Critical Diaspora Voices

In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky's Netivot Shalom Magid, Shaul, 1958Jewish Social Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, Spring/Summer 2006 (New Series), pp. 193-227 (Article) Published by Indiana University Press DOI: 10.1353/jss.2006.0029

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jss/summary/v012/12.3magid.html

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In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky’s Netivot Shalom Shaul Magid Judaism is Diaspora.

—Benjamin Tammuz, Jacob Exile . . . will chasten them and teach them to see and grasp what the world is, what man is, what human life is, what truth and justice are.

—Hayyim Hazaz, Anavim rothot “Why do Jews persist in living in the Diaspora?” I didn’t want to write off with one line a man obviously in a state of serious confusion, but I didn’t want this conversation either. . . . The best I could try to do was to leave him with something to think about. “Because they like it,” I replied and got up and moved to an empty seat a few rows back.

—Philip Roth, The Counterlife Shaul Magid, “In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky’s Netivot Shalom,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 12, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2006): 193–227

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he ongoing conversation about Israel and the Diaspora, both in the academy and beyond, still largely centers on familiar dichotomies, categories formulated in the early years of the Zionist movement: center/periphery, geulah/galut, home/homelessness, power/powerlessness, and, of course, sovereignty/antisemitism. In this article I explore the economy of these dichotomies, suggesting that they are ideologically driven to maintain a hierarchy whereby the contemporary Diaspora is, after the state, permanently relegated to a subservient role in contemporary Jewish history.1 I argue that these dichotomies also contribute to a virtual identity crisis among many Diaspora Jews in terms of what the Diaspora means after the establishment of the state and what the Diaspora signifies outside of its relationship with the state.2 Earlier critiques of Zionism, anachronistically akin to contemporary diasporism, can be found in early and mid-century Reform Judaism.

The essential difference between classic Reform’s approach and my own is that the former posits that exile has indeed ended. That is, that America is a/the homeland of the Jews and that a Jewish presence in Erets Israel may be beneficial for the Jews (though nationalism was detrimental and a state would be horrific) but does not obviate the positive station of post-exilic Diaspora Jewry.3 It is, in fact, a position of “affirmation of the Diaspora and negation of exile,” the response to the Zionist “negation of the Diaspora.” I am suggesting a different model, one that does not erase the category of exile for the sake of Diaspora but affirms exile (as homelessness) and reenvisions it as a positive category for Diaspora Jews living alongside but not in the shadow of the State of Israel.4 It is precisely exile that interests me (and Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky)—in this case exile as a volitional act of expatriation. In a sense, I am buying into Zionist nomenclature and dichotomies (redemption/exile, home/homelessness) and trying to see them “otherwise,” as opposed to Reform’s attempt to counter the Zionist claims categorically by denying the viability of their own station as exilic.

Writing about the toll of Zionism on Diaspora Jewry, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi notes, “A majority of Jews continue to live outside of the Holy Land even after the founding of the State of Israel, but the philosophical and cultural apparatus for validating life in exile had been shattered.”5 The positive impact Zionism had on the American Jewish consciousness (that of pride and national identity) came at a heavy price. Evyatar Friesel argues that

T

Zionism, in its American version, became . . . a powerful glue binding American Jewry together. However, it did so laboring under a significant

handicap: whatever tasks Zionism came to fulfill in Jewish religious life in America, it was not toward America that the basic aims of the original Zionist idea had been directed but toward the Land of Israel.6

Zionism and the State of Israel, or Zionism as the State of Israel continues to have a profound impact on American Jewish consciousness, especially among those who are, borrowing Alan Dershowitz’s term, “Jewish Jews.”7 The fact remains, however, that Zionism and the emergence of the state did not result in mass immigration among Jews who were not living in an oppressed regime, and it will likely not do so in the future.8 Yet many “Jewish Jews” who identify strongly with Jewishness in some form (religious or secular) and choose to remain in the Diaspora adapt Zionism as a big part, or even the center, of their Jewish identity. This sentiment is reflected in the quip by Normon Podhoretz in 1974 (referring, I assume, to American Jews): “We are all Zionists.”9 What does this mean in terms of Diaspora Jewish identity? Does the failure of mass immigration to Israel among Diaspora Jews signify that the idea of “negation of the Diaspora,” a pillar of some important dimensions of mid-twentieth-century Zionism, was a failure?10 And what does it mean for those American Jews whose Jewish identity is conferred on Zionism despite the fact that they choose not to live in Israel?

On the question of “negation of the Diaspora,” the failure of mass immigration is not necessarily a failure of the doctrine. I argue that the doctrine remains as an existential (rather than a material) part of Diaspora Jewish identity and is an impediment preventing new thinking on the question of diasporism.11 It can be argued that Zionism and the State of Israel have become fused in the contemporary Diaspora mind, and this fusion has impeded Diaspora Jewry from developing an identity distinct from Israel.12 Although many Diaspora Zionists are not very conversant in the multivalent dimensions of Zionist ideology or familiar with many Zionist personalities, many view Israel as a central pillar of their Jewish identity and the main focus of their “Jewish” attention.13 For Jewish organizations in America and, more pointedly, in Jewish schools (both day schools and Hebrew schools), Zionism and Israel have become central pillars of Jewish education, pride, and identity.14 The focus on Zionism and Israel in American Jewish education is crucial in determining the place of Israel in the diasporic imagination and, more important, the self-fashioning of Diaspora Judaism in a post-state era. This educational trajectory is at least partially driven by the Jewish historiography of “the Jerusalem School,” a group of influential Jewish historians working in Israel through the first two-thirds of

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the twentieth century. Consisting of Diaspora-trained Zionists who immigrated to Mandate Palestine, this school “revised” Jewish history through the lens of Zionism and the centrality of the land, and it upheld an unapologetic negation of the Diaspora position. My claim is that, though few in the Diaspora know of this school, its impact on Jewish history and historiography as envisioned in America should not be underestimated.15 In response to being taught that Diaspora Jewry stands on the margin of Jewish history, the support of Israel, monetary or political, has become a sine qua non for much of Diaspora Jewish identity.

In this article I challenge the perception that choosing to remain a Diaspora Jew is to choose a marginal existence. I present Said’s notion of the expatriate as cultural critic and Barzofsky’s theory of exile as permanent and necessary for Israel’s destiny and spiritual vitality as alternative models of how Diaspora Jews can reenvision their place in contemporary Jewish history. Before getting to Said and Barzofsky, however, I begin by contextualizing one problem I see facing the future of Diaspora Jewry.

Whatever can be said for or against Zionism, the fact is that Zionism has won as a political reality in the minds of postwar Jews worldwide. The existence of the state has forever changed the ways in which Diaspora Jews view their history and their choice to remain in the Diaspora. Exile (diaspora/galut/golah) as a physical or existential category may remain, but in light of the state it is, and must be, different in both form and substance than it was before the state. This is not to say, as some Zionists do, that the fact of the state and the victory of Zionism negate the viability or future of Diaspora Jewry. It is also not to say, as some in the “Jerusalem School” claim, that the State of Israel erased exile as the operative context of Jewish existence—that is, that the State of Israel has created an entirely new construct of Jewish communal and personal life. It did not.

Derek Penslar is perhaps most accurate when he argues that Israel has become another chapter in the exilic history of Jews and Judaism.16 Structurally, at least, it has not introduced a new paradigm.

It is largely not taught in Zionist education in the Diaspora that the emergence of Zionism as a popular ideology in the last decades of the nineteenth century was countered from its inception by both traditional and progressive critics. On the traditional side, Isaac Breuer (building on his grandfather Samuel Raphael Hirsch’s mid-century overt anti-Zionism),17 Hillel Zeitlin, Aaron Shmuel Tamares, Hayyim Elazar Shapiro of Muncatz, and Joel Teitelbaum (the Satmar Rebbe) all waged ideological and, in some cases, political battles against Zionism.18 Although they had different agendas and approaches, they all

viewed the consequences of Zionism, both its secularism and its acquisition and utilization of military power, as threatening to Judaism and the Jewish people. An interesting extension of this trajectory, albeit a Zionist one, can be found in the writings of the Israeli scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz.19 Progressive critics of Zionism such as Simon Dubnow, David Frischman, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Simon Rawidowicz had different concerns but nonetheless understood the dangers of what Ehud Luz calls “the Zionist wager,” viewing the fate of the Jews and Judaism as dependent on the implementation of decisive action based on one ideological position—Zionism.20 “The wager is a form of faith that Zionism inherited from Judaism but filled with new meaning: to resolve to ensure the survival of the Jewish people in an apparently hopeless situation.”21 Intentionally or not, the individuals who waged multivalent criticisms of Zionism and Jewish nationalism (both traditionalists and reformers) served to deflate or at least temper the fledgling Zionist project in America, reminding Jews of the dangers that underlie Zionism’s radical stance toward Jewish history. As Naomi Cohen puts it, “Reform put American Zionism on the defensive and forced the young nationalist movement to find answers to the incessant criticism.”22 On the Israeli side, Gershom Scholem, surely a Zionist but in many respects a pessimistic one, aptly noted, “Zionism was a calculated risk in that it brought about the destruction of the reality of exile. The enemies of Zionism certainly saw the risk more clearly then we Zionists did.”23 Here I note that the critical voices against Zionism (not necessarily critical voices against Israel’s policies)24 have largely disappeared in the postwar American Diaspora.25 The Holocaust, the emergence of the Jewish state, the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and the triumphant victory of the Six Day War in 1967 are events that largely destroyed the context where dissent against Zionism was legitimate.26 Marc H. Ellis notes: With the Israeli victory in the 1967 war, the possibilities and limitations of dissent radically shifted. The euphoria with which many Jews greeted the defeat of the Arab countries and the reunification of Jerusalem helped to create a consensus surrounding Israeli power and initiative, at the same time birthing a Holocaust theology that saw empowerment as the response to Jewish suffering. For many who were indifferent to the state, or even opposed it, the 1967 war represented a conversion experience.27

Zionism had moved from one Jewish option in the Diaspora to the default position—from the periphery to the center. As a result, any

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Diaspora identity independent from the State of Israel was significantly jeopardized.

