The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance

INTRODUCTION

In May 1942, there was a momentous meeting of American Zionist leaders—steered by Jewish philanthropist and communal leader Jacob Blaustein and rabbis Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver, among others—with David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann at the Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan. The topic of discussion was the state of American Zionism.

Up to this point, most American Zionists were devoted to two things: raising money for Jewish settlement in Palestine and, as the situation in Europe became increasingly dire, simply trying to save as many Jews as possible. Ben-Gurion and Weizmann wanted to convince these American Zionists to focus their efforts on one goal: Jewish statehood, what Ben-Gurion called mamlakhtiyut (sovereignty), which he believed was the best hope for Jewish survival. Blaustein, Wise, and company considered the suggestion and agreed on one condition: that Jews in America would not be considered as living in exile (galut) but rather in diaspora (golah). It was a seemingly nominal request, but quite an important one for many American Jews. These American Zionists did not want to be seen as living in a deficient state of Jewish existence—exile—but rather in a more neutral state of dispersion: diaspora. They might not have viewed America as a New Promised Land, as some of their predecessors did, but they viewed themselves as fully American and proud of it; and they wanted Ben-Gurion and Weizmann to acknowledge that. Ben-Gurion and Weizmann agreed, and the trajectory of American Zionism changed its course.

Decades later and across the ocean, in 1975, Muki Tsur interviewed Gershom Scholem, a lifelong Zionist—albeit a complicated one—about his life’s work. When the subject turned to Scholem’s views on Zionism and Israel, he opined, Zionism was a calculated risk in that it brought about the destruction of the reality of Exile, adding that the foes of Zionism certainly saw the risk more clearly than we Zionists. It is no coincidence that the interview occurred only a year after the founding of Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), which served as the institutional cornerstone of the fledgling settler movement, a movement that has come to dominate the Israeli political landscape—not to mention the reality of Palestinian life in the West Bank. Scholem remained a Zionist. But in the years that followed, in those waning years of his life, he became more and more pessimistic about the turn he was witnessing.

What precisely was Scholem pointing to in that conversation with Tsur, now decades behind us? I believe he meant that Zionism often fails to recognize the implications of its own project. 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. But by the 1970s, with the rise of Kookean Zionism¹ and the slow erosion of Zionist socialism, Zionism’s radical edge had become more tempered. Or perhaps it is better to say that its radicalness had taken on a new messianic-nationalist turn. But in 1975, Scholem—an acclaimed historian of messianic heresy in Judaism—was not fooled, and thus he offered his dire warning: ending exile is a precarious exercise.

This book is in some sense a response both to the deal struck at the Biltmore in 1942, and to Scholem’s comments many years later. In these pages, I attempt to reverse Blaustein, Wise, and Silver’s request to Ben-Gurion, and to substantiate Scholem’s claim about the precariousness of ending Jewish exile. I argue that much is lost when we abandon the idea of exile, and that, at least to some degree, the attempt to erase exile may still be contributing to the significant problems of the Jewish national project as it exists today, both in the diaspora and in Israel. In the following chapters, I take Scholem’s insight about the risk of ending exile quite seriously—revisiting the theological and historical underpinnings of the Jewish notion of exile, and the price paid by its attempted erasure.

In his 1986 book Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming, Arnold Eisen provided an invaluable service by examining the concept of galut historically and how it has been refracted in modern Jewish thought. In addition, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s path-breaking essay 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. And the price was unmistakable. It was not uncommon for early Zionist ideologues to use antisemitic tropes such as sick, diseased, and parasitic when describing Jews in the diaspora. It was, and remains, troubling that the promotion of the New Jew of Zionism was substantiated by the European antisemitic tropes used to describe the Old Jew of exile. The relationship between Zionism and antisemitism is, after all, complex. Hannah Arendt put it quite trenchantly in the beginning of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism: 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.² It is for this reason that some—such as Daniel Boyarin in his essay on Theodor Herzl, 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.

