What a fascinating conference, an attempt to found a new Jewish anti-Zionism. I wish I could go listen to the speeches. The early Zionists all began as assimilationists. Pinsker, Nordau, even Herzl himself. They longed to belong to the European culture that surrounded them, even as that culture imposed on them deeply negative stereotypes of Jews that drove them crazy. In the central-European intellectual elites to which many of the early Zionist thinkers belonged, Jews were seen as untethered to place or nation, unmanly, dishonest, opportunistic - the moral opposite of how Enlightenment Europeans imagined themselves. Jews were the first victims of this European “orientalizing” - the process by which Europeans constructed their sense of self by projecting opposite negative traits onto an inferior Other. They did it to Muslims and Hindus, but only after learning to do it on the Jews. And the harder Jewish assimilationist intellectuals tried to belong, the more these stereotypes and bigotries and demands for ever greater compromises of their Jewishness intensified. It’s hard to overstate the psychological crisis that was the lived experience of Jewish intellectuals of the era. People like Herzl spent much of their lives shaping their personalities in opposition to these anti-Jewish stereotypes, joining German nationalist clubs and working fiercely to erase any traits they thought corresponded to these antisemitic stereotypes. It was only when they began to understand that these stereotypes were themselves a form of institutionalized domination — that the more they assimilated and “resembled their Christian compatriots, the more old anti-Jewish stereotypes were revived…. [Thus were] Jews kept in their place,” as the historian Jacques Kornfeld wrote of them — that the great pivot to Jewish independence began. For these tormented central-European Jewish intellectuals, Zionism was not just another nationalist idea. It was a liberation from this European cultural bondage, this crippling existence under a majority culture’s dehumanizing gaze. It took a lot to drive assimilationist Jews to break free of the false promise of European acculturation, to drive them toward a solution as radical as Zionism. But Europe managed it with the explicit, fierce antisemitism that dominated the central-European politics of the 1890s. (Google Karl Lueger.) Now, 130 years later, a handful of Jewish intellectuals, facing a new wave of disdain and a new argument from their prevailing cultural milieu that Jews (other Jews, of course, not them) are uniquely distasteful to the cultural and moral landscape of the modern world, will gather to discuss why generations of Jewish independence might have been a mistake, or even a crime. They are driven by the same sensitivity to the withering scorn of their surrounding culture — these are academics, remember — and by the same imbibing of their milieu’s offer of acceptance through moral and cultural acquiescence. I wish them luck, I wish them an easing of their great anxiety. But I suspect their effort to fit in through the ideological rejection of Jewish independence will ultimately fail. 2025 isn’t 1895. There’s a kink in this old-new anti-Zionism that they will not easily overcome, no matter how desperately they try. In their narcissism, they cannot see it; to all other Jews, it’s as obvious as daylight: Too many Jews have died, the blood of too many millions has been spilled and too many Jewish cultures have been wiped from the Earth for this exercise to be anything more than pandering self-delusion. If communism or Bundism or assimilationism or French or Arab nationalism were the answer to Jewish safety and belonging, there would be millions such Jews today. But there aren’t, because they’re not. A century ago, anti-Zionist ideas were part of a rich and complex discourse about a vast and multi-layered predicament no one quite knew the answer to. In 1897, when the first Zionist delegates gathered at the first Zionist congress, history had not yet had its final, bloody say on the viability of other Jewish survival strategies. Then the 20th century happened. To hold a conference today that seeks to revive anti-Zionism is inherently and necessarily to gather atop a pile of dead Jewish bodies stacked to the very vaults of Heaven. It is not really a debate, but a cry of bitter frustration at the implacable facts of history. And a narcissistic cry at that; not a lamentation at the horrible suffering that left Zionism the last desperate option for millions of Jews, but a lamentation that this cruel history leaves the present-day assimilationist shorn of a viable argument against Zionism’s rejection of Jewish erasure. You don’t have to like modern Israel anymore than you have to like modern France. You certainly don’t have to support its policies or actions. But to be an explicit anti-Zionist — to oppose its existence — is, inherently, to declare one’s principled opposition to the 20th century. It is a silly and meaningless exercise. For a Jewish scholar to choose such willful ignorance, to choose to be Herzl before his awakening, before he grasped how stereotypes and morality tests are instruments of domination, is to signal a profound psychological misery, to admit to being intellectually crippled and counterfeit, an object of ridicule not merely for other Jews, but for the cultural majority you’re desperate to join. I wish I could help them. But I can’t. They’re far too clever to be moved by simpletons like me. So I wish them luck. I hope their new anti-Zionism offers the comfort their aching psyche so desperately needs. An anti-Zionist Jew is a safe Jew, but also, after the 20th century, a fundamentally ahistorical Jew, defined not by what they know but by what they choose to ignore. An anti-Zionist Jew is a Jew afraid of the non-Jew’s gaze. I welcome their safety, lament their shame and over-agreeableness, and, being a Zionist myself, stand ready to defend them should their faith in their current political and cultural allies ever prove to have been misplaced.
See Tweet