Palestine

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

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

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).

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.

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.