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The Post-Zionist Jew

Eli Zaretsky

Many Jews today feel torn. On the one hand, they feel loyalty to Israel, the land of their fellow Jews, many of whom were driven to that country by persecution. On the other hand, they recognise that Israel has been committing crimes against humanity, which are essentially racially driven. They want to oppose Israel’s wars, but they want to do it as Jews. Is there a specifically Jewish way to address this conflict? I believe there is.

In his Philosophy of History, Hegel wrote:

Religion is the consciousness that a people has of what it itself is and of the essence of supreme being … A people that takes nature for its God cannot be a free people; only when it regards God as a Spirit that transcends nature does it become free and Spirit itself.

By taking nature for a God, Hegel does not only mean the many forms of Mesopotamian and Egyptian polytheism, against which the ancient Hebrews defined their monotheism. He also means the identification of God with the ties of consanguinity that are the basis of ethnic-tribal communities. When God is posited outside nature, the inner unity of these communities dissolves and the natural ties of common descent are no longer recognised as binding. In positing a God situated above and beyond the earthly com­munity, Hegel had in mind Protestantism, but such a God – one that trumps all forms of ethnically based loyalty – is the founding idea of Judaism.

Judaism, then, was founded on a paradox: on the one hand, a promised land for a chosen people; on the other, a God that transcends all locations and identities. Both were intrinsic to Judaism’s early identity. For more than 2500 years, the Jews survived in diaspora by drawing on both. Beginning with the Babylonian captivity (597-539 BC), they survived in part by defining themselves as a separate people, regulating marriage, kashrut, circumcision and other rituals, which is how all ethnic groups survive, down to the present.

At the same time, they also survived because of their conviction that they possessed a unique and wonderful idea of God: a God that created the universe out of nothing, as opposed to one that emerged out of some primal matter, and therefore retained a connection to the natural world, which revealed itself in the form of magic, polytheism or idolatry, including the idolatry of blood ties. Jews had to survive not only prejudice and oppression: they also had to resist incorporation into the great universal religions of Christianity and Islam, both of which claimed to be based on the originally Hebrew conception of God.

The great reckoning in Jewish history was not the Holocaust or the founding of Israel, as many claim today, but rather the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions, when the Jews were released from their ghettos and became citizens. This led to a conflict between older Jews, who tended to hold to tradition, and younger Jews, who tended to embrace modern science and liberal and socialist thought. Such conflicts were not unique to Judaism, but the Jewish case had a specificity to it. The Hebrew idea of God evolved into modern intellectuality, with its abstract and universalist characteristics, and into such universalist goals as social justice and equality.

This was the period in which Freud called himself a ‘Godless Jew’, and in which Isaac Deutscher coined the phrase ‘non-Jewish Jews’ to describe Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Freud, all of whom were Jewish by birth but, in Deutscher’s words, ‘found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting’ – in a word, too ethnic. I might add to the list Einstein, Benjamin, Derrida and Deutscher himself, all of whom saw Judaism as at the core of their identity and all of whom shaped the modern world indelibly for the better.

If the modern world had moved toward universal ideals of equality and justice, Zionism would never have existed. What in fact happened was that the Jewish embrace of universalism made them even more the target of antisemitic hatred. Zionism was born as a response to that hatred, to the pogroms of the 1880s and the Dreyfus affair of the following decade. There was a real alternative to Zionism, namely socialism, which won the allegiance of as many Jews as Zionism did. Many orthodox Jews meanwhile opposed an ethnically defined nation on religious grounds. Finally, Jewish intellectuals were not persuaded by Zionism because they were universalists. In the words of Ernst Bloch, they felt it would substitute ‘mere nationality’ for ‘chosenness’, by which Bloch meant Judaism’s oppositional intellectualist culture, which embodied a clear opposition of ‘the good and the illuminated against everything petty, unjust and hard’.

After the Holocaust, the argument was made that no Jew anywhere could be safe without Israel, and this argument had merit when applied to the Mizrahi, the Jews of the Middle East, almost all of whom today have been driven out of places they lived in for millennia. But it was always also in the service of racial discrimination and oppression, increasingly so over time. In particular, we have to recognise the invidious role of the alliance between Israel and the United States. Israel today is a wealthy country, perfectly capable of defending itself without American aid. What the aid goes for is not defence but rather ethnic cleansing, land grabs and something approaching genocide.

Contrary to the Israeli claim, then, the relation of the Jewish people to Zionism has always been tentative and complex. The Israeli reaction to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 – the destruction of Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the invasion of Lebanon, the threatened war with Iran – has forced Jews everywhere to consider the contradiction between beliefs in universal justice, which cannot allow for ethnic states or occupations, and loyalty to our fellow Jews. Zionists have responded to this situation by heightening the demand for loyalty.

Antisemitism, according to Columbia University, can include not only ‘targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them’ but also ‘exclusion or discrimination based on … real or perceived ties to Israel’. By this definition, efforts to boycott Israel, as South Africa was once boycotted, or to disinvest from Israel, are antisemitic. As a Jew, I do not believe that Columbia University has the right to define my politics. On the contrary, my view is that Judaism can only survive in a meaningful form if it is not based on ethnic loyalty. It must, in a word, be non, post or anti-Zionist.