The progressive anti-Zionism of the Reform movement in America, championed by the American Counsel for Judaism28 and the American spiritual Zionists and anti-statists such as Louis Brandeis and Louis Finkelstein, no longer has a voice.29 As late as the 1960s, Rawidowicz was writing his constructive critique of Zionism, but how many nonacademic Diaspora Jews have read or even heard of him?30 It may very well be that a revival of these voices (are they anti-Zionist or simply critical diasporist voices?) is possible precisely because Israel, though struggling to come to terms with its 37-year occupation and the rebellion of the Palestinian people, is no longer in a position in which its very survival is threatened. The exact physical and existential contours of a future Jewish state may be in flux, but the very continuation of the state is hardly in jeopardy. This is not to suggest a theory of a new antiZionism. Rather, it may be that Israel’s strength as a nation can now support a new non-Zionist diasporic alternative.31 The disappearance of those critical voices of the past has also enabled certain strains of Zionism to become what its critics, and even some of its advocates, always feared—an expression of unfettered power that has abandoned its moral, “prophetic,” and Judaic roots.32 This article is not formally about Israel, nor is it about politics in the conventional sense of the term; it is about Jews and Judaism in the Diaspora. But it is, of course, also about Israel, as these dichotomies (Israel/Diaspora) can only function when they are dialectically engaged.

To talk about the Diaspora in a post-state era is to talk about Israel, not necessarily the physical state but the imagined Israel in the minds of Diaspora Jews33—that is, how Diaspora Jews envision Israel as part of their own self-fashioning.34 When I speak of Diaspora Jewry here I refer only to its instantiation in North America. And, as mentioned above, I refer only to those Alan Dershowitz calls “Jewish” Jews, Jews for whom Judaism and Jewish identity play prominent and positive roles in their lives. Although this admittedly makes up a small percentage of Diaspora Jewry, these individuals and communities create the educational curricula that creates Jewish identify in the Diaspora. That is, these communities create the ideational construct called “Diaspora Judaism.”

Negation of the Diaspora in the Diaspora I suggested above that one of the forces behind the silencing, or disappearance, of critical voices from the Diaspora about Zionism more

generally is that Diaspora Zionism itself (perhaps now in the form of unmitigated “support for Israel”) contains a dimension of negation of the Diaspora that Diaspora Jewry has adapted as part of its selffashioning.35 My interest here is not to explore negation of the Diaspora in Zionist ideology but negation of the Diaspora as a component of diasporic Jewish identity.36 One way this is expressed in contemporary Zionism, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, is that Diaspora is exile (here employed in a negative fashion) whereas the State of Israel is not. This is the case even when “exile” is employed as a secular category and even after the demise of the more radical Diaspora-negating theories of Yosef Hayim Brenner and Micha Yosef Berdyczewski. For example, Nathan Rotenstreich argues that though the “new exile” of contemporary America does not share the features of the “old exile” (persecution, exclusion, alienation), it is exile nonetheless: Even when Jews become part of a majority, their collective ethnic or religious consciousness provides for a nebulous sense of detachment. . . . The detachment has nothing to do with a lack of loyalty toward the host country or with reservations about conditions there. It is, rather, rooted in the historical fate of the Jews in the Christian world. . . . As long as these two directions of their collective consciousness [self-perception of Jews as “other” and solidarity with other Jews] coincide, or nourish each other, the Jews are in exile even when they deny it.37

Rotenstreich suggests that we substitute the more pugnacious “negation of the Diaspora” or Ahad Ha-am’s more conciliatory “centrality of Israel” for the softer “primacy of Israel.” In any case, a qualitative distinction and hierarchical relationship remains.38 In response to this, it is worth quoting Rawidowicz from a lecture he delivered in 1931 at the founding of the Brit Ivrit Olamit: “I demanded that Hebrew literature and the Hebrew movement in the galut emancipate itself from Ahad Ha-amism and its theory of the center and the circumference, and begin to regard galut Jewry not as a parasitic welfare establishment, but as a productive and creative community, that has to create its own Babylonian Talmud by itself and for itself.”39 Sadly, this is not the direction galut Jewry has taken.

In an essay entitled “The Galut Now Emptied of the Spark of Redemption,” Gershom Scholem argued that American Jewry was in a state of exile “denied by those who inhabit it . . . the fact of its hiddenness is hidden from them.”40 Citing this passage in his book Galut, Arnold Eisen illustrates how “negating the Diaspora” was and remains dominant among most Israeli thinkers, Scholem included, in the sec-

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ond half of the twentieth century. Eisen suggests more broadly that negation of the Diaspora is a cornerstone of Zionism, even those Zionisms that do not explicitly advocate such a stance. More forcefully, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has recently argued that Zionism simply could not exist without negation of the Diaspora and the negation of any alterity more generally.41 That is, Zionism and negation of the Diaspora are mutually inclusive ideas.42 This point is succinctly stated by Ehud Luz: The new Zionist self-image, with its concept of dignity, was based on a negation of “the other.” In this view, “the other” is a strange, complicated composite of two negative stereotypes: the enemy Arab and the Diaspora Jew. The Arab represents the constant threat to Jewish existence and arouses dread. The Diaspora Jew, on the other hand, stands for impotence in dealing with this threat, an impotence that derives from certain moral qualities.43

Raz-Krakotzkin argues that this “rejection” (first of the Diaspora Jewish “other” and then of the Palestinian “other”) is a Judaized politicization of Christian notions of soteriology and not inherently a “Jewish” idea, making Zionism as much a product of the Diaspora Jewish experience as any diasporism.44 The idea that Zionism is essentially a negation of exile, either ideationally or materially (or both), is developed by the Jewish/Israeli historiographers of “The Jerusalem School.” Some historians of this school, most notably Benzion Dinur (Dinaburg), argue that, in effect, this negation is not new—that is, it is not a phenomenon of modern Zionism—but that Jews in the Diaspora always negated their own exile, expressed in their continuous desire to dwell in Erets Israel even as they lived and thrived in the Diaspora. Programmatically, Dinur unabashedly notes in his introduction to Sefer ha-tsiyonut: “The starting point of all work of collection in our generation is Zionist ideology.”45 On the ideological underpinnings of this school, David Myers notes that these “Palestineocentric” Israeli historians (all of whom immigrated to Palestine from Europe, where they were trained in the nationalist historiography of Germany)46 focused on “the materialism of the Jewish past,”—the idea that Jews throughout history focused primarily, albeit not exclusively, on dwelling in the land of Israel. They argued that, historically, the centrality of the land and dwelling in it was framed not simply as a messianic promise but as a physical place to inhabit even before the messiah.

Although Dinur held that all pre-modern Jews were essentially proto-Zionists,47 others like Yizhak Baer had a more complicated relationship with the place of the Diaspora in Jewish history. Yet even Baer,

in his small book Galut, published in 1936, argues that the work of the hour is to forever sever exile from the national Jewish experience.

That is, even if, contra Dinur, exile may have been a working model in pre-Zionist Jewish history, modern Zionism (and this includes even Diaspora Zionism) must abandon exile as a covenantal response to punishment and “normalize it” so that exile is relegated to simply living outside Erets Israel.48 To live freely in the land (that is, to be sovereign in it) is, for Baer, to be out of exile. Hence, if the category of exile is to be abandoned, and if living outside Erets Israel/the State of Israel is living in exile, then Diaspora Jewry is negated. Baer is considered less radical than Dinur and also more influential outside of Israel.49 He represents one prominent historiographic grounding for the State of Israel and, more relevant to our concerns, has influenced Diaspora historiography in the twentieth century. I argue that this perspective, largely filtered through Diaspora historians, has also influenced Diaspora Jewish education about Israel for at least three generations.50 The overt and unabashed notion of negation of the Diaspora is not often heard in contemporary Jewish discourse, with a few exceptions such as Hillel Halkin and Chaim Chertok (both American immigrants whose disdain for the Diaspora is extreme), A. B. Yehoshua, and Eliezer Schweid, but it permeates the consciousness of Diaspora Jewry in more subtle ways.51 There is an underlying belief among many Diaspora Jewish thinkers (many of whom are important Jewish philanthropists) that the continued existence of Diaspora Jewry is inextricably tied to Israel’s existence. That is, the Jewish Diaspora is not an independent edifice that can sustain itself without the Jewish state. In my view, this is partially an outgrowth of Zionist historiography coupled with a dependence on antisemitism, both of which constitute the twin engines that drive Diaspora Zionism.52 The argument goes that, if Israel disappeared (or even if its Jewish character was radically altered), the very existence of Diaspora Jewry would be at risk because there would be no escape from antisemitism.

Even in America, where antisemitism is at a historic low, antisemitism is used as a tool to justify abandoning the Diaspora for Israel. Here it is worth mentioning Emile Fackenheim, the great post-Holocaust theologian, who writes that “to make anti-Semitism . . . a main raison d’etre of the Zionist impulse—minimally, the escape from anti-Semitism; maximally the cure of the world from the anti-Semitic disease—can under certain conditions only harm the Zionist impulse.”53 With antisemitism (and here I think Fackenheim’s reference to antisemitism is specifically antisemitism in the Diaspora) as the reason for Zionism, Diaspora Jewry becomes inextricably dependent, both physically and existentially, on

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it. Fackenheim’s observation notwithstanding, antisemitism remains a powerful tool to compel Diaspora Jews to immigrate and, at the very least, support Israel.54 In some way, keeping the threat of antisemitism alive secures Zionism’s centrality in the Diaspora Jewish consciousness.55 The threat of antisemitism, real or imagined, is thus a prerequisite for the survival of Zionism in the Diaspora.

The Creativity of Exile: A Model for a New Diasporism I will now suggest a model in which exile/Diaspora can be both positive and constructive through the comparison of two thinkers, one Palestinian and one Jewish. Using Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky, I suggest that Diaspora Jewry, by negating the negation of itself (that is, by coming out from under the Zionist worldview that currently determines its discourse), can reemerge as an independent Jewish collective and contribute creatively to the next phase of exilic Jewish history.

