Judaism Without Zionism, Part Two

I finished Shaul Magid’s “The Necessity of Exile” and I can’t say enough about it. I bought the Kindle version but I may get it in paperback so I can reread it, something I rarely do. What follows is a rude summary.

We could distinguish three pillars of Jewish anti-Zionism. One is deeply religious, another is cultural, and the third is atheist and socialist. Their origins are as old as Zionism itself, if not older. They narrowed to minority status after World War II and the Holocaust. They may now renew as Israel’s increasingly untenable position, from rogue to pariah state, becomes more blatant.

The religious strain is upheld by the ultra-orthodox Hasidim, who reject hackneyed, secular substitutes for its vision of the coming of the Messiah. Among Hasidim, the rejection of Zionist doctrine is widely held, though acceptance of the Israeli state itself varies. The ultra-orthodox stance was common in Europe and perhaps the most victimized by the Nazis. These days in the U.S. the Hasidic sects live in heavily segregated but prosperous isolation.

The views of the ultra-orthodox regarding a Jewish state are comparable to how committed Christians might regard the Christic idolatry and its devotees surrounding Donald Trump.

What we could call the cultural movement was not irreligious. Rather, it upheld a vision of Jewry prospering in the diaspora. It feared accusations of dual loyalty (to the U.S. and Israel both).

Zionist hostility to the diaspora is easy to document and provoked me to noodle with the idea of Zionism as antisemitic. That would be idiotic, actually. But Zionism as Judeophobic has some weight. The anti-diaspora rhetoric lapses into old antisemitic stereotypes now and then, but its main thrust is to dispute the validity of Jews rejecting emigration to Israel, of the idea of legitimate Jewish life outside of Israel. I think this rejection inspires hidden rage among American Jewish Zionists whose hypocrisy is on display. As old New Leftie Arthur Waskow (now a rabbi) once said, “If you say you’re a Zionist, go to Israel or shut up.”

Israel’s calling card used to be that only the Jewish state could ensure the safety of Jews. This is now clearly false.

Finally there is the secular socialist tradition, where I am, which forsakes religion altogether, though for some it may entail an attachment to the culture of the Diaspora. The Bund — the Jewish socialist/labor movement in Europe, later transplanted to the U.S. (and Israel) — is a kind of halfway point between universalist socialism and cultural Judaism. You could call it a kind of revolutionary nationalism, not unlike the doctrine of the Black Panther Party.

In all three traditions, there are lengthy and rich histories prior to World War II. One of the objections to Zionism common to all three camps was that concentration of Judaism under the rule of a Zionist state in the Mideast would retard the flowering of both Jewish spirituality and/or culture. Indeed, one critic suggested that if the kingdom of Israel had never been taken down in antiquity, Israel today would be no more than another benighted Arab tribe.

Characterizations of Israel as the new center of world Judaism really bug me. There has been so much life in the Diaspora since the Holocaust! Literature, music, theater, poetry, everything. There is nothing comparable coming out of Israel itself. Sorry, Gal Gadot. To deny the legitimacy of the Diaspora does smack of antisemitism, or at least of a type of bigotry.

For evangelical Christians whose view of Jews is limited to their own religious outlook, this is a particular problem. There is something to the idea of Christian Zionism, which foresees the elimination of the Jews via conversion during or after the Rapture, as antisemitic.