Finally, one may legitimately ask: if Jews define themselves in terms of modern ideals of universality, justice, equality and so on, why are they not simply liberals? Why do we need Judaism at all? My short answer to that is that historic liberalism has never been truly universal, but is deeply imbued with Christian ideas of progress, salvation and redemption, gained via the British and American nation-states, which is why the figures that Deutscher cited, including Freud, were socialists and radicals, not liberals. Judaism, then, is still necessary, even if Zionism is not. Not until we have a genuine universality can we say that the Jewish contribution to world history has been exhausted. When we try to specify what that contribution is, we have to say that nationalist ideals play an ever smaller role in it. In the 1935 preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud poses a question for the non-Zionist Jew: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ He replies: ‘A great deal, and probably its very essence.’

Comments

  • 23 October 2024 at 1:07pm
    Hanyun Chen says:
    I'm utterly apathetic to anything Jewish when we're talking about a genocide being done to un-Jews. Just like I'm utterly apathetic to some unfortunate stranger stranded on a remote island in Antarctica and having to eat raw fish to survive. Israel and Zionism define themselves in relation to the un-Jews they oppress and kill, not to Jews (as Netanyahu has shown he couldn't worry less about the hostages still not returned). For that reason when we talk about the post-Zionist Jew, the new Jew, the only starting point is the un-Jews against whom Zionist ideology becomes possible for articulation and therefore owes existence to. But where are the un-Jews, the Palestinians dying in their hundreds and thousands, in this piece? They are absent. If we bypass this only starting point in the discourse of the post-Zionist Jew, we're then not really taking about the new Jew. We are talking instead how to resuscitate the dead biblical Jew. This piece never really looks beyond its own narcissistic, ethno-religious calculus, and it is pathetically incapable of recognising the Palestinians, the un-Jews, as fully functional humans in the making of the post-Zionist Jew. It is too self-absorbed and therefore irrelevant to what we need to know about Zionism and Israel today.
    • 23 October 2024 at 3:37pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Hanyun Chen
      Actually, my piece is only superficially about the Jews. It is about the basic problem of identity. My commitment to the Palestinian cause is frequently mentioned in the piece. I was trying to give Jews a way to support Palestine, while remaining Jewish. Deeply so.
  • 23 October 2024 at 5:14pm
    R Srinivasan says:
    Prof. Z: A very moving post! A very difficult philosophical situation indeed, reflective Jews find themselves in. I am confident they will find a satisfactory resolution. Unfortunately, the difficulty is not philosophical for the targets of drones, bombs, and exploding phones!
    • 23 October 2024 at 7:06pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ R Srinivasan
      I agree. Gazans and others are facing an immediate emergency. My piece is a longterm reflective approach. Thanks for understanding.
  • 23 October 2024 at 7:58pm
    Michael Kemper says:
    Why are we not recognizing that the Palestinian people, speaking Arabic a Semitic language, are Semitic too? Anti-Semitism can be anti-Palestinian, it is not exclusively anti-Jewish. Being against Israeli government policies is not ipso facto anti-Semitic
    • 24 October 2024 at 12:05am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Michael Kemper
      Yes, I agree. That was what I was trying to say.
    • 24 October 2024 at 11:22am
      Chris Bright says: @ Michael Kemper
      I certainly didn't expect to see the historically illiterate 'arabs are semites too' argument advanced in the LRB. "Anti-Semitism" has never meant prejudice against people speaking the Semitic languages. Apart from the fact that no such blanket prejudice exists, it's always been a synonym for jew-hatred.
    • 24 October 2024 at 5:54pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Chris Bright
      Actually, in Renan's work the two forms of prejudice are mixed. Probably in other works too. Its complex.
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:35pm
      Wael Elrifai says: @ Michael Kemper
      While it’s true that Arabs are also Semites, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ has a specific historical and cultural meaning widely understood today. Shifting focus to this linguistic technicality doesn’t contribute much to the conversation. Your intentions are commendable, but it would be more impactful to address the pressing issues of aggression and oppression directly, rather than emphasizing the shared proto-Semitic roots of Arabic and Hebrew.
  • 23 October 2024 at 8:03pm
    Ian Ross says:
    I am trying to maintain a consensual approach to the current disaster. In doing so I remember that 30% of my secondary school was Jewish. Both used the pejorative 'kykes' and 'yids' but this was a playground taunt that had no political conviction. My oldest friend is a Jew. He is now an avowed opponent of any criticism directed at the State of Israel.

    As other commentator have noted this conflict did not begin on 7th October 2023 but reflects a centuries old history of Jewish oppression. Whereas I supported Israel in the Six Day War (as a teenager) on the basis that they had had enough after the Holocaust to deserve preservation now I wonder if the 'chosen people' has led them, and certainly their current government, to believe that they are somehow superior to those who have different religious beliefs. Rashid Khalidi's book- 'The Hundred Years' War on Palestine' makes it clear that the Israeli government has never been interested in a rapprochement with the Palestinians it usurped. Only military might could keep them quiescent.

