine. You can criticize the government, there’s
lots of, I mean Israelis do it all the time, but they don’t say we should turn the
whole country over to the Arabs. Just like we can criticize our own govern-
ment’s conduct, and many Americans do very vigorously, that doesn’t mean we
want to go ahead and […] destroy the system. So that’s the difference between
criticism and existential denial.
Lamont (2000) shows how people invoke moral boundaries to create a sense of
security in conditions when material conditions are unstable, and I would argue that
the cognitive perception of instability would be more significant than the material
reality in shaping an individual’s invocation of moral categories; those living in very
similar material conditions, but with different interpretations of the cause and extent
of the dangers facing Jews, set different boundaries than Rick did. Putting that minor

15
Apart from the references to Ahmadinejad’s more recent actions, this list echoes Dershowitz’s (2003)
reasoning in The Case for Israel.
274 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

point aside, Rick’s comments have a deeper meaning: his use of the phrase “existen-
tial denial” speaks to the profound meaning the state of Israel has for many American
Jews’ sense of who they are and what it means to be Jewish, in ways similar, but not
identical, to how other diasporic populations refer to their people’s geographic center
(Kurien 2004). When people do not affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, they
threaten Jewish existence—a threat other groups have systematically attempted to
carry out—and thus defy the American Jewish civil religion’s tenets of mutual
defense as well. He thus casts them “out of the tent.”
This boundary definition does not create any institutional change in itself, but it
does a great deal of work. Tilly pointed out that nations, social movements, civil
organizations, and other groups all perform for an audience, needing to demonstrate
that they are worthy, unified, numerous, and committed (1998, p. 467). In his own
framing, Rick objects to those he sees as endangering Jewish security by framing
Israel as not worthy (because of its treatment of the Palestinians), and who demon-
strate by their very objections that the Jewish nation it represents is not unified,
numerous, or fully committed. In Rick’s view, such Jews have consciously chosen to
oppose themselves to continued Jewish survival and have thus put themselves out of
the tent. He thus repaired damage to the collective self, restoring its appearance of
unity and commitment, as well as the comfort of home. He preserved his hope for
continued safety by delegitimating those who would consider the possibility of Israel
being replaced by a binational state (of Jews and Arabs), akin to Canada or Belgium.
In this sense, we can think of civil Judaism as an effort to affirm the boundaries of
the American Jewish habitus. To defy its core principles is simply to cease to “play
the game,” much the way a basketball player who assists the opposition’s offense is
simply no longer playing basketball (and accordingly, will soon not be allowed to
play on any basketball team) (Bourdieu 1990). As such, drawing the line by defining
some as “out of the tent” can be seen as enacting symbolic exclusion. In contrast to the
moral boundaries Lamont (1992, 2000) finds her respondents invoking largely to
maintain self-esteem (but which, when influencing the decisions of the powerful, can
have concrete effects such as in hiring or funding decisions), symbolic exclusion is a
performative gesture that can have concrete, if indirect, effects in the lives of group
members, apart from institutional structures—in their sense of identity and belonging,
in how group membership is defined, and the like.16 This exclusion can also have
institutional effects, as I show below, but I argue that the main force of symbolic
exclusion lies in the power to define group boundaries.
Symbolic exclusion asserts the classificatory principles for the group, backed by
authority that is anchored firmly in the realm of interaction, not economic or state
power.17 Symbolic exclusion repaired speakers’ sense of the collectivity by symbolically
16
This concept builds on Herzfeld’s argument that rhetoric is “the source of social continuity and change in
all areas of social life” and a “causative agent” in the social world (1997, p. 142). Herzfeld’s (1997) and
Butler’s (1993, 1997) understandings of performative authority are more apt here than Bourdieu’s (1991).
See also Austin (1965). While Bourdieu (1991) sees the authority of the performative inhering in the social
structural position of the speaker, Butler and Herzfeld show that such authority is sometimes created by
citing previous nonhierarchical authority, or by affirming the everyday authority of others, and thus does
not depend on structural position. Of course, in this case part of the power of Rick’s gesture comes from its
widespread recurrence; the numbers of people who share his definitions contribute to the efficacy of the
claims made by each.
17
Indeed, Goldberg (1996) argues that the success of such informal gestures creates institutional support.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 275

casting out Jews whose definition of what it meant to be Jewish resulted in actions that
seemed to threaten Jewish security by threatening the definition of Jewishness. While
symbolic exclusion would take different forms in different groups, and possibly even in
other forms among American Jews, in addition to drawing the line, respondents enacted
symbolic exclusion in four other ways as they tried to account for why some Jews would
publicly criticize Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians: questioning heritage, pathol-
ogizing psyches, reducing through ridicule, and casting into the abject. These rhetorical
moves define problematic members as outside the moral community, as not worth
engaging or connecting with interpersonally.18

Questioning heritage If symbolically casting Jews with certain political views “out of
the tent” was a particularly clear statement of symbolic exclusion, others sought to
question whether certain people were “really Jews” in the first place. While he may
have disagreed with Rick on some points, 38-year-old Bill too was an ardent advocate
for US support for Israel and an active member of AIPAC, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee. Bill told me that the Palestinians deserved a better life than they
have, but saw it as wrong to hold Israel responsible for their plight or to single out
Israel for human rights abuses. Like Rick, he drew the line at questioning Israel’s
right to exist as a Jewish state. Commenting on the anti-Semitism he attributed to
many Arabs and Arab-Americans in his town and the neighboring university, Bill
remarked that many of their supporters in the United States were Jews, explaining:
There’s the very vocal, very ugly if you ask me, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic
element on the university campus, there were Arab students, Arab and Pales-
tinian professors, […] who are, I think terribly hypocritical, coming from the
Arab world and pointing the finger at Israel for their human rights abuses, when
[…] Syria, for example, and Saudi Arabia, there’s just no clear argument that
you can make if you want to balance those human rights issues in the Middle
East and to point fingers at Israel. So there’s the highly vocal side of Arab
students and professors. And there’s the ultra progressive members of the
American community who are sort of their supporters. Amazingly but not so
amazing, because it’s common, many of them are Jews. So when they say,
“How can I be anti-Semitic? I’m a Jew like you,” well, one thing is that some of
their backgrounds are suspect. You know: “Well … my grandfather was a
Jew…”— but they’re not really members of the community. But some of them
are. No question. […] I find it maddening.
It is significant that what Bill finds maddening is that other Jews define their Jewishness
in such a way as to allow or encourage them to hold Israel responsible for the
Palestinians’ plight; what provokes him is precisely the conflict over how to define
the group, and others’ competing definitions seem to him to threaten Jewish existence,
and thus to be anti-Semitic. For Bill and other respondents, given that other countries
egregiously violate human rights and receive relatively little sanction compared to Israel,
18
By delineating types of symbolic exclusion and elaborating their effects and people’s responses to them,
I expand on Herzfeld’s discussion of the performative power of stereotype (1997, pp. 165–164). Such
rhetoric also echoes what Alexander (1992) describes as the distinction between worthy citizens and
unworthy non-citizens in any civil society’s discourse. See also Alexander and Smith (1993), and
Lamont (1992, 2000).
276 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

to demonize Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians echoes anti-Semites’ scapegoating
of Jews for the world’s troubles and disproportionate punishment of Jews for trans-
gressions that all kinds of people commit with little notice (Dershowitz 2003; Smith
1996). By holding suspect the Jewish identifications of some of the Jews he saw as
demonizing Israel, Bill defined them out of the group—and in doing so, he minimized
the pool of those he defined as traitors, and perhaps his feelings of betrayal as well. He
could view this subset as outsiders, being anti-Semitic as some outsiders often have over
the centuries, and could effectively retain his sense of the group’s cohesion. Here we see
Bill, like Rick, working to repair the damage these other Jews have done to his sense of
the coherence of American Jewish habitus.

