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Modern Judaism, Volume 29, Number 3, October 2009, pp. 326-350 (Article)

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Allan Arkush

FROM DIASPORA NATIONALISMTO RADICAL DIASPORISM

In the first week of June 2007, on the fortieth anniversary of the SixDay War, the weekend supplement of Ha’aretz featured a dialoguebetween the journalist Ari Shavit and Avraham Burg, former chairmanof the Jewish Agency, former Speaker of the Knesset, and a onetimecandidate for leadership of the Labor Party. Having already expressedon numerous occasions his deep dissatisfaction with Israel’s generaltrajectory, Burg went much further in this conversation than he had inprevious writings and appearances and actually stepped over the linedividing Zionists from non- and anti-Zionists. He rejected the idea ofa Jewish state as unworkable, dismissed the notion of a ‘‘Jewish-democratic state’’ as ‘‘schmaltzy, nostalgic and retro’’ and repeatedlyechoed the all-too-familiar post-Zionist line.

Among other things, Burg strongly denounced the Zionist‘‘negation of the Exile,’’ countering it with a very positive evaluationof contemporary Jewish life outside of Israel.

I maintain that just as there was something astonishing aboutGerman Jewry, in America too they also created the potential forsomething astonishing. They created a situation in which the goycan be my father and my mother and my son and my partner. Thegoy there is not hostile but embracing. And as a result, what emergesis a Jewish experience of integration, not separation. Not segregation.I find those things lacking here. Here the goy is what he was in theghetto: confrontational and hostile.

Shavit responded to this statement and Burg’s disparagement of Israeliculture in general by suggesting that ‘‘you see in American Jewry thespiritual dimension and the cultural ferment that you don’t find here.’’Burg not only affirmed that that was the case but proceeded to pro-claim the nullity and doomed character of Israeliness and to clarify hisown personal priorities. ‘‘I am going to the world and to Judaism.Because the Jew is the first postmodernist, the Jew is the first global-ist.’’ His own personal ‘‘hierarchy of identities’’ was ‘‘citizen of theworld, afterward Jew and only after that Israeli.’’1

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Hearing Burg say these things was very dispiriting to Zionists inIsrael and around the world. Post-Zionists, on the other hand, were nodoubt heartened to see their ranks augmented by such a prominentson of the Zionist establishment.2 Even more gratified, one has toassume, were the scattered champions of what one might call thenew diasporism.3 Burg is their first really big Zionist catch. Soon,I suspect, they may be quoting him with great regularity.4

Even if they do so, not too many people are likely to notice.Diasporism is currently a relatively weak force in the Jewish world.Now and then, here and there, one or another left-leaning Jewishacademic departs from what is nearly a global Jewish consensus andwrites a manifesto or an article or a book trumpeting the need forJews around the world to reappraise their overall situation in a waythat de-centers Israel. Some of the new diasporists simply see a needto put Israel in its proper place, as one among many Jewish commu-nities. Others are outspokenly anti-Zionist. All in all, however, thereare not many of them, nor are they very influential (outside of certainprecincts of the academic world, at least).5

This is reassuring, but it is not enough. Things change. There maybe more Avraham Burgs on the way. Marginal as they may seem to be,the new diasporists could represent a (if not the) wave of the future.They should not be ignored.

I myself have been paying fleeting attention to them for sometime but have never examined all of them thoroughly and I do notintend to do so here. What I wish to do on this occasion is simply tocompare a few of these late twentieth and early twenty-first centurydiasporists both with each other and with their most outstanding pre-decessor from a century ago, the Diaspora nationalist Simon Dubnow.To a limited extent, I would even like to offer some thoughts on howcontemporary issues might be viewed from Dubnow’s diaspora-centered viewpoint, a perspective I consider to be far more sagaciousthan that of today’s diasporists.

I

Simon Dubnow was an unabashedly secular thinker, a man whoabandoned the traditional Judaism in which he had been raised andbriefly adhered to purely cosmopolitan ideals before returning not tohis religion but to his people.6 He subsequently developed a uniquenationalist ideology, one that portrayed the Jews as a people that hadpassed through the two initial, inferior stages of national existence andhad successfully adapted itself to the third stage, i.e. living as a nationwithout the territorial shell in which it had once been encased.

Radical Diasporism 327

Dubnow’s ‘‘autonomism’’ included a program to revise and update thetype of national framework within which diaspora Jews had hithertolived and to accommodate it to the political circumstances and thesecularity of the modern world. In formulating his program hedevoted a great deal of attention to the institution-building in whichJews would have to engage in order to survive as a nation in the newkind of diaspora in which they could now look forward to living.

Dubnow’s ideas clearly set him in opposition to the Zionist move-ment, but they did not necessarily entail the rejection of all aspects ofits activities. He looked benignly and sympathetically on the Jewishresettlement of Palestine. In the end, without ever seeing the establish-ment of a Jewish state as anything like a complete solution to theJewish problem and without ever advocating it, he clearly came toterms with such a prospect and even greeted it with no small measureof enthusiasm.

At the very beginning of his Letters on Old and New JudaismDubnow locates the origin of nations in nature.

Common origin, territory and climate leave their stamp on the phy-sical and mental characteristics of the members of the family group,who may be concentrated in one territory or in many (in fixed set-tlements or nomadic). Thus the ‘‘nation,’’ in original and biologicalsense (natio, from nasci, to be born), comes into being. General tribalcharacteristics become crystallized, as the law of heredity operatesover many generations, and in this way a fundamental pattern isestablished, the natural or tribal stage of nationality.7

Primitive as it may be, this is a stage that is never fully transcended.Even at the highest level of national development, membership ina nation remains a matter of heredity. This applies to Jews everywhere.As Dubnow remarked in the second of his Letters,

It is enough to recall the simple definition of the term ‘‘nationality’’in order to understand how erroneous it is to assume that emanci-pated Jews in France have become in their very nature Frenchmen,those of Germany – Germans, etc. A person is not made a memberof this nationality but is born into it.

Only through a generations-long process of ‘‘mingling of blood(through marriage)’’ can an alteration of nationality take place.8

Every people, Dubnow believed, naturally strives ‘‘to retain itsoriginality and to preserve the necessary internal or external culturalor political autonomy in order to insure its own free development.’’This national will, viewed through the prism of the ideals of theFrench Revolution, yields, according to Dubnow, a natural right.

The freedom of the national individual flows from the freedom ofthe individual as a human being. Just as the individual enjoys

328 Allan Arkush

freedom in the community, the nation also needs to be free in theinternational community.

But just as individuals can exercise their freedom only withinlimits, so can nationalities. None have the right to oppress others.Thus, ‘‘if several national groups are joined together into one state,no single dominant nationality has the right to suppress the individual-ity of the national minority.’’9

Having established, to his own satisfaction, the right of any partic-ular national group to retain its individual identity within the frame-work of any particular state, Dubnow considered the ways in which theJews, members of a minority in every state they inhabit, might bestimplement such a right under modern conditions.