    On the face of it this seems successful but destroying command structure does nothing but raise resentment amongst those citizens who are not Jewish. In other words they might win the battle, but not the war.

    What makes this worse is the political incompetence of those who oppose Israel (granted that Israel's refusal to enter into a genuine two state discussion plays a part in this). I remember Yasser Arafat's obituary which claimed 'he never failed to grasp an opportunity when presented to him.'

    So a war that dates back to the Balfour Declaration, or perhaps Israel's independence in 1948, will continue without an end in sight. There is a heavy irony in this: Israelis fled Europe because of the Holocaust - perhaps that is the only safe place to be these days.



    • 24 October 2024 at 12:06am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Ian Ross
      Yes, all true. Eli
    • 24 October 2024 at 10:31pm
      Nicolas Dobson says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      I am amazed that you are replying so affably to some of these comments, Eli. I say this although I would probably find myself in broad agreement with your article and am strongly opposed to the horrific war being waged on the Palestinians by Israel. The last one, in particular, is reprehensible. Firstly, with respect to this extraordinary line - "I supported Israel in the Six Day War (as a teenager) on the basis that they had had enough after the Holocaust to deserve preservation now" - the Jewish desire for safety and security is not only valid because of the six million murdered in the Shoah; there is no threshold to be met, let alone this one, before this is a reasonable expectation. Second, this comment as a whole consistently elides Jews with Israel or the Israeli government, sometimes in comically inept fashion ("Israelis fled Europe because of the Holocaust"), at other times more subtly, as in the "chosen people" remark. Any attempt to draw a line between the horrors of Gaza and the Jews per se, rather than the Israeli state, is anti-semitic by definition, holding Jews responsible for the actions of a foreign state. The other comments, with their deeply unpleasant sarcasm (seemingly missed by the author) or accusations of "narcissism", or wilful obtuseness in brushing away the historical specificity of anti-Jewish hatred on the grounds that Arabic is also classified as a semitic language, speak to a similar, if more occluded, animus. Shame on the LRB for its lack of moderation. I would be extremely surprised if people were permitted to make comments expressing similar predjudice about other ethnic or racial groups.
  • 23 October 2024 at 8:08pm
    Ian Ross says:
    What I failed to add was that Jewish (and Christian) communities lived in relative harmony with Moslems for centuries throughout the Middle East. But ethnic cleansing is now 'la mode du jour'.
    • 24 October 2024 at 12:08am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Ian Ross
      Th Jews did much better under Islamic suzerainty than under Christian. But the Christian rule became genocidal, first in tone, and then in reality, in the nineteenth century. We ae still trying to understand why an dhow. Moishe Postone's work is helpful here.
  • 23 October 2024 at 8:25pm
    Danbo Buckperson says:
    Nice piece, but a couple things:

    1) "Israel has been committing crimes against humanity, which are essentially racially driven." Let's say that Gaza were run by Hamas, that Hamas had committed the rapes, murders, kidnapping, etc. of October 7, but that all Gazans (including those in Hamas) were blond, blue-eyed Swedes. Would Israel's response have been any different?

    2) "Antisemitism, according to Columbia University, can include not only ‘targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them’ but also ‘exclusion or discrimination based on ... real or perceived ties to Israel’." I may be wrong, but I think this refers to exclusion or discrimination directed at individual students, faculty, staff, et al. So boycotting the state of Israel under this definition would not be anti-Semitic.
    • 24 October 2024 at 12:13am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Danbo Buckperson
      Thanks Danto: on 1) several people have pointed out to me privately that my claim that Israel's policies are racist is not grounded. I have come to agree. If I wrote the piece again I wouldn't make that claim. However, I still believe there is a racial element. 2) It is very clear that the Columbia statement is aimed at policies, not individuals. This has been a long standing goal of Aipac to define anti-ISrael policies as anti-Semitic. For a while I saw the point of this, if you think of Israel as a"homeland" for a people. It is but the people are the Israelis, not the Jews, if you see my point. Criticisms of Israel are not criticisms of the Jews, in spite of Columbia's claim.
    • 24 October 2024 at 9:00pm
      Jeff says: @ Danbo Buckperson
      If Gazans were “blue-eyed Swedes,” they wouldn't have been in the Gaza concentration camp in the first place! Just a couple of weeks ago, Netanyahu held up a map in front of the entire UN General Assembly clearly showing Gaza and the West Bank as part of Israel. Israel has been doing this since soon after the 1967 conquest. It is keeping all the land from the river to the sea forever.
      So Israel was not attacked on Oct. 7, as you imply and has often been said. In fact, an internal rebellion was launched against a non-democratic apartheid regime. Why is there a fence preventing people in Gaza from going to other parts of Israel, a fence that has been breached for only one day in decades? You claim it's not for racial reasons. OK, then why is the fence there?
      Admittedly, the racial reasons are fictious – genetic studies show Jews and Palestinians are so closely related both likely descend from the Canaanites, and some Palestinians may descend from Jews forcibly converted to Judaism after the Arab conquest. But like America, Australia, etc, the settlers want to steal trillions in land from the indigenous and will only grant the survivors equal rights once the land theft is irreversibly completed.
    • 25 October 2024 at 12:22am
      Jeff says: @ Jeff
      Islam, not Judaism, in the last sentence. It seems you can't edit or delete your own post here?
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:11am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Jeff
      strongly put but I don't really disagree with the overall gist.
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:12am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Jeff
      seems that way, Eli
    • 25 October 2024 at 4:28am
      Jeff says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      https://www.timesofisrael.com/canada-sanctions-israeli-extremists-settler-groups-over-violence-against-palestinians/
      "In a recent CNN interview, [settler activist Daniella] Weiss [supported by Ben Gvir] called for ethnically cleansing the whole Land of Israel of Arabs." My father's family was originally Weiss...

