After the Shoah politics and political solidarity take on a different quality. The attribution of an identity and the affirmation of that identity have to be viewed as importantly different. It is no longer possible to define Jewish identity simply in terms of the object of persecution and oppression. Such descriptions deny the possibility of that conception of identity that Jews would attribute to themselves. The politics of identity has to take the divide between attribution and affirmation as central to any understanding and evaluation of claims concerning identity. Within the investigations of solidarity friendship has emerged as a model whose resources have yet to be adequately explored. The project here is to investigate that model in relation to the problem of writing about the history of the figure of the Jew after the Shoah. Rather than pre–empt the analysis to come a beginning will be made with two questions: what can be made of friendship? What is it that marks out friendship? A concern with friendship opens the way as much to the political, understood as an account of a generalised belonging together, as it does to intimacy and thus to a form of particularity without generality.

The matters that arise in the attempt to respond philosophically to the question of friendship concern, for the most part, the problem of the relationship between particular and universal. For example, is friendship, understood as a relation, an instance of the self/other relation and thus explicable within the terms set by that relationship? Or is friendship such that it is not a particular of any universal? If this is so then this implies that friendship is a uniquely private affair, such that in being made public and being universalised, more than friendship would be involved. As a result, there could not be, for instance, a politics of friendship.

Once the public and the private are introduced they do not so much complicate friendship as allow for a more sustained examination of it. It would only be in the terms set by such a conception that it would then be possible to evaluate the claim that there is either an ethics or a politics linked to friendship.