The dramatic events of 2023-24 – the October 7 Hamas attacks and the ensuing Israel-Hamas War, the unprecedented demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and even Hamas, the surge of antisemitic attacks – have had palpable effects on Jewish identity and solidarity. The organized Jewish community in the Diaspora mobilized itself for impressive expressions of solidarity with Israel along with significant financial and political support. Yet, at the same time, these events opened up questions concerning basic aspects of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, especially the centrality of Israel, which had seemed long settled.

This process of questioning the place of Israel in Diaspora Jewish life is happening – to a large extent – in the cultural-literary sphere. Surveys show that the vast majority of North American Jews support Israel (as does the majority of non-Jews) and favor it over the Palestinians. However, such support and solidarity decreases in the younger age cohorts (below age 29), and the attitude toward Israel is “colder” among  this population. Nevertheless, the majority of Jewish college students support Israel and identify with it.

However, attitudes and positions that are either anti/non-Zionist or anti-Israel deemphasize attachment to the Jewish state, and are garnering increasing attention in the media and in Jewish cultural forums. These are supplemented by publications and other cultural products (films, documentaries) that are “Diasporist,” that is, they want to acknowledge the value of Diaspora Jewish life and encourage it to continue developing as an autonomous and independent center (or centers) of Jewish life, not necessarily in place of Israel but alongside it.

This is especially clear in several books and other works that in one fashion or another “de-center” Israel.  These works vary in the intensity of their animus toward Israel or toward “political Zionism,” which places a Jewish state at the center of the Zionist enterprise, ranging from the desire to dismantle the State of Israel to an emphasis on Diaspora life as, in its own right, making a valuable contribution to Jewish life without reference to Israel.

Jewish Anti-Israel Manifestations or Expressions of Indifference

The net effect of these developments is, at least in the cultural-intellectual sphere, to re-open questions that seemed to have been settled long ago regarding Diaspora Jewish identity and the place of Israel within it. The vast majority of these manifestations of a “cooling” attitude toward Israel (whether in behavior or in cultural production such as writing or film), are associated with the progressive left. We seem to be witnessing a roll-back of historical developments. The old Jewish non-Zionist socialist and communist left, which was Yiddish oriented, was either neutral on Zionism (as was the Forward) or hostile (as was the communist Freiheit). Nevertheless, these attitude changed in the wake of the Six Day War when the very existence of the State of Israel was threatened. This change was epitomized by the stand taken by Irving Howe, the well-known literature professor, cultural historian and critic. Faced with the possibility of the destruction of the Jewish state, Howe, a Trotskyist in his youth and a leading socialist intellectual, expressed solidarity with Israel and support for it. Howe called the preservation of Israel an “urgent moral and political necessity,” and argued that a nation composed of Holocaust survivors should not  be allowed to undergo another one. This commitment of the traditional Jewish socialist left was reinforced during the Yom Kippur War, in which again it seemed that Israel’s existence was under threat. In other words, even the Jewish socialist left which had been historically cool, if not hostile to Zionism, identified with the “We are one!” slogan floated by the UJA -Federation of New York.

It appears that the left is reverting to its historical cool, if not hostile, attitude toward Zionism and the Jewish state. To some extent this is the result of the Palestinians success in making their cause into a progressive one (perhaps the progressive cause célèbre). The opening for this, is of course, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and, together with the Egyptians, the partial blockade of Gaza. This, along with the attendant denial of political rights for the Palestinians makes the charge of colonialism against Israel plausible. The Palestinians have skillfully exploited this, offering aid and advice to the Black Lives Matter demonstrators following the police killings of Michael Brown (2014) in Ferguson Missouri and George Floyd in Minneapolis (2020) and stressing the similarity between the oppression of African Americans and Palestinians. It should be noted that some BLM adherents have begun to express frustration about a perceived lack of reciprocity from the Palestinian activists in support of their cause.

The theory of progressive identity politics is very “friendly” to the Palestinian cause, which can be easily and superficially explained in terms of “settler colonialism” and “decolonization.” Thus, many young Jews, who have not been exposed to the Israeli narrative in a serious way, have developed a progressivist sympathy for the Palestinian cause. This reversion to the left’s historical coolness toward Zionism also has an organizational aspect. One of the more visible non-Zionist platforms is Jewish Currents. This periodical which had been owned by the communist Yiddish paper Morgan Freiheit, was given a facelift, and shaped into a younger and hipper quarterly magazine and online news site, in partnership with the democratic socialist Jewish Workman’s Circle, which had once been the Freiheit’s mortal enemy.