    • 26 October 2024 at 4:22am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Jeff
      yes, we know how strong that sentiment is in Israel. I am fighting to save Judaism from that.
    • 26 October 2024 at 1:46pm
      Jeff says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      "save Judaism"? I'm an atheist myself and I think the whole problem is this powerful identification with a people/religion. Admittedly, there's also the issue of self-selection -- those who choose to emigrate to Israel -- often to become settlers and be part of a movement (and get some free land) -- are often strong nationalists before they even go; that's WHY they go.
  • 23 October 2024 at 8:25pm
    Graucho says:
    Sadly, the myriad of virtues one has admired in Jewish friends and colleagues have steadily evaporated from the state of Israel as it has become increasingly brutalised and brutal. The signs are that this process will now accelerate. The religious parties are in government and they are the country's future. It isn't just that Netanyahu couldn't form a government without them, no future Israeli PM will. They have huge families and the grandchildren of the settlers of the 1970's are now voting. On top of that they are a block vote. As an Israeli friend told me, they go to the synagogue on the Sabbath and the Rabbi fells them who to vote for. I can well understand and sympathise with the author's dilemma, but offer no succour. Things are going to get worse I fear.
    • 24 October 2024 at 12:14am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Graucho
      Yes I see it that way too. I am trying to salvage Judaism from the train wreck of Israel.
  • 23 October 2024 at 9:12pm
    John Zuraw says:
    I thrash my materialist lulav against the hard-backed chair of your universalist abstraction. Jews in Israel-Palestine are compelled to struggle with competing, clashing social ideals. There is no magic in statelessness.
    • 24 October 2024 at 12:15am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ John Zuraw
      Universalism and statelessness are two different things.
  • 23 October 2024 at 10:54pm
    Francis Landy says:
    We cannot afford to be indifferent to a catastrophe that overwhelms all of us, amid all the other catastrophes in the world. The only thing that concerns me in Professor Zaretsky's very interesting and thoughtful blog is that it reduces Zionism to the dominant Fascist model represented by Netanyahu and his government. It is perfectly possible to be a Zionist and to be deeply critical of Israeli policies, of the occupation, and of the whole idea of a Jewish state that dominates others, as in the infamous Nation-State law. Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem would represent this point of view, as might Peter Beinart today.

    Professor Zaretsky is certainly right that the situation presents a crisis for Jews and Judaism. I don't think the only answer is to be non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. One can also be a critical Zionist, and an activist against the occupation and injustice, as are many of my friends. I also think he simplifies the motivations of Zionism. It was not just a reaction to persecution, but represented a desire for political responsibility, utopianism, and a sense of exile from their original homeland.

    I would add that the crisis faced by Jews and Judaism is not confined to Jews. It is a crisis experienced by all liberals and progressives in a world increasingly dominated by neo-liberalism and Fascism.
    • 24 October 2024 at 12:19am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Francis Landy
      what wonderful statement from a truly enlightened thinker. A lot to ponder here. I don't know whether Peter Beinart would call himself a Zionist anymore. (I also used to see myself as a Zionist). I think Peter -- and Jewish Currents generally-- stands for a single state that includes Jews and Palestinians. Is that Zionist, even critical Zionism? I don't think so. Also, while historic Zionism had socialist and other idealist elements I would not exaggerat them. The more we learn about the history, the less reassuring It is. But thanks as usual Francis.
    • 24 October 2024 at 1:17am
      Francis Landy says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      I think Peter Beinart does, but I can ask him next week when he visits my university. I think he says he believes in a Jewish homeland but not a Jewish state. That's fine as far as I am concerned. And you are right about not exaggerating the socialist and other idealist elements in Zionism. They were deeply flawed. Also, you are right - in response to another comment - that there is a powerful racist element in Israeli provenance and governance especially now.
    • 24 October 2024 at 3:47am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Francis Landy
      Thanks again, Eli
  • 23 October 2024 at 11:55pm
    Henry Zachary says:
    I am a post Zionist secular American Jew. I do not believe in the exceptionalism that Jews have historically claimed, but I do believe that many many Jews have achieved exceptional things. While I am horrified by the wanton destruction that the state of Israel has wrecked on the Palestinians and now in Lebanon, I am also convinced that the Jews, who choose to still live in Israel are the only ones of us who actually remember the unending tragedy of the last 2500 years of Jewish history.
    • 24 October 2024 at 3:20pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Henry Zachary
      Oh please, the Jews of the diaspora are every bit as aware of the history of Judaism as the Jews of Israel. Maybe more so.