First of all, they must not hesitate to make their legitimatedemands. The Jew says, among other things,

I have the right to speak my language, to use it in all my socialinstitutions, to make it the language of instruction in my schools,to order my internal life in my communities, and to create institu-tions serving a variety of national purposes; to join in the commonactivities with my brethren not only in this country but in all coun-tries of the world and to participate in all the organizations whichserve to further the needs of the Jewish nationality and to defendthem everywhere.10

The specific means by which Jews ought to seek the implementation ofthese rights vary according to local conditions. In some places, likeGermany, he thought, they ought ‘‘to wage a parliamentary battle forthe recognition of the fullest measure of secular national communalautonomy.’’ In a free country like the United States, on the otherhand, ‘‘Jews could enjoy even now a large measure of self-administra-tion, if only they were willing to advance beyond the confines of the‘religious community.’ ’’11

Dubnow was well aware that his program could lead to the accusa-tion of ‘‘separatism.’’ But this did not bother him. For ‘‘no self-respecting minority will take notice of such accusations, becauseit considers its free development to be a sacred and inalienableright.’’12 It is, moreover, a right that a minority must exercise inorder to survive. Contemplating the ‘‘internal national disruption’’that was in his own day ‘‘destroying the lives’’ of the Jews living infreedom in western countries, he warned that the Jews of Russia wouldface similar dangers even if they were to be freed from governmentoppression and pogroms.

Even if we secure our lives as citizens, we are not at all secure fromnational death, or, at least, from a national death struggle, unlesswe take measures to obtain assurances of cultural autonomy basedon the same demands made by every national minority which does

Radical Diasporism 329

not wish to be assimilated by the alien environment of themajority.’’13

The maintenance of Jewish cultural autonomy was fully compati-ble, Dubnow insisted, with the Jews’ full and loyal participationin other peoples’ nation states or transnational political entities,such as multinational states.14 But why, we must ask, is it necessaryto stop there? If autonomy is such a vital matter, why shouldn’t theJews seek to obtain as much of it as possible by becoming fully inde-pendent in their own land? Why, in short, was Dubnow not a Zionist?

From the beginnings of Hibat Zion in the 1880s, Dubnow doubtedthe practicality of the effort to restore the Jews to Palestine. Heinsisted to the very end of his own life that it could never provide asolution to the problem faced by the preponderant majority of Jews,who would have to remain in the Diaspora.15 Although he was recep-tive, as is well known, to Ahad Ha’am’s idea of establishing a culturalbase in Palestine, he differed with his close friend with respect to thedegree that such an enclave could ever become the center of modernJewish life. Nor did he ever express for the agenda of the politicalZionists support comparable to that which he offered to the culturalZionists. At first, he worried about what would happen to the Jewishpeople if they failed to achieve what he considered to be their fancifulgoal of establishing a Jewish state. Later, he may have worried tooabout what might happen if they succeeded.

Dubnow argued, as Jonathan Frankel has observed, ‘‘that theJewish nation, lacking a territory of its own, represented the highestform in the evolution of nationalities, dependent as it was entirely on‘cultural-historical’ and ‘spiritual factors,’ with ‘no possibility of strivingfor political victories, territorial annexations or the subjugation ofother peoples.’ ’’16 Deploring the kind of national egotism character-istic of other peoples and the way that it led to international conflict,Dubnow proudly declared that there ‘‘is absolutely no doubt thatJewish nationalism in essence has nothing in common with any ten-dency toward violence.’’17 No one who held such views could haveanticipated the creation of a Jewish state without some misgivings.

To a certain extent, then, Dubnow’s outlook is reminiscent of thatof pacifist cultural Zionists like the members of Brit Shalom. But therewere important differences. His reaction to the disturbances in 1929was not, like that of Hans Kohn, for instance, to renounce the idea ofsettling Palestine because he foresaw that it would have to be accom-plished with ‘‘the help of our own bayonets.’’18 Nor did he conclude,like some others, that it was necessary to redouble efforts to arrive atan agreement with the Arabs of Palestine. Dubnow instead denouncedthose who attacked Jews as terrorists and, as he noted in his

330 Allan Arkush

autobiography, ‘‘reacted in the press to the Arab pogroms with a callto the Jewish people to answer them with intensified immigration toPalestine.’’19

Dubnow’s final words on the subject of Zionism are found at thevery end of the final volume of his History of the Jews, completed in1937. The last section of its last chapter is subtitled ‘‘On the Brink ofa ‘Jewish State’ in Palestine.’’20 There he observes that ‘‘after expecta-tions of Messianic miracles of a millennium, Jewry now stands on thethreshold of a practicable ‘Jewish State’ . . . ’’ True, it will be a smallone, and will be able to ‘‘accommodate only a part of the Diaspora,just as was the case in ancient times.’’ It will in fact constitute merelythe junior partner in the worldwide Jewish people, ‘‘a small Judea’’alongside ‘‘a huge ‘ten-tribe Israel.’ ’’ But it is unquestionably a verypromising development. It could lead, Dubnow hopes, to ‘‘a mutualcultural cooperation between the two parts of the nation that could‘‘prove a boon for the people as a whole.’’21

Obtaining boons for the people as a whole could indeed be said tobe the primary focus of Dubnow’s entire doctrine of diaspora nation-alism. He could not have denied more emphatically that the Jewishpeople existed for the sake of some goal or project larger than itself.‘‘We subordinate the Jewish national idea neither to a ‘mission’ ideanor to the traditional forms of the Jewish law, but bind it to the freegrowth of the nation on its spiritual soil.’’22 While there is certainlyroom within the nation for political parties of different orientations,‘‘they must all subordinate themselves to the highest of all principles,national survival.’’23 This highest principle was, however, in Dubnow’sopinion, fully compatible with other elevated principles. ‘‘It is fittingand proper,’’ he wrote, ‘‘for the descendants of the prophets to raisealoft on their flag the unsoiled national ideal that combines the visionsof the prophets of truth and justice with the noble dream of the unityof mankind.’’24

II

The Holocaust (in which Dubnow himself perished) destroyed theJewish communities in which he had mostly strongly hoped to seediaspora nationalism come to fruition. The ensuing establishment ofIsrael confirmed in most Jews’ minds the validity of the Zionist solu-tion to the problems of modern Jewry. During the past two decades,however, this pro-Zionist consensus has been fraying at the edges.One of the most conspicuous manifestations of dissent from it is anarticle that appeared in the academic journal Critical Inquiry in 1993.

Radical Diasporism 331

This essay, ‘‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,’’by Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, has played a significant part inshaping Jewish scholarly discussions of diaspora in recent years andperhaps an even more important part in the formation of the newdiasporism.25 Its role, to be sure, has not been a determinative one.Not all of the later diasporists are fully in agreement with theBoyarins. But even those who part company with them in certainrespects reflect their influence and are engaged in an explicit or atleast a tacit dialogue with them. Their article therefore deserves verycareful attention.

Unlike Dubnow, the Boyarins are not unequivocally secularist.Whether they should be classified as religious or secular Jews is,indeed, an interesting question, but it is one that we can dispensewith here, since it is not entirely relevant to a discussion of‘‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.’’26 In thisarticle they explicitly speak on one occasion on behalf of ‘‘[w]e, includ-ing religious Jews,’’ and do seem throughout its pages to be attempt-ing to articulate, in essentially secular terms, a position that ought tobe shared by all Jews, religious and secular alike.27 This position, it isclear, stems not from Judaism but from other sources (although theydo, as we shall see, make an attempt to read part of it into Jewishtradition, while trying to make it seem as if they are actually deriving itfrom that tradition).

The Boyarins resemble Dubnow in their general concern withthe preservation of the cultural autonomy of different peoples. Theirarticle consists in large measure of a polemic against contemporarywriters who disparage any kind of group loyalty or cultural particular-ism in the name of universal values, a stance that they brand as bothPauline and imperialist. They seek to protect ‘‘the power to speakfor themselves and remain different’’ of ‘‘those who have historicallygrounded identities.’’ They wish, indeed, to uphold their ‘‘right to bedifferent.’’28 Unlike Dubnow, however, the Boyarins see no need topinpoint the origin of this right.29 They apparently regard it as some-thing that can be taken for granted and are much more interested indetermining who possesses it and the ways in which it ought andought not to be exercised.