The comparison between Said (d. 2002) and Barzofsky (the Hasidic master of Slonim, d. 2000) may seem irregular. Said was a prominent spokesperson for the Palestinian cause and a celebrated literary and music critic. Barzofsky was an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Grand Rabbi who led a fairly insular life, in America and Israel, leaving us an eightvolume work entitled Netivot Shalom al ha-Torah as well as other volumes on Jewish festivals and general matters of Jewish spirituality and devotional life.56 Although they did not know of one another, what brings about this comparison is the prominence of exile and homelessness as a positive category in their respective writings.57 Said suggested—in his lectures entitled “Representations of the Intellectual”—that the exercise of comparison is a reflection of the exilic experience; that is, being homeless either by force or choice compels one to forge an identity through the lens of another. Said called it “a double perspective that never sees things in isolation.”58 The exile is simultaneously tempted and repulsed by the other, that is, her host, but is never able to see herself except through him. In this way, Said suggested, the state of exile (both existential and material) problematizes any absolutizing narrative; all things are relativized through the filter of someone, or something, else.59 As the host culture continues to seep into the consciousness of one in exile, she sees herself and her surroundings more and more in relation to it. “The exilic standpoint tends to see things not simply how they are, but as they have come to be that way”60—that is, how they come to be what they are through an

encounter with the other. All ideologies are susceptible to totalizing narratives, be they nationalistic, utopian, or even ones that defer the unfolding of the Absolute to an unknown future (for example, ultraOrthodox anti-Zionism). Said was suggesting that the experience of exile is, perhaps, less susceptible to this danger because the Exile, being homeless, cannot avoid engagement with, and being influenced by, the “other,” even as she may deny doing so.61 This is why the dichotomies mentioned at the outset function best when they are dialectically engaged, when each one is seen only in light of, and in spite of, its opposite. Said suggested that this dialectical engagement functions more naturally in a diasporic setting because one is forced to engage with the “other” and will invariably forge one’s identity with or in spite of that other. In short, he argued that alterity is an organic byproduct of any diaspora.

In his essay “Reflections on Exile,” Said noted that “exile is strangely compelling but terrible to experience.”62 “Terrible to experience” because it is “a discontinuan[t] state of being.”63 This situation can be compensated in numerous ways, one of them being nationalism: Exiles feel . . . an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as a part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people. The crucial thing is that a state of exile be free from this triumphant ideology—designed to reassemble an exile’s broken history into a new whole. [This is] virtually unbearable, and virtually impossible in today’s world. Look at the fate of the Jews, the Palestinians, the Armenians.64

This suggests that nationalism, especially a nationalism like Zionism that often views itself as post-exilic (to say nothing of redemptive), is particularly susceptible to an absolutizing narrative because its own identity is no longer countered and thus softened by and through another. It is not only messianic movements such as Gush Emunim that are vulnerable to absolutizing narratives but even secular post-exilic Diaspora-negating Zionisms like those of Dinur and Baer. Although there are surely multiple Zionist voices, many of which affirm the continuation of the Diaspora, here I am focusing on a Diaspora-denying Zionist voice that plays an important role in Diaspora self-fashioning.65 One of Said’s great lessons here is that exile functions within a multiplicity of categories. Diaspora Jewry does not occupy one but several of these categories, depending on its historical station. Said gave us three generic exilic categories to examine: refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. My question is: what category do Diaspora Jews occupy today?66 As mentioned above, the creation of the state has forever changed the Diaspora, and any new diasporism cannot revert to a pre-

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state posture. Few would argue this point. And it follows that the one who chooses to live in the Diaspora today is different than the Diaspora Jew prior to the existence of a state. The State of Israel is, according to the Law of Return, a virtual home for all Jews. Thus, Diaspora Jews today are no longer refugees and can no longer claim the sympathy that goes along with that status. They are, in fact, expatriates, those who have a home but choose not to live there. If they consider Israel their Jewish home, they are voluntarily homeless.

Is voluntary homelessness exilic in the same way the refugee is in exile? Describing the category of exile, Rotenstreich suggests that “Gola or galut is ‘exile,’ which stresses more of a compulsion to which people are exposed; because of the compulsion they are forced to reside away from their native land.”67 According to this, the contemporary Jewish Diaspora is not exilic; yet Rotenstreich, cited earlier, describes the Diaspora as a new exile and argues that nothing could erase exile from the Jewish Diaspora. And, from the perspective of Zionism, Diaspora Jews are made to believe they are in exile—voluntarily perhaps, but in exile nonetheless. I am willing to accept Rotenstreich’s use of the term “exile” regarding the Diaspora but reject its pejorative implications.

Exile as voluntary homelessness can be a positive and productive trope, a source of creativity through marginality that can serve as the foundation of a new Diaspora consciousness.

Regarding immigrants to Israel (olim), Fackenheim suggests two categories: “olim of necessity” and “olim of freedom.” The “olim of freedom” are those who immigrate for one reason—because of a love for and desire to live in Israel.68 They do not immigrate to escape oppression or antisemitism. And those who love Israel yet choose to remain in the Diaspora (that is, Diaspora Zionists) do so because they choose their circumstances of homelessness over returning. I suggest that the Jewish expatriate is simply the Diaspora Zionist who chooses not to be the “oleh of freedom”—that is, one who chooses to live the life of an expatriate.

Regarding the expatriate intellectual, Said argued that the state of expatriation, as opposed to the mournful and laconic state of the refugee (his view of the contemporary Palestinians—who do not yet have a home), is a wellspring for critical reflection, both of the home and the state of homelessness. It is the state where writers, artists, and poets do some of their best work. Think of Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jonathan Swift, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad, just to name a few. The expatriate intellectuals analyzed in Said’s lectures do not sit and ponder home. In most cases, if they wanted to go home, they

could. Rather, the expatriate builds worlds in and through that chosen homeless state, critical worlds carved by comparison out of a host culture they temporarily inhabit (even if that habitation lasts a lifetime).

Often these worlds—created through fiction, poetry, philosophy, and art—come to inspire those at home to change how they envision their own identity and dwelling.69 As much as Diaspora Jews may feel at home in America, and many do, they are, as Jacob Neusner puts it, “marginal,” at least in Jewish history. Marginal, perhaps, and even exilic (depending on how the term is defined), but not the way the refugee is exilic, because America is an adopted home (according to Neusner, quite nurturing) or perhaps a foster home that the Jew can easily leave if he or she so chooses.70 Yet, however one defines North American Jews’ relationship to their “home” in the Diaspora, they are no longer refugees who hope for a home; they are expatriates who choose to live elsewhere. Using Said’s analysis of the expatriate intellectual, they hold the potential for creative and constructive critique, both of the home they choose not to live in and their choice not to live there.

Said’s analysis of the productivity of exile was founded on a critique of the champion of exile, Theodor Adorno, who, writing in what he determined was “exile” in Southern California, concluded that “dwelling in the proper sense is now impossible.” Said responded that Adorno missed “the pleasures of exile, those different arrangements of living and eccentric angles of vision that can sometimes . . . alleviate every last anxiety or feeling of bitter solitude.”71 Another advantage of exile, he posited, is “the pleasure of being surprised, of never taking anything for granted, of learning to make do in circumstances of shaky instability that would confound or terrify most people.”72 In some way, Adorno’s pathology of exile suggests a model closer to much of Diaspora Jewry, except the latter has Israel as a “home” that it can look toward, visit, support, and be proud of. This difference is crucial but does not erase a laconic resonance that seems to underlie some of the Jewish diasporic vision of itself as distinct from Israel.

Said’s lectures on the exilic fate of the intellectual, and his theory of the expatriate as intellectual (and vice versa), offer a basis for an alternative model for Diaspora Jews, one that becomes more textured when combined with Barzofsky’s thinking on exile (galut/golah). For both, as we will presently see, the conditions of homelessness produced spiritual enrichment. Both models point toward a similar end—that being on the margin or periphery of a society gives one a perspective that is unavailable from the center. Home may satiate the desire for normalcy (Theodor Herzl’s vision) and national creativity (Ahad Ha-am’s hope), but the exilic margin is a place that holds unique creative promise be-

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cause it is situated in the destabilizing context of alterity where the danger of an absolutizing narrative of identity is kept in check.

Barzofsky’s discussion of exile (using both galut and golah interchangeably)73 is dispersed throughout his eight-volume corpus. There are, however, a few places where this topic is discussed at length. I will focus on selected texts that I think contain his essential message on exile. Before turning to Barzofsky, however, I want to briefly situate him and make a case for why he may serve as a springboard for renewing the tension so productive in the early days of Zionism and why he is uncharacteristic in his position on the Diaspora. As a Hasidic Grand Rabbi, Barzofsky’s obvious place would be in the trajectory of other late Hasidic masters. In many ways he fits the model quite well. For example, his metaphysics embodied a classic Jewish neo-Platonism, revised through Hasidism, and his thinking on devotion and prayer as the centerpiece of Jewish worship was in concert with late Hasidic spirituality. He also had an ascetic orientation not uncommon among later Hasidic masters.

On the question of exile, however, Barzofsky’s teachings most resemble thinkers like Hillel Zeitlin and Aaron Schmuel Tamares, two early-twentieth-century East European traditionalists who did not fit the mold of ultra-Orthodoxy.74 All three waged a war against nationalism from a traditionalist perspective. Yet none framed their critique politically, nor did they traffic in the black-and-white distinctions between the holy and the profane like the Hungarian Hasidic master Hayyim Elazar Shapira or Joel Teitelbaum, the late Satmar Rebbe. Moreover, Zeitlin, Tamares, and Barzofsky did not focus on the false messianism of Zionism that was so common among ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. As a Hasidic thinker seemingly uninterested in the political arena—unlike Shapira and Teitelbaum—Barzofsky focused on the spiritual advantages of exile/Diaspora and the ways in which personal devotion is threatened by the inebriation of power that follows the physical implementation of Jewish nationalism. Thus, Barzofsky’s diasporism was not a classic instance of ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionism because he did not, in principle, contest the viability of a pre-messianic Jewish state. Rather, the state was an expression of power that threatened to undermine the foundation of a devotional life. Yet Barzofsky, unlike Zeitlin and Tamares, was writing after the establishment of the state, after the silencing of much of the anti- or non-Zionist discourse in the Diaspora. The state did not seem to have effaced what he viewed as the real challenges of Zionism to Judaism—in fact the state made those challenges even sharper.

Barzofsky’s rhetoric, though quite resonate of earlier pietistic notions of exile stemming from early Hasidism, was also different in the

following way: although his discussion reflected a personalization of exile, coined by Rivka Shatz as “self-redemption in Hasidism,” he consistently spoke about the collective, the nation, and the Jewish people.

Perhaps the collectivization of the Jewish experience produced by Zionism compelled him to redirect Hasidism’s personalized redemptive vision, one that was to some degree severed from its historical context, in more collective terms.75 If this is correct, his battle against Zionism and the state may have been a product of the recognition of Jewish collectivity (created by Zionism) while arguing that the power implied in the state endangers the internal life of the collective. He was collectivist without being political. In some ways he was the antithesis of Abraham Isaac Kook, for whom the personal was swept up in the collective, which quickly translated into the political. For Barzofsky, the personal must direct the collective, as redemption is something that emerges from within, a very Beshtean idea (perhaps also modern), and is not foisted on the individual from without.76 On this reading, Barzofsky offered a Beshtean critique to Kook’s more metaphysical and kabbalistic approach.