  • 24 October 2024 at 3:04am
    Edward Luttwak says:
    Re The Post-Zionist Jew Eli Zaretsky
    Zaretsky is well known as New Left author. He has not studied Jewish religious texts, neither Tora nor Talmud, he is not a Zionist and he has written about may things but not about Judaism. Therefore he is a Jew only by virtue of his descent from 4 Jewish grandparents,. the Nazi definition. He advises Jews to give up their ethnic solidarity and their allegiance to Zion. The Bolsheviks had the same advice.
    Do not know what greater purpose he offers the Jews but whatever it is, it will be forgotten or discredited or both in a few decades or a century or two while Jews and Zion persist.
    • 24 October 2024 at 4:16am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Edward Luttwak
      While I do not claim to be a scholar of Jewish learning, I did study Torah for many years in preparation for my Bar Mitzvah. I grew up in a Yiddish speaking home and attended synagogue regularly for many years, including as an adult. I raised my daughter Jewish and she has done the same with her children. My parents were refugees from anti-Semitic persecution in the Ukraine and Bessarabia and I lost family in the Holocaust. Far from being Jewish because of my grandparents, I am descended from Chassidic Rabbis, notably Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev. Being Jewish is absolutely at the core of my identity. The New Left, much as I treasure it, is not. But Edward-- and I speak as one of your readers-- if you think that my profound sense of being Jewish obligates me even one iota to support an obvious reign of terror, being undertaken in my name moreover, you could not be more mistaken. I believe that in criticizing Israel I am being intensely true to my Judaism. And I never advocated an empty universalism, but instead upheld the continuing importance of Jewish identity and thought.
    • 24 October 2024 at 2:56pm
      Omer Karasapan says: @ Edward Luttwak
      One expects more from Mr. Luttwak than junior high level arguments that are little better than ad hominem attacks and do not get into the substance of the points being made in the piece.
    • 26 October 2024 at 1:37pm
      Rory Allen says: @ Edward Luttwak
      This is our old friend, the 'no true Scotsman' argument. Mr Luttwak tries to smear Eli Zaretsky as a 'New Left author', as though this invalidates his views. One might as well describe Edward Luttwak, with more accuracy, as 'a Far Right author'. He does not address the arguments in Zaretsky's piece, but engages in name-calling.

      The simplest refutation of Luttwak's claims is to point out that he is conflating two quite separate things. One is 'allegiance to Zion', and the other is 'unconditional support for the policies of the Netanyahu goverment'. Apart from the scope for disagreement about what 'Zion' means, it is clear that the two ideas are distinct: at least, to most of us. Perhaps the circle can be squared by assuming that for Mr Luttwak, they are identical.
  • 24 October 2024 at 12:58pm
    gringo_gus says:
    My great-auntie Betty Bloch (Big Betty) lived in a council block called Gay House in Stoke Newington, with Uncle Mickey, rumoured an acquaintance of the Krays, and for sure an accomplished pickpocket.
    She adored 'Jeremy', Corbyn, her MP, the only one she said cared about antisemitism. Religious zionist jews she'd denounce as 'frommers'. My maternal grandma, her sister in law, would always respond 'fanatics' , call and response.

    We were the normal jews, they were the oddities. Never in a synagogue, no bar mitvahs, but begels (pronounced by-gals), chopped liver, call me Sammy Glick or Dudeleh (for Duddy Kravitz) if I got too boastful about work, reading Leo Rosten, and lots, lots of books about the Third Reich.
    The political stories were of Cable Street, and Phil Piratin the Communist MPs, and ongoing anti racist struggles, particularly at that time against the National Front, and in support of Anti-Apartheid. How proud we were of Joe Slovo. That was what being Jewish meant to me.


    But at the same time we were told 'never tell anyone you are Jewish'. Once, my grandma asked my brother to tell him the story of the Golem, he'd been reading about, and she said 'that's very interesting Dan, but it is not pronounced 'go-lem' you actual say 'girl-em'. Yes says my mum, now in her eighties, she spoke Yiddish I though everyone knew. Wish we did when she was alive.

    But we were the mainstream, the religious zionist ones were the outsiders. Now it is reversed, the horrors and the torture that tore us apart which we felt a particular need to stop happening to others are now perpetrated in our name. Netanyahu taking Bolsonaro to Yad Vashem was nauseating at the time, but peanuts compared to the horrors of the current genocide, we must call it what it is.

    Anyway, a particularly London insight of all this is on BBC iPlayer, a 1968 One Pair of Eyes documentary (link below) by the musical theatre star, and beauty, Georgia Brown, nee Elsie Klopp, where she revisits the East End in the company of Lionel Bart, of Oliver! fame. Both come out of it well, and represent the Jewish majority ethos of that time. But in one scene Miss Brown encounters a meeting of a religious-zionist Jewish group, which she clearly finds difficult. But the underlying theme is they are the oddball cultists, we - she Lionel me, my family at the time - are the norm. Now, according to Columbia, and Israel we are not Jewish at all. As Grandma Bregman used to say, what are they going to do come and test my blood for purity?