The kind of difference with which the Boyarins are most con-cerned in their article is what they call ‘‘genealogically based iden-tity.’’30 Like Dubnow, they wish to preserve peoples’ rights toremain what their heredity has made them. With respect to the Jewsin particular, they ‘‘suggest that a Jewish subject-position founded ongenerational connection and its attendant anamnestic responsibilities

332 Allan Arkush

and pleasures affords the possibility of a flexible and nonhermeticcritical Jewish identity.’’31

The Boyarins’ approbation of generational connection goes handin hand with a pronounced hostility toward people’s retention ofcertain kinds of territorial connections. They do not deny the valueof territorially rooted memories, nor, as we shall see, do they deploreall territorial aspirations, but they do call for the abandonment of theconnection between ethnicity and present-day territorial claims as ameans of ending oppressive political hegemonies and inter-ethnicconflicts. What the Boyarins

wish to struggle for, theoretically, is a notion of identity in whichthere are only slaves but no masters, that is, an alternative to themodel of self-determination, which is, after all, in itself a Western,imperialist imposition on the rest of the world. We propose Diasporaas a theoretical and historical model to replace national self-determination.32

They also ‘‘propose a privileging of Diaspora, a dissociation of ethnic-ities and political hegemonies as the only social structure that evenbegins to make possible a maintenance of cultural identity in a worldgrown thoroughly and inextricably interdependent.’’ Learning ‘‘thelesson of Diaspora, namely that peoples and lands are not naturallyand organically connected, could help prevent bloodshed such as thatoccurring in Eastern Europe today.’’33

It is not, however, the situation in Eastern Europe with whichthey are preoccupied but the situation in the Middle East. The culpritthat they most wish to eliminate is Zionism, ‘‘Jewish state hegemony,’’which in their eyes ‘‘represents the substitution of a European,Western cultural-political formation for a traditional Jewish one thathas been based on a sharing, at best, of political power with othersand that takes on entirely other meanings when combined with poli-tical hegemony.’’ Zionism is not all bad, or, rather, it has not alwaysbeen all bad. It was once at least partially justified, ‘‘insofar as it repre-sented an emergency and temporary rescue operation . . .’’ But thatmoment has passed and whatever limited virtues Jewish statehood mayonce have had it has now, inevitably, become irredeemable.

The sins that the Boyarins adduce in order to discredit Israeltotally are surprisingly minor ones, especially in light of the unbridledlanguage to which they resort in condemning them. They lament thefact that traditional Jewry’s ‘‘discursive practice’’ of extending charityonly to members of one’s own community has been transformed, inthe Jewish state, into ‘‘a monstrosity whereby an egregiously dispro-portionate measure of the resources of the state is devoted to the

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welfare of only one segment of the population.’’ Israel has showncontempt for Muslim holy places and let some of them fall intoruins. Finally, they maintain,

Insistence on ethnic specialty, when it is extended over a particularpiece of land, will inevitably produce a discourse not unlike theInquisition in many of its effects. The archives of the IsraeliGeneral Security Services will one day prove this claim eminently,although we already ‘‘know’’ the truth.

In spite of the monstrous, Inquisition-like character of the Israeliregime, the Boyarins will not compare ‘‘Israeli practice to Nazism.’’But this refusal is merely provisional. Calling Israel Nazi now

would occlude more than it reveals and would obscure the realdanger of its becoming the case in the future; the use ofLebensraum rhetoric on the part of mainstream Israeli politiciansand the ascent to respectability and a certain degree of power offascist parties in Israel certainly provide portents of this happening.34

One of these portents, it seems, is ‘‘the attempt of the integrationistZionist Gush Emunim movement to refigure the Palestinians asAmalek and to reactivate the genocidal commandment’’ in the Bibleto wipe out the peoples of Canaan.35 That such phenomena arise inIsrael is no accident, since any notion ‘‘of redemption through Landmust be either infinitely deferred (as the Neturei Karta understandsso well) or become a moral monster.’’36

As this respectful reference to one of the most extreme of thecontemporary anti-Zionist Orthodox forces reminds us, the Boyarinsare not absolutely opposed to the Jews’ maintenance of an attachmentto Palestine. A people, they say,

can be on their land without this landedness being expressed in theform of a nation-state, and landedness can be shared in the sameplace with others who feel equally attached to the same land. This isthe solution of the Neturei Karta, who live, after all, in Jerusalem butdo not seek political hegemony over it.

Nor are the Boyarins inclined to condemn ‘‘the longing for unity,coherence, and groundedness in the utopian future of the messianicage.’’ What they vehemently oppose is not dreaming about hegemonyin the future but the effort to exercise it now, as part of a ‘‘premes-sianic praxis.’’37 They recommend the reverse, ‘‘an Israel that reim-ports diasporic consciousness—a consciousness of a Jewish collective asone sharing space with others, devoid of exclusivist and dominatingpower . . .’’ For

the only moral path would be the renunciation of Jewish hegemonyqua Jewish hegemony. This would involve first of all complete

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separation of religion from state, but even more than that the revo-cation of the Law of Return and such cultural, discursive practicesthat code the state as a Jewish state and not a multinational andmulticultural one.38

The diasporic model supplies the basis for a morally superiormode of Jewish existence. Only under conditions of Diaspora canJews achieve a synthesis that allows for ‘‘stubborn hanging-on toethnic cultural specificity . . . in a context of deeply felt and enactedhuman solidarity.’’ Under these conditions ‘‘many Jews discoveredthat their well-being was absolutely dependent on principles of respectfor difference . . .’’ Nor did their concern for others turn all suchpeople into rootless cosmopolitans.

Absolute devotion to the maintenance of Jewish culture and thehistorical memory was not inconsistent with devotion to radicalcauses of human liberation; there were Yiddish-speaking and Judeo-Arabic speaking groups of Marxists and anarchists, and some evenretained a commitment to historical Jewish religious practice.39

Here the Boyarins oversimplify matters greatly and convenientlyfail to mention not only those multitudes of Jewish-born radicals whochose to abandon any kind of Jewishness but even the fact that manyof the radicals they describe maintained only a very qualified andprovisional devotion to Jewish culture and history.40 What is moreinteresting to note, however, is that this passing reference to Jewishradicals of earlier generations seems to be altogether supportive yetfails to include any recommendation that contemporary Jews follow intheir footsteps and combat injustice the way that they did. Evidently,the Boyarins, despite their strong commitment to social justice, arenot militant fighters for it. Daniel, in particular, would seem to beaverse to political activism. One is led at any rate to think so by hiscritique of modern Jewish capitulation to ‘‘masculinist’’ Western valuesand his effort to replace them with the ideal of ‘‘rabbinic Jewish male-ness,’’ which is, as he understands it, evolved in the Diaspora into theideal of being soft and meek, a ‘‘sissy.’’41

Diaspora is, in the eyes of the Boyarins, not only a politicallybeneficial situation but a culturally enriching experience. For onething, it discourages ‘‘nativism.’’