Pathologizing psyches Another form of “exclusion” involved claiming that one with
whom a speaker disagreed on political matters actually suffered from “self-hatred.”
This claim might not seem at first to be a form of exclusion, but to discount another’s
remarks as coming from a place of pathology, in effect, shuts the person out of the
moral community; it renders their views illegitimate and off the table for consider-
ation. Describing those who were “really Jewish” and still took positions he found to
be anti-Semitic, Bill commented:
So you wanna ask about anti-Semitism, is there anti-Semitism? Definitely. There’s
anti-Semitism. And can you be a Jew and be anti-Semitic? Yes. Because some of
these people are self-loathing, self-hating Jews. They have no affiliation whatso-
ever with the Jewish community, or Judaism. They have Jewish blood, and
therefore they use it to, defend, what I believe to be anti-Semitic positions.19
While he maintained that some of these Jews’ heritage was suspect, Bill deployed
another mode of symbolic exclusion. Rather than allow that fellow Jews might act in
ways that would call into question his own definition of Jewishness, he discounted
them as pathological, as people who did not know their true interests because their
self-hatred clouded their judgment and caused them to voice the views of those bent
on destroying them. In effect, this move turns an adversary’s perceived hostility back
against her- or himself, while casting him or her as irrational and not worth taking
seriously.

Reducing through ridicule Ridicule could have a similar effect. Like other forms of
symbolic exclusion, ridicule and dismissal can help those who deploy them to maintain
a sense of home and coherence that Bourdieu sees as arising unproblematically in
habitus. For instance, Rick recognized that some Jewish individuals and groups saw a
single, multiethnic state of Palestinians and Jews as the best hope for peace in the Middle

19
Bill made it clear that any state is open to criticism by its citizens or others; it was not out of bounds, in
his mind, for Americans to criticize American policy in Iraq, nor is it anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli
government. “Can you be anti-Israel and not anti-Semitic? Yes, you can. And it occurs in Israel. [And] to be
Jewish does not mean to necessarily be pro-Israel. That’s fine,” he remarked, citing the small group of
Israeli orthodox Jews who are critical of Zionism for religious reasons, believing that it is up to the Messiah,
not human beings, to restore Israel. On the other hand, at a public event I attended at a synagogue, where a
speaker discussed the creation of the state of Israel, a member of the audience mentioned that small Israeli
orthodox group; the speaker responded in quick and forceful words, saying that there was a special place in
Hell reserved for those who turn on their own people.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 277

East, and to him, such ideas were ridiculously naïve at best and reflected a potentially
deadly haplessness. About such groups he remarked:

They call for what is referred to as “the one state solution,” which is a single
state of Jews and Arabs between the Jordan [River] and the Mediterranean, and
everybody will sort of live in harmony and sing “Kumbaya” and celebrate the
sunset together. And our answer to that is yeah, [in states] just with Arabs that
worked really well, in Lebanon and Iraq. They co-exist really well just on their
own; how are they going to co-exist with a large Jewish minority for whom they
would not want to give any, you know, equal rights anyway?

Built on a foundational image of Arabs as incapable of living peacefully, even among

themselves, Rick took on a tone of ridicule in describing Jews who did not rule out the
possibility of a binational state, suggesting that these groups believe that an insipidly
romantic utopia can emerge instantaneously. Arabs are the absolute Other in this
formulation, in which Rick interprets conflicts in Arab nations as evidence that Arabs
could never get along with Jews—a conclusion further supported, in his reasoning, by
what he saw as evidence that while Arabs may not be unified in general, history had
proven that they are unified in their desire to purge Jews from the Middle East. The
evidence of conflicts among Arabs served to show him not that they differ in opinions or
standpoints, but that they are inclined to violence. Ridicule, like pathologizing, negates
those Jews who do not share his view of Arabs; ridiculous people are unthreatening and
unworthy of engagement—if they contribute nothing meaningful to the Jewish collec-
tivity, then they cannot threaten to change it. As I show below, a number of respondents
spoke in great depth about the fear of ridicule, which they saw deterring people from
voicing different opinions and experiences, or even seeking them out.

Wishing dead Diane was a 69 year-old retired advertising executive who, having loved
Israel when she lived there for several years in the mid-1960s, joined JJLP when she
read a book that taught her about how Palestinians were treated in the West Bank and
Gaza. Like many JJLP members, she saw the Occupation as not only unjust to
Palestinians, but as harmful to Jews as well, by inspiring anti-Jewish attacks such as
those her daughter witnessed while living in Italy. As we discussed Diane’s experiences
of anti-Semitism—being denied seating at a restaurant while on family vacation as a
child, hearing the phrase “Jew ’em down”—she related a story in which she framed
other Jews’ efforts to ostracize her as a form of anti-Semitism. She recalled:
My worst experience, in terms of being a Jew, was after I joined JJLP and I was
at my first demonstration, which was against the Occupation and against what
Israel was doing. And we were handing out fliers to people who had come to
celebrate Israel’s Independence Day, who were extremely pro-Israel. And I’d
never even dreamed I’d [have] such terrible things said to me, because of who I
was—and I considered that part of who I was, was a Jew who was critical of
Israel. So this young, young teenage girl said to me, well, [lowering her voice] I
was called a cunt, and then another girl said to me “Oh, bitch, you should die.”
For Diane, the topic of anti-Semitism led her to think of this verbal attack, being
debased and wished dead, in her experience, for being “a Jew who opposes the
278 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

