Review: Women In Dark Times - The Jewish Chronicle

By Jacqueline Rose
Bloomsbury, £20 (eBook £17.99)

Jacqueline Rose is an illustrious public intellectual and academic, the author of many books of feminist literary criticism laced with psychoanalysis and, more controversially, political analysis. In recent years, she has focused much of her attention on Israel and Palestine, and has not been thanked by a lot of the Jewish community for doing so. This has not stopped her from continuing to campaign (she is a founder member of Independent Jewish Voices) nor from engaging with potential opponents.

I recall interviewing her at Limmud some years ago, finding her keen to debate and also to insist on the depth and durability of her interest in Jewish issues. Women in Dark Times reflects these Jewish interests but also marks a return to a passionate engagement with feminism that addresses the question of what, after a century of activism, it still has to achieve.

The answer is: there is still suffering and oppression aplenty, and, Rose argues, it requires a capacity to look straight into the heart of this darkness to combat the suffering. Women, or certain women, can do this, and their legacy informs the kind of complex, philosophically and emotionally adroit feminism that Rose embraces.

Women in Dark Times focuses on three "historical" and three contemporary women, each given a separate chapter; sandwiched between them is an examination of writing by women on so-called "honour killings" that tries to manage the difficult task of both insisting on its appalling reality as a mode of extreme violence and avoiding getting caught up in racist pillorying of supposedly "other" cultures.

Of the six target women, four are or were Jewish (Rosa Luxemburg, Charlotte Salomon, Esther Shalev-Gerz and Yael Bartana) and one, Marilyn Monroe, converted to Judaism; the artist Thérèse Oulton, with whom the book ends, is the one exception, included because Rose sees her as a "mind confronting the limits of its powers". Two of the three historical women were murdered (Luxemburg was killed by proto-fascists and Salomon died in Auschwitz) and Monroe might have been; the two Jewish contemporary artists deal with some of this violent legacy, with Bartana in particular challenging received ideas with her call for a return of the Jews to Poland.

Rose's writing is complex and often difficult, though the richness of her material helps to maintain the interest of her book. Her purpose in describing the lives and work of these women thinkers and artists - and the women who are putting themselves at risk in combating honour killings - is to show just how much the world continues to need a feminism that has "the courage of its contradictions".

For me, the most compelling material is in the early chapters, where the bravery of Luxemburg and Salomon, and in a different way of Monroe, comes across as a reminder of the tragic reality of political and sexual (and also antisemitic) violence. Rose's argument is that in the way these women and the lesser-known contemporary artists face their inner as well as outer demons, we can see how it might still be possible, even at great personal risk, to face this violence, to bring some precarious light into even very dark times.