Diaspora culture and identity allows [sic] (and has historically allowedin the best circumstances, such as in Muslim Spain), for a complexcontinuation of Jewish cultural creativity and identity at the sametime that the same people participate fully in the common culturallife. The same figure, a Nagid, an Ibn Gabirol, or a Maimonides, canbe simultaneously the vehicle of the preservation of traditions and ofthe mixing of cultures. This was the case not only in Muslim Spain,nor even only outside of the Land. The Rabbis in Diaspora in their

Radical Diasporism 335

own Land . . . produced a phenomenon of renewal of Jewish tradi-tional culture at the same time that they were very well acquaintedwith and an integral part of the circumambient late antique culture.42

This mixing of cultures, according to the Boyarins, is probably neces-sary for the survival of any given culture and is, in any case, somethingthat they wholeheartedly welcome. It is perhaps for this reason, inpart, that they refrain from calling for the revival of anything likethe socialist Jewish Workers’ Bund’s ‘‘model for national-culturalautonomy,’’ which they refer to admiringly at the end of their‘‘Diaspora’’ article.

In a manner reminiscent of Dubnow, the Boyarins divide Jewishhistory into three stages, the last and highest of which is ‘‘diasporicexistence.’’43 In addition, however, they do something that it wouldhave never occurred to Dubnow to do. They present their diasporicideology not only as one that ought to be preferred on rationalgrounds but as one that is much more fully in step with the outlookof rabbinic Judaism than Zionism, which they label a ‘‘subversion ofrabbinic Judaism.’’44 The means by which they do this require closeexamination.

Their point of departure is the unquestionable fact that rabbinicJudaism renounced the possession of the Land of Israel until theadvent of the final redemption.45 What they omit to mention is therabbis’ reason for maintaining this position. The Boyarins studiouslyavoid any reference to the well known fact that they perceived the lossof the land as a punishment for their ancestors’ sins.46 Instead, they fillthe rabbis’ minds with other thoughts. They suggest that their renun-ciation of the Land resulted from their belief that ‘‘in an unredeemedworld, temporal dominion and ethnic particularity are impossiblycompromised.’’47 Further developing this theme, they reconstructthe rabbis’ thoughts about the control of the Land of Israel as follows:‘‘Given the choice between an ethnocentricity that would not seekdomination over others and a seeking of political domination thatwould necessarily have led either to a dilution of distinctiveness,tribal warfare, or fascism, the Rabbis chose ethnocentricity.’’48

Needless to say, the Boyarins adduce no traditional texts in sup-port of their ascription of these views—which are clearly their ownviews—to the ancient rabbis. For this is not the way the rabbis thoughtand there is no reason to believe that it what they thought.49 Butneither is there any reason to believe that it is what the Boyarinsreally think that the rabbis thought. With respect to this matter,I believe, they are acting not as historians but as ideologues with ajob to do. As they note in the article under consideration here, it isperhaps ‘‘the primary function for a critical construction of cultural(or racial or gender or sexual) identity is to construct it in ways that

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purge it of its elements of domination and oppression.’’50 If this isthe task to be performed, what would be wrong with injecting intotraditional culture whatever elevated moral ideas it happens to belacking?

As we have seen, Dubnow regarded the Jews of the Diaspora asa nation in danger of dissolving through assimilation and in need ofthe greatest possible degree of autonomy in order to survive. TheBoyarins, for their part, are not nationalists at all. To their credit,they engage in rhetorical battle with those who oppose the Jews’persistence as a distinctive group bearing its own culture, but theyapparently do not perceive the threats to their survival under diasporaconditions to be so great as to require anything like the kind ofseparate, semi-autonomous national existence that Dubnow advocated.They seem, on the whole, to be less concerned with avoiding theJews’ assimilation than with preventing their cultural self-segregation.Their appreciation of the ways in which Diaspora can facilitate theJews’ exposure to other peoples’ cultures is not tempered by anyfears that this might pose a threat to their maintenance of their own(except in so far as they fret about the Jews having been corrupted byWestern ‘‘masculinism’’).

There is a certain resemblance between Dubnow’s moral qualmsabout Jewish statehood and those of the Boyarins. Dubnow, as we haveseen, was satisfied that the Jews had moved on to the third and higheststage of national evolution, one in which their identity was entirelydependent on cultural-historical and spiritual factors and unspoiled byany egotistical ‘‘striving for political victories, territorial annexationsor the subjugation of other peoples.’’ The Boyarins, at a later date,are appalled at the fact that the Jews have descended from the moralheights of the third stage of historical development to an earlier stageand are once again engaged in the kind of efforts that Dubnow wasonly too glad to see his people leave behind.

Dubnow, however, was by no means as averse to the idea of Jewishstatehood as the Boyarins are. As we have seen, when it appeared asif one was on the horizon, in the late 1930s, he regarded this prospectas a miracle and potentially a great boon to the Jewish people. True,this was a time when, as the Boyarins put it, the Jews faced ‘‘anemergency’’ and a ‘‘rescue operation’’ was needed, a time wheneven they might have been in favor of a Jewish state. But even ifone might conclude that the Boyarins would have been in accordwith Dubnow, had they lived in his time, one need not necessarilyconclude that he would have been in accord with them, had helived in their time.

Dubnow was not an opponent of the nation-state per se. Unlikethe Boyarins, he never described it as an entity inevitably destined to

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perpetrate unjustifiable oppression. He did think, however, that mem-bers of national minorities living within a given nation-state had theright to make certain demands upon it. As we have seen, he believedthat they could claim a variety of cultural rights, a measure of internalautonomy, and the right to join in common activities with members oftheir own nation living in other states. Dubnow would certainly havebeen critical of a Jewish state that denied such rights to nationalminorities present within it. But that does not mean that he wouldnecessarily have called for its dissolution. And there certainly is noreason to believe that he would have regarded the Jewish abuses ofpower in Israel listed by the Boyarins as evidence of the State ofIsrael’s unacceptable character and the consequent need to replaceit with something other than a Jewish state.

The Boyarins describe the unequal distribution of state resourcesin Israel as ‘‘a monstrosity.’’ This state of affairs surely involves muchinjustice, but it is hard to see how, on the basis of Dubnovian princi-ples, one could condemn it as beneath the realm of the human. Israelhas behaved improperly with regard to some mosques, it is true, butneither Israeli Muslims nor other minorities have been deprived of thereligious and cultural freedom to which Dubnow believes they wereentitled. Dubnow would no doubt have been dismayed to see thexenophobia and bigotry on display in some sectors of the Israeli reli-gious right, but it is by no means clear that he would have believedthat these things were inevitable or identified them as signs that afascist takeover of the Jewish state might be on the horizon.

As we have seen, Dubnow’s strongest and deepest commitmentwas to the survival of the Jewish nation. Toward the end of his life,while remaining a Diaspora nationalist, he was quite prepared to wel-come as a potentially great boon to the nation the establishment ofwhat he assumed would be a small but vital Jewish state living along-side a ‘‘huge Diaspora.’’ He himself perished, of course, in the cata-clysm that upset that calculation. Had he witnessed the destruction ofEastern European Jewry, had he lived to witness the post-Holocaustconditions that rendered his vision of ‘‘autonomism’’ mostly unwork-able, had he lived to see a world in which the Jews of Israel were theonly ones living within the kind of national framework that he con-sidered indispensable for the Jews’ survival as a people, it seems mostlikely that he would have become something very hard to distinguishfrom a Zionist.