However, the demand for “justice” for the Palestinians is not the only factor responsible for the “coolness” of young Jews toward Israel. For the past few decades, younger Jews have sought forms of Jewish expression and practice that are more oriented toward individualizm and what they find meaningful and “authentic.” Some of thease young people tend to be put off by the communal, public standardized Jewish practices denominational prayer and the public rituals and philanthropy in support of Israel. Over the past decades new “emergent” communities or congregations have sprung up that reflect this new religious sensibility. While Israel had been central to the Jewish experiences of the generations who are 50 and over, it is often relatively irrelevant to those who are younger, especially those under 30.

Furthermore, among the non-Orthodox Jewish population, many of the younger Jews are the offspring of intermarriages. Of course, as has been often noted, intermarriage tends to reduce the social-communal affiliation of Jews, both to the local community, the Jewish people as a whole and the State of Israel. As also noted, Jews under 50 have little experience or memory of the Jews as a persecuted minority. Their experience of Israel has been of a strong regional power that allegedly oppresses Palestinians. Whether or not this view will change as a result of the events of October 7 remains to be seen. It should also be noted that there has been a failure of imagination on the part of Israel and the American organized Jewish community in communicating Israel’s relevance to Jews worldwide in the 21st century.

Decentering Zionism and Israel in Academic Writing

The developments described above – the discomfort with Israeli occupation and the settlement policy in the West Bank, the emergence of modalities of worship that stresses  personal meaning and authenticity – form the cultural and religious background for various attempts to rethink Jewish identity and practice, without Israel at the core or sometimes while decrying Israel’s policies and perhaps its very existence. This essay looks at four works which span a spectrum in regard to Zionism and Israel. They are: a 2012 essay by Judith Butler (later expanded into a book), “Is Judaism Zionism?”¹; The No-State Solution by Daniel Boyarin²; The Necessity of Exile by Shaul Magid³; and Zionism and the Roads not Taken by Noam Pianko⁴.

Re-opening the question of the centrality of Israel and Zionism in Diaspora Jewish  life also involves the revival of historical figures and proposals, that is, examining “roads not taken”. Despite the extraordinarily problematic nature of Judith Butler’s statements concerning the October 7 massacres and the Israel-Hamas war, we have included her because of her overall status – she has the academic standing of a rock star – and because her philosophical writing on Judaism and Zionism touches upon troubling perennial themes and issues of Jewish identity.

In her essay, “Is Judaism Zionism?” Butler attempts to revive and apply the ethic first advanced in Walter Benjamin’s well-known 1940 essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher and critic who uniquely combined mysticism with Marxism. At the heart of the ethic espoused in this essay is the memory of the suffering of the oppressed “that flashed up during moments of emergency.” While the standard liberal view of history, celebrates the march of liberal capitalist society, Benjamin was concerned with the “losers” of history, whose suffering was ultimately forgotten. The flash of the memory of suffering, “interrupts” the present and enjoins one to alleviate the suffering of the contemporary oppressed.

Butler applies this structure to the case of the Jews and the Palestinians. The memory of Jewish suffering, and especially the Holocaust, should cause Israeli Jews to refrain from oppressing the Palestinians (Butler is careful to insist, however, that Palestinian suffering is not analogous to the Holocaust and Jewish suffering in general.) On the contrary, it should enjoin them to disrupt Israel as an exclusively Jewish state and to instead create a truly binational state, allocating land, political power, resources, and citizenship to all Palestinians as well as Jews. Butler is not insensitive to the risks that such “cohabitation” might entail for the Jewish population, including the destruction of Jewish life. But she implies that on ethical grounds, Israel should accept them. “After all,” she says, “remembrance does not restrict itself to my suffering or the suffering of my people.”

Butler allows herself to take this position because she conceives of being Jewish in “anti-identitarian” terms. That is, to be Jewish is paradoxically to negate one’s attachment to particular, conventional identity groups, such as the Jewish people as an ethno-religious group, and to “affirm the displacement of identity that Jewishness is.” Butler’s position in 2011 was radical but not really new. In the Jewish left, there is a tradition of “the non-Jewish Jew.” Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer wrote an essay with that title, pointing to Spinoza, Marx, and Freud as exemplars of outstanding Jews who went beyond conventional loyalty to a defined ethno-religious group, and precisely in such boundary crossing fulfilled their Jewishness. In fact, the notion of the “non-Jewish Jew” who fulfills her Jewishness by transcending it can be traced to Paul of Tarsus (St. Paul). According to Paul, the Jews fulfill their divinely appointed destiny by transcending their narrow ethnic identity and becoming the basis for the universal Christian church.  Butler’s position, too, thinks of Jews as the chosen people. One can hardly imagine her demanding such “anti-identitarian” paradoxical identity from the Norwegians, the French, or the Fiji Islanders. Only of the Jews does she demand a unique standard of self-immolation.