Occupation.” Being negated and wished dead are forms of abjection, symbolically
casting the object of one’s slurs out of the realm of the livable (Butler 1993). As in the
incident described at the beginning of this article, coarse language reflects and enacts
the symbolic removal of their object from the moral community, effectively saying
that the object does not merit the speaker’s respect or recognition.
Similarly, Bill recalled occasions when he had come face-to-face with JJLP
protestors:
So JJLP is the element of Jews who believe, “[…] I can prove my leftist
credentials by standing up for what I see is wrong, and if that means standing
up against my own people, aren’t I a more just person?” It’s the only way I can
[…] understand what their position is. I have put my finger in their chest and
told them that I think they’re disgusting, and I think they don’t understand, and
it doesn’t go anywhere. I think they should be ashamed of themselves. I see
them at AIPAC events, I see them out front with their placards and occasionally
I’ll break down and give them a few choice words, and then I’ll go in and I’ll sit
with [1000 or] 4000 people, and I’ll feel fine. And I’ll know that they’re a small
element, and right now they’re not very powerful. […I]n the big picture, they’re
little ants.
We can see Bill’s disgust at JJLP’s transgression of the boundaries of the Jewish
community, his shaming them and envisioning them as “little ants,” as repairing his
sense of the Jewish community’s boundaries. He does not wish them dead, but his
feelings of disgust and his vision of them as puny similarly cast them into the realm of
the abject; they need not be taken seriously.
Others have observed different forms of symbolic exclusion. For instance, in her
study of a college Israel-advocacy organization, Minkin spoke to a student named
Brad, who took exception to members of the international Jewish peace group
Women in Black,20 calling them a “hillul Hashem” (an abomination of God’s name).
He remarked, “they are a hillul Hashem because they are going against the Jewish
people in public. They are horrible.” For Brad, rather than self-hating, they figured as
religiously anathema—in his remarks, the public face of the Jewish people stands in
for the Creator and to violate one is to abominate the other, a view that reveals the
extent to which each, in its own way, defines and gives purpose to life. Again, certain
kinds of dissent in civil Judaism can lead to punishment in the form of an exclusion
that is not geographic, but as I show below, still real in its effects. Symbolic exclusion
is clearly a form of boundary work. Much the way Gieryn describes scientists
working to keep a monopoly on the authority to define “science,” we see defenders
of the Jewish state working to keep a “monopoly” on the authority to define
Jewishness, “excluding rivals from within as ‘pseudo,’ ‘deviant,’ or ‘amateur,’”
(Gieryn 1983, p. 792)—or in this case, as “pseudo,” self-hating, ridiculous, puny,
or abject. Other groups may evince other forms of symbolic exclusion, but the key to
this concept in any situation is that it has the performative effect of shutting out
people who threaten to change a moral community’s self-definition by challenging

20
The organization’s actual name. Minkin, S. A. (n.d.). Constructive critique or unwelcome opinions:
Israel advocacy inside a West Coast Hillel. Unpublished manuscript.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 279

that definition while claiming membership. They may contest their exclusion, but
they feel its effects whether they do or not.21

Other kinds of policing

In addition to symbolic exclusion, respondents reported other, more concrete forms of

removal or silencing. Indeed, I spoke with Rachel, a rabbi who had been forced out of
her congregation for writing an op-ed piece in her local newspaper where she
acknowledged that a small group of Jews and Palestinians in Israel were engaged
in reconciliation. In a less drastic case, Aviva, a 22 year-old intern with a Jewish
organization that drew funding from the local Jewish Federation, described to me the
intimidation she felt when her boss summoned her after she was quoted in her small
hometown paper, thousands of miles away, for saying that she found mainstream
Jewish organizations’ focus on terrorism to be too limited for her taste, as she was
more interested in Jews’ long history of work for social justice. This reprimand
served as a disciplinary lesson, making clear to Aviva the terms of belonging in the
organization and the broader community she worked for. As an organizer, JJLP’s Lisa
said that she regularly encountered Jews who agreed with her that the Israel was an
occupier and its occupation was dangerous to Jews as well as Palestinians, but who
feared reprisal were they to voice that view or allow it to be voiced in their
workplaces or organizations. She said that she had spoken with numerous leaders
in American Jewish life—rabbis, Jewish school teachers or administrators, and the
like—who had had their jobs threatened for such acts as organizing debates that
would allow “anti-Occupation” analyses to be expressed. In these cases, people in
positions of authority defined the boundaries of “the Jewish community,” reproduc-
ing those definitions by inciting those under their authority to stay in line, or denying
them employment. In a less direct but further-reaching form of reprisal, a website,
called “The Self-Hating, Israel-Threatening List” (Masada2000.org, n.d.) publicizes
the names of Jews who have supported policies or causes that the compilers find
objectionable or dangerous, where the names could potentially be discovered by
employers, relatives, or anyone with internet access, while employing the symbolic
work of coarse language.
Symbolic exclusion addresses the needs of the state in this case, but people
feel its real force at the microsocial level. For Tilly (1998) and Herzfeld (1997),
states, like social movements and other imagined communities (Anderson 1983)
seek to present themselves to audiences internal and external as having a fixed,
timeless identity, a continuity, and a contemporary unity. Appearing to have these
characteristics allows the state to speak legitimately for the nation. In this case,
actions taken in the name of the state of Israel and the nation it claims to
represent—the Jewish people—are complicated by the actual state’s considerable
economic dependence on people it in some ways claims as part of its nation but
who do not, have not, and probably will never live within its physical borders. In
the mid-twentieth century, in Woocher’s analysis, civil Judaism came to address

21
Whatever form it takes, symbolic exclusion challenges the legitimacy of those whose claims or behaviors run
afoul of one’s definition of what it means to be “us,” of what members of the moral community owe each other.
I have argued (Moon 2012) argues that these questions are central to the production of collectivities.
280 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

some of the needs of this state; it had the effect of managing the wide diversity
of American Jews in such a way as to make doxic the sense of a shared fate
with the state of Israel. That sense of shared fate depends on many things,
including cognitive categories, but we must not overlook either its emotional
content or the effects of people’s efforts to maintain that collective feeling. As
Lamont (1992) argues, that sense of collective feeling emerges when people
engage in boundary work. She writes:
Boundary work is also a way of developing a sense of group membership;
it creates bonds based on shared emotions, similar conceptions of the
sacred and the profane, and similar reactions toward symbolic violators.
More generally, boundaries constitute a system of rules that guide inter-
action by affecting who comes together to engage in what social acts.
They thereby also come to separate people into classes, working groups,
professions, species, genders, and races. Therefore, boundaries not only
create groups; they also potentially produce inequality because they are an
essential medium through which individuals acquire status, monopolize
resources, ward off threats, or legitimate their social advantages, often in
reference to superior lifestyle, habits, character, or competences (Lamont
1992, pp. 11–12).
While Lamont focuses on the potential for structural inequality, it is also important, as
Foucault (1978) pointed out, to look at the power that works not hierarchically, but in
the “interstices” of society, as doing so gives us a better understanding of social
power. Symbolic exclusion, in this sense, is a way to cast out the polluting influence
of those deemed untrustworthy and who thus threaten chaos or destruction.22
At a less conscious level, symbolic exclusion, like more concrete forms of
punishment or threat, reveals the work people do to maintain habitus (Skeggs
2004; Moran and Skeggs 2004).23 If habitus consists of the dispositions one
acquires in one’s own milieu, where one is competent to improvise, then calling
group members incompetent (ridiculous, pathological, puny, or unlivable) protects
the group from change by negating the claims of those whose improvisations
seem to threaten the group’s very existence. Symbolic exclusion can work to
stave off the “potentialities” of habitus that the dominant group deems unaccept-
able, thereby helping to maintain a sense of worthiness, unity, numerousness and
commitment (Tilly 1998) of the nation and helping to maintain political, eco-
nomic, and emotional connections between that nation and the state that many
believe legitimately represents it.