I will discuss three points in Netivot Shalom that are representative of his idea of exile as positive, constructive, and, most important, necessary. In fact, Barzofsky argued that exile is the message Israel carries to the nations. This conception of exile consists of the following assumptions: that exile is the condition of divine election; that exile is natural, permanent (nitshi), and not circumstantial; and that continuous exile is the condition for redemption—that is, redemption happens in and through exile.77 I suggest that the negation of exile, or the Diaspora, as the exclusive narrative of the Jewish people was for Barzofsky tantamount to a destruction of God’s covenant with the Jews and the unique role Judaism has to play in the world. For Barzofsky, if exile disappears, Judaism is soon to follow, an interesting inversion of the Zionist claim that if Israel disappears the Diaspora is soon to follow.

This critique was not based on the idea that Zionism is guilty of “forcing the end” or “defiling the land,” positions advocated by Teitelbaum and Shapira, respectively. That is, his was not classical ultraOrthodox anti-Zionism that almost always frames Zionism in the realm of the political. It was also not necessarily a rejection of the category of “home.” It was, however, a rejection of home that no longer contains homelessness and thus, in my reading, a rejection of Dinur and even Baer’s rendering of Jewish history, a history that culminates with Zionism. I am reading Barzofsky here as a Jewish voice living with a Jewish state who nonetheless protested the dangers of power that threaten

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the ideological and devotional foundations of Israel’s covenant with God. The enemy is not secularism per se (unlike Teitelbaum and Breuer, he did not equate political power with secularism) but the way in which power effaces devotion and the extent to which the erasure of devotion is the disappearance of covenant.

As an ultra-Orthodox Jew, Barzofsky did not exude tolerance or pluralism. His theology was not as stark as Teitelbaum’s Gnostic construction of the world, and not as surprising as Tamares’s traditionalist pacifism, but he focused on the exilic experience as foundational for Judaism and, more important, Jewish devotion, thus texturing Said’s theory of exile as intellectually constructive. Barzofsky provided a model, as Myers suggests, of the “anti-Rav Kook,”78 one who can cull the sources to provide a more nuanced and dialectical vision of the Diaspora/Israel, exilic/redemptive dichotomy without envisioning any immanent and triumphant seismic shift that will resolve the dialectic.

One of the more provocative ideas in Netivot Shalom is the connection made between exile and divine election. In his comments on the beginning of the Book of Exodus, Barzofsky notes that Israel was not chosen for material gain but only to fulfill its exalted fate as a spiritual nation. Prima facie this is quite conventional. However, he continues, divine election originates in exile and exile is its condition. He writes: The Talmud (bT Hagigah 8a) states, “all who are not in a state of concealment (hester panim) are not from them.” What does it mean, “are not from them”? It means are not from Israel because it is the state of hester panim that brings Israel to its elected state, which results in their achieving the status of Am Yisrael. . . . [T]here is no other possible vehicle to bring them to that elected state.79

The connection between the eternality of election and exile is made clear in many places. For example: “The soul does not occupy any space but gives life to the entire body. . . . So too Israel, as the light of the soul that illumines the entire world . . . does not occupy any space in that world.”80 In his essay “Maamar galut u-geulah” (An Essay on Exile and Redemption), he writes, “God said to Abraham, if you want your seed to be a chosen people and receive the Torah, know that the condition is that they will be a stranger in a land that is not theirs.”81 Given that this was written after the emergence of the State of Israel, it is quite suggestive. This correlation of exile and election is not circumstantial but existential. The point is made with surprising clarity when he says, “The exile in Egypt embodies all the exiles of Israel, which is an eternal state of the generations of Israel in this world [she-hu davar nitshi ha-kavua be-toldot am Yisrael ba-olam ha-zeh].”82

A second point is that exile is natural. Exile cannot be a response to sin because the paradigmatic exile, the exile of Egypt, is not a result of sin.83 And “it is a wonder that Abraham did not pray to nullify the decree of exile while he prayed to nullify the decree against Sodom and Gomorrah.” The reason, he suggests, is that exile is the natural state of the Jews, their unique fate, because it is the only way for them to bring about universal redemption, which is their ultimate purpose. Being homeless is the condition of their chosen status. In fact, exile is so fundamental that Barzofsky radically re-reads the obligation to twice daily affirm the going out of Egypt. It is not, he suggests, that we remember God taking Israel out of Egypt but that we remember the exile of Egypt (that is, God bringing us into Egypt), for it is in exile and through exile that Israel continues to serve its universal mission. “Exodus opens with the verse, These are the names of Israel that come to Egypt, using the present tense [of the verb to bring]. This hints that the Egyptian exile should be a constant in all generations. God brings every generation into Egypt.”84 It is the memory of exile that enables Israel to continue to function in exile and, in doing so, to continue its divine mission of tikun olam (repairing the world).

In terms of exile as both the condition of and the context for redemption, Barzofsky rephrases conventional categories that undermine Zionism’s basic severance of exile and messianism (made explicit

by Baer above) without the polemical and political rhetoric of Satmar.

“From that very fact of exile [me-etsem ha-galut gufa] redemption is built.”85 Or, more pointedly, “all redemption and its great unfolding are built in exile.”86 I suggest these statements not be read chronologically but as existential observations suggesting that exile is not a historical station to be overcome but an existential condition of Israel’s covenant with God. Again, this does not deny the possibility of “home.”

It only denies the viability of any “home” that erases homelessness.

Exile is thus the necessary condition for the experience of redemption. For Barzofsky, exile was not a consequence of sin but a reflection of the diminished state of the human soul in need of repair. “The fundamental purpose of exile is purification, not purification from sin but the purification of the soul in order for it to receive the Torah.”87 “This purification is not about sin, but in order to enable materiality to achieve a divine status.”88 This purification can only happen in exile, not through it. To see oneself, or one’s people, living outside the theater of exile (that is, fully at home), even though not living in the messianic era, undermines Israel’s entire destiny.

In terms of the exilic posture as necessary for the redemptive experience, I will cite one approach among many in Netivot Shalom. Barzof-

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sky begins a discussion by citing a passage from Jacob Joseph of Polnoy’s Toldot Yaakov Yosef. The “Toldot” (Genesis 25:19–28:9), citing the Baal Shem Tov, states that exile and redemption both have an individual and collective component. Barzofsky adds, “Before one can pray for collective redemption one must pray for personal redemption.” To answer why this is so, I refer back to Barzofsky’s earlier discussion about anokhiyut (literally, I-ness) or self-absorption. In his comments on Exodus, Barzofsky posits that the greatest challenge to the human being is the inflated sense of anokhiyut. Although personal piety and self-reflection can annul this tendency, the best context for this work is exile. “Even if one is not able to reach this elevated state of self-nullification to God, by means of exile one can at the very least experience the diminution of materiality [I would say power—S.M.].”89 To be in exile, or homeless, is to be under the material supervision of another. This “other” is not God, but it is still more productive than the illusion of sovereignty that undermines the existential trajectory Barzofsky was trying to procure. Homelessness is the posture that cultivates the mentality required for true redemption. Although this appears similar to ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionism, I think there is an important distinction. Satmar’s essential protest against Zionism is the pre-messianic status of sovereignty and the defiled state of secular Jewish culture.90 Teitelbaum’s understanding of the tradition was that there could not be a truly “religious” Zionism before the Messiah, which is why his most vehement attacks were against Agudat Israel who “defiled” themselves in their collusion with the secularists. Satmar’s discussion about the positive nature of exile in a pre-messianic state is a second-tier justification for exilic living.

For Barzofsky, the secular and the political were not the issue. The issue appears solely to be the context best suited for religious devotion.91 Although in principle this can be accomplished while living in a sovereign Jewish state, sovereignty, as we have seen, often cultivates the opposite mentality—one of exclusion, defensiveness, hubris, and even arrogance. This is true not only of one’s stance toward the nonJewish other but of the Jewish (diasporic) other. Negation of the Diaspora is one ideological manifestation of that posture.92 In sum, I am suggesting that Diaspora Jewry can use its station, if it is willing to own it, to construct a model of what it means to be a twentyfirst-century Jew who consciously chooses to live outside of Israel (the land or the state) and views that choice as holding unique potential that is unavailable to the Jew who chooses to live in Israel. I suggest that Said’s notion of the expatriate as constructive critic93 and Barzofsky’s theory of exile as both the condition and context of Jewish piety pro-

vide alternative models of the Jewish Diaspora’s relationship to Israel and, more important, to itself. This would include a posture whereby the Diaspora develops an alternative to Zionist historiography (initiated by “the Jerusalem School”) that the trajectory of Jewish history is always toward the land and the state of Israel. Or, to repeat Dinur’s call, “all our work is Zionist ideology.” This stance can only relegate expatriate diasporic living—that is, choosing to live “elsewhere”—to a subservient or, to return to the old dichotomy, peripheral role in contemporary Jewish history. If Diaspora Jews see themselves as expatriates (that is, homeless by choice), this can contribute something toward a new self-fashioning of those Jews, including their role in the home they choose not to live in.

The reason I chose the model of the expatriate to define contemporary Diaspora Jews (who consider themselves Zionists—that is, who believe Israel is the Jewish homeland) is two-fold. First, like the expatriate, most of these Jews choose to live outside the home and could, in many cases, change their station if they were willing to make certain, mostly economic, sacrifices.94 Second, Said argued that this homeless status is actually productive, creative, and can perpetuate itself; it can acknowledge the home and still function independent of it. Such a posture by Diaspora Jews would amount to a negation of the negation of the Diaspora built on a positive assessment of their choice to be homeless and not the guilt of their choice not to return home. What this new diasporic model will look like is an important reconstructive project beyond the scope of this admittedly limited prolegomenon.95 Among other things, it would require reenvisioning previous Jewish critiques of power as an end (Breuer, Zeitlin, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Tamares, et al.) and underscore the challenges and even dangers that sovereignty poses to Judaism and the Jewish people. Of course, this can all take place within the context of an existing state and therefore need not revert to a pre-state anti-Zionism, either traditionalist or progressive. That is, it can support the right of the State of Israel to exist, but that is really beside the point. What I am suggesting is that Diaspora Jewry may benefit from marginalizing Zionist historiography’s desire to dictate the terms of its identity. Said and Barzofsky, in tandem and in conversation, can serve as two models of how this new conversion can commence. The fact that Barzofsky was a Jew and Said was a Palestinian in the late twentieth century is significant. As a Jew, Barzofsky was trying to reenvision the efficacy of homelessness at a time when his people, for the first time since antiquity, have a home.

