How to Separate Jewishness from Zionism
Judith Butler writes toward a new Jewish secularism
September 27, 2012
By Shaul Magid
Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism
by Judith Butler
Columbia University Press , 2012
Now that the firestorm has largely died down over Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism we may be primed for new thinking in the debate about Jewish identity in the Diaspora in the next generation.
Beinart’s Crisis is critical of present-day developments, but he writes from within Zionism, and is committed to the principles upon which the state of Israel was founded. Philosopher Judith Butler’s new book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, on the other hand, is radical (in the etymological sense of the word) as she goes to the very root of the question of Jewishness in the early decades of this century and asks: why Zionism?
In the aftermath of the Six-Day War in the early 1970s, Norman Podhoretz wrote in Commentary magazine, “We are all Zionists now.” In a sense, Podhoretz’s proclamation makes Butler’s point. From its inception Zionism had been always one of a variety of Jewish narratives of identity. Anti- or non-Zionist narratives always existed, both in Europe and the U.S., from Bundists, Yiddishists, German nationalists, universalist and internationalists of various stripes, Marxists, American assimilationists (i.e. classical Reform Judaism), ultra-Traditionalists from Aguddat Yisrael, to Habad, to various communities of Hungarian Orthodoxy now largely coalesced around Satmar Hasidism.
These movements all contested the narrative of Jewish identity encapsulated in a Jewish nation-state. Even within Zionism, statist Zionism was hardly accepted uncritically. From Ahad Ha-Am’s cultural Zionism to Simon Rawidowicz’s vision of two spiritual centers in Israel and the Diaspora, Zionists were almost always at odds about what Zionism was supposed to accomplish.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/atheologies/6423/how_to_separate_jewishness_from_zionism/
Shaul Magid is the Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. His next book, Jews and Judaism in Post-Ethnic America: Becoming an American Religion, will be published by the Indiana U. Press.
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