In a new paper at Critical Research on Religion, Shaul Magid examines the new anti-Zionist Jewish left — and how it itself is an expression of the “Zionization” of Judaism. Magid asks how progressive Jewishness can move beyond anti-Zionism, “and in doing so move past Zionization and begin to construct a New Radical Jewish Diasporism that would include new forms of religious/spiritual expression not bound by fidelity to Israel.”
Magid begins by putting this moment of the Jewish Left in the context of the last century: Though there are deep roots of anti-Zionism on the Jewish Left, Magid argues that it may mean something different now than it did in the past.
His tour of the past century includes Mordechai Kaplan’s 1955 work A New Zionism, which showed “Kaplan was quite aware of the problems that Zionism faced that remained largely under the radar for most American Zionists, including the problems of minorities and the future of Israel’s democracy.”
Magid asserts that the New Jewish Left began in earnest in 1962 and started morphing into a return to Jewishness in 1967. At this time, however, he stresses, many considered it possible to be a radical leftist and a Zionist (for example, some argued as leftists that America’s antisemitism was unsolvable and aliyah was the only solution). Magid argues that that’s in part because of how some perceived Israel at the time: to some, it was still a socialist dream world.
“Universal Equality, Anti-Coloniality, and Justice”
“I do not think the radical Zionist left could survive as the occupation became more of a reality. The incongruity was too acute,” writes Magid. But, he adds, “the critical Jewish Zionist left could not survive the mainstream Zionization of American Jewry in the 1970s.”
Liberal Zionism didn’t change its core platform for 40 years, he writes, but the country of Israel changed in this time.
He also writes that liberal Zionism became of the moment in the 1980s. Magid puts liberal Zionists into three buckets: “post New Left liberals such a Michael Walzer, some neoconservatives like David and Yoram Hazony (who later abandoned Liberal Zionism), some younger liberal Jews such as Jill Jacobs, founder of T’ruah, a Jewish social justice organization, and a slice of Modern Orthodoxy, for example David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and Yitz Greenberg.”
Liberal Zionism didn’t change its core platform for 40 years, he writes, but the country of Israel changed in this time. And disillusionment, plus the gap between Jewish education and reality, has led to “an open proclamation of anti-Zionism.”
But Magid believes that “the ‘anti’ of today’s Jewish anti-Zionism for some is not as much a repudiation of the state as much as a repudiation of Zionism as defining diasporic Judaism and Jewry.”
“Perhaps now,” he writes, “Jews on the Left can begin to refocus away from the critique of a state that once determined their Jewishness, something that may have been a necessary stage in its development, to a diasporic project or reviving a Jewish religo-culture that includes a non-normative religiosity that fully embraces progressivism and its aspirations for universal equality, anti-coloniality, and justice.”