My thinking is indebted to Eisen, Raz-Krakotzkin, Boyarin, Arendt, and many others, but I approach the issue of both Zionism and antisemitism from a slightly different, and more contemporary, angle. In the nine essays that comprise this volume, I engage a variety of contemporary issues and thinkers broadly revolving around the question of exile, fidelity to Zionism, the Zionization of American Jewry, and antisemitism. I look at the struggles Jews face today in negotiating alliances, allegiances, and the growing complexity of being Jewish in the twenty-first century—specifically among Jewish progressives, many of whom are now rejecting the Zionization project altogether. If there ever was a Zionist consensus, it is now, at least among American Jews, undoubtedly in peril.

While some may read this book as anti-Israel, that is not at all my intention. Like many others, 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. However, unlike many others, I do not believe those earlier humanistic strains of Zionism can be recuperated, or, as I’ll argue in this book, that liberalism and Zionism can be seen as compatible in any easy way.

The question of Israel and liberalism is indeed a complicated one; in some ways, Israel has been a liberal society (although that too may be changing). Its progress on issues of gender and LGBTQ+ rights (now potentially being reversed by the new government), its social safety net, and its national health-care system are liberal, even at times progressive. However, Israel’s national sentiment and the policies that grow from it—specifically regarding Palestinian citizens of Israel, other non-Jewish citizens of the state, and Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation—are decidedly, and increasingly, illiberal. One can see this in the entrenchment of the settlement enterprise and its effects on Palestinian life, in the Nation-State Law passed by the Israeli Knesset in 2018, and in the results of the fall 2022 election.

In my view the Zionist narrative, even in its more liberal forms, cultivates an exclusivity and proprietary ethos that too easily slides into ethnonational chauvinism. It is for this reason that I believe, as religious Zionist thinker Rav Shagar wrote in his book Briti Shalom, that Zionism has exhausted itself.

This book is therefore, in some sense, anti-Zionist—or more precisely, as I suggest below, counter-Zionist. I try to sever Zionism as an ideology from Israel as a nation-state. In so doing, I fully acknowledge the land of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and the same land as the homeland of the Palestinian people. I also fully acknowledge the legitimacy of the right to self-determination for the Palestinian people in their homeland and for the Jewish people in their homeland. I am thus in favor of Israel acting as a nation-state that protects and exercises the rights of both peoples. (At some point in the future, this might even mean changing the name of the country to better represent all of its citizens.) And I do not believe that Zionism as an ideology can ensure those equally legitimate rights. Not today. By distinguishing the nation-state from Zionism I suggest that we can begin to cultivate a new collective ideology that, if enacted, could serve Israel as a more liberal and more democratic place for the next phase of its existence.

But the fact that many confuse a critique of full Jewish hegemony in Israel with anti-Israelism is, in my view, part of the problem. Zionism is an ideology; the State of Israel is a country. Israel may have been founded on the principles of Zionist ideology but, like all countries, it needn’t be wed to its founding principles. Ideologies and nation-states are not identical. America, now experiencing its own deep fissures as a country marked by its history of slavery and genocidal occupation, has undergone significant shifts in ideology since its founding. For example, the nineteenth-century theory of Manifest Destiny was once a quite popular justification for western expansion, yet today it is only espoused explicitly by white nationalists and white supremacists. Similar narrative shifts have occurred in other countries as well. If we were to allow for such a narrative shift and leave statist Zionism behind, for example, we could imagine a new relationship to exile—positing a counter-Zionism that reappropriates exile as a productive motif for rebuilding a humble and non-proprietary Jewish relationship to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Such a shift, in my opinion, is precisely what Israel needs.

To say it plainly, while I am not against the State of Israel, I am not in favor of it functioning as an exclusively Jewish state. I am in favor of Israel (or whatever name it may choose to adopt) becoming a liberal democracy, a state of all its citizens on the land Jews and Palestinians call home, a place that can offer a just political reality for two peoples, Jews and Palestinians (Muslims, Christians, and others). The state’s character would be both Jewish and Palestinian. It would not be structured on the notion that this land belongs to anyone, it would be a true democracy; it would not be a state of the Jewish people (as the 2018 Nation-State Law claims), it would be the country of all the people who live there, equally. It would be a state of shared sovereignty and dual autonomy, as outlined in Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future For Israel. The question of such an idea’s viability at present is not my concern. 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 one wants to be.