As a member of the Palestinian people who, like the Jews, were born from homelessness96 (the Jews in Egypt and the Palestinians living in

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Israel and occupied Palestine), Said may have been thinking about the productivity of homelessness as his people approach the dangers and challenges of having, for the first time, a home (a home, by the way, that Said may very well have chosen not to live in).

From the “outside”—that is, from the Diaspora—it appears that Israel is engaged solely in a conflict with its Palestinian neighbors. This conflict is real and pressing. But, internally, Israeli society is also engaged in a serious debate about itself that is not solely driven by the Palestinian conflict.97 Although the Israel-Palestinian crisis is everpresent and urgent, Israeli intellectuals also see it as a lens through which Israel can reassess its own identity—as a sovereign nation ruling over a minority, as a nation whose myth is succumbing to the natural deterioration of all nationalist myths, and as a country committed to democracy that understands the tensions between its commitment to democracy and the state’s “ethnic” character.98 From Barzofsky’s reading of exile, Israel’s internal struggle to forge a new identity may be a consequence of viewing itself living outside exile, by negating it, thus living outside the very condition of its own spiritual trajectory. From Said’s perspective, it may be the natural, and unavoidable, consequence of thinking outside comparisons. This, however, is Israel’s problem and not the problem of the Jewish Diaspora. Living in the Diaspora—in exile and “on the margins”—Diaspora Jews have the opportunity to contribute something important to the well-being of their own constituency. They cannot do so, I suggest, unless they are willing to see their historical and existential station for what it is: not a remnant of a past not yet absorbed into the Zionist vision of land and sovereignty, but as an independent collective whose volitional exilic experience is a positive and vital component of a new understanding of Jewish peoplehood, one that accepts their expatriate status and views it as a positive station in human (and Jewish) history.

Notes To the memories of Louis Finkelstein and Simon Rawidowicz—humanists, pacifists, diasporists.

1 On the problem of dichotomies as a productive way of viewing historical phenomena, see Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 1–14. I am in agreement with Funkenstein and suggest these dichotomies only because they have become part of common historical discourse, the very same historical dis-

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course Funkenstein criticizes. Even those who criticize Zionism’s infatuation with “origins” and authentically “Jewish” narratives and phenomena, such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, often fall into a similar trap. On the identity crisis of Diaspora Jewry and Diaspora Zionism after the state, see Melvin I. Urofsky, “A Cause in Search of Itself: American Zionism After the State,” in American Zionism: Mission and Politics, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock (New York, 1998), 451–63.

On this question more generally, see Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (New York, 2003), and Anthony D. Smith, “The Question of Jewish Identity,” in A New Jewry? Studies in Contemporary Jewry Annual VIII, ed. Peter Y. Medding (Oxford, 1992), 219–33, esp. 227–30. See also Daniel Elazar, “The Jewish People as the Classic Diaspora: A Political Analysis,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer (London, 1986). For a recent exploration into contemporary diasporism, see Aryeh Cohen, “‘Seek the Welfare of the City to Which I Have Exiled You…’: Toward Another Diaspora Manifesto,” and the response by Nancy Levene, “The State and the state of Israel,” both in Sh’ma 35, no.

616 (Dec. 2004).

For a thoughtful assessment of this problem, see Jacob Neusner, “The Jewish Condition After Galut,” in Diaspora: Exile and the Contemporary Jewish Condition, ed. Etan Levine (New York, 1986), 245–56.

It should be noted that living in Erets Israel and being “home” are not at all synonymous in the history of Israel. See, e.g., Nehemiah 9: 36, 37, where exile can also be an experience in Erets Israel. On this, R. Mosis writes: “So the Babylonian exile leads to post-exilic Israel living as a minority, and often as an undervalued and disadvantaged minority, both in Judea and elsewhere, and to its seeing itself as a diaspora people” (cited and discussed in Reinhard Feldmeier, “The ‘Nation’ of Strangers: Social Contempt and Its Theological Interpretation in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Ethnicity in the Bible, ed. Mark Brett [Leiden, 2002], 245).

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Grapes of Roth: ‘Diasporism’ Between Portnoy and Shylock,” in Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (Oxford, 1996), 148. Later in that same paragraph, Ezrahi states that “the existential virtues of life in exile and the essence of Judaism as a culture in exile have reconverged as a new philosophical-political platform.” I do not share Ezrahi’s optimism on this point.

Evyatar Friesel, “The Meaning of Zionism and Its Influence Among the American Jewish Religious Movements,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. S. Almog, J. Reinharz, and A. Shapira (Hanover, N.H., 1998), 184.

This, of course, was not always the case. In the early and mid-twentieth century, Orthodox Judaism in America was not dominated by Zionists.

See Jeffrey S. Gurock, “American Orthodox Organizations in Support of Zionism, 1880–1930,” in Almog et al., Zionism and Religion, 219–34.

Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York, 1981), 3, 4.

Normon Podhoretz, New York Times Magazine, Feb. 3, 1974, p. 6, cited in

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Ben Halpern, “The Americanization of Zionism,” in Gurock, American Zionism, 125. This was surely not the case in the first part of the century.

“Negation of the Diaspora” as a central tenet of early-twentieth-century Zionism will be discussed below. Seminal studies on this phenomenon appear in Yehezkel Kaufmann, Golah ve Nekhar, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv, 1929–30), and Eliezer Schweid, Toldot ha-gut ha-yehudit ba-meah ha-20 (Tel Aviv, 1990). For an important survey of the “negation of the Diaspora” debate in English, see Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle of Brit Shalom, 1925–1933 (Leiden, 2002), 286–344, and Eliezer Schweid, “The Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought: Two Approaches,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, ed. Yehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (New York, 1996), 133–60.

This sentiment has recently been advocated by Arthur Hertzberg in “America is Galut.” This article first appeared in the “Hagshama” department of the World Zionist Organization website and was then reprinted in World Jewish Digest 2, no. 3 (Nov. 2004): 34, 35. Hertzberg begins with the assumption that the lack of antisemitism in America is endangering Judaism’s survival. One important exception to this rule is Mordecai Kaplan’s “New Zionism,” built on the foundation of Ahad Ha-am’s notion of Israel as a spiritual center. I would argue that Theodor Herzl’s political program of national sovereignty, coupled with Vladimir Jabotinsky’s revisionist doctrine of political and military might, have become more dominant Zionist tropes in contemporary America. American Jews surely travel to Israel to be inspired and uplifted, but Israel does not serve as a spiritual and cultural center the way Ahad Ha-am envisioned it. On Jabotinsky, see Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siecle (Berkeley, 2001), 203–37. See also Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the U.S., 1920–1948 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2002).

See Tresa Grauer, “‘A Drastically Bifurcated Legacy’: Homeland and Jewish Identity in Contemporary Jewish American Literature,” in Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 238–55. Grauer focuses on the Israel novels of Philip Roth, arguing that, from the perspective of American Jewish fiction, Israel plays a nominal role at best. While this may be true, I would argue that the centrality of Israel in the popular imagination of American Jewry is hardly nominal, even among those Jews who dissent from the Israeli government’s current policies.

For a different view, see Edward Bernard Glick, The Triangular Connection: America, Israel, and American Jews (London, 1982), and Edward Bernard Glick, “America, Israel, and American Jews: The Triangular Connection Revisited,” in Eretz Israel, Israel, and the Jewish Diaspora: Mutual Relations, ed. Menahem Mor (Lanham, Md., 1991), 229–42. The notion that Zionism ceased having a variegated and complex ideological pattern was noted by Naomi Cohen: “By then [1946] the subcategories of Zionism— religious Zionism, cultural Zionism, and even non-Zionism—had lost their meaning. A person who contributed in any fashion to the building

of the yishuv, which as most now understood was the preparation for a Jewish state, was ipso facto a Zionist” (The Americanization of Zionism, 1897–1948 [Hanover, N.H., 2003], 189).

14 See Walter Ackerman, “Israel in American Jewish Education,” in Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews, ed. Allon Gal (Detroit, 1996), 173–90.

15 If we examine some of the more popular Jewish history textbooks in America, we see the weighted emphasis on Zionism and the State of Israel. The chapters on American Jewry in the twentieth century often focus on pre-Israel America, and the remainder of Diaspora Jewry is often lumped together in one short chapter. The trajectory of some of the Jewish histories is that the State of Israel is a kind of culmination of Jewish history, even when treating the Diaspora Jewish communities. Following are some examples. Abraham Leon Sacher, A History of the Jews, rev. ed. (New York, 1948): Of the final seven chapters (pp. 338–430), six of them deal with either antisemitism or Zionism. The final segment of the book is devoted to the Jewish state. All remaining Jewish communities in the contemporary modern West constitute a mere 11 pages (387–98). Howard M. Sacher, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York, 1990): Three separate chapters deal with either Israel or Zionism (pp. 369–93, 460–88, 542–70). One chapter deals with American Jewry, and one chapter with the remainder of Diaspora communities entitled “A ‘Second Ring’ of Jewish Communities.” H. H. Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People, (Cambridge, Mass., 1976): This is a more explicit example of the Palestineocentrism of contemporary Jewish historiography, which is understandable because Ben-Sasson is an Israeli scholar. His book is not easily accessible to a nonacademic audience but, in English translation, serves as an important educational resource for graduate students training in Jewish Studies in the Diaspora. An important exception to the general trajectory is Robert Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought (New York, 1980), which gives a more balanced rendition of modern Jewish history. I wish to acknowledge my friends and colleagues Jeffrey Veidlinger and Matthias Lehmann for suggesting this line of inquiry.

16 See Derek Penslar, “Normalization and Its Discontents: Israel as a Diaspora Jewish Community,” in Critical Issues in Israeli Society, ed. Alan Dowty (Westport, Conn., 2004), 223–49. Penslar convincingly argues that the State of Israel—politically, socially, and existentially—mirrors the Diaspora mentality of Jews throughout history and is not a radical exception to it. He argues that an important lacuna in “Israel studies” is the comparison of Israeli society to Jewish society in the Diaspora. His critique is two-fold. First, he argues against the “negation of the Diaspora” ideology that so dominated Zionism in its formative years, arguing that Zionism cannot negate the Diaspora because it has largely reproduced it.

Second, he criticizes the value of post-Zionism, which ignores Judaism’s rich heritage (which grew and flourished in the Diaspora), as a source for Israeli culture and society. See also Ezrahi, “Grapes of Roth,” 148–58, and

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Donna Robinson Divine, “Zionism and the Transformation of Jewish Society,” Modern Judaism 20, no. 3 (2000): 257–76.