22
That sense of chaos or destruction is certainly made concrete in this case by the attacks on Jews in living
memory, but all nation-states face similar threats, because, as many have pointed out, all nation-states are
fictions, enacted by sometimes brutally incorporating some people and eliminating others (Tilly 1998;
Herzfeld 1997).
23
Thinking about symbolic exclusion from a more Gramscian perspective (Laitin 1986), we could also say
that these techniques show the work that people must do to maintain the “common sense” status of their
political beliefs when the latter are opened for questioning from within the group. My approach comple-
ments Laitin’s perspective on how some identities come to be considered more significant than others by
focusing on how people enact political struggles through collective emotions.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 281

Responses to exclusion

Symbolic exclusion works to help define the community and its members, in fact,
because it evokes strong emotions, because it is felt. The definition of the group is the
definition of oneself and when one’s own definition conflicts with others’, that conflict
impinges on one’s self, on who one is, on one’s existence. Symbolic exclusion is thus a
way that people produce and maintain collective identities and align individuals with
them (Moon 2012). In the respondents’ comments above, we have seen how emotional
investments in the definition of a category with which one identifies can lead to a
protective posture, reinforcing metaphorical tent walls to keep out threats to a group’s
cohesion or, potentially, survival. But because their own habitus is Jewish as well, those
who are cast outside the “tent” can also feel angry, betrayed, and existentially threatened
in conflicts over what it means to be Jewish, and like those who do the excluding, they
too may seek out places of “home” and security. Such conflicts can inspire continued
struggle, or they can trigger avoidance through discipline, in which one controls one’s
access to information in order to avoid unruly feelings.

Engaging in struggle: who is a Jew?

Consider this account by Lisa, discussing JJLP’s excitement at the prospect of

holding an event at the local Jewish Community Center (JCC).
I mean this is so insane, because here we are this organization of Jews, and
we’re all flipped out. We’re so excited, because we’re going to have an event at
the Jewish Community Center [emphasis spoken]. And yet, terrified. […] I went
[on a site visit] with my colleague Karin, who’s this out activist who’s been
doing this for decades. And I’m wearing my JJLP t-shirt, I actually have it
reversed. It doesn’t even say “Occupation” on it. It just says, “Israelis and
Palestinians, Two Peoples, One Future.” Like, who can disagree with […] that
message, unless they’re just whacked out on either extreme side? And Karin’s
like, “Cover your shirt.” And I’m just like, “Oh, Karin, you’re so paranoid.”
And she [says], “Cover your shirt. I don’t want anything to.…” And I’m
thinking, “I can’t believe Karin of all people is telling me this.” And I did.
And in the end, she was right, (chuckling) because we had the event. It’s a huge
success. [But 9 months later, when we inquired about holding another event
there, we found out that they had changed the rental policy, so that] sandwiched
in between a clause which says clean up after yourself and [one that says to] pay
a down payment, was suddenly a whole ideological caveat. And it was clearly
written to specifically exclude us, but it would exclude Amnesty International,
it would exclude Human Rights Watch, […] people said it would have excluded
Martin Buber. […] You know, it’s hurtful.24

24
The policy may have changed between when Lisa read it and when I did. When I consulted the JCC’s
website, the policy barred only specifically Jewish groups that did not affirm the need for Israel to remain a
Jewish state, thus probably exempting Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Indeed, banning
only Jews who do not affirm the Jewish state confirms that this policy is part of the struggle to define
Jewishness itself.
282 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

It seemed absurd to Lisa that she could feel so excited and “flipped out” to be
holding an event for her Jewish organization in the local JCC, a center that was open
to people of all backgrounds and faiths and offered such mundane amenities as fitness
equipment and CPR classes to anyone interested. She also found ironic the explicit
policy that was soon to be written, apparently just to exclude them. That initial
moment of being welcome, as Jews who opposed what they saw as an illegal and
unjust occupation, was deeply symbolic. Being excluded from the JCC was hurtful in
a way that being excluded from another club would not have been, precisely because
it symbolized to them the Jewish community that shunned them because of their
analyses of what policy is coherent with Jewish values and what is best for Israelis
and the Jewish people in general. Like the Jewish Community Organization in Rick’s
formulation, the JCC board members had the authority and legitimacy to define some
Jews “out of the tent.” That symbolic exclusion was palpable to those cast out,
beyond its concrete effects on their ability to have a meeting place that was recog-
nized as Jewish.
Lisa’s story conveys a sense of preciousness about that initial welcome—it was
both dear enough and fragile enough for her colleague to implore her to zip her jacket,
and for her to concede. And being explicitly, formally shut out triggered its own
feelings, which Lisa described as “hurtful.” When I asked her to say more, her reply
covered a great deal of ground, beginning with immediate anger, and leading into a
deeper, more profound sense of betrayal. She began:
Well of course it is [hurtful]. I mean your first reaction is like, “Screw you!” I
mean, what they’re trying to do is completely define Jewish identity. Now, as
Jews we know, pick your issue, Jews will never agree on Jewish [identity]—the
idea of struggling over it isn’t new. The Orthodox think that the Reform aren’t
Jews, the Reform— I mean, everybody has their reason to think nobody else is
Jewish or Jewish enough, I mean—that is one of the few things that’s essential
to being Jewish, is that debate (laughing), I would say. So that’s true, and at the
same time, it’s what makes you feel like you’re, you know, in a war.
Lisa’s responses made clear that symbolic exclusion did not actually challenge her
understanding of who she was; at no point did she consider that she might not be
Jewish. Her first response was to dismiss the JCC’s rejection, casting it as part of the
seemingly boundless definitional debate among Jews over the question of “Who is a
Jew,” a debate which she saw as paradoxically putting all of its participants clearly
within the category of Jews.25 She invoked her similarities to the group, challenging
established boundaries by insisting that her difference did not disqualify her. At the
same time, using a war metaphor, Lisa indexed the potential for mutual destruction
she saw in these definitional debates.
Like Rick and Bill, Lisa invoked a sense of ontological threat in these struggles.
As she continued to describe what she meant by “hurtful,” she quickly segued into a
discussion of the root of the pain she and fellow JJLP members experienced, not only
at being barred from the JCC, but in visiting Israel and experiencing Israelis’