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00t3mkz/one-pair-of-eyes-georgia-brown-who-are-the-cockneys-now
    • 24 October 2024 at 3:22pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ gringo_gus
      Thanks for sharing. A nice reminisce.
  • 24 October 2024 at 2:35pm
    Omer Karasapan says:
    Well done. Much here that addresses broader issues of identity beyond the Jewish one.
    • 24 October 2024 at 3:22pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Omer Karasapan
      Thanks, Eli
  • 24 October 2024 at 3:27pm
    Patrick Cotter says:
    Every American should question their moral responsibility in the way that Eli does here. It's hard for many non-Americans to give a damn who occupies the White House when it is irrelevant to American foreign policy, their waging of proxy wars, their programmatic undermining of Social Democracy wherever they find it in the world and their festhishization of their military. We can't care about the abuse Americans do to one another while they are abusing the rest of the world with impunity.
    • 24 October 2024 at 5:57pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Patrick Cotter
      Thank you Patrick. I completely agree. The world was closer to thinking straight about world peace in 1945 than it is today. And its the US that has encouraged the view that there are enemies everywhere, peace through strength and other terrible ideas.
  • 24 October 2024 at 5:00pm
    Kenneth Wilkerson says:
    I'm a liberal who was born into a protestant Christian family but fail to recognize "Christian ideas of progress, salvation and redemption, gained via the British and American nation-states" as essential features of
    liberalism. Explication is needed from the writer.
    • 24 October 2024 at 6:01pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Kenneth Wilkerson
      Well, let's consider Barack Obama. He wanted to avoid conflict and preached that the arc of history always bends in the right way. He left the country wide open to Trump. Much of the liberal world view is based on Christian themes such as reconciliation, ultimate salvation-- what the IWW organizers called "pie in the sky," you'll get pie in the sky when you die. These are a few examples.
  • 24 October 2024 at 6:19pm
    Apollinaire Scherr says:
    Eli Zaretsky, Thank you so much for this clear and heartening articulation of a livable position as a Jew. It's what I have tried to say, to friends, though without your skill and eloquence, for a while. I'm wondering: are you familiar with Daniel Boyarin's argument for the Diasporic Jew as the essential judaism? It seems related.
    • 24 October 2024 at 8:06pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Apollinaire Scherr
      It is related but a bit different. I talk about this in another blog: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/february/israel-and-the-crisis-in-judaism
  • 24 October 2024 at 8:49pm
    haym soloveitchik says:
    Who is this author? What is the basis for his wide-ranging apodictic statements?
    haymso@gmail.com
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:13am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ haym soloveitchik
      I think your comment has something "apomictic" to it. I gave reasons and cite authorities throughout.
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:41pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      apodictic
  • 25 October 2024 at 2:01am
    S. S. says:
    It is not accurate to characterise Freud as a "socialist" - and possibly wasn't the intention but the syntactical proximity of those words renders that impression. "Radical" would also be inaccurate where that word is taken in its political dimension. Liberal - possibly. In his later works Freud sighs heavily over the apparent risk of society violently shaking off the process of civilisation, lapsing into archaic regression. For which Freud prescribes the necessity of repression (by politics and psychology), and the minor outlet of sublimation.
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:21am
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ S. S.
      Freud was most definitely a socialist or, better, social democrat. The Wednesday night society was all social democrats. Read Freud's early stuff on marriage reform, which is how he got involved with Adler. Read his stuff on why the government should fund mental health coverage. He lived in "Red Vienna," a socialist government, which funded psychoanalysis to the tune of giving them a building, also the Zionists I n his group were all socialists, Read Elizabeth Danto on Freud's Free Clinics. Freud was definitely a socialist. He even said that if Marxists understood the superego "that would remove his objection to Marx." Read Civilization and its discontents on the role of labor in Human history I could go on and on. Wiping out Freud's socialism, reducing him to a conservative or a classic liberal (Peter Gay's view) is just another example of the fundamentally dishonest role of liberals in constructing the past they want.
    • 25 October 2024 at 11:11am
      S. S. says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      @Eli Zaretsky
      His affinities and friendships notwithstanding I still think it's a stretch to characterise Freud as a socialist. Esp. in the later works he points with some dismay to "that great experiment in the East" (or words to that effect) as an example for his argument against investing in "revolutionary" politics.
      And isn't his own statement worth consideration: “I remain a liberal of the old school” (1930)? So who would that old school be: Gladstone? J.S. Mill?
      I do appreciate that we can find some latent (or not so latent) progressive thought about labour, poverty in Freud's work, and in the free clinics. His explicit pessimism on the future role of radical politics in shaping "civilisation", though, at least puts him outside of the innate Hegelian optimism of Marxist theory of historical progress.
      Adorno provocation (in Minima Moralia): that Freud, having discovered the drives, then is complicit in their condemnation:
      "[...] what is fatal is that, in opposition to bourgeois ideology, he materialistically pursued conscious behavior into the basis of its unconscious grounding in the drives, yet simultaneously accords with the bourgeois contempt for the drives, which is itself the product of precisely those rationalizations, which he demolishes." (Section 37 --This side of the pleasure-principle)
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:50pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ S. S.
