Open Access (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism
2017
Offers a novel exploration of the relationship between religion and the state in Israel. The question of Jewish sovereignty shapes Jewish identity in Israel, the status of non-Jews, and relations between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, yet its consequences remain enigmatic. In Sovereign Jews, Yaacov Yadgar highlights the shortcomings of mainstream discourse and offers a novel explanation of Zionist ideology and the Israeli polity. Yadgar argues that secularism’s presumed binary pitting religion against politics is illusory. He shows that the key to understanding this alleged dichotomy is Israel’s interest in maintaining its sovereignty as the nation-state of Jews. This creates a need to mark a majority of the population as Jews and to distinguish them from non-Jews. Coupled with the failure to formulate a viable alternative national identity (either “Hebrew” or “Israeli”), it leads the ostensibly secular state to apply a narrow interpretation of Jewish religion as a political tool for maintaining a Jewish majority. To Read the Introduction click here: http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6401-sovereign-jews.aspx
Introduction: Jewish Conditions, Theories of Nationalism
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
Thinkers with Jewish backgrounds, whether ascribed, embraced or even denied, created the central grammar used in modern attempts to understand nationalism. This introduction first describes the central dilemma faced by those with Jewish conditions when confronted by the rise of ethnonationalism. The responses to the dilemma were varied, so the bulk of this introduction describes some of the most important intellectual boundariesdoing so in such a manner as to introduce the specialist studies that then follow.
This paper tries to answer whether or not Jewish though is compatible with Western thought, which plays out in the question whether the Western style liberal democratic concept of a state can provide a fitting system for the Jewish people. After shortly reflecting on the question what the constituting element of the Jewish people is and how this can justify the use of the term “Jewish thought”, the philosophical groundings of the Western post-Enlightenment concept of the liberal democratic state shall be examined. It is then the objective to have a closer look at the text “The meaning of homeland” by A.B. Yehoshua that caused the Yehoshua debate in 2006. By analyzing the different possibilities for Jewish life in the land of Israel and in the Diaspora as pointed out by A.B. Yehoshua as well as the history of the foundation of the Jewish state, it will be explained why Israel already is in many ways different to the prototype Western state. By further analyzing the text “Israeli Judaism: The Judaism of Survival no longer works” by Yair Caspi, which is a critic on Yehoshua’s text, the ontological differences between the Western concept of the sovereign nation state and the understanding of Israel in Jewish thought shall be pointed out. With the help of Heidegger’s analysis of the inauthentic “I” in the Western enlightened thought, the fundamental difference between Western thought and Jewish thought will be outlined with special respect to the yearning for authenticity that can be found in Western societies and that at the same time is a philosophical grounding for Nazism. With the ontological assumption of this fundamental difference, it will be argued why however, on a political level the existence of a sovereign nation state is an absolute necessity for the Jewish people in current times and why at the same time the effects of this concept of a state are less dangerous in Israel than in any other place on earth.
The autonomy of the political and the dissolution of the Jews
International Journal of Law in Context, 2007
This essay argues that the more the state or the political is treated as autonomous the more the specific conception and history of Jews dissolves into a universalised and universalistic category. From this perspective, the emancipatory rights granted to Jews appear as exercises of an arbitrary sovereign power rather than the product and compromises of diverse interests in which Jews are present. This thesis is articulated through a discussion and comparison of two anti-emancipationist radical thinkers; Bruno Bauer and Girogio Agambem. Where Bauer demands the Jews’ emancipation from Judaism as a precondition for the granting of rights, Agamben dissolves the specific Jewish dimension of the Holocaust into a universalist notion of domination and the figure of the Musselman. I conclude by noting that, in the wake of this dissolution, any reference to Jewish specificity, even in death, can be interpreted as the Jews demanding ‘special privileges’ over and above others, thereby running the risk of the Holocaust taking its place in the chain of the antisemitic imagination.
Nationalized Judaism and Diasporic Existence. Jakob Klatzkin and Hans Jonas
This paper characterizes the modern Jewish debate around Zionism as a profound political theological controversy by juxtaposing the works of two significant twentieth-century Jewish scholars, Jakob Klatzkin (1882–1948) and Hans Jonas (1903–1993). The paper demonstrates that, for these scholars, the Zionist political venture was informed by a Gnostic theological message. While Klatzkin campaigned for Zionism as Gnosticism, Jonas critically challenged this link in his writings from the 1950s and 1960s thus showing his own distancing from Zionism by introduction a critique of gnosticism.
2019
This article unpacks Margarete Susman’s political and theological arguments at the core of her reading of the Book of Job. As I show through a reading of her oeuvre, Susman rejects political projects that she takes to be based on eschatology such as political Zionism. However, Susman should not be viewed merely as a critic of Zionism. I argue that an analysis tuned to the historical circumstancesofherwritingshouldrecognizeherstanceonthenation-buildingprojectinPalestineas ambivalentratherthanantagonistic. Susman’sconceptionoftheJewishspiritasrootedinself-sacrifice allows her to appreciate the national aspirations at the core of the Zionist project while rejecting Zionism’s exclusion of other Jewish national projects. I contend that Susman’s understanding of Jewish messianism as immanent rather than teleological informs her ambivalence toward Zionism as well as her original vision of Jewish political action. I argue in closing that Susman’s theodicy offers a novel vision for Jewish ethics that is not limited to the historical moment of its formulation. Susman’s theodicy also resonates within contemporary debates on Jewish diaspora in providing a non-centralized vision of Jewish national projects.
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.
Zionism and Political Liberalism: The Right of Scattered Nations to Self-Determination
This essay defends a neutralist version of E-Zionism (inspired by Rawls’s Political Liberalism) in a three-step argument. I first delineate a sense in which ethno-cultural nations are “self-determined” in a strictly neutral state and then show that some of them are indeed entitled to self-determination in such a state. As it is understood here, E-Zionism asserts that Jews in the end of the nineteenth century were entitled to establish a strictly neutral state within which they enjoy national self-determination. I then argue for E-Zionism, by addressing two objections that critics level against it. The first “statehood objection” observes that it is simply false that all ethno-cultural nations are entitled to self-determination in a liberal state. As Ernest Gellner put it, "there is a very large number of potential nations on earth" but there is only room for a smaller number of political units, "not all nationalisms can be satisfied… at the same time." The second, “nationality objection”, targets the factual assumption on which E-Zionism is founded: during Zionism’s early years (the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century), there was no one Jewish people/nation that was entitled to self-determination. As the Arab opponents of Zionism had insisted very early on, Jews form a religious group rather than a people with the right to national sovereignty. Hence, even if all ethno-cultural nations do possess a pro tanto right to a national home, the Jews in the nineteenth century had no such right.