25
Though Lisa referred to broader conflicts, the “Who is a Jew?” controversy refers to what Cohen and
Eisen (2000) find to be the other main source of American Jewish disaffection from Israel, the state’s
refusal to recognize conversions performed by non-Orthodox rabbis (see also Freedman 2000).
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 283

treatment of its Palestinian citizens as well as those who lived under occupation. She
continued:
I was most—we’re deeply, deeply hurt—we’re traumatized by going to Gaza
and the West Bank; what we saw was traumatic, no matter what, to see people
treated the way we’ve seen them treated. When other Jews are doing it, it’s a
whole—when it means the complete and total destruction of, we all have this
sort of fantasy dream, we all have this ideal of what it means to be Jewish,
everyone does. We all have this idea of what Israel is or could be as an
embodiment of that [ideal]. And when that is all dashed against the rocks in
this profound way, you feel traumatized by it.
For Lisa, thinking about what is painful about being shut out of the Jewish
Community Center, or symbolically, the Jewish community, led her to think about
the trauma she experienced in seeing how particular Jews—Jewish Israelis and the
Israeli government—treated Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Lisa’s remarks
convey a profound sense that no identity exists in a vacuum, that being Jewish for her
had always meant working for justice and for mutual respect for everyone—a
universalism that some observers see as a central tenet of American Jews’ everyday
Judaism (Liebman and Cohen 1990, Cohen and Eisen 2000).26 Lisa’s ideal of what it
meant to be Jewish was shattered in her first visit to the region, when her Zionist love
of the Israel her grandparents and parents had helped to build was confronted with
what she saw as shameless racism, recurring throughout her visit. She experienced
the loss of that ideal as “traumatic,” as an injury with lingering damage. For the
American Jewish community to silence her critique of those conditions, to shut her
out and say that she is not appropriately Jewish, caused her profound pain not simply
by denying her a meeting place or even a “community,” but by collaborating in what
she perceived as the destruction of her ideals— of what being Jewish means in the
world, her grandfather’s legacy, her ideal Jewish self. Like the value of a strong
Jewish state, the values of justice and equality inhere at the level of habitus; the
“heat” of these debates emerges precisely because the classification struggle over
what it means to be us, prompted by geopolitical changes, impinges on individuals’
sense of their own being, what it means to be me.
Struggles over a group’s self-definition are emotion-laden because they strike at
the very root of what it means to exist at all. Just as Rick saw attacks on the Jewish
state as “existential denial,” Lisa experienced an ontological threat not simply in her
group’s exclusion from community institutions, but in the actions of the Israeli
government and others who identified with its actions. For Lisa, the ontological
question took a different form: if the authoritative Jewish voice defines being
Jewish as identifying with a state that oppresses people, then what could it mean
for her to be part of this group? Does being Jewish mean she cannot oppose injustice
when she sees it, or does it compel her to? And while citing her family’s losses in the
Holocaust and her grandfather’s Zionist commitment make explicit the depth of
26
This universalism was generally shared by Bill, Rick, and other respondents who took a more protective
stance with regard to the state of Israel. The difference is that these speakers saw it as foolhardy to extend
universalism to those whom they understood to be unwilling to or incapable of returning that graciousness,
an example of the discursive struggle that Alexander (1992) posits as central to democratic civil society, the
struggle over whom should be classified as democratic, and whom as repressive.
284 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

Lisa’s feelings with regard to these questions, these citations also help to reestablish
her Jewish credentials, defying those who would cast her out of the group by
confirming her irrevocable status. It is as if she was saying that the Holocaust failed
to stamp out her family and its Jewishness; should she let other Jews erase her
Jewishness by symbolic means?27
In addition to fear and anger, speakers on both sides expressed a sense of comfort
in sharing a “tent” with others, as we saw in Lisa’s shift from the first-person singular
to plural—“I was most—we’re deeply, deeply hurt—we’re traumatized….” She
effectively asserted that she was not alone, but part of a Jewish collectivity. Some
who had long felt distant from their Jewishness reconnected with it when they found
groups like the Reconciliation Circle or JJLP that allowed them to use the terms of
their Jewish habitus to express the unpopular truths they saw. For instance, 35-year-
old Simon experienced his activism with JJLP as an opportunity to reconnect with a
Jewish community and with his own Jewishness. He remarked:
[People think as a critic of the Israeli occupation I must be] self-loathing, and in
fact nothing could be further from the truth. I am not only proud of my Jewish
heritage, but my getting into this work was exactly what brought me back in
touch with Judaism and with a Jewish community. But we get this constantly
and all the time, because for many Jews now, the test of your true Jewishness is
your support for Israel. […T]hey can’t allow for the idea that there’s other ways
to support a strong and positive Jewish future.
As Lisa did by invoking her family’s experience of the Holocaust in Eastern
Europe, Simon here recouped his belonging in the category of “Jews” by asserting
that his own knowledge of Jewishness was deeper than that of those whose vision of a
strong and positive Jewish future depended on Israel. Rejecting the aspects of
mainstream civil Judaism they deemed dangerous or unethical, dissenters sought
other ways to connect to Judaism or Jewishness. Ken, for instance, investigated his
genealogy, connecting to his Jewish roots by deepening his consciousness of his
grandparents’ and great grandparents’ struggles and successes. Some were moved to
seek out alternative religious communities, where the mandates of the American
Jewish civil religion were not part of the experience of Judaism as a faith. Twenty-
five year-old Leah, who had been raised Orthodox, attended an alternative minyan
(prayer group), where the weekly prayers were said quickly in Hebrew and no
commentaries were given, lest differing opinions distract participants from their
shared faith. Others found nontraditional Jewish communities of the like-minded,
while yet others “toughed it out” in more traditional congregations, voicing their
views to fellow members as the occasion arose, confident in their own Jewishness
thanks to their connection with other Jews who shared their views. We have seen that
Ken cited a prayer, and similarly, Karin cited the words of a Biblical prophet and the
Jewish tenet of tikkun olam; both linked their analyses to indisputably Jewish
concepts and values. All of these members rejected the seeming monopoly on
American Jewish life held by the civil religion of mainstream organizations, rejecting
its symbolic power. They tested the limits of what Herzfeld (1997) calls cultural

27
Lisa made no reference to Fackenheim’s (1987) “614th commandment” to deny Hitler a posthumous
victory by asserting one’s Jewishness, though its resonance is evident.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 285

intimacy, rejecting others’ power to cast them out by insisting on their similarities
with those who would exclude them. Bernstein (1997) would expect marginal
members like these, with little institutional access to policy makers (either Jewish
or in the United States as a whole), to stress their differences from the dominant
groups, employing what she calls “identity as critique.” But this is not what we see.
Rather, they stress their similarities to legitimate their critiques of dominant groups.
My findings suggest that we cannot predict a group’s strategy using institutional
factors alone; meanings make a great difference in material life.28

