meanwhile, told me that while the realities of the Holocaust made Zionism a necessity for a time, that time has now passed. We are no longer facing extinction, and the exigencies that trump other considerations have faded. In arguing for a post-Zionism, he holds that the Jewish community could repair some of the issues plaguing the community in general as well as the rifts with Israel’s Palestin- ian neighbours. In recognizing our own existence in exile and as an other in the global society, Magid says, we should develop a more compassionate approach to the Palestinian people. Then there is modern anti-Zionism, which comes in several forms and which was a lonely position for a Jew to hold until about 10 years ago. Cultural anti-Zionism is very similar to diasporism: it rejects a single place in which to center Jewish identity. Political anti-Zionism—the variety we tend to think about most often—itself comes in diverse forms, but most share the idea that a land es- tablished by displacing (an)other people, and continually causing harm to them both individually and as a group, is wrong. Whatever religious or historical connection Jews may have to the Land of Is- rael cannot supercede this wrongness, and as a result, Israel as a nation-state should be, according to this line of thinking, abolished or fundamentally reconfigured.
late their founding beliefs. The document, known as the Pittsburgh Platform, consists of eight concise points, one of which was a re- joinder to burgeoning Zionism: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” This was a controversial move, even for a liberal community, and over the following decades, with the prospect of Israel becoming more and more real, successive Reform platforms moderated those ideas. By 1937, the Reform movement’s Columbus Platform stated that, “in the rehabilitation of Palestine, the land hallowed by mem- ories and hopes, we behold the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren. We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its up- building as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.” Around the same time as the Pittsburgh Platform was being writ- ten, but emerging from an opposing sentiment, was diasporism. If the early Reform movement emphasized the religion in Juda- ism, others were taken by the idea of Judaism as a culture and
did not feel the need to move somewhere to fully flourish. This concept of Doykayt , or Hereness, was very much a part of the secular Yiddish world of Eastern Europe at the time. The idea emerged from the social-democratic Bundist ideology, which argued that Judaism didn’t need a separate place to exist. In order to develop a robust Jewish identity, Bundists argued that one needed to recognize that wherever Jews were was central to their identity. If there was a “Jewish Problem” it needed to be solved wherever it was being felt, not by fleeing to another land. (The Russian town
Anti-Zionist Jews have, by and large, felt alienated within and by the Jewish community: many describe being called, even by friends and family, self-hating Jews, and having their support for Palestinian rights vilified and trivialized. But their ranks have, slowly, been growing in recent years, in tandem with and largely fueled by Israeli expansionist tenden- cies in the West Bank and a pronounced right- ward trend in government policy. More Jews than at any other time in Israel’s history reject the halutznik narrative of Jews as neutral im- migrants to a barren land with foreign nations
“The secular Israeli theology has been summarized as follows: There is no God and He gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people.”
of Birobidzhan, established in 1928, was originally planned as the centre of a Jewish autonomous region within that country, and a direct outgrowth of the idea that Jews could have their own land, wherever they were.) Diasporism evolved in the decades that followed, often but not always as an alternative to Zionism. Jews who embraced this mod- el tended to focus on the incredible diversity of Jews around the world, and on the reality that, however painful the origins of Jewish exile are, much of contemporary Jewish culture and religion were informed by being a group of people who were dispersed around the world. Instead of seeing this only in terms of those painful origins—a state of affairs to be remedied—they framed it as an evolution that could be embraced. While diasporism predates the Arab-Israeli conflict, that conflict is likely one of the reasons why it is having a bit of a resurgence today. This is evidenced in two books that came out (and this is worth not- ing) before October 7 and the subsequent upending of Jewish dis- course around Zionism: Israeli-American historian Daniel Boyarin’s The No-State Solution, and Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile , both published in 2023. Both authors argue that living outside of Israel is not only acceptable but might even be the ideal state for Jews. Boyarin sees Zionism as a novel invention of recent Jewish history and argues that Zionism’s focus on land and sovereignty runs counter to what Judaism has believed for centuries. Magid,
seeking to destroy the nascent Jewish state. Within larger segments of the Jewish community, there is a recognition that at the very least, the history is much more complicated and facts on the ground lend much credence to the Palestinian claims on the land. Israel’s pursuit of the war in Gaza in the wake of October 7 has visibly and significant- ly accelerated this growth. This is evident in the increasing numbers of Jewish participants in anti-war rallies and anti-war university en- campments, in public statements by Jewish artists and academics, in polling of Jews since the war started, and in the growing presence of explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish groups. A survey of Canadian Jews con- ducted by University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym in February found a statistically significant drop in support for Israel compared to previous years, “particularly among younger Jewish Canadians.” The American Jewish Committee conducted a survey at about the same time; 19 per cent of respondents reported feeling somewhat or much less connected to Israel since October 7. It is impossible to say how much the growth of Jewish anti-Zionism is growth, and how much is a change in how many Jews who have long harboured doubts about Israel feel comfortable expressing them. But it is clear that debates on the question are breaking out into the open in new ways. Nowhere was this more clearly evidenced than in the movement Reconstructing Judaism and its Reconstruc- tionist Rabbinical College (RRC). In the spring of 2024, two students left the school and published an op-ed in The Forward about their
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