Daniel Boyarin’s 2023 book, The No-State Solution, a Jewish Manifesto, also thinks of the Jews in exceptional terms, at least vis-à-vis Western, Christian civilization. Coming at the end of an extraordinarily rich and productive academic career, The No-State Solution reads like an apologia pro vita sua, a defense or an explanation of the author’s life. Phrases like “I have dedicated my life to” are frequently encountered by the reader. Indeed, Boyarin’s positions on the meaning of Jewishness, Jewish life, or “Jewish doings” are quite complex. He has dedicated much of his scholarly endeavor to explaining that the very terms that Jews use to describe themselves and their individual and communal activity, while they may seem too similar to Western, Christian terms (especially in translation), in fact have a very different meaning and valuation.  Thus, in his pathbreaking Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in the Talmud, he explains that concepts such as the body and sexuality do not have the connotation of something base or inherently sinful as they do in Hellenistic-Christian civilization. Their valuation is extremely positive, and they are constitutive of Jewish identity and Jewish life.

Similarly, in his 2018 book, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion, he explains that the very term, “Judaism” is a Protestant term which denotes a “religion” – a spiritual activity, detached from other spheres of life – which has been imposed upon the Jews in modern times. In fact, Jewish religious practices or “doings” are material, communal and entirely implicated in daily of life – eating, sexuality, bodily functions, conducting business. Thus, in the terms suggested by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Jews are engaged in a totally different “language game” or “form of life” from Western, especially Protestant, civilization.  The term that Boyarin finds best describes Jewish life is “nation” (“I can think of nothing but nation…”⁵): Jews have a national religious culture which permeates their communal and material life. This understanding expressed itself in Boyarin’s personal life. Having grown up in an American Conservative household, he moved to Israel, married an Israeli woman and lived there for 20 years. He served in the IDF, and his two sons served as Israeli paratroopers.

Nevertheless, Boyarin started to reject Zionism and the State of Israel, a tendency that probably strengthened as he moved from Bar-Ilan University in Israel to the University of California at Berkeley. Starting with his uneasiness with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, he now calls for “full justice” for the Palestinians. So, in his current situation, Boyarin has to thread the eye of a needle. The Jews are a “nation,”, but he does not want sovereignty or territoriality. What he wants is Diasporic national existence, which for him means “the continued, creative, development of Jewish cultural practices.” Parsing this out he proposes “Jewish pleasure, Jewish joy: the intimacies of shared history, languages, practices, songs, holy days, literature, political comradeship (Black Lives Matter), things we eat and “things we don’t eat”…and he sees no contradiction between this commitment and “an equally passionate commitment to the well-being of the entire world….”⁶

Though Boyarin himself is extremely well versed in many important branches of Jewish culture and Jewish learning, and I am sure enjoys every minute that he spends researching and writing, his proposal seems to be an exercise in nostalgia for the vibrant Jewish culture of Eastern Europe (and its offshoot in New York.) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The variants of this idea put forth by the Jewish Workers Bund and the historian Simon Dubnow made sense because they were made in reference to a population that not only spoke Yiddish, it was immersed in Yiddish culture, Jewish time and calendar, and the dilemmas of Jewish communal existence in a modern but hostile world.  This is far less practical for a population in which Jewish studies majors may be well versed in critical theory but have trouble reading Rashi in the original script and whose connection to Jewish culture as a whole is tenuous.

Shaul Magid is another well-known Jewish studies professor who has lived for an extended period of time in Israel and even in a West Bank settlement. His 2023 book, The Necessity of Exile, Essays from a Distance, focuses on the dilemma of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Invoking another iconic Jewish intellectual figure from the 20th century, Hannah Arendt, Magid wants to retain the territorial aspect of Zionism but not necessarily the state-centered political aspect. Magid, too, has concluded that the State of Israel in its current form does not do justice to the Palestinians. (A conclusion he came to, he says, while serving in the IDF in the West Bank.)

Accordingly, he proposes what he calls “counter-Zionism.” This is an approach in which Zionism loses its proprietary claim to the land: “By ‘counter’ I also mean an ideology that resists the ethnocentrism that in my view lies at the very heart of Zionism, which is based on the claim of ownership and thus privilege…. [Counter-Zionism] would be predicated on the principle that we (Jews and Arabs( live on this land together on equal footing, and neither party can claim ownership any more than the other.” In other words, Magid proposes a binational solution, which as he says, resembles the binational proposals of Brit Shalom and Ichud in the first half of the 20th century (though Magid points to significant differences in the political and cultural context of the two proposals). If Israeli Zionism adopted the “counter-Zionist” framework, it could free itself from the “intoxication of power” and endorse ethnic difference.

