On identity and the nation state – Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker:

‘Although the prospect seems scarcely imaginable now, there was a time, not very long ago, when American Jews were free to have no particular thoughts or feelings about Israel. This was true not only of run-of-the-mill Jews but of intellectuals and writers as well. And it wasn’t merely that assimilation—an act at once idealistic, pragmatic, and mortifying—was more pressing to a Philip Roth or a Saul Bellow than one’s relationship, one way or another, to the nascent Jewish state. It’s that Israel, and Zionism, didn’t seem like relevant objects of concern. This is no longer a tenable position.’

(…)

‘What has been repressed, for Blum, isn’t sex but Israel—both the actual state and its reconstituted form of muscular Jewish identity.’

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‘He is nonetheless drawn in, to his surprise and discomfort, by Benzion’s provocation that American Jews have ransomed themselves for the fantasy of belonging.’

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‘Part of this might be his sense that there is no place for Jews in the new landscape of competitive victimhood—that identity politics has become a militarized option for every minority aside from his own.’

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‘When Cohen’s book first appeared, it was read as a comic allegory about identity politics. This is true, although it was at the same time a tragic allegory about identity politics. The present moment, when the boundary between identity politics and global realpolitik has become blurry, clarifies the novel’s stakes. Two new books—Shaul Magid’s “The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance,” completed just before October 7th, and Noah Feldman’s “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People,” written late enough to be updated—provide judicious, sober genealogies of the political and spiritual conflicts that have afflicted Jewish communities in light of their relationships to Israel. Taken together, they invite a more capacious understanding of Jewish lives and Jewish futures in the diaspora.’

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‘Between the eighteen-eighties and the nineteen-forties, statist Zionism was a minority aspiration. This was true at virtually every point along the spectrum of Jewish observance. For religious Jews, the establishment of a state prior to the arrival of the Messiah was an apostasy. The statist project was avowedly secular—the endgame was the construction of a new Hebrew culture to supplant Judaism as a religion—and observant communities generally wanted no part of it. For many Socialist and communist Jews, nationalism of any stripe was a monstrous and decrepit ideology. They predicted, especially in the wake of the First World War, that it would inspire exactly the kind of exclusionist zealotry that had long been the bane of European Jewish existence. A Jewish nation-state would invariably squander the righteousness the Jewish people had cultivated on the civilizational margins: as it is written in scripture, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” For American Jews, the prospect of nationhood elsewhere undermined their faith in Jewish assimilation. They feared that it would summon the spectre of dual loyalty. These various cohorts didn’t necessarily agree with one another about anything else—they were, after all, Jews—but they shared a deep suspicion of Zionism’s commitment to shlilat ha’golah, or the negation of exile.’

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‘Paramount was the matter of historical exigency: the Holocaust had proved that Jews were not, in fact, as safe in the diaspora as they might have thought, and the refugees were explicitly unwelcome anywhere else. But it also had, in Magid’s telling, just as much to do with a special offer extended to American Jews. In 1942, Ben-Gurion travelled to the Biltmore Hotel, in New York, to meet with American Jewish leaders, who until then had largely been indifferent or opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. The price of their investment, he learned, was to concede that American Jews would not be living in exile—a state of spiritual impoverishment and deracination—but in diaspora, a more neutral characterization of dispersion. The American Jewish project could proceed on its own parallel track. People like Ruben Blum were licensed to look away and do their own thing.’

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‘Feldman’s argument is too sophisticated and manifold to summarize succinctly, but it amounts to the proposal that support for the Israeli state in the wake of the Holocaust has become not just the central political but the central theological underpinning of Jewish identity, at least for most non-Traditionalist American Jews. On the verge of destruction, we were redeemed by a miracle. This story became concrete and sacrosanct in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. The Holocaust itself was not enough—no people can build a sustainable and dignified self-image on the basis of victimhood alone—but Zionism transformed victimhood into triumph. This became the metanarrative that binds many contemporary Jews, from uneasy liberal Zionists to settler fanatics, to a tradition that can feel otherwise unmoored.’

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‘Feldman believes that it is possible, irrespective of one’s own personal position on Israel, to accept and even refine criticism of the country as a deep expression of one’s relationship to tradition, and perhaps even an inevitable one.’

Read the article here.

Underneath all that is called identity politics one can find the conviction that all assimilation is an illusion, even worse a betrayal.

I would argue that it was the remembrance culture of the Holocaust that helped identity politics to reach its heights, yes the ‘militarized’ option for all victims or anybody felt the need to identify as victim, and who didn’t?

I’m not sure of the culture of defeat needs a victory to become a viable culture? The defeat itself might prove more sustainable in the long run. The defeat can become a religion, the victory will just fade away.

Lewis-Kraus rightly suggests that the Jewish experience in the US is different from the Jewish experience elsewhere in the diaspora.

Philip Roth might have looked at diasporism as an inside joke, but even before October 7, 2023 diasporism had become a reality. Just travel to Berlin.

The better jokes become reality.