*

I feel it is important to note at the outset that this book is intra-Jewish in nature. That is, it engages the question of exile and Zionism from an exclusively Jewish perspective. While this question is intimately connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I acknowledge that this book does not include Palestinian voices or Palestinian narratives, neither on the question of exile—to which Palestinians have their own very different, painful, and vexed relationship (as beautifully depicted in Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays)—nor on the question of territorial claims, sovereignty, or autonomy. This is not meant as a slight in any way, but is rather a consequence of positionality. A full-bodied analysis of the question of exile in Israel|Palestine would require both Jewish/Israeli and Arab/Palestinian voices, each of which would express their claims, arguments, and points of view.³ In this book, however, my task lies elsewhere. I aim to investigate Jewish conceptions of exile in our contemporary world to engage those who are invested in Israel, for whatever reason, and those who care deeply about the Jewish tradition, the Jewish present, and the Jewish future.

Although obviously related to the burgeoning field of diasporic studies, my interest here is primarily exile, as both an idea and an empirical reality (galut not golah)—as well as a phenomenological category and even an existential posture or state of being in the world. As Eugene Borowitz wrote, Anybody who cares seriously about being a Jew is in Exile and would be in Exile even if that person were in Jerusalem. That Exile results because our Jewish ideal is unrealized anywhere in the world.

Living in exile is to exist in a productive state of tension with what Rav Shagar called the not-yet, a state that requires constructive modes of coexistence—not as a compromise, but, as both Judith Butler and Daniel Boyarin suggest in different ways, as a generative way of being Jewish. This needn’t only take place in the diaspora (although for Butler and Boyarin, that is its natural habitat). As I show in the chapter on Rav Shagar’s religious post-Zionism, exile can actually function as productively in the land as outside it.

This book suggests that Zionism, in many of its iterations, seeks to end this not-yet, to make it a now (the now that seduced me and my friends as young yeshiva students long ago), not necessarily through its eventual turn to the messianic—though, of course, that too—but also by simply giving up on the positionality and posture of exile. On the one hand, given the proximate history of genocide, this maneuver was understandable. And yet, it still begs the question: whether erasing exile was the only, or the best, response for a traumatized people. For me, it is clear—this erasure of exile produced serious flaws and problems both theologically and politically, realities which this book seeks to articulate.

Some of the essays in this volume have appeared in different forms elsewhere. Others are new. My intention in expanding and revising these pieces is to offer a series of alternative scenarios whereby Israel the nation-state could continue to flourish by circumventing, in effect rejecting, Zionism—which I believe is hampering its ability to overcome the chauvinistic ethnonationalism in which it is presently mired. My hope is that these essays cohere into a kind of alternative vision, one that resituates Zionism as an important relic of the past, and opens space for us to reconceive Jewish national and collective identity in a new exilic mode.

Such a mode would not, however, be entirely new. The rabbinic sages worked in what could be called an exilic covenant, one that deeply shaped Judaism as we know it today. 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. People as disparate as philosopher 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). More exacting, as in Teitelbaum’s case, is the argument that it is a form of Jewish heresy, which some early Zionist ideologues would have had no problem with. But this is not my assumption here. Zionism has certainly proved productive in many ways but also, to my mind, destructive, and it no longer serves the needs of a state and people that aspire to justice and equality. For this reason, this book thinks back to the rabbinic sages who placed exile at our tradition’s center; it argues that re-visioning exile, or thinking exilically, might be one way to move forward.

Today, Israel as a country is confronting many of its demons, even as it confronts many of its enemies, both internal and external. The Necessity of Exile is my small contribution toward the health of the Jews, the health of all those who will one day live in a democratic Israel|Palestine as equal citizens, long overdue justice for Palestinians, and the flourishing of humanity.

¹A form of religious Zionism that grew from the teachings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook (the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandate Palestine) and his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. The son’s ethnonationalist interpretation of his father’s ideology became a guiding philosophy of the Israeli settler movement.

²Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), xv.

³An example of this can be found in Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg’s edited volume The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

CHAPTER ONE

Has Zionism Exhausted Itself?

