From Diaspora Nationalism to Radical Diasporism (original) (raw)
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We Were Made for These Times: Diasporism as an Emergent Jewish Movement
We Were Made for These Times: Diasporism as an Emergent Jewish Movement, 2021
Young American Jews are increasingly diverging from the American Jewish consensus on Zionism, while theoretical arguments for Jewish diasporism have been developed over the past several decades. I argue in this thesis that over the past half-decade, Jewish diasporism has developed into a full-fledged, embodied movement within Judaism, one that draws creatively on resources of Jewish memory, ritual, calendar and activist rhetoric to live into a Judaism that reimagines homeland as relationship, in a temporality described as “the world to come.” Key aspects of Jewish diasporism include the lived experience of queerness and a desire for connection to tradition; a negotiation of the ethics of land, place and nation through the concepts of doikayt (hereness), assimilation, and decolonization; and a reorientation to time and relationship expressed through the concept of olam haba (the world to come). Through interviews, participation in online events, and analysis of writing, art and music produced by communities of American Jewish activists, I explore Jewish diasporism as a dynamic, emergent movement.
Toe establishment of the State of Israel in I 948 was at once the Zionist move ment's greatest triumph and the beginning of an ongoing crisis of self-doubt. Its principal goal achieved, Zionism could have ceased to exis� as did the movement for women's suffrage in the United States with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Indeed, some Jewish leaders quickly argued that its historical mission was complete; its continued existence served no useful purpose. For Amer ican Jewry as a whole, which had emerged after the Holocaust as the largest Jewish community and chief representative of the Jewish Diaspora, the transformation of Palestinian Jewry into an independent political entity immediately made their relationship highly problematic.
Antisemitism and the Relationship Between Zionism and Jewish Diasporic Identity
2015
I’m sitting cross-legged inside the small refugee tent, decorated with posters from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Across from me is Mohammed, a new Canadian and for-mer Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem. We make eye contact, I give a little smile. Diagonally to my left, sitting down, smiling and hugging his knees is Ori. He’s an Israeli who’s recently shown me a film he made while serving his mandatory military service in Southern Lebanon. The video, shot from an opening in his jacket with a hidden camera (the IDF doesn’t take kindly to soldiers filming while on duty) depicts the hardships of army life as the soldiers of his unit lip-sync the lyrics to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. “Mamma mia let me go ” is not exactly the lyrical basis of a pro-military kind of film. To my left is Racheli. Also an Israeli, Racheli fits the stereotype of someone from Northern Tel Aviv; worldly, stylish, and VERY lefty. Racheli was condemning the occupation long before Ariel Sharon decided the “O...
PRE-POSTMODERN": Four Jewish Nationalist Thinkers of the Last Century
Common Knowledge, 2012
mounted Zionist arguments of a sort that we now regard as poststructuralist or postmodern. 1 Connections between postmodern thinkers and various Jewish sources are by now well established. In his book Wittgenstein and Judaism, for example, Ranjit Chatterjee describes the Jewish background of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his ties to the characteristic hermeneutics of Judaism, his interest in Jewish texts, and his own prophetic experiences. 2 In particular, Chatterjee argues that the Jewish origin of Wittgenstein's thought left its mark on the concluding sentence of the Tractatus, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." 3 Chatterjee understands this idea to be a defining feature also of the Philosophical Investigations (thus Chatterjee dismisses the conventional notion of a gap between Wittgenstein's early and later thinking). 4 His Jewishness is said to be evident as well in his opposition to Augustine in particular and the dualist Christian narrative in general-and Chatterjee interprets Wittgenstein's writings overall as waging an unyielding war, in the spirit of Maimonides, against idolatry. 5 The writings of Jacques Derrida are treated in a similar manner by John D. Caputo, Harold 1. This article relies in part on Avinoam Rosenak, "Milhamah ve-shalom be-hagut yehudit modernit nokhah 'ha-aheir' " ("War and Peace in Modern Jewish Thought Regarding 'the Other' "), Da'at 62 (2007): 99-125. Here I focus on the postmodern context of the question, which is not expressly treated in my article in Da'at. Except as otherwise noted, translations here of quotations from Hebrew sources are by Joel Linsider.
For a symposium on the consequence of blur in a journal whose aims are irenic, it seems right that contributions should blur distinctions on which current enmities are built or in the process of building. One distinction of this kind is of specific relevance to enmities (or resentments is perhaps a better word) in Israel but, given the significance of Jewish nationalism to international politics, has wider ramifications. For some years now, an opposition has been drawn, not only among Israeli academics but among politicians and journalists as well, between Jewish nationalist or Zionist thought and the kind of thinking that is called "postmodern." The argument is that a Zionist cannot be a postmodernist and vice versa, the two being incompatible. It appears that this opposition originated with an identification made between "post-Zionist" historical revisionism (of the kind associated with Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and Tom Segev) and postmodernist methods, assumptions, and claims. In some cases, the identification was made by the "new historians" themselves. While there is considerable bad blood between post-Zionist scholars and those, inside and outside the academy, who defend one or another version of the Zionist narrative, it needs Common Knowledge 18:2
Mondoweiss, 2020
Essay discusses how Jews and scholars of Jews who are critical of Israel and/or non-Zionist are being cast out of the Jewish community. It begins with several personal/professional anecdotes and argues that they are part of a new line of attack by supporters of Israel to de-Judaize Israel and Zionism’s critics. It then draws from scholars such as Arendt, Said, and Moten/Harney to assert our place within the Jewish community as defenders of universal principles of peace and justice. https://mondoweiss.net/2020/05/the-new-kherem-or-barry-trachtenberg-does-not-represent-us-on-speaking-for-and-against-jewish-self-interests