Magid references an essay by Hannah Arendt, which was written in 1948, which separates the notion of a Jewish homeland from that of a Jewish state. In other words, it separates the issue of territoriality from that of sovereignty. Arendt’s essay, written between the UN partition resolution (on Nov. 29, 1947) and the declaration of the State of Israel (May 14, 1948), testifies to how taken Jewish intellectuals were with the idea of the kibbutz as a utopian project and how hopeful they were of Jewish-Arab cooperation. She was afraid that declaring statehood would eventually turn Israel into an ugly, militaristic ethno-state that excluded and oppressed others (if it survived) and that the possible contributions  to humanity that a “Jewish homeland” (not a state) could provide such as the kibbutz would be lost. Magid includes this notion of “territorial but not political Zionism” in his binational proposal.

Arendt recognized that her ideas were not accepted by the vast majority of the Jewish world, which aligned with Ben-Gurion in the drive for a state. Magid explains this by referring to the trauma of the Holocaust, “Trauma, anxiety and fear gave birth to a hyper nationalism (the kind that ironically helped produce the genocide[!]).” Arendt made a concrete policy suggestion, which at least in theory could have been implemented. Her suggestion was that the United States and President Truman accept a United Nations trusteeship over Palestine. In such a trusteeship Jews and Arabs would learn to cooperate, and the Jewish homeland with its utopian experiments would be saved. Magid, though he cites Arendt, does not really offer a parallel concrete suggestion.

What these books really signify is that the Diaspora, and especially the American Jewish Diaspora, is beginning a process of separation from Israel, and hence undertaking a process of self-clarification concerning its basic values and its conceptions of Judaism (or “Jewish doings”), Jewish life, and Jewish identity. Unlike Arendt’s essay, Magid’s book is not a policy document. But it is part of this larger conversation of “what do we think about this project called Zionism and Israel.” Such a conversation can only arise in the wake of, or a as a corollary of some process of “separation” between Israel and the American Jewry. I use this term deliberately so as to allude to the psychodynamic processes of “ego separation” of mother and child. Any number of metaphors could be used to describe the Israel-Diaspora relationship in these terms. This could be framed according to the halachic-talmudic concept of “being dependent upon one’s father’s table”, that is the situation of a young man being supported by his father or father-in-law. In a certain sense, the Diaspora could have been described as “dependent upon Israel’s table.” Not financially of course, but in terms of values, orientations, and symbols. Israel has undergone a similar process regarding its financial dependence on the Diaspora.

The books in this review, seem to be indicating the first steps in ending that dependency. Developments in culture, literature and art are often a few steps ahead of similar developments in the more “serious” areas of politics and economics. It is true that the vast majority of American Jews support Israel significantly and it is also true that the criticism of Israel mainly refers to the occupation of Judea and Samaria and the oppression of the Palestinians. But something seems to be moving beneath the surface and the critique of Israel and Zionism may be a lot broader. This critique may reflect the slow realization that the needs, assumptions, horizons of an ethno-national state in existential peril are not the same as an ethnic and religious minority in a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic democracy. The two will deploy language (words and syntax) differently regarding different subjects, objects and shades of meanings – they play two different language games –and sentences uttered in one may be unutterable in the other. In short, we are speaking past each other.

Almost fifteen years ago, at the very embryonic stage of this process, Noam Pianko published his study of Simon Rawidowicz who taught Jewish philosophy at Brandies. Rawidowicz advocated the creation of two Jewish centers – one in the Diaspora and one Israel. Pianko focused on him (Rawidowicz was not really a major figure) because he thought that the dependency of the Diaspora periphery on the Israeli center was unhealthy. The case of Rawidowicz shows that one does not have to be a non- or anti-Zionist to recognize the independence of the Diaspora and advocate for it. This separation is already happening, so we should be concerned not with stopping it, but with shaping it. The worst thing that could happen is what happened two thousand years ago – when the Greek speaking Diaspora produced a new form of Judaism that competed with the received (Land of Israel) version in a hostile fashion. In order to avoid that, at minimum we need honesty and openness and a willingness to listen to and learn from the other.

The question we need to ask is – how do we speak with each other?

Endnotes

1. Judith Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?”, in Eduardo Mendietta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen eds. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere? NY, Columbia University Press, 2011, p. 70-92. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012,
2. Daniel Boyarin, The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto, New Haven and London, Yale U. Press, 2023.
3. Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, Brooklyn, NY, Ayin Press, 2023.
4. Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan and Kohn. Bloomington, Indiana U. Press. 2014.
5. p12
6. p16-17