A Critique of Liberal Zionism

Zionists just want to be happy.

—Hermann Cohen (cited in Franz Rosenzweig’s introduction to Cohen’s Jüdische Schriften, vol. 1)

As I write this in 2022, I do not think it’s provocative to state that liberal Zionism is in crisis. It is, after all, abundantly clear today that the present iteration of liberal Zionism, as a humanistic project of Jewish self-determination based on liberal democratic values, is in a defensive posture. The problem is that the social and political realities of the Israeli state today cannot be defined as liberal by any stretch of the imagination. This includes the country’s continued—perhaps permanent—occupation/annexation of millions of stateless Palestinians and their land, as well as its own narrative self-fashioning—illustrated in part by the 2018 Nation-State Law, which arguably codifies Jewish domination, even supremacy, into the state itself. (The law states that national self-determination is exclusive to the Jewish people in the State of Israel, where non-Jews comprise over 20% of the population.) Many in the contemporary Zionist camp celebrate this ethnocentric turn. Most liberal Zionists do not. And yet most liberal Zionists remain steadfast in their defense of the State of Israel. Therein lies the crisis.

In an essay in the online journal Religion Dispatches, The Last Licks of Liberal Zionism in America, Ilan Benattar used the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream kerfuffle in the summer of 2021 as an occasion to observe how liberal Zionism has lost its moorings, mostly because its liberalism is no longer connected in any coherent way to the contemporary reality of Israel. That summer, Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice cream company founded by two Jewish liberals in the 1970s, decided to refrain from selling their product in West Bank Jewish settlements moving forward. This caused an uproar among Zionists in Israel and the diaspora who claimed that Ben & Jerry’s was boycotting Israel. Of course, the intent was not to boycott Israel—the plan was for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to remain available in Israel proper, pending renegotiations with its parent company Unilever.¹ The company had simply decided to recognize the so-called Green Line, the 1949 armistice line separating Israel proper from the land it occupied during the war in 1967—the occupied territories that remain disputed under international law. The problem with this decision is that the Green Line has been all but erased in much of Israeli society; Jewish settlements have been economically, socially, and practically interwoven into Israeli life for decades. Acknowledging the existence of the Green Line (by ceasing ice cream sales, no less) will not do much at this point. Benattar notes that most of the liberal Zionist arguments against the Ben & Jerry’s decision were stuck in 2010, in the heyday of the organization J Street, before the acceleration of de facto annexation and the 2018 Nation-State Law; before liberal Zionism’s most celebrated advocate, journalist and pundit Peter Beinart, abandoned the two-state solution; and before five Israeli elections, between 2019 and 2022, illustrated definitively that Israel is not a liberal country, certainly not today.

Given what has transpired, how does a professed liberal support a state that is openly illiberal and whose liberal elements have almost collapsed? Benattar thus claims that American liberal Zionism has fallen into utter conceptual incoherence—that is, its program seems divorced from reality if it still claims to support the actual State of Israel, as opposed to some vision of an Israeli state that doesn’t actually exist. Electoral will matters, and the majority of Israelis have voted over and over again for illiberal leaders and laws.

While much of the liberal Zionist literature (especially outside of academia) contests this prognosis of crisis and imminent demise, a few voices within liberal Zionism have grappled honestly with these contradictions. One example is a 2022 essay published in the English-language journal of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem (a bastion of liberal Zionism) by Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman, the president of the institute, titled Liberal Zionism and the Troubled Committed.

In the essay, Hartman courageously faces the precipice of liberal Zionism’s future head-on. Surprisingly, he does not defend the old program of liberal Zionism in its entirety (as one would expect of someone in his position); rather, he argues that it has the right ideas but a poor way of conveying them, and that in some significant way, liberal Zionism remains mired in the discourse of the 1980s. It has not sufficiently reconsidered the realities on the ground. His essay is one of the most honest appraisals of the present state of affairs that I’ve read by a liberal Zionist. And yet, I think it misses a number of crucial elements—not so much in its diagnostics but in its framing of liberalism, and in its suggestions for a new liberal Zionist paradigm.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Donniel Hartman for a long time, and I am a senior fellow at the Hartman Institute