      I certainly cannot agree with Adorno that Freud sought to re-repress the drives. He did prefer sublimation, but he didn't think it would gain many converts. But he certainly sought to emancipate the drives, e.g. homosexuality. The basic point is that he was opposed to utopianism. His reference to "the great experiment to the East" was not anti-Communist-- it was a great experiment, at least at the beginning. He was a critic of the popular front, but from within. He was no flaming radical, to be sure. But when he called himself a liberal of the old school, he meant his commitment to Freilichkeit, individual freedom, not the worship of markets and hatred of the state (on which psi depended in Vienna). All social democrats are also liberals. I would describe my politics that way too.
  • 25 October 2024 at 12:05pm
    Andrea Zanardo says:
    Hundreds of thousands of Mizrachi Jews are alive today because Israel offered them a shelter.
    Yet, according the (mainly Ashkenazi) anti Zionist Jewish Left, they should have remained to die under some pseudo-Socialist (Arab nationalist) dictatorship rather than emigrate to Israel.
    This is the equivalent of human sacrifices in front of an idol, Socialism. And since the victims are of darker complexion, there is a name for this.
    Do your Isaiah. Being a light unto the nations does not mean throwing yourself into the fire.
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:52pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Andrea Zanardo
      I specifically talked about this in my piece. As Arendt said, when I am attacked asa Jew I respond as a Jew. I would never deny that. Like is complicated. One case the Mizrachi) does not describe the whole, but we cant ignore it and I don't.
    • 28 October 2024 at 1:02am
      whatnot says: @ Andrea Zanardo
      thank you for your funny little rant about the 'idol of Socialism'. I saw a documentary once, which featured Moroccan Jews being escorted out from their mountain villages for no apparent reason other than some AJDC apparatchik deciding they'd be better off living a second-class life in Israel. 'anecdotal pieces of evidence' of Iraqi Jews being doused with DDT upon arrival to their promised land, of being made to feel ashamed of speaking their native Arabic, receiving substandard housing, and facing all other kinds of discrimination from their 'mainly Ashkenazi' brethern abound, so it's hardly surprising then that having experienced Israel's 'socialist' founding ideals first-hand, they now tend to favour right-wing antics of assorted 'students of old books' like Smotritch or Ben Gvir (the open fascism I've seen among former Soviet expatriates is another story). See also substantial portions of Algerian or Iranian communities, which given the chance declined the offer, and chose France or Teherangeles instead (not that it stops them from falling for the bigotry of Trump or le Pen). Some empathy you must be preaching, but more importantly, can your 'old books' explain the difference between a 'pseudo-Socialist (Arab nationalist) dictatorship' and a Jewish one?
  • 25 October 2024 at 12:34pm
    Andrea Zanardo says:
    Prof Zaretsky is entitled to his own opinion ("Many Jews today feel etc etc"). However, polls, voting patterns and anecdotal pieces of evidence say something else: October 7 has planted the Israeli flag in our room of prayer, especially in the UK. See: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/josh-glancy-opinion-7-10-planted-the-israeli-flag-in-our-houses-of-prayer/
    So one wonders how these well-meaning neo-Bundist crusaders plan to persuade the vast majority of British Jews that they are guilty of the sin of ethnonationalism, that they should embrace socialism rather than spending time in synagogue or studying old books, such as the Pirkey Avot (by the way, 3:5 "אַל תִּפְרוֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר ). Outlawing Zionist organisations? Banishing Zionists from academic life? Sending Zionists to Siberia? Even the USSR failed at the task...
    • 25 October 2024 at 2:54pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Andrea Zanardo
      No, I don't think Zionists should be sent to Siberia. The truth is the danger is in the other direction. In the US at least, Zionism is preventing freedom of speech, claiming that defenders of the Palestinian cause are making Jewish students feel uncomfortable.
    • 25 October 2024 at 5:15pm
      Andrea Zanardo says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      We clearly have different perceptions about what is going on on campuses. I am a Rabbi, and I cannot share everything I hear. However, perhaps it would not hurt to concede that Jewish students who are afraid to walk around with a כיפה סרוגה have some reason. Or even try to understand   Italian Jews like myself (google Rome synagogue, 1982: ah, the noble Palestinian cause…). It’s called empathy. 
      If such a lack of empathy is the way anyone plans to recruit Jews into this universalistic, neo-Bundist (East Coast) Diasporist, post-Zionist form of Judaism, well... good luck. 
      Chabad does a better job. 
      By the way: My point stands. This position is a) nothing new and b) deemed to fail (see under: birth rate) 
      בהצלחה
    • 25 October 2024 at 9:06pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Andrea Zanardo
      obviously we disagree, but I definitely understand where you are coming from. I would never tolerate anti-Semitism in any form. You don't need to be a Zionist to understand that.
    • 26 October 2024 at 12:18pm
      Nicolas Dobson says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      "I would never tolerate anti-Semitism in any form" - and yet you seem happy not only to accept several remarks posted above which, at best, fall into the grey zone of anti-Jewish prejudice (muddying the distinction between Israelis and Jews, unprovoked malice, insinuations that Jews consider themselves superior, denial of antisemitism as a specifically anti-Jew historical phenomenon), but mostly concede that their authors have a point. Why? A robust defence of Palestinian rights and protest against this terrible war of vengeance and political opportunism can and must go hand in hand with a commitment to standing up against antisemitic discourse. Perhaps you have normalised this stuff, so widespread is it.
    • 26 October 2024 at 3:38pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Nicolas Dobson
      I would hate to believe that I did that. If I did I would want to correct it.
  • 25 October 2024 at 6:17pm
    Rory Allen says:
    The thought that occurs to me whenever I see yet another report about a bombing in which a further 20, or 50 people are killed in Gaza, is how differently these deaths are treated from the killings of civilians in Ukraine.