Isaac Breuer’s inclusion in this cadre of anti-Zionists is complicated. He surely was no Zionist, but his later writings, after he immigrated to Palestine, are less monolithic in their rejection of the Zionist project in all its facets. See, e.g., Asher Bieman, “Isaac Breuer: Zionist Against His Will,” Modern Judaism 20, no. 2 (2000): 129–46.

For Breuer, Zeitlin, and Tamares, see Ehud Luz, Wrestling with an Angel: Power, Morality, and Jewish Identity, trans. M. Swirsky (New Haven, Conn., 2003). For Breuer, see also David Myers, Resisting History (Princeton, 2003), 130–56. On Teitelbaum, see Aviezer Ravitsky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. M. Swirsky and J. Chipman (Chicago, 1996), 40–78.

In English, see Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). It is noteworthy that Leibowitz, even though he is translated into English, has found almost no audience among North American Jews.

See Myers, Resisting History, 35–129. On the Zionist wager, see Luz, Wrestling with an Angel, 66–90.

Luz, Wrestling with an Angel, 67.

Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 40.

Gershom Scholem, Dvarim be-go, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1976). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Hebrew sources are mine.

See Jack Werthheimer, “Breaking the Taboo: Critics of Israel and the American Jewish Establishment,” in Gal, Envisioning Israel, 397–419.

It is not only the critical voices of Zionism that have disappeared but also the support and advocacy of earlier forms of Zionism, e.g. binationalism, which had served Zionism quite well in the early part of the twentieth century. Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Louis Brandeis, Hannah Arendt, Leo Baeck, and Gershom Scholem (in his early years) were all binationalists, and Zionist binational societies such as Brit Shalom and Ihud were active in Mandate Palestine. See Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle of Brit Shalom, 1925–1933 (Leiden, 2002). Almost nothing is known about this movement among contemporary Diaspora Jews.

Zionist education in America has all but erased it from its curriculum except in some university courses. Contemporary writers such as Yoram Hazony even claim that Buber’s Zionism was all but indistinguishable from the anti-Zionism of Hermann Cohen. See Hazony, The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (New York, 2000), 190–94, and Allan Arkush, “The Jewish State and Its Internal Enemies: Yoram Hazony Versus Martin Buber and His ‘Ideological Children,’” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 7, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 169–90.

Luz, Wrestling with an Angel, 142–61. See also Marc H. Ellis, Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, 3rd ed. (Waco, Tex., 2004), esp. 51–74.

Ellis, Toward a Jewish Theology, 81.

28 See Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews Against Zionism: The American Counsel for Judaism, 1942–1948 (Philadelphia, 1990).

29 On Zionism and Reform Judaism, see Michael A. Meyer, “American Reform Judaism and Zionism,” Studies in Zionism 7 (Spring 1983): 49–64; Howard Greenstein, Turning Point: Zionism and Reform Judaism (Chico, Calif., 1981); Naomi Wiener, “The Reaction of Reform Judaism in America to Political Zionism,” in Gurock, American Zionism, 29–62; and Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 39–63. For Finkelstein’s view of Zionism, see his “Reflections on Judaism, Zionism, and Enduring Peace,” New Palestine, May 21, 1943, pp. 19–21, and his “Israel Is Central,” Jewish Frontier (May, 1952): 25, 26, as well as Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 189–212. Brandeis once described the prospect of a state as “a most serious menace” (cited in Arthur Goren, “Spiritual Zionists and Jewish Sovereignty,” in The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert Seltzer and Norman Cohen [New York, 1995], 170). For more on Finkelstein and Zionism, see ibid., 180– 83. Finkelstein was a firm believer in internationalism and the creation of a congress of nations that would foster world cooperation and conflict resolution. The prospect of an ethnically Jewish state was not part of his internationalist vision. In fact, Finkelstein understood America as a spiritual wellspring for Jews, arguing that the values of the Founding Fathers were identical to those of the Pharisees. (See Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 196). In this sense, his book on Rabbi Akiba can be read as a book of American patriotism and Jewish nationalism, since Finkelstein viewed the two as largely synonymous. See Finkelstein, “Reflections,” 8. In remarks to the American Jewish Committee in Oct. 1944, Finkelstein stated, “[B]y saying we want the Jewish commonwealth in Palestine . . . we are helping to defeat that which is the salvation of the Jews, as of all other people, namely, the creation of states on political and economic and geographical bases without regard to ethnic religious and other divisions” (cited in Goren, “Spiritual Zionists,” 182, 183). Finkelstein seems to have tempered his anti-statist view in brief remarks made in 1985 (see ibid., 186). In fact, even in the late 1940s, Finkelstein had a great deal of sympathy for a binational state (an idea that is presently considered “antisemitic”), understanding that a “Jewish” state would be morally indefensible if it came at the expense of the indigenous Arab population. See Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 206, 210.

30 For a brief yet informative sketch of Rawidowicz’s diasporist theory, see Eugene R. Sheppard, “Babylon and Jerusalem: The Integrity of the Diasporic Critical Mind,” Sh’ma 35, no. 616 (Dec. 2004): 6. Sheppard argues that Rawidowicz’s “Bavli vi-Yerushalayim” model founded on the principle of equal status and partnership between Israel and the Diaspora never really gained solid footing in the post-state era. On exile, see Simon Rawidowicz, State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity (Hanover, N.H., 1988), 96–117. For a similar position, see Ben Zion Bokser, “Israel and the American Synagogue,” in Roads to Jewish Survival, ed. Milton Berger (New York, 1967), 295–98. Three contemporary examples of a critical

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stance in the Diaspora can be found in the work of Michael Lerner and his pro-Zionist critique of the current Israeli government; Marc Gopin, whose work on conflict resolution has created a constructive critique of contemporary Israel; and David Myers in his scholarly work on the “Jerusalem School” and anti-historicism in modern Jewish thought, which has reintroduced this trajectory into the discourse of modern Judaism. In the case of Lerner and Gopin, perhaps less so with Myers, the basic assumption of Zionism (i.e., political and territorial sovereignty) is a given. What does not appear on the Jewish landscape is questioning the very notion of sovereignty as something that is beneficial to Judaism. That was the nature of the discourse that played such an important role in the anti-Zionist sentiments in Breuer, Zeitlin, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Strauss, et al. Given our post-state situation, it is perhaps more fruitful to think about the constructive role that the Jewish Diaspora can play in preventing the Jewish acquisition and use of power from undermining the prophetic and, according to Tamares, pacifist core of Judaism.

A similar case can be made about the emergence of post-Zionism in Israel. That is, post-Zionism, as a critique of Zionism, is also a sign of Zionism’s success.

Ironically, Israelis are far more reflective and critical of Zionism than their diasporic counterparts. The post-Zionist movement in Israel, including scholars such as Baruch Kimmerling, Ilan Pappe, and Boaz Evron, anti-Zionists such as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, and even Zionist critics of contemporary Zionism such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz, are far more critical of present-day Zionism than most Diaspora Zionists.

Simon Rawidowicz, in his Bavli vi-Yerushalayim (London, 1957), is the best example of a thinker who sees both Zionism and diasporism as mutually dependent categories. See also Rawidowicz, The Ever-Dying People (Philadelphia, 1988), with the important introduction by his son, Benjamin Ravid, and Ravid’s Introduction to Rawidowicz, State of Israel, 13–50.

A good illustration of the point I am trying to make is Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of Leon Uris’s Exodus. More than a movie about the founding of the Jewish state, Exodus is a film about the romance and complexity of the Zionist dream from an American/diasporic perspective.

The romanticized vision of the Sabra and the love story between Ari (Paul Newman’s character, who has sun-bleached hair and blue eyes) and the blond American Midwestern gentile embody an American/Diaspora and not a Sabra perspective. Another important Zionist propaganda film that had an impact in America was Land of Promise, which premiered at the New York Astor Theater in 1935. On the influence of this film in America, see Hillel Tryster, “The Land of Promise: A Case Study in Zionist Film Propaganda,” History Journal of Film Radio and Television 15, no. 2 (1995): 187–217, and Arthur Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 178, 179.

There is an important distinction here between voices critical of Zionism and those critical of Israel. Many American Jewish voices are critical of

Israel’s policies, such as Michael Lerner, Brit Tsedek ve-Shalom, and Americans for Peace Now. However, almost all frame their criticisms as “Zionist” in nature and orientation. The post-Zionist “Zionism” born in Israel has never gained a solid footing in the American Jewish consciousness, much less the Israeli anti-Zionism of people like Amnon RazKrakotzkin. There were many earlier “dissenters” whose critiques did not survive. See, e.g., Judah Magnus, Like All the Other Nations? ( Jerusalem, 1930); Arthur A. Goren, Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); and William Zuckerman, Voice of Dissent: Jewish Problems, 1948–1961 (New York, 1962). More recent works address the question of power in the form of Jewish sovereignty as a potential detriment to the survival of Judaism. See Earl Shorris, Jews Without Mercy: A Lament (Garden City, N.Y., 1982), and Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Power and Jewish Ethics (New York, 1983). Both of these are discussed at length in Ellis, Toward a Jewish Theology, 11–50.

36 See Steven M. Cohen, Israel-Diaspora Relations: A Survey of American Jewish Leaders (Ramat Aviv, 1990); Chaim I. Waxman, American Aliyah: Portrait of an Innovative Migration Movement (Detroit, 1989); Chaim I. Waxman, “All in the Family: American Jewish Attachments to Israel,” in A New Jewry?

134–49; and David Mittleberg, “The Impact of Jewish Education and an ‘Israel Experience’ on the Jewish Identity of American Jewish Youth,” in Medding, A New Jewry?, 194–218.

37 Nathan Rotenstreich, Essays on Zionism and the Contemporary Jewish Condition (New York, 1980), 49, 50. In another essay on this topic, Rotenstreich suggests that “the negation of the Diaspora has an evaluative meaning and not a factual one, that is to say that it is not the existence of the Diaspora that is negated in some ideological trends but that the position of the Diaspora and the Jewish mode of life in it are negatively evaluated” (“The Negation of the Diaspora—Past and Present,” Zionist Ideas 11 [1985]: 69).