Disciplining feelings, preventing symbolic exclusion

Clearly some people confront symbolic exclusion and, particularly if they are
invested in their own membership in a group, engage in the classificatory struggles
for the power to define it. However, my interviews suggest that symbolic exclusion
also inspires discipline, in the form of abiding by feeling rules (Hochschild 1979,
1983) so strictly as to avoid new knowledge that might challenge those rules. In this
case, conflicts within the American Jewish habitus can be managed with discipline; a
concerted effort to manage the knowledge one attains can help to maintain one’s own
conformity, avoiding the conflicts that others so problematically embody.
In some cases, we might surmise that even the knowledge that one’s Jewish identity
may be called into question if one seeks out certain information seems to demonstrate a
performative, productive effect. For instance, in Minkin’s study of the student Israel-
advocacy group, she encountered a student, Liat, who had recently attended a summer
program in Europe for Jewish and Palestinian youth, and returned with a more conflicted
stance on Israeli policy than many of her fellow group-members deemed appropriate. Liat
still loved Israel. But in the program, she had formed a connection with the Palestinian
students, or as reconciliation proponents might phrase it—she had “heard” them. She
came to understand the Palestinians as living in an ongoing state of economic and
political oppression at the hands of the Israeli government, and she had formed relation-
ships with Palestinians of her own age who had experienced oppressive conditions she
would never want to inflict on anyone. Liat attended the program after having been
elected to chair her school’s Israel-advocacy group for the following year, and her
leadership was affected by this experience in every meeting and event. For instance,
Liat invited a Palestinian student to speak at a meeting of the group, who was met with
silence and hostility. As the group’s chairperson, she felt obligated to set up the group’s
annual Israeli Independence Day party, but felt unable to stay for the event itself because
of what Israeli patriotism implied to the Palestinians with whom she had come to identify.

28
Bernstein studied strategies for gaining political inclusion, in the form of lesbian and gay movements’
struggles for basic rights in a variety of polities. I expect that she would have found meanings to be more
germane if she had looked at struggles over issues with subtler nuances for group insiders. A more
analogous example would be struggles over whether Jews have full political rights, a struggle that would
undoubtedly find a great deal more consensus among Jews (though no doubt there would be differences
over strategy and the like). The conflict over policies in the Middle East would be more analogous to, say, a
struggle over same-sex marriage rights, if the latter struggle were of a similar political scope and if same-
sex marriage advocates felt their existence to be as imperiled as is the case here. In that case, struggles
among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people over who is really homophobic, who is really
“gay,” who is really working in “our” best interests would exhibit much more of the kind of symbolic
struggle we see here.
286 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

When Minkin asked another student, named Shelly, if she would consider attending that
summer program, Shelly replied, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be like Liat. I want
to still love Israel.” For Shelly, Liat’s knowledge of the Palestinian perspective equaled a
loss of “love” for Israel.29 Her formulation implies that love must be uncritical, pure, and
romantic rather than based in the practical reality of the imperfection of its object, capable
of harboring and withstanding conflicts (Swidler 2003). Shelly, unlike speakers such as
Lisa, Karin, and Simon, may have felt ill-equipped, due to her youth or other factors, to
assert her continued belonging were she to lose the love of Israel that she worked to
protect. Instead, she worked to protect the feelings of comfort and home Bourdieu
associates with the unchallenged habitus of the competent adult.
Similarly, JJLP’s Diane had a sister who disagreed with her about Israeli policy.
Diane remarked:
My sister, for instance, is not very political. And when we tried to talk about it, we
couldn’t. At one point, I started to talk, and she said, “All I know is [the
Palestinians are] hurting us.” And then I tried to answer and she just said, “I don’t
want to know what we’re doing to them,” and I thought, that’s it on the button.
Reconciliation Circle organizer Ken found a foreclosure similar to what Diane
observed when his group was invited to a local Jewish study group to talk about their
experiences together. He recalled:
There are havurah groups, […] groups of Jews that get together, some of them
have been together 10, 15, 20, 25 years—they study books, they meet, they
learn together. So we were recommended to this one havurah. The couple that
was going to host the evening said, “Would you come down and talk to us about
the Reconciliation Circle?” So they invited the group. And not one couple
wanted to come. It’s not that they didn’t want to meet Palestinians. They did not
want to know, about what happens when Palestinians and Jews come together.
They did not want to know that. They did not want to hear anything other than
their mindset. Because if they did, their whole stack of cookies might crumble.
The fear of learning to see the Palestinians’ perspective propelled Diane’s sister,
Liat’s peer, and others like them, who loved and identified with Israel, to shut out
information that might lead them to question their ideal image of the state. “Loving
Israel” without knowledge of the Palestinians’ experiences of it seems to have been
for these women, and perhaps to Ken’s neighbors in the havurah, akin to an emotional
requirement for membership in the Jewish community. The fear of that love faltering
propelled them away from certain information, lest they lose the senses of both
comfort and belonging that came with that love. As Bourdieu (2000) acknowledges,
habitus changes with experiences. By extension, shielding oneself from new knowl-
edge or experiences helps to keep habitus, as well as affect, in line. Gould writes:
… one of the ways in which power operates is affectively: power is exercised
through and reproduced in our feelings, and it is forceful and effective precisely
because of that. The power of a habitus to structure human behavior, for

29
Minkin, S. A. (n.d.). Constructive critique or unwelcome opinions: Israel advocacy inside a West Coast
Hillel. Unpublished manuscript.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 287