The Boyarins, who are ‘‘equally committed to social justice andcollective Jewish existence,’’ conceive of the permissible conditions ofthe latter in terms of the requirements of the former.51 The achieve-ment of social justice, as far as they are concerned, is inextricablybound up with the transformation of the Jewish state into a different

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kind of entity. What kind of transformation they have in mind isindicated, it seems, by the appendix to their ‘‘Diaspora’’ article,which includes a photograph from a Yiddish newspaper of the oncewell known Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi posing smilinglyalongside three members of the Neturei Karta.52 Unfortunately, theBoyarins make no effort to try to sketch for us, in any detailed way,what kind of existence the Jews of Israel would enjoy if they were all toassume, as they recommend, the political posture of the Jews in thisphotograph. There is, therefore, no need to analyze what could onlyhave been, in any case, either a preposterously naıve and utopianprogram or a picture horribly frightful to any self-respecting Jew.

III

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and RadicalDiasporism represents in some ways a more and in other ways a lessradical departure from contemporary Jewish conventional wisdomthan does the Boyarins’ way of thinking. We will focus on this bookhere not because it is the most important diasporist work to appearsince 1993, but because it is the most recent to have been published.Our concern is much less with the specific character of the radicalpolitics espoused in the book than with the diasporism that is inter-twined with it.

Kaye/Kantrowitz admonishes those who wish to reduce Jewishnessto Judaism not to forget ‘‘the complex indivisible swirl of religion—culture—language—history that was Jewishness until relatively recently.’’Those who mistakenly equate Jewishness with Judaism, she says, also‘‘forget how even the contemporary, often attenuated version of thisJewish cultural swirl is passed down in the family; almost like geneticcode . . .’’ Kaye/Kantrowitz herself remembers this ‘‘swirl,’’ but hassucceeded in swimming part of the way out of it. While respectfulof religion, she is an unabashed atheist.53 And despite her emphasison Jewishness as a family matter, she makes no brief, as the Boyarinsdo, for genealogically based identity. What matters ‘‘is not the blood-line but culture, history, memory.’’ A Jew, in her eyes, is anyone who israised Jewish, whether he or she has a Jewish parent or not.54 Far frombeing concerned with Jewish continuity in anything like a racial sense,she ‘‘welcomes intermarriage, embraces mixed-race, mixed-culturebabies.’’55

Kaye/Kantrowitz is aware that this outlook might seem to lead tothe dilution of Judaism ‘‘into a shallow anything-is-Jewish-tradition-because-I-say-it-is’’ and insists that this is not what diasporists want.56

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She is, to be sure, eager to embrace a very wide variety of pheno-mena as authentically and equally Jewish. ‘‘Diasporism’s languages,’’for instance, ‘‘include Judeo-Espanol, Judeo-German, Judeo-Arabic,Judeo-Greek, not to mention Turkish, Polish . . . etc.’’ Her diasporismrejects self-ghettoization. It ‘‘is committed to an endless paradoxicaldance between cultural integrity and multicultural complexities.’’57 Forall of her cultural openness, however, the real core of her Jewishness israther sharply defined. ‘‘Between Jewish history and Jewish morals ourjob as Jews is pretty clear,’’ she writes. It is ‘‘to seek justice’’ through‘‘left politics.’’58

Kaye/Kantrowitz does not devote an inordinate amount of time toestablishing this fundamental affinity between Jewishness and leftism.There is scarcely any Torah, Talmud, or Jewish philosophy or, for thatmatter, left-wing political theory in her book. All one finds in supportof her most fundamental assumption are scattered tributes to Jewishrevolutionaries of earlier generations and some admiring accounts ofsmall, radical Jewish organizations currently devoted to the strugglefor social justice and given to quoting verses from the Torah aboutloving the stranger.

This concern for social justice recalls that of the Boyarins, whoare, as we have seen, ‘‘equally committed to social justice and collec-tive Jewish existence.’’ Kaye/Kantrowitz, too, is committed to both ofthese things—but equally? She does not exactly say so, and there isreason to think that she is, on the contrary, more attached to theformer than to the latter. It is interesting to compare, for instance,her admiration for ‘‘non-Jewish Jews’’ of the kind famously describedby Isaac Deutscher, people who shed their tribal Jewish loyalties butembodied what he considered to be Jewish values, with her distaste forJews who have abandoned leftist causes.59 Leon Trotsky is someoneshe fondly thinks of as Lev Bronstein.60 Alan Finkielkraut, on theother hand, who has repudiated ‘‘his past commitment to socialismand liberation struggles, as if these commitments had been inauthenticrefusals to be fully Jewish,’’ she dismisses as someone who is ‘‘trying tocut a deal with the larger Christian society.’’61 If forced to choose,it seems, between a host of non-Jewish Jews with the right values ora right-wing Jewish people she would probably choose the former.

But this is not a choice she wants to make. Reflecting on SamuelFreedman’s account in Jew vs. Jew of internecine battles within theAmerican Jewish community, she makes her feelings known.

I do not relish this vision of increased separation and alienationamong Jews. We are a small community and I’d rather strugglethan split. But this kind of conflict is, I believe, preferable to allowingfundamentalists or other right-wing voices to represent the Jewishpeople.62

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The Colors of Jews is in large part a vehicle for carrying on this struggle.Most of the book consists of a display of the kaleidoscopic range ofnon-white or at least non-Ashkenazi or only part Ashkenazi individualsor groups that identify themselves as Jews.

What she hopes to accomplish by drawing this picture is some-thing that Kaye/Kantrowitz makes perfectly clear. I write this book,she says, (among other things)

to heighten understanding among Jews of diverse backgrounds/cultures/ethnicities that we need each other in part because of ourdifferences. To help Jews grasp that those Jews who are culturalminorities within a hegemonic Ashkenazi community are often bestequipped to help the Jewish world reckon with our multiculturality,and to know that this multiculutrality is an enormous asset when itcomes to combating racism and anti-semitism and to building socialjustice coalitions.63

Kaye/Kantrowitz speaks of building coalitions and engaging incombat in language quite unlike that of the Boyarins. It is no surprisetherefore to find her taking issue with the passivity that she attributes,perhaps accurately, to both brothers.

I would like—the Boyarins’ critique of masculinism notwithstanding—for people to see The Partisans of Vilna, a magnificent, virtuallyunknown documentary that tells the story of Jewish resistance inthe ghetto of Vilna, Poland, an attempted rebellion by young Jewsof unimaginable courage. They flew up a German munitions train,and wrestled with whether to save their own families or fight theGermans.64

She is similarly thrilled by stories of the three Jews who fought withJohn Brown’s men against slavery in the United States in 1859.65

Kaye/Kantrowitz’s vision of the Jewish future, then, is builtaround widely dispersed, multi-tongued, many-hued, groups of comba-tants for social justice in their respective countries.66 United only in sofar as they retain some kind of attachment to Jewish history, culture,and memory, these people would be more outward than inward look-ing. They would regard individuals who might desert them and pursuesocial justice altogether outside of any particularistic Jewish frameworknot as heretics or renegades but as entirely admirable ‘‘non-JewishJews,’’ allies in the cause even if they chose not to think of themselvesas such.

One would not expect the bearer of such a vision to have muchsympathy for Zionism. Still, it comes as something of a surprise toobserve just how much Kaye/Kantrowitz despises the Zionist move-ment and the State of Israel. In comparison to her, the Boyarin broth-ers look like people who have only just barely strayed outside of theZionist fold. True, she does not, like them, proudly identify herself as

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an anti-Zionist or label Israel a moral monster, but everything she hasto say about Israel in its formative stages and in its current configura-tion reflects an animosity that is in some respects even more deep-seated than theirs.

