Diasporism, or 21st Century Internationalism? American Jewish Political Cultures of Diasporic Radicalism

Sammendrag

This essay locates current framings of "diasporist" Jewish anti-Zionism within longer modern traditions of political writing on Jewish internationalism. While "diasporism" emerged in the last decade or two to describe contemporary American Jewish visions of an anti-or-post-Zionist future, there is little consensus on what the term means.  From the liberal individualism of Philip Roth to Shaul Magid's religious evocations of messianic time to Judith Butler's "ethics toward the Other" to Daniel Boyarin's "diasporic nation," it would appear there are many ways of conceiving Jewish life in opposition to Israel's current form, all of which posit a different ontological logic for Jewish life. This essay provides both an overview of these particularly American frameworks, while asking how earlier generations of Jewish left-wing anti-Zionists conceived of Jewish identity prior to and during the emergence of a Jewish state. Isaac Deutscher, Daniel Bensaid, Jewish Life, and the novelist and columnist Mike Gold articulate "diaspora" as a state of contradiction, a dialectical relationship both to history and identity. Diasporism, or what Gold refers to as the "broken Jewish nation," is a dialectical non-identity, that is both fully Jewish and not-Jewish simultaneously. While this echoes and is engaged with left-wing politics of internationalism, it is also a particularly Jewish articulation of transnational politics, as it neither accepts nor rejects the nation form, but rather posits national identity as site-in-becoming-through-the-past.  The essay ends on the Chicago based organization The Chutzpah Collective, as one group that attempted to construct this dialectial relationship to Jewishness as an actual, lived political project.