example, derives from the fact that it operates at the visceral affective level,
often bypassing conscious thought altogether (Gould 2009, p. 39).
Here, we see people managing their access to information in an effort to keep affect, and
habitus, from changing. What seems to be at work is not just a fear of exclusion, but a
fear of losing the affective attachment to “Israel,” to what the state of Israel symbolizes.
The threat of losing the sense of comfort and home can be terrifying for anyone.
Indeed, among Jews who rejected the mainstream organizations’ approach to the
Arab-Israeli conflict, fear of ridicule and hostility was often cited as the main obstacle
new recruits overcame before they could get involved. A Reconciliation Circle
member named Deborah, an artist, showed me a work of art she had made thinking
of her family; its title was “It’s Okay If You Think I’m Naïve,” reflecting the
conversations that had taken place because of her refusal to dismiss Palestinians as
“Other.” Similarly, Ken told me of the names members of his movement were called,
and the effect this ridicule had in preventing people from joining. When explaining
what brought new members to the Reconciliation Circle, he remarked:
These relationships are hard-won but usually they’re personally invited. Usu-
ally it takes a few invitations before they have the courage to come. It takes
great courage. We’re talking about fear. Fear: part of it is fear not only of the
Other but also of your own people. Part of the thing that keeps my Jewish
community from moving out to the Other is fear of what other people will say.
And what other people will think. You’re seen as a traitor, you’re seen as naïve,
you’re seen as not intelligent, which is a terrible thing in the Jewish community.
You’re seen as on the Left. Oh my goodness. It takes great courage to move out
to the Other. You take flak from your own people, usually.
In Ken’s experience, fear of Arabs might keep Jews from engaging in reconciliation
processes, as fear of Jews might similarly bar Palestinians. But more profound is the fear
he describes Jews having for other Jews. In his experience, the fear that other Jews will
judge them keeps many potential members from confronting their fears of Arabs,
engaging in dialogue, and learning that Arabs want the same things Jews want: peace,
security, a happy life—that “Arab” is neither the opposite nor the negation of “Jew-
ish.”30 The fear of losing the comfort of feeling at home among other Jews inspires
discipline.
Members of reconciliation groups and JJLP also saw this fear as cultivated in
mainstream organizations—particularly by their fundraising narratives. They saw the
mainstream organizational model as producing American Jews who were terrified to
challenge the dominant approach to Jewish organizing—in their view, the fear, not
just of exclusion or retribution, but of destruction, prevented many American Jews
from more publicly dissenting from these organizations’ positions on Israel. In Lisa’s
experience, the mainstream American Jewish organizations fostered a sense of
perpetual, unending fear. She recalled (prior to 2010):
I went to the General Assembly of all the Jewish Federation, United Jewish
Communities, and it’s billed as the largest gathering of Jewish leaders in the

30
Similar blocks can exist for Palestinians as well, though their experiences of this conflict are not
equivalent. Future research will examine some of these issues from a Palestinian perspective.
288 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

country, and [former and current Israeli Prime Ministers] Netanyahu and
Olmert, you know everybody’s there. And, their bottom line, and it was
you know, 3 days of terror […], terrorizing people. It’s all victim mentality.
Everything, it’s amazing, because we’re in this beautiful place, a very well-
heeled crowd, I mean, this is not cheap to get there; these people are not
working-class people for the most part. And yet, nonetheless, there is this
incredible victim mentality: “They’re all against us, they’re all against us,
they’re all against us.” […] And anybody who gets fundraising pieces from
AIPAC, and [the] Simon Wiesenthal [Center], and the ADL, knows they’re
all the same: “You’re gonna die tomorrow because you’re a Jew!” That’s the
subtext—it’s not even subtext because it’s not subtle, they’re incredibly
unsubtle about it. […] But that’s how they raise money. And at this confer-
ence of everybody, that’s 3 days, everyone’s learning about Israel, and
they’re learning about Israel in a forum that’s, whose objective is pretty
much, the essential objective is to continue the flow of money to Israel—for
many of the right reasons.
Ken of the Reconciliation Circle offered a similar analysis:
And I have seen, how, things that happen, events that happen are magnified
by people whose reputations, even their jobs depend on holding the Jewish
community together because there’s such a threat out there. There’s that
whole dynamic of maintaining your institution, maintaining your personal
power, by showing that there’s a big threat out there. So it’s both. There
are anti-Semites, but not as much as we think. And, the way to correct it is
to relate to people.

Both Ken and Lisa appreciated mainstream Jewish organizers’ fear of anti-Semitism;
they worried, however, that a perpetual sense of embattlement endangers not only
Palestinians, but Jews as well. From their perspective, Jews’ fears of destruction can
be used to gather support for policies and worldviews that themselves threaten Jews’
(and others) physical safety and Jewish habitus. And to express different feelings
about Israel can put one in danger of symbolic exclusion.

Conclusion

In the 1990s, boundary and ethnic conflict scholars were more cognizant than
many social scientists of the significance of emotions in social processes.
Petersen made emotions central to his analysis of ethnic violence, but saw them
as “recognizable individual-level causal forces” (2002, p. 3). Herzfeld (1997) saw
emotions as central to his analysis of the relationships between formal state
functioning and everyday life, for instance, when the fear of ridicule prompted
voters to eschew a candidate who himself had been ridiculed (1997, p. 161). But
he did not bring out the implications of this finding for his theory of social
power, as he focused on the sense of intimacy states need their citizens to
perceive. Indeed, he characterized collective emotions as “simulacra of social
relations” rather than the substance of social power.
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 289

Closer to the levels of personal emotions and interaction, Lamont presaged

Emirbayer and Goldberg when she wrote of the bonds boundary work creates of
shared emotions:
Boundary work is an intrinsic part of the process of constituting the self; [bound-
aries] emerge when we try to define who we are: we constantly draw inferences
concerning our similarities to, and differences from, others, indirectly producing
typification systems.... By generating distinctions, we also signal our identity and
develop a sense of security, dignity, and honor; a significant portion of our daily
activities are oriented towards avoiding shame and maintaining a positive self-
identity by patrolling the borders of our groups. At a more macrosociological
level, boundary work is used to reinstate order within communities by reinforcing
collective norms, as boundaries provide a way to develop a general sense of
organization and order in the environment (Lamont 1992, p. 11).
In Lamont’s analysis, emotions are present, but only until we change our gaze to
what she considers a “more macrosociological” level of analysis; Lamont sees the
social group as concerned not with emotions but with “order.” Not only did she see
emotions as individual, internal motivators, but she neglected the role of emotions in
collective processes of group formation, social exclusion, and agenda-setting. Indeed,
Lamont’s (1992, 2000) studies of upper-middle-class and lower-middle-class men in
France and the United States focused on how her respondents valorized the fields
(cultural/intellectual, economic, or moral) in which they themselves excelled and tend
to look down upon those who did not prioritize those areas, yet she made little
mention of the emotional stakes of such distinctions, of the personal dignity retained
by regarding one’s own areas of excellence as standards on which to judge others.
These emotional stakes may not have been relevant to Lamont’s question of how
these symbolic boundaries translate into institutional discrimination. But in some
cases, as in the case examined here, emotions are central to the production of power.
In a compelling and exhaustive article, Emirbayer and Goldberg (2005) urge scholars
to examine how power works through emotions. Like others before them (such as
Goodwin et al. 2001), they urge scholars not to treat emotions as something irrational,
relevant to social change only insofar as they can be manipulated by rational framing
techniques. They urge those who consider political contention to see emotions as
existing between people, in relationships of identification or cathexis—and not as
internal states within an individual—and to look for how these emotions in context
can both generate and organize social power in relational processes. When we draw
from Bourdieu, it can be very tempting to see emotions as shaped by one’s structural
position; indeed, Emirbayer and Goldberg posit collective emotions as grounded in and
shaped by habitus, such that similarly structured lives promote similar emotional
dispositions.
By encouraging us to consider emotions not as internal states, these authors also
urge us to see them as sources of social power. I develop this argument and add that to
understand fully the relationship between emotions and social power, we need to
consider emotions’ role in struggles over symbolic power. Indeed, some of the most
contentious political struggles take place in the realm of classification. In the exam-
ples above, the prospects of being symbolically excluded from the Jewish moral
community—of being called an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew, being ridiculed,
290 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