The Boyarin brothers, as we have seen, do not speak ill of whatthey call ‘‘landedness,’’ and even see an eschatological hope for therepossession of Palestine as an essential component of Judaism. Whatthey oppose is an effort on the part of Jews to make Palestine theirown as part of a ‘‘premessianic praxis.’’ Kaye/Kantrowitz speaks con-temptuously of the territory in question as a ‘‘scrap of land’’ and neverindicates in any way that it might continue to have positive signifi-cance for Jews. The Boyarin brothers acknowledge that Zionismonce had the character of ‘‘an emergency and temporary rescue opera-tion.’’ Kaye/Kantrowitz, in her treatment of the Zionist movement’srecord during the period surrounding the Holocaust, identifies noth-ing other than evidence of its malfeasance. Indeed, every reference toIsrael in her book reflects poorly upon the country, with the exceptionof her positive portrayals of Israeli dissidents.

The indictment of Zionism and Israel in The Colors of Jews is notsystematic and thorough but is rather scattered and piecemeal. Puttingit all together, we obtain a picture of Zionism as a force that rangeditself from the beginning of the twentieth century against the SephardiJewish advocates in Palestine of existence within the framework ofa liberal Ottomanism, uprooted or suppressed traditional Ashkenaziand Sephardic cultures alike, and idealizes masculinist state power.We see Israel using the survivors of the Holocaust as cannon fodderin its War of Independence, discriminating against its non-Ashkenaziminorities, oppressing its Arab citizens and the Arabs of the occupiedterritories, and soaking up billions of American tax dollars for its warmachine. None of these charges is developed in any detail and none ofthem merits any extended consideration here.67 I mention them onlyin order to demonstrate the hostility evinced by Kaye/Kantrowitz’sradical diasporism toward the movement against which it defines itself.

Unlike the Boyarins, however, Kaye/Kantrowitz does not callfor the importation of ‘‘diasporic consciousness’’ into Israel and theend of Jewish statehood. She does point to diasporist models presenton the Israeli scene, such as Shira Katz, a ‘‘dual-citizened U.S. Israeli’’active in the Hebron Solidarity Committee.68 But this does not implyany opposition to the perpetuation of Jewish sovereignty in part ofPalestine. In fact, her calls upon Israel not to dissolve itself but tocompromise with the Palestinians imply the opposite.69 In the end,it seems, she is actually in some respects less anti-Zionist than theBoyarins. What she really wants is for Israel to cease to be diasporaJews’ ‘‘surrogate identity kit.’’70 There is, of course, a place for Israelis

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within the larger Jewish world, but it is a smaller place than theyoccupy in the Zionist scheme of things. She recommends that we‘‘conceive of the diaspora as the center that includes but does notprivilege Israelis.’’71

Kaye/Kantrowitz is grudgingly prepared to leave the State ofIsrael intact, within proper borders. She would evidently like to seeit lose its current friends, however, both among Diaspora Jews and thenations of the world. It irks her that Israel ‘‘has the most powerfulmilitary in the region, heavily financed by U.S. tax dollars.’’72 As faras she is concerned, diasporists ought to be ‘‘against an ever morepowerful Israeli Defense Force,’’ against ‘‘billions of U.S. dollars forthe Israeli government to purchase weapons from U.S. arms manufac-turers.’’73 And if diasporists were successful in their efforts to weakenIsrael, what would be the result? Kaye/Kantrowitz neither asks thisquestion nor answers it. It is hard to believe, however, that if shehad an answer it would be a realistic one. This is an author, afterall, whose solution to America’s current immigration problems is toacknowledge ‘‘documented and undocumented’’ immigrants’ ‘‘rights’’and admit everyone who seeks entrance, since people ought to be freeto cross ‘‘imperial borders’’ wherever they wish to do so.74

IV

Simon Dubnow has not always enjoyed the reputation of being arealist.75 In comparison to the diasporists we have considered here,however, Dubnow looks like an extremely pragmatic thinker, someonewith his feet firmly placed on the ground. Highly conscious of thenew dangers that the modern era posed to the Jewish people, heconcerned himself extensively with the institutional frameworksthat would have to be put in place for it to continue to survive inthe Diaspora. Dubnow was, to be sure, an idealist too, but a flexibleone, someone who adjusted his diaspora-oriented thinking to changingcircumstances. Witnessing both the worsening of the Jews’ situation inEurope during the interwar years and the astonishing successes ofZionism in Palestine, he smiled upon what seemed to him to be theimpending establishment of a Jewish state, without ever abandoninghis Diaspora-centric outlook.

There is no reason to doubt that Dubnow would have given theState of Israel his blessings, had he lived long enough to see it. Butthere is also good reason to believe that he would have eyed it withsome suspicion, fearing that it would become, in the end, just anothervehicle for the kind of ‘‘national egotism’’ that he deplored. It is easy

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to imagine him, in today’s circumstances, chastising Israel for itsunequal treatment of its Arab citizens and encouraging the latter tostruggle for their rights to maintain the greatest possible degreeof cultural autonomy within the Jewish state.76 It is even possible toimagine him questioning whether the best solution for Israel-Palestinemight not the replacement of Israel and the Palestinian Authority witha bi-national state. What one cannot picture Dubnow doing is eagerlydelegitimizing Israel, like the Boyarins, or maligning and marginalizingit, like Kaye/Kantrowitz.

Unlike Dubnow, the Boyarins and Kaye/Kantrowitz have lived ina world in which a Jewish state is neither an unlikely prospect nor animminent likelihood but very much an actuality. It is evidently onethat does not please them at all. For their brands of diasporism to takeroot, they realize, they must dethrone Israel from its position of dom-inance in the Jewish world. They endeavor to do so without anyapparent qualms, in allegiance to abstract ideals that easily overwhelmany inclination they might have to consider realistically the implica-tions of their proposals for the Jews living in the State of Israel.

Unlike Dubnow, the Boyarins and Kaye/Kantrowitz devote littlethought to the institutional arrangements that could facilitate Jewishsurvival in the Diaspora. This is no doubt a consequence of the factthat they do not, like Dubnow, regard Jewish national survival as thehighest of all principles. The Boyarins are focused above all on recon-ciling Jewishness (for whatever reason) with ‘‘deeply felt and enactedhuman solidarity,’’ which, as they understand it, requires ‘‘the renun-ciation of Jewish hegemony qua Jewish hegemony.’’ Kaye/Kantrowitz,for her part, concentrates primarily on preparing the Jews to partici-pate in ‘‘social justice coalitions.’’ Dubnow, if he were still around,would not chastise them, I suppose, for their more universal concerns,but I imagine that he would criticize them, as he did the Bund, forhaving the wrong priorities and for overlooking the basic interestsof the Jewish people as a whole.

It is, of course, difficult to say with any certainty how a figure fromthe past would size up the present. If I have engaged in conjectures ofthis sort it is not in order to answer this question or to understandDubnow’s thinking better but in order to utilize it as a yardstick withwhich to measure contemporary thinking that bears a certain resem-blance to his but which, in my opinion, falls far short of it. And Iwould not even do this were I not fearful that Israel’s moral vicissi-tudes may lead to further demoralization among Zionists, moreAvraham Burgs, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, and more sympa-thetic readers of the works of the Boyarins and Kaye/Kantrowitz.

