My abiding memory of Daniel Boyarin is sitting with him on the top deck of one of London’s famous red buses. We were traveling to Golders Green to eat a kosher meal after a conference in central London. It was the summer of 1994, at the height of Western optimism that the Oslo Accords would bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end. This optimism, however naive, resulted in an extraordinary phenomenon. Closeted Jews in the British academy attended the conference by the hundreds. The late Laura Marcus and I, who organized “Modernity, Culture, and ‘the Jew,’” were expecting a handful of specialists along with the invited speakers, such as Daniel Boyarin. Instead, the audience was made up of a rainbow alliance of out-Jews and other others who could no longer fit on a single red bus but needed a fleet of double-deckers. This was a time when a new iteration of Jewish studies—feminist, fluidly gendered, postcolonial, antiracist, anti-Eurocentric—came into being and has, thankfully, influenced future generations of scholars.2 No less important, it was a time of a momentary and unspoken hope that the world could be healed and that tikkun olam (the “repair of the world”) might at long last be on the horizon.

My old friend Daniel Boyarin has raised, not for the first time, the problem of whether one can imagine what he calls “an ethical form of Jewish collective continuity.” He strikes out against the notion of such a “Jewish” ethical continuity seeing it having been negated in the present discussion, the negation driven by two arguments, “[Christian] supersessionism” on the right and “territorial nationalism” on the left. Whether it is possible “to inform prejudice against collective Jewish continuity is perhaps mitigated when Jews per se are obviously the objects of collective discrimination, and correspondingly exacerbated when Jews as a collective appear to be ‘powerful’ or ‘secure.’” Anti-Semitism or the “model minority.”

I will begin by thanking Professor Quayson and all of the contributors to this forum with the deepest of gratitude. I deem it a great privilege to have been engaged with in such depth and seriousness by such a group of superb interlocutors, all of whom seem nearly completely to have understood my project, even when more negatively reflecting on it. As a version of the Talmud would have said: it is far better to be understood by one’s opponents than to be misread by one’s supporters. Even those who have most highly approbated my thinking here have done so in ways that have taught me much and challenged me to match the precision of my thinking to theirs. So I welcome both the approbation and the reprobation. In this response—and following the guidance of Professor Quayson—I will not answer or comment point by point or even author by author but give a somewhat expanded account of what I am about that will show, I hope, the manner in which I concede some arguments to the opponents and understand myself better having read carefully the proponents of my views.

Auritro Majumder is Associate Professor of English at University of Houston. He is the author of Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and currently chair of the South Asian and Diasporic Languages, Literatures and Cultures forum of the Modern Language Association.

Cajetan Iheka’s African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (2021) and his edited collection, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022), importantly privilege—indeed celebrate—non-Western epistemologies at the very forefront of ecocriticism. In the former book, Africa is not “lagging” behind but is modeling sustainability for the future. This is a resourceful continent even in the face of “nonrenewable infrastructures dotting the continent’s environment” (11). Iheka offers a meticulous historical contextualization of Africa’s present economic demise while beautifully answering the question, “Why can’t we be seen?” (African Ecomedia 105). Kisilu Musya, a famer in Julia Dahr’s climate change film Thank You For the Rain (2017), makes this query, which cannot be ignored in a book rich in both its theoretical frameworks and interventions in fields such as African and media studies as well as the energy and environmental humanities. Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media advances Iheka’s agenda to make the invisible visible. Ultimately, the various ecomedia employed in Iheka’s works suggest an Anthropocene implicated in global degradation. As users of smartphones and paper, we are the problem as well as the solution to more ethical, postcolonial ecologies.