debased, or wished dead—did not simply define some people out of the group,
punishing them with exclusion. The emotional and sometimes material force of this
exclusion frightened many of the people I spoke to, exerting what they saw as a
propulsive effect, in the way that sociologists of deviance see the deviant role as
functioning to warn others to stay in line (Erikson 1966; McIntosh 1968). While
losing one’s job, or facing tremendous sanctions at it, is certainly a punishment more
concrete than symbolic exclusion, the threat of losing one’s livelihood, and the fear of
losing dignity and respect—particularly that of a people whose community is sup-
posed to be “home”— can act to discipline members, silencing dissent and keeping
people from wanting to even know about alternative viewpoints. When that happens,
they reproduce the (relatively) dominant institutions, symbolic terrain, and habitus; at
the same time, people’s self-definitions are constituted in line with the dominant
definition. In this way, fear serves as the conduit for social power. At the same time,
“outlaw emotions”—such as disgust or shock at the state of Israel or empathy with
Palestinians—also emerge from the American Jewish habitus and provoke struggle
over the symbolic power to define what it means to be a member of the group, the
very meaning of being Jewish. Such outlaw emotions can engender intense conflict.
In the face of these conflicts, a struggle over symbolic power—fought in part with
the techniques of symbolic exile—arises in American Jewish politics. Because of the
especially deep ontological ramifications of this particular classificatory struggle, we
see clearly the emotional dimension of symbolic power. Indeed, in any classificatory
struggle, the central cognitive distinctions at stake may be inextricable from emo-
tions. It is possible that symbolic power works most effectively through emotions,
that emotions give symbolic power its greatest capacity to work in any situation.
What struggle to define quality, style, orthodoxy, the parameters of “us” as distinct
from “them,” is not driven by pride in one’s own legacy, fear of or desire for change
in what it means to be “us” or what it means to be “me?” Is there not an emotional
component to the boundary work of the Frenchman of declining fortunes who looks
down on the nouveau riche, or the successful American stockbroker who prides
himself on his “competitiveness” and looks down on those who excel at literary
criticism rather than profitmaking (Lamont 1992)? What of many scientists’ disgust
for what they consider “pseudoscience?” Academicians often need look no further
than controversies within their department, university, or discipline, sites Bourdieu
saw as exemplars of the struggle for symbolic power, to see these struggles animated
by emotions, such as participants’ fear for their sense of belonging, their legacy, and
the meaning of membership in one’s discipline or department.
Emotions do not simply lurk beneath the surface of, or arise in response to, “real”
processes of social change—they drive them, impede them, shape them, and further-
more, in some situations, they constitute the substance of social power. Emotions
constitute people’s sense of self, as well as alerting them when that selfhood is
threatened. They motivate people to reconcile new information with what they already
know, or to avoid new information altogether. Emotions serve as a medium of social
power by producing and limiting people’s subjectivity—how it is possible to be. Inciting
particular emotions is a way to produce common sense understandings of how the world
works, and at the same time, the feeling that something is amiss may be strong enough to
prompt resistance to dominant categories or systems and produce countermovement.
Emotions inspire struggle, but they also inspire consent and discipline. Without
Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294 291

considering emotions, we obscure a key medium through which social power works and
thus the very processes by which society changes—or stays the same.
I have shown how emotions of fear and comfort work in tandem to produce subjects
who conform to dominant definitions of what it means to belong to the group, and we
have seen how disgust, trauma, and betrayal animate those on both sides who have been
moved to act to change the conditions that incited those feelings and, in some cases, led
to transformation in their worldviews. Intra-group conflicts such as those I have
discussed are not limited to American Jews, or to Jews in general. The comfort of home
among one’s people, and the fear of losing it, may work in similar ways in other contexts
to prevent any manner of disagreement—public or in one’s own mind, in words or
actions. Infighting is common to any group whose members care enough about it,
perceive enough to be at stake to be worth fighting for. Such conflicts may be “hotter”
when they come out of a collective identity framework that allows both agreement and
conflict to take on existential implications.31 Group members’ definitions of the “we”
are certainly shaped by factors such as external forces and conditions (Balser 1997;
Laitin 1986), political strategy (Armstrong 2003; Bernstein 1997; Ghaziani 2008), and
the cultural meanings available (Herzfeld 1997; Laitin 1986; Lamont 1992, 2000; Tilly
1998). Group identifications of nation, religion, tribe, race, gender, sexual orientation,
ability, and the like are all “fictions” that people produce in ways that may be arbitrary,
coherent, strategic, and sincere, but they matter to people because they have concrete
effects in our lives, order our reality, and give us a sense of meaning, purpose, and
belonging. This is why classificatory struggles have the potential to stir great emotions
and these emotions give legitimate classifiers a certain kind of power. Thus contests over
legitimacy itself can be highly emotional.
These conflicts shed light on the emotional aspects of social power, in its punitive
and productive forms. As Hochschild (1979) points out, power works through
“feeling rules” about how particular people are supposed to feel in a given situation.
It takes discipline to avoid inappropriate feelings and to foster appropriate ones. New
selves emerge when people permit themselves to connect emotionally with those they
have feared, hated, or otherwise deemed “Other,” be those others of a different group
or one’s own. Are those new selves the beginning of a new era or are they the
beginning of the end? History has given plenty of reasons to be pessimistic, and
plenty of reasons not to. Emotions govern the way we interpret history, as well.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank the countless friends and colleagues who have offered
insight and encouragement. Particular help with this article came from Tobin Belzer, Steven M. Cohen,
Lynne Gerber, Debbie Gould, Arlie Hochschild, Avi Jezer, Sarah Anne Minkin, Sameena Mulla, Jessica
Weddle, and Jaye Cee Whitehead, some of whom read multiple drafts and offered tremendous help and
insight. The anonymous referees and Editors at Theory and Society provided excellent, helpful, and
gracious feedback, for which I am thankful. Most of all, I am deeply grateful to the anonymous respondents
who made this work possible by spreading the word through their networks and being gracious enough to
share their time and insights with me. I hope they may find something in this work to make them feel their
contributing was worthwhile.

31
After the explosion of collective identity studies in the 1990s, some important works challenged the
utility of the concept (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Polletta and Jasper 2001) but I have argued (Moon 2012)
for examining how historically marginalized and stigmatized groups actually go about defining themselves
and their members. This article advances that project by showing how emotions and power animate those
processes.
292 Theor Soc (2013) 42:261–294

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Dawne Moon earned her PhD at the University of Chicago and is Assistant Professor of Sociology at
Marquette University. She is the author of God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies
(Chicago 2004). She is working on a book, based in part on the research discussed here, about how social
power works through the narratives that people employ as they form collective identities and community
boundaries.