    In the first conflict, the official Western position is that the civilian deaths are deeply regrettable, but we will continue to supply the bombs to Israel anyway, so that it can defend itself (against what exactly, is unspecified). Regarding the Ukraine war, the West condemns the civilian deaths as war crimes, for which Putin and his tyrannical regime will eventually be brought to account.

    These two positions seem to me to be incompatible. One can consistently condone both the Russian and Israeli civilian killings, as some on the far right would do (including perhaps Donald Trump himself). Or one can consider both the Russian and Israeli governments to be guilty of war crimes, and possibly genocide (that is my personal belief).

    But to pick and choose one's attitude to murder based on whether the perpetrators are, or are not, our allies, seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy.
    • 25 October 2024 at 9:10pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Rory Allen
      The US is at the root of both wars. Russia and Ukraine would have fractious relation without the US but they would be forced to work it out, as neighbors. The US push to expand nato-- an anti-Russian alliances what caused the war. Similarly, if Israel did not have the US megabucks they would be forced t o find some reasonable solution. The fact that the US finances a monster state is the problem
    • 27 October 2024 at 5:14am
      OldScrounger says: @ Rory Allen
      " But to pick and choose one's attitude to murder based on whether the perpetrators are, or are not, our allies, seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy. "

      Not many Allied personnel were tried at Nuremberg. Hypocrisy is a highly valued quality among those who have the upper hand.
    • 27 October 2024 at 6:55pm
      whatnot says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      "Russia and Ukraine would have fractious relation without the US but they would be forced to work it out, as neighbors. The US push to expand nato-- an anti-Russian alliances what caused the war. "

      'forced to work it out', really? like 'you there, roll over' work it out? Eli must have forgotten that unlike Israel, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal, high on guarantees from assorted memoranda that it will remain safe and intact, and look how's that 'worked out'.

      and I trust Eli is ready to visit each and every ex Soviet block country and tell their clueless folk that they were actually 'pushed' into joining NATO, because having agency of their own - you got to be kidding, right?
    • 28 October 2024 at 2:33pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ whatnot
      there is no reason for nato. Russia threw down its arms in 1989-91. We just kept pushing.
    • 28 October 2024 at 4:38pm
      whatnot says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      'You' pushed nothing - countries apllied and joined to stay safe. Perhaps you also know who 'pushed' Russia into partitioning Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1790, or into cutting a deal with Hitler in 1939 to, once again, partition Poland and occupy the Baltics? It's quite amazing how with each 'push', poor Russia's borders just continue to expand.
  • 25 October 2024 at 7:52pm
    Jerold M Rothstein says:
    Thank you for this, Eli. I'd like to comment privately, if you can provide a safe email address to me at gestaltwork@proton.me.
    Jerry Rothstein
  • 26 October 2024 at 9:15am
    Rose Levinson says:
    Your remarks much appreciated, Eli Zaretsky. I'm in despair over Israel, and have no qualms about denouncing its actions. Sadly, its actions have also destroyed much of that anchor I call Judaism. I'm an elder, and was around when Israel was declared a state. I gave it a pass on the Occupation for years, but began questioning this some time ago. Gazans are being made invisible and vermin-like, not dissimilar to what was done to Jews. I'm in despair over Israel's murderous, vengeful cruelty. It will be many, many years of tshuvah needed before there's any redemption for what is happenig now. Thanks for speaking out.
    • 26 October 2024 at 3:39pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ Rose Levinson
      Thank you! I feel as you do.
  • 27 October 2024 at 5:33am
    OldScrounger says:
    In all the above I have found no mention of the fact that while Netanyahu clings to power he remains free to eat non-prison food. And as Thatcher found in 1982, there's nothing quite so effective as a "good war" for rallying voters and and others, such as friendly nations, to your cause.
    • 28 October 2024 at 2:34pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ OldScrounger
      thanks
  • 27 October 2024 at 1:21pm
    whatnot says:
    "After the Holocaust, the argument was made that no Jew anywhere could be safe without Israel, and this argument had merit when applied to the Mizrahi, the Jews of the Middle East, almost all of whom today have been driven out of places they lived in for millennia."

    but wasn't it precisely because of Israel, or rather its botched establishment, that Arab Jews ('Mizrahim', a more convenient moniker, was coined in Israel) suddenly faced violence in their countries of origin?
    • 28 October 2024 at 2:34pm
      Eli Zaretsky says: @ whatnot
      two wrongs don't make a right
    • 28 October 2024 at 4:40pm
      whatnot says: @ Eli Zaretsky
      well, according to your logic, at least one does.
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