Thinking like theirs ought to be recognized, I think, for the half-baked, perilous utopianism that it is. Comparing Dubnow with its

344 Allan Arkush

authors not only illuminates their shortcomings but reminds us thatthere are on the Jewish bookshelf many old volumes, including somewritten by non-Zionists, that can still assist us in coming to terms withour current dilemmas. They can not only help us to deflect unwise andunjust criticism but can also provide us with models for a more soberand balanced sort of moral self-assessment, especially in so far as therelations between Israel and Diaspora Jewry are concerned.77 I hopethat they will in the future continue to receive the attention that theydeserve and that the texts of the new diasporism that I have examinedhere will soon fall into desuetude.

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY

NOTES

1. Haaretz, June 8, 2007. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/868385.html.

2. This is true, of course, in the most literal sense. Burg is the son oflongtime National Religious Party leader Yosef Burg.

3. One of the authors I will discuss below, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz,claims to have coined the term ‘‘diasporism’’ in 1996 and only subse-quently to have discovered its prior use by Phillip Roth in his 1993Operation Shylock. See Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of Jews:Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism (Bloomington, 2007), p. 227, note2. But even before Roth utilized it in his novel it was a byword of thejournal Diaspora, which has been in existence since 1990. In an articlethat appeared in the first issue of Israel Studies, Arnold Band coinedthe term ‘‘the new diasporism’’ to characterize the discourse aboutdiaspora emanating from that journal (‘‘The New Diasporism and theOld Diaspora,’’ Israel Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1996), pp. 323–31. I willborrow this term from him and use it as a rubric under which to groupthe thinkers analyzed below.

4. Burg has expressed his views most fully in his book LeNazeach etHitler (Tel Aviv, 2007), translated into English as The Holocaust is Over: WeMust Rise from the Ashes (New York, 2008).

5. Among the more moderate voices are Caryn Aviv and DavidShneer. I have discussed their recent book New Jews: The End of theJewish Diaspora (New York, 2005) in ‘‘ ‘Difference’ in the Jewish Stateand in the Jewish World,’’ in Covenant, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 2007):http://covenant.idc.ac.il/en/vol1/issue2. See also the December 2004issue of Sh’ma magazine for other, similar statements.

6. David H. Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity: HaimZhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am, and the Shaping of Modern JewishIdentity (New York, 1996), pp. 145–216.

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7. Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History; Essays on Old and NewJudaism, edited with an introductory essay by Koppel S. Pinson(Philadelphia, 1958), p. 77.

8. Ibid., p. 102.9. Ibid., pp. 95–96.

10. Ibid., p. 136.11. Ibid., p. 139.12. Ibid., p. 140.13. Ibid., p. 226. See also p. 86.14. Ibid., pp. 109–10.15. Ibid., pp. 158–59.16. Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S.M. Dubnov: Diaspora

Nationalism and Jewish History, trans. Judith Vowles, (ed.) Jeffrey Shandler(Bloomington, 1991), pp. 17–18.

17. Old and New Judaism, p. 97.18. Cf. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, (ed.), A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber

on Jews and Arabs (New York, 1983), p. 99.19. Simon Dubnow, Buch des Lebens: Erinnerungen und Gedanken:

Materialien zur Geschichte meiner Zeit, Vol. 3, trans. Vera Bischitzky(Gottingen, 2004), p. 126. It is interesting to note that GershomScholem, a member at this time of Brit Shalom, reacted similarly tothese events. ‘‘In a series of letters to his mother, Scholem—who rathersurprisingly, was at the time galvanized into more, not less, radicalBrit Shalom activity by these traumatizing events—wrote: ‘What will be,one cannot yet say. What is certain is that if the Jewish settlement wasdouble in size, the Arabs would not have risked this matter.’ ’’ See StevenE. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: the German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton,2007), p. 34.

20. Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews: From the Congress of Vienna to theEmergence of Hitler, Vol. 5, translated from the Russian by Moshe Spiegel,Fourth Definitive Revised Edition vols. IX and X (Cranbury, 1973), p. 888.

21. Ibid., p. 892.22. Old and New Judaism, p. 95.23. Ibid., p. 216.24. Ibid., p. 130.25. This essay was most recently republished in Laurence Silberstein’s

anthology entitled Postzionism: A Reader (New Brunswick, 2008). Fora recent and representative assessment and reflection of the Boyarins’influence, see Brett Ashley Kaplan, ‘‘Contested, constructed home(lands):Diaspora, postcolonial studies and Zionism,’’ Journal of Modern JewishStudies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 85–100.

26. I have entered these murky waters once before, in an effort toelucidate the meaning of Daniel’s self-identification as someone who, inhis own words, ‘‘believes in’’ and is ‘‘comfortable with the discourse ofOrthodox Judaism.’’ On that occasion, I took note of the fact thatJonathan (as Daniel himself reports), had criticized this utterance as a‘‘somewhat disingenuous statement’’ that ‘‘masks more than it asserts.’’

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I also tried to show that Daniel’s stated beliefs were inconsistent with thebasic tenets of Orthodoxy and that he might perhaps be better character-ized as an ‘‘orthoprax’’ Jew. In his terse response to my critique, Danieldodged this issue and rather irrelevantly took me to task for not layingbare my own religious beliefs. (See ‘‘Antiheroic Mock Heroics: DanielBoyarin versus Theodor Herzl and his Legacy,’’ and Daniel Boyarin,‘‘Response to Allan Arkush,’’ in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Fall1998), pp. 65–97.

27. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, ‘‘Diaspora: Generation andGround of Jewish Identity,’’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19 (Summer 1993), p. 720.

28. Ibid, p. 697.29. Jonathan, at least, has explicitly rejected the path pursued by

Dubnow. He cannot link group rights to individual rights, since he hasdenied any basis for assuming the existence of the latter. To his mind, theidea of ‘‘the universal rights of man is,’’ unfortunately, ‘‘not coherent.’’It ‘‘relies on a bare assertion, a profession de foi in the existence of some setof ‘basic individual rights,’ which can be objectively identified and whichare susceptible to protection through an institutionalized procedurefor hearing claims of infringement because individuals are ‘entitled’ tomake those claims,’’ Jonathan Boyarin in Jonathan Boyarin and DanielBoyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture(Minneapolis, 2002), p. 20.

30. ‘‘Diaspora: Generation and Ground of Jewish Identity,’’ p. 702.31. Ibid., p. 701.32. Ibid., p. 711.33. Ibid., p. 723.34. Ibid., p. 712.35. Ibid., p. 710. The offhand ascription of this view to Gush Emunim

as a whole is both unsupported by any evidence and very much out of linewith the facts at the time that the article was written.

36. Ibid., p. 714.37. Ibid., p. 719.38. Ibid., p. 714.39. Ibid., p. 720.40. Compare what the Boyarins write with Dubnow’s description of the

cultural orientation of the Bund. ‘‘For the Bundists,’’ he wrote in 1905,‘‘the essence of Jewishness is only an ethnic or folk quality, not national-cultural, with the exception only of the spoken language of the masses,Yiddish, whose rights they recognize. (They are opposed to Hebrew).They talk of ‘the right to self-determination’ and even of ‘national-culturalautonomy,’ among the principles of universal freedom, but they do notcare for the concrete development of national Jewish culture, for theorganization of autonomous communities, or for national education, asa shield against assimilation, which they consider a natural phenomemon’’(Essays on Old and New Judaism, pp. 208–9).