A recent American Zionist negation of the Diaspora can be found in Hertzberg, “America Is Galut,” 34, 35. This idea also resonates in Kaufmann, Golah ve Nekhar. Eliezer Schweid sums up Kaufmann’s position on this in the following way: “The Jews who turned to emancipation were willing to relinquish their national culture completely, but a considerable portion of them were not prepared to give up the basic tenets of their faith, and the decisive majority were not prepared to accept Christianity, while European society remained faithful to the Christian ethos despite the process of secularization” (“Rejection of the Diaspora,” 145). Judah Magnes, echoing Ahad Ha-am, seems to have agreed that the Diaspora, even if it is not oppressive, needs to be negated. He writes, “If in the lands of oppression, the Jews be held in bodily language, in the lands of freedom all too many are spiritual slaves” (cited in Goren, “Spiritual Zionists,” 168).

38 Rotenstreich, Essays on Zionism, 52, 53. Even though Rotenstreich considers the term “primacy” more inclusive than “negation” or “centrality,” he admits the following: “One advantage of the latter metaphor (primacy) is

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the implication that if conflicts of interest arise between the Diaspora and the State of Israel, it is the interest of Israel which should have preference.

But one should not concentrate on conflict situations, though they have to be taken into account. The primacy of Israel is rather to be considered in terms of the status of Israel” (53). While not advocating the negation of the Diaspora per se, Rotenstreich’s assessment hardly invites a new diasporic Judaism. If not negation, “primacy” is surely demotion. At best, Rotenstreich suggests a kind of “subjective negation” (his reading of Ahad Ha-am)—that is, to negate the Diaspora in our consciousness even as it is affirmed as fact. In this light we can talk of coexistence, but this does not relegate the Diaspora to any constructive part in the discourse; it is merely something that must be tolerated since it is a part of contemporary Jewish reality. See Rotenstreich, “Negation of the Diaspora,” 76, 77. On Ahad Ha-am’s essay “Shlilat ha-golah” (“Negation of the Diaspora”), see his Parshat drakhim, part 4 ( Jerusalem, 1961), 106–16. In another essay, Ahad Ha-am suggests viewing the Diaspora as “dispersion” and says that Israel would give Diaspora Jews a sense of possessing a homeland as they continue to choose to remain outside that project. See Ahad Ha-am, “Dr. Pinsker u maamaro,” in ibid., part 1. Schweid claims that, even with Ahad Ha-am’s “spiritual center” and rejection of the radical negation doctrines of Brenner and Berdyczewski, he held “extremely negative views of the Diaspora” (“Rejection of the Diaspora,” 147).

Rawidowicz, State of Israel, 101 (emphasis added).

Cited in Arnold Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflections on Homelessness and Homecoming (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 148.

Raz-Krakotzkin suggests by implication that Zionism is, in fact, an antiLevinasean concept in that its success is always about the negation, and not integration, of the other. See his “Galut bi-tokh rabanut: Le-vikoret ‘Shlilat ha-golah” ba-tarbut ha-yisreelit,” Teoryah u-vikoret 4 (1993): 23–56.

The question remains to what extent Zionism is simply another example of nationalism more generally and fashioned primarily on European nationalism. On this, see George Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover, N.H., 1993), 121–31.

See Raz-Krakotzkin, “Galut in the Midst of Sovereignty,” 30–36.

Luz, Wrestling with an Angel, 50, 51 (emphasis added). Gil Anidjar, in his Arab/Jew: The History of the Enemy (Stanford, 2002), exhibits the extent to which Jewish adaptation of the Arab as enemy (with all the requisite stereotypes) is an adaptation of a Christian history of the Arab as enemy.

And that antisemitism is, in fact, the arabization of the Jew in the Christian imagination.

Hence, Zionism may be guilty of being just as diasporic, and just as “un-Jewish,” as its anti- or non-Zionist counterparts. As Funkenstein notes in “Dialectics of Assimilation,” 6, Hatam Sofer’s explanation of the Spanish exile (“[we] got close to the nations instead of separating ourselves from them”) could easily be, and was, a criticism of Herzl’s proposal of Zionism as “normalization.” On this, see also Penslar, “Normalization and Its Discontents.”

45 Cited in David Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York, 1995), 141.

46 Ibid., 5 n. 12. For a critique of the Jerusalem School, see Gershon Hundert, “Reflections on the Whig Interpretation of Jewish History: Ma’asei Banim siman l’tov,” in Truth and Compassion: Essays on Judaism and Religion in Memory of Dr. Solomon Frank, ed. H. Joseph, J. N. Livingstone, and M. D. Oppenheim (Waterloo, Canada, 1983), 111–19. See also David Myers, “Community, Constitution, and Culture: The Case of the Jewish Kehilah,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 (1992): 633–70.

47 See Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past, 129–31. Myers notes that Dinaburg “did not attempt, as a historian, to demolish all vestiges of diaspora culture” (131). Unlike more radical negators of the Diaspora, such as Brenner, Dinaburg continued to teach and write in Yiddish until he immigrated to Mandate Palestine.

48 To nuance this observation, Meyers notes that Baer’s and, even to a lesser extent, Dinur’s negation of the Diaspora is subtle, reflecting a complex tension between Diaspora and Zion, largely resulting from the personal history and educational background of this first generation. However, he continues, in subsequent generations, this healthy tension is largely erased. The exilic biographies and academic training of these early historiographers perhaps contributed to their zealotry, but their life experience at least contained a more textured approach to the relationship between homelessness and home. See, e.g., Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past, 109. See also Eisen, Galut, xvii.

49 The English translation of Baer’s Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, 2 vols.

(Berlin, 1936), as History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1961) is a classic in the field, and his small book Galut was translated in 1947 and widely read in English. On Baer more generally, see Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past, 109–28; Pinhas E. Rosenblut, “Yizhak Baer: A Re-Appraisal of Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 22 (1977); and Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yizhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 77–87. Baer’s thesis that Jews in medieval Spain were persecuted far more than was conventionally thought implies that, even in the most tolerant societies, Jews were relegated to an inferior status. Thus, one can argue that his historiography of medieval Jewish history is a “historical” illustration of his negation of the Diaspora ideology.

50 On the place of Zionism and Israel studies in North American Jewish education, see Allon Gal and Alfred Gottschalk, eds., Beyond Survival and Philanthropy: American Jewry and Israel (Detroit, 2000); Barry Chazan, “Teaching Israel in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Jewish Educational Leader’s Handbook, ed. R. E. Tornberg (Denver, Colo., 1988); and Ackerman, “Israel in American Jewish Education,” 173–90.

51 See A. B. Yehoshua, “Exile as a Neurotic Solution,” reprinted in Levine, Diaspora, 15–35. From a critical perspective, see Rawidowicz, State of Israel:

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“There is hardly a single blemish to be found on our body and soul that Zionist thought and its literature does not ‘diagnose’ as a product of galut. Everything in our life and existence that is displeasing to the thinker or writer, every complaint that the nations of the world make against us, all stem from galut” (97). See also Schweid, “Rejection of the Diaspora,” 133–60. Schweid calls for a reassessment of the doctrine, one that he laments has largely disappeared in Zionist education. The result of this disappearance, he argues, has left a vacuum for Israeli youths in search of identity in the State of Israel. Schweid attempts to reinvigorate a more moderate but nonetheless definitive negation of the Diaspora: “We must now once more reorient the educational ideology of the Zionist movement. In the face of the phenomena such as emigration from Israel and alienation from Zionism both in Israel and abroad, the Zionist movement must sharpen its criticism of the Diaspora experience and bring it up to date, in order to make the people face the cruel truth of disintegration and decadence in Jewish life abroad” (159).

On this point, Salo Baron argues that Zionism must abandon antisemitism as a force driving its ideology. His reasons are largely pragmatic: “antiSemitic threat has lost much of its force as a living reality in the minds of the young, whether in the United States or in other free countries” (“A New Look for Israel and the Diaspora,” in Levine, Diaspora, 307). I would argue this is the case even in contemporary Europe, where antisemitism has once again raised its ugly head. The reason is that there are groups who hold antisemitic ideas and even act on them sporadically; there is no indication that such activity is accepted in any legal framework.

Emile Fackenheim, “The Renewal of the Zionist Impulse,” Forum: A Quarterly 48 (Spring 1983): 20. Fackenheim’s point is that aliyah must be solely a response to “love of Jerusalem” and not fear of antisemitism. Otherwise, the disappearance of antisemitism would undermine the impulse to immigrate to Israel.

In response to antisemitic acts in France in 2004, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon called on French Jews to immigrate in order to escape the escalation of antisemitism in Europe. His remarks received harsh criticism from many leaders of the French Jewish community.

Keeping the threat of antisemitism alive in America also has the advantage of enabling Diaspora Jews to remain tied to their identity. In “America Is Galut,” Arthur Hertzberg argues that the lack of a “memory of suffering” (via the absence of antisemitism) among third-generation American Jews results in the danger of their disappearing. “When in his own inner-consciousness he begins to approach a real feeling of athomeness within the larger society, what remains of his Jewish identity is too little and too personalized to sustain a community” (35). See also his Being Jewish in America: The Modern Experience (New York, 1987).

Barzofsky was born in Baranovitch Poland in 1911 and immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1935, where he lived in Tiberias, Tel Aviv, and then Jerusalem until his death in 2000. He descended from a line of Hasidic

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rabbis from the Hasidic dynasties of Lechovitz and Kobrin and was crowned the seventh Slonimer Rebbe in 1981 after the passing of his father-in-law R. Avraham Weinberg. There is very little written about Barzofsky apart from the recent translation of his pamphlet on pedagogy entitled Netivot Hinukh. See R. Shalom Noah Barzofsky, Nesivos Sholom: Essential Perspectives on Education (New York, 2001). See also Allan Nadler, “Ha-sintezah be-hasidut slonim bein hasidut le-limud Torah be-nusah hamitnagdim,” in Yeshivot u-Vatei midrashot, ed. Immanuel Etkes ( Jerusalem, forthcoming).

The notion of “exile” or Diaspora as positive was the stance of anti-Zionist Reform Judaism in the early part of the century. Naomi Cohen puts it this way: “With the advent of political Zionism, Reformers expatiated on the concept of exile. The dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple, they reiterated time and again, was a positive blessing, for exile from Palestine was the first step toward the fulfillment of the Jewish mission” (Americanization of Zionism, 44). There are two major differences between pre-1948 Reform Judaism and Barzofsky. First, the Holocaust all but destroyed the ideological anti-Zionism of Reform even though the American Council for Judaism remained intact, albeit quite weak and ineffectual, until 1967. Barzofsky continued writing after 1948.

