The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry,” in Unheroic Conduct—argue that not only was Zionism a response to antisemitism but, in some way, it also absorbed antisemitism.

In Scholem’s youth, Zionists were more openly radical, even revolutionary, in their belief that Zionism was the “transvaluation of all values,” the dismantling of Judaism itself.

The only direct, unadulterated consequence of nineteenth-century antisemitic movements was not Nazism but, on the contrary, Zionism, which … was a kind of counterideology, the ‘answer’ to antisemitism.”

Leo Strauss and Hasidic master Yoel Teitelbaum have therefore argued that Zionism (or at least political Zionism) is in some respect anti-Judaism (or at least anti-rabbinic Judaism).

I believe Israel is mired in an increasingly chauvinistic ethnonational project, one that has undermined the more humanistic attempts of certain earlier iterations of Zionism.

Exile Within Sovereignty: Critique of ‘The Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture,” published in English in 2017, did essential work to conceptualize the price of erasing exile within the Jewish national project

In complicated ways, after the destruction of the Second Temple (hurban) in 70 CE, the rabbinic sages reconceived the biblical covenant by radically reconceptualizing it, placing exile at its center. In some way, the radicalism of Zionism was an attempt to subvert that rabbinic innovation by, as Scholem framed it, ending exile.

Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

As I see it today, there are no viable equitable solutions. So my counter-Zionist vision is certainly aspirational, but no less so than Zionism itself at its inception. Noble efforts sometimes lead to noble failures. And noble efforts sometimes also lead to surprising results. One can only think from where one stands, and gaze toward a future where