41. A considerable portion of Daniel Boyarin’s writing since the pub-lication of this essay has been devoted to demonstrating how rabbinic

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Judaism rejected the Roman culture ‘‘of violence, of a male sexualitysuffused with brutality and domination,’’ as he puts it in his UnheroicConduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man(Berkeley, 1997), p. 140. In its place, he has sought to show, the rabbisset up their ‘‘counterideal’’ of the scholarly male, which had a profoundimpact on the development of the idealization of ‘‘the soft man’’ and‘‘meekness’’ among Ashkenazi Jews. He has also sought to show that therabbis responded to the Jews’ defeat by the Romans not by cultivating anideal of heroic or suicidal defiance but by following Rabbi Yohanan benZakkai’s submission to Roman power ‘‘in order that Jewish life and Torahmight continue.’’ The ‘‘Rabbis,’’ he approvingly notes, ‘‘prefer slavery todeath’’ (Powers of Diaspora, p. 52).

Boyarin’s characterization of the submissive outlook and behavior ofpost-Yavneh Jewry is open to challenge. Most recently it has been con-tested by Elliott Horowitz in his book Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy ofJewish Violence (Princeton, 2006). Strangely enough, this volume has beenlauded by, of all people, Daniel Boyarin himself, who describes it as awork ‘‘of tremendous importance that explores some of the most signifi-cant themes in Jewish history, especially the relations between Jews andChristians and the question of Jewish passivity and meekness.’’‘‘Horowitz,’’ writes Boyarin (who is quoted on the book jacket ofReckless Rites), ‘‘disputes scholarly and popular accounts that ascribethese characteristics to Jews, in part by showing that both Jews andChristians have had polemical and apologetic motives in making suchrepresentations. This book represents a vitally significant reorientationof Jewish historiography. It will be controversial, no doubt, but it is certainto be a turning point in the field.’’

42. ‘‘Diaspora: Generation and Ground of Jewish Identity,’’pp. 720–21.

43. Ibid., p. 722.44. Ibid., p. 719.45. ‘‘Diaspora: Generation and Ground of Jewish Identity,’’ p. 718.

They also refer briefly to a supposed ‘‘prophetic discourse of preferencefor ‘exile.’ ’’ For an argument against them on this point, see MichaelGalchinsky, ‘‘Scattered Seeds: A Dialogue of Diasporas,’’ in David Biale,Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (eds.), Insider/Outsider:American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley, 1998), p. 202, and 211,note 41.

46. While they omit any reference to this belief in the body oftheir text, it is prominently featured in an appendix, which consistsof a statement of the Neturei Karta. In view of the way they distancethemselves, in n 52, from some of the ideas of this sect, one cannot,however, consider the Boyarins to be in agreement with everything con-tained in its statement. Galchinsky is not really catching them in a contra-diction, therefore, when he asks ‘‘How can diaspora be plausiblyconstrued as both a positive position and a curse at the same time?’’(ibid., p. 203).

348 Allan Arkush

47. ‘‘Diaspora: Generation and Ground of Jewish Identity,’’ p. 718.48. Ibid., p. 719.49. Whether or not they were as meek as Daniel Boyarin once, at least,

believed them to have been, pre-modern Jews certainly assumed a submis-sive stance in political matters, as he has maintained. Their accommoda-tion to their own position of weakness cannot be taken to imply, however,that they ever rejected political dominion over others because theybelieved that it was by its very nature morally compromising.

50. ‘‘Diaspora: Generation and Ground of Jewish Identity,’’ p. 710.51. Ibid., p. 713.52. Ibid., p. 725. In the footnote on p. 724, it is only fair to note, the

Boyarins note that they are not members of Neturei Karta, ‘‘some ofwhose policies we are in sympathy with and others of which we findviolently objectionable.’’

53. The Colors of Jews, pp. 28–29.54. Ibid., p. 101.55. Ibid., p. 222.56. Ibid., p. 223.57. Ibid., p. 199.58. Ibid., p. 108.59. Ibid., p. 216.60. Ibid., p. 193.61. Ibid., p. 64.62. Ibid., p. 212.63. Ibid., p. xi.64. Ibid., p. 203.65. Ibid., p. 213.66. Ibid., p. 198. ‘‘Diasporism takes root in the Jewish Socialist Labor

Bund’s principle of doikayt—hereness—the right to be, and to fight forjustice, wherever we are.’’

67. I would like, however, to provide two illustrations of the tenden-tious way in which Kaye/Kantrowitz utilizes the work of other scholars toreinforce her points. As Michelle U. Campos has observed, ‘‘the historiansAron Rodrigue, Esther Benbassa, and Sarah Abrevaya Stein have arguedeloquently for a unique ‘Ottoman Zionism’—one that stood distinct fromEuropean Zionism in its support for Hebraism without the correspondingseparatist political aims’’ (‘‘Between ‘Beloved Ottomania’ and ‘The Landof Israel’: The Struggle over Ottomanism and Zionism among Palestine’sSephardi Jews, 1908–13,’’ International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies,Vol. 37 [2005], p. 461). Basing herself not on the work of all of thesehistorians but solely on Campos’ article on this subject, Kaye/Kantrowitzquickly sketches what seems to her to have been a model superior to thatof Ashkenazi Zionists for Jewish existence in a liberalized and multicul-tural Ottoman Palestine. The failure of this model to take root was due,she indicates, to the fact that ‘‘the empire disappointed the expectationsof Ottoman Jewry’’ (The Colors of Jews, p. 195). She fails to note, however,something that Campos makes clear: the importance at this time of

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indigenous Palestinian Arab hostility to Ottomanism and opposition toany kind of Zionism. The reader of Campos’ article can reasonably con-clude that Ottoman Zionism never stood a chance of being accepted bythe Jews’ neighbors in Palestine. Readers of the most recent book to dealwith these matters, Arieh Bruce Saposnik’s Becoming Hebrew: The Creationof a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (Oxford, 2008) will find, inaddition, a powerful argument against Campos’ distinction betweenSephardi Zionism and Ashkenazi Zionism in pre-World War I Palestine(pp. 179–80).

Kaye/Kantrowitz brings a lengthy quotation from Yosef Grodzinsky’s Inthe Shadow of the Holocaust: The Story of Jews in Displaced Persons Camps andtheir Forced Role in the Founding of Israel (Monroe, 2004). This quotation(on p. 206 of The Colors of Jews) outlines the ways in which Zionist orga-nizations coerced reluctant Jews from the camps to enlist in the IsraeliArmy and fight in Israel’s War of Independence. Kaye/Kantrowitz evi-dently considers this passage altogether damning and makes no commenton it. The reader of Grodzinsky’s book, unlike the reader of The Colors ofJews, will learn that the tactics she evidently deplores were employed by anascent state that was in desperate need of armed manpower in order tostave off destruction.

68. Ibid., p. 217.69. Ibid., p. 163.70. Ibid., p. 212.71. Ibid., p. 200.72. Ibid., p. 212.73. Ibid., p. 203.74. Ibid., p. 200, 223.75. See for instance, the critique of his ‘‘messianic’’ and ‘‘utopian’’

ideology in Yehezkel Kaufmann, Golah ve-Nekhar, Vol. 2 (Tel Aviv,1929–1932), pp. 300–321.

76. For statements of support from both Jews and Arabs for grantingIsrael’s Arabs the kind of autonomy once sought by diaspora nationalistslike Dubnow see Uzi Benziman, Shel Mi Ha-aretz Ha-zot? (Jerusalem, 2006),p. 29ff., pp. 201–17.

77. For an example of how such models can be utilized thoughtfullyand responsibly see Shaul Magid, ‘‘In Search of a Critical Voice inthe Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Edward Said andShalom Noah Barzofsky’s ‘Netivot Shalom’ ’’ Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 12,No. 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 193–227.

350 Allan Arkush