Veneration and Critique: Israel, the Sociology of American Judaism and the Problematics of Sovereignty (original) (raw)

Israel and American Jewry: Peoplehood, Religion, and Politics - Syllabus

University of Chicago Divinity School, 2022

Israel and North America currently constitute the two leading centers of Jewish demography, identity and existence. Broadly speaking, they represent the two major Jewish responses to modernity – Zionism as a form of modern nationalism on the one hand, and integration into a liberal western society and body politic on the other. Their relations respond to this initial divide, while at the same time trying to coalesce a collective notion of Jewish peoplehood, based on culture, identity and a sense of a shared history and fate. The aim of this course is to learn more about the emergence of these two centers, and then explore the past, present and future of their relations. In recent years, the issue of religion has emerged as a crucial factor in Israel-Diaspora relations, especially in relation to the Jewish center in North America. The historical development of progressive Jewish strands in the United States, together with the fundamental changes in the religious makeup of Jewish society and the perception of the political role of religion in the state of Israel, have led to tension and strife regarding such issues as religious praxis, social identity and the public sphere. Religion with therefore be the main theme through which the relations will be explored, both historically and in relation to current affairs and issues.

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

Fear, Fantasy, and Family: Israel's Significance to American Jews

2014

Author(s): Minkin, Sarah Anne | Advisor(s): Ray, Raka | Abstract: This dissertation investigates the construction and maintenance of ethnic boundaries in the face of contestation over core values. The dynamics of American Jewish communal structures and American Jews' relationships to the state of Israel offer a case study for exploring questions of boundary-maintenance, diasporic nationalism, and the social power of emotion. Specifically, this dissertation asks how, given disagreement and struggle over the ways in which Jewish Americans relate to the state of Israel, Jewish organizations strategize to develop and maintain Jewish community. It argues that dominant American Jewish organizations act like a social movement in mobilizing American Jews to identify with a particular version of the Jewish collective, which contributes to nationalist and political goals. Contestation over the state of Israel is central to the organized Jewish community's efforts to produce and regula...

Identity matters. Reflections on the "Israelite matrices" of American identity

"Rivista di studi politici. Quadrimestrale dell’Istituto di Studi Politici S. Pio V"; ISSN: 1120–4036, 2024

The pro-Palestine riots on US campuses and the support for the Jewish state, as well as the offensive launched after 7 October, have generated numerous reflections. This article moves away from the analysis of international relations, and it is focused on the citizenship support for Israel. It offers some reflections on the origins of the concepts of 'Americanism' and 'People' that inform American culture and political identity. In particular, the use of Old Testament themes and the resulting "symbolic" link between American and Israelite identity is discussed, with particular attention paid to the role of evangelists and the various recent sources recounting their growing influence. In this paper, the origin of this support is considered by reflecting on the link between the current Revival and the 18th century Great Awakening. The methodology of critical discourse analysis, as employed by various authors, is adopted to reconstruct the establishment of these elements as the result of a discursive and doctrinaire clash before Independence, and to demonstrate how these elements influenced subsequent political developments.

Michael A. Meyer, “Foreword,” in Yosef Gorny, The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought: The Quest for Collective Identity (London: Macmillan, 1994), ix-xii

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.

The Threat from Within: American Jews, the State of Israel, and Intermarriage

2011

This paper investigates how dominant American Jewish organizations seek to construct a collective Jewish identity that focuses on and advocates for the state of Israel. While the state of Israel has long been at the center of Jewish collective identity, there has been increasing fragmentation among American Jews with regard to Israel over the last several years. It is within this shifting, unstable dynamic that the dominant Jewish organizations cultivate Jewish collectivity, explicitly constructing American Jews’ attachment to Israel as inextricable from collective Jewish identity. For this reason, data for this paper comes primarily from ethnographic research on the representation of Israel in normative Jewish spaces in the Bay Area. Dominant Jewish organizations, the membership of which constitutes the elite leadership of American Jews, view the loss of Israel-centered collective identity among American Jews as posing an existential threat to Israel, and they link the loss of this...

Judaic Challenges to the Legitimacy of Israel

Global Jurist, 2018

Legitimacy implies the existence of a framework within which it is assessed. The framework chosen for this paper is the religion of Judaism. This is, of course, contingent on the assumption that the state of Israel is related to Judaism, whatever its stream. Both the founding fathers of Zionism and their detractors emphasized the discontinuity and the revolutionary nature of the new political movement in Jewish history. Traditional leaders of Judaism almost unanimously condemned Zionism as an alien and perfidious import. They refused it all legitimacy. However, the policy of centrality of Israel exported around the world by Israeli educators for several decades has borne fruit. Many Jews find it difficult to separate Zionism from the Jewish identity as it has been taught to them. Their identity is often centred on political support for the State of Israel, and they see advocacy for Israel — a special course in the curriculum of many private Jewish schools — as a key part of being Je...