Second, Reform Jews had abandoned the concept of exile as homelessness. For them, America was the homeland. In 1898, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations resolved that “America is our Zion. Here in the home of religious liberty, we have aided in founding this new Zion, the fruition of the beginning laid in the old” (quoted in ibid., 46). Barzofsky argued we should maintain the category of exile but view it as spiritually and existentially positive. In this sense he was adopting Zionist language and turning it on its head.

Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York, 1996), 60. See also Alaian Epp Weaver, “On Exile: Yoder, Said, and a Theology of Land and Return,” Cross Currents 52, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 439–61.

Jacob Neusner expresses a similar sentiment: “But the Jewish situation of homelessness, of detachment, has provided me, secondarily, with the awareness that what is now is not necessarily what was nor what must always be. Being able to stand apart because of an inherited and acquired perspective of distance, I realize the people have choices they may themselves perceive. There have been and are now other ways of conducting life and living with others, of building society and creating culture, than those we think are the norm” (“Jewish Condition After Galut,” 249).

Ibid.

Alaian Epp Weaver puts it this way: “Said does, it turns out, ‘redeem’ exile by stressing its moral possibilities; in particular, the exile, because she is not at home, can resist accommodation to the powers, intellectual and political, which exclude and dispossess” (“On Exile,” 449).

Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 173.

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63 Ibid., 177.

64 Ibid.

65 Mordecai Kaplan’s Zionism is unique in that it positively affirms the validity and even the need for the Diaspora in Zionist thought. Kaplan’s New Zionism has not received the attention it deserves. Recently, Israeli scholars have been reassessing Kaplan’s Diaspora-affirming Zionism. See Joseph Turner, “The New Zionism: In Memory of Mordecai Kaplan,” Faculty Forum: The Schechter Institute in Jerusalem 2, no. 3 (Nov. 2004).

66 This, of course, is a question that is not limited to the Jews. See Sheffer, Diaspora Politics, 15–22.

67 Rotenstreich, “Negation of the Diaspora,” 69. More generally, see Samuel Klausner, “Diaspora in Comparative Perspective,” in Mor, Eretz Israel, 194–97.

68 Fackenheim, “Renewal of the Zionist Impulse,” 22.

69 The position of cultural Zionism, most prominently in Ahad Ha-am’s notion of Israel as a “spiritual center,” is that Diaspora/exile does not foster creativity. For a further discussion on this, see Rotenstreich, “Negation of the Diaspora” 72, 73.

70 See Jacob Neusner, “The Real Promised Land Is America,” International Herald Tribune, Mar. 10, 1987, where he forcefully argues that Jews in America can live just as freely as Jews in Israel. Neusner calls for a renewed diasporism that affirms Jewish creativity in America.

71 Said, Representations, 59.

72 Ibid.

73 I have not been able to decipher the difference between these two terms in Barzofsky.

74 See Aaron Schmuel Tamares, Patsifizm be-or ha-Torah ( Jerusalem, 1992), and Steven L. Weinstein, “Galut, a Mission or a Curse?: The Writings of Aaron Schmuel Tamares,” Jewish Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1978): 21–26. On Zeitlin in English, see Moshe Waldocks, “Hillel Zeitlin: The Early Years, 1884–1919” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1982). Another name worth mentioning in this regard is Hayyim Herschonsohn, whose legal writings have recently attracted the attention of Israeli scholars. In English, see Eliezer Schweid, Democracy and Halakha (New York, 2002).

75 Martin Buber was the one who initially portrayed Hasidism as uninterested in collective redemption (messianism). Gershom Scholem revised the Buberean thesis in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971), 176–202. Others have gone further, claiming that messianism played an even more important role in Hasidism. See Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomiansim, and Messianism in Izbica and Radzin Hasidism (Madison, Wisc., 2003). Hasidism, even when messianic, begins from the personal and moves outward. In this sense, I think Shatz’s “selfredemption in Hasidism” still holds as a general category.

76 On the modernism of Hasidism, see Magid, Hasidism on the Margin, 225–28.

77 It is noteworthy that Barzofsky’s call for the continuation of exile/ Diaspora had more in common with early and mid-century Reform anti-

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Zionism than ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionism. His was not a negation of the halakhic viability of a secular state but a belief that Jewish dispersion was divinely ordained, an idea that emerges in various Reform anti-Zionist thinkers, albeit for different reasons.

I am grateful to David Myers, who suggested this to me in response to a shorter version of this article presented at the AJS conference in Dec. 2003. It is interesting to note that the anti-Rav Kook here is not Teitelbaum but Barzofsky. Teitelbaum and Kook, not without irony, were surprisingly similar in their worldviews, even as their interpretations of reality were radically different.

R. Shalom Noah Barzofsky, Netivot Shalom (NS), vol. 2, “Exodus” ( Jerusalem, n.d.).

Ibid., 8. This, of course, is not new; there is a long history of attempts by Jews to distinguish themselves from the non-Jewish other. See a similar formulation in R. Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague (MaHaRal), Netsah Yisrael (New York, 1969), chap. 1, pp. 10a/b, 11 a/b.

NS, “Maamar galut u-geulah” (MGG), Pesah, 405 (emphasis added).

NS, “Exodus,” 14.

NS, MGG, 45.

NS, “Exodus,” 15.

Ibid., 10.

NS, MGG, 406.

NS, “Exodus,” 8.

Ibid., 10.

Ibid., 12. A possible precedent for this can be found in Jacob Joseph of Polnoy, Toldot Yaakov Yosef, 2 vols. ( Jerusalem, 1973), 1: 410a.

See Ravitsky, Messianism, 66–78.

In this sense, Barzofsky is aligned with the secular anti-Zionist Simon Dubnow, who held that political power would blind Jews from the real task at hand: creating a modern secular Jewish culture. See Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History (Philadelphia, 1958), 182–91. The danger of Zionism as an expression of power that threatens the moral fabric of contemporary Jewish society is also discussed in a secular light in Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics (New York, 1983).

Moshe Idel has argued that contemporary Zionist messianism is guilty of that notion of exclusion. He posits, quite convincingly, that contemporary religious messianism is rooted in the biblical religion of Ancient Israel but not the revision of that idea in the prophets and rabbis. That is, it is essentially Israelite yet anti-Jewish. The “Jewish” model of messianism, continues Idel, is one that extends to the world at large and is not limited to Israel. Contemporary religious messianism adopts the normalization theory of Herzl and applies it to redemption. Of course, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Ha-Kohen Kook advocates a more universal messianic model, which only stresses how much contemporary religious messianism, built on R. Kook’s writings, deviates from his thinking. See Moshe Idel, “Raayonot

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meshihiyim ve-raayonot tsiyonut,” in Ha-tsiyonut ve hazarah le-historyah, ed.

S. Eisenstadt and M. Lisk ( Jerusalem, 1999), 73–81.

On the relationship between exile and the critic, see Edward Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said (New York, 2001), 53–68.

This precise point is made by Shalom Ratzabi: “However, with the foundation of the state of Israel, the concept of galut has lost its meaning—and this because almost every Jew can now make aliyah, and if he or she chooses to live in another country, this circumstance is a consequence of personal choice rather than historical or theological necessity” (“Is There Religious Meaning to the Rebirth of the State of Israel After the Shoah?” in The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology, ed. Steven T. Katz [New York, 2005], 214).

In a larger project tentatively entitled “Is Judaism an American Religion?”

I intend to explore this question in greater depth.

The notion that a Palestinian national identity may be born precisely from the emergence of the Jewish state was articulated even before 1948

by Israel Friedlander; see his “A Few Suggestions Concerning the Relations Between Jews and Arabs,” cited in Goren, “Spiritual Zionists,” 173.

But see also Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York, 1998), who argues that there was a clear Palestinian identity and even a proto-nationalist Palestinian movement beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the Palestinian Diaspora, see Pamela Ann Smith, “The Palestinian Diaspora,” Journal of Palestine Studies (1986): 90–108, and, for a comparison between the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas, see Klausner, “Diaspora in Comparative Perspective,” 194–221.

On the internal Israeli struggle that extends far beyond the Palestinians and territory, see Amos Oz, Mi-mordot ha-Levanon (Tel Aviv, 1989). This is one reason why post-Zionism is a home-grown Israeli phenomenon that has not, and likely will not, take root in the Diaspora. American Zionists are too attached to the classical definition of Zionism to be “post-Zionists.”

That is, Zionism is a central part of their identity as Jews, which is not necessarily the case for Israelis. Moreover, the impact of post-Zionism reaches far beyond the realm of the political, which is what concerns most contemporary American Zionists. The disclosure of the speciousness of the “Zionist myth” and of the realistic and messy nature of Israel’s nationalist origins is a necessary and healthy step toward the maturation of Israeli identity. The cultural and even existential dimensions of postZionism will far outlive its political ramifications. In my view, one can see the beginnings of this in Benny Morris’s new “rightist” post-Zionism. PostZionism is, as it should be, no longer inextricably linked to the political left. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, Engl., 2004).

This tension is, of course, built into the very foundation of the state as expressed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence—that Israel is to be a “democratic and Jewish state.” There has been much written on this. For a good overview in English, see M. Waltzer, M. Lorberbaum, N. Zohar, and

Y. Lorberbaum, eds., The Jewish Political Tradition: Volume One, Authority (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 501–23. More specifically, see Sammy Smooha, “Ethical Democracy: Israel as an Archetype,” Israel Studies 2, no. 2 (1997): 198–241; Ruth Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the ‘Ethical Democracy’ Debate,” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 44–72; Ruth Gavison, Yisrael ki-medinah yehudit ve-demokratit: Metahim ve-sikuyim (Tel Aviv, 1999); Sammy Smooha, “The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State,” Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 4 (2002): 475–503; and Ilan Peleg, “Israel as ‘Jewish and Democratic’: Revising the Sacred Formula,” The Reconstructionist 6, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 16–25.

Abstract This article explores the perception of Israel and Zionism in the diasporic imagination. I argue that the dominance of Israel as a tool of diasporic Jewish identity has impeded Diaspora Jews from developing their own identity alongside, yet distinct from, Israel. I use the work of Edward Said and the late Slonimer Rebbe, Shalom Noah Barzofsky, as lenses through which to view the notion of exile as a positive and constructive social and ideological posture. I challenge the progressive Jewish attempt to erase “exile” as a category and replace it with the more tepid “Diaspora.” I argue that diasporic Jews are indeed living in exile—not as refugees but as expatriates—and this exile should be a positive part of their identity, used to create new avenues of Jewish expression in the contemporary world.

Keywords: Diaspora, exile, Zionism, Edward Said, Shalom Noah Barzofsky, Slonim

[227] In Search of a Critical Voice

• Shaul Magid