Jewish tradition is internally oriented and self-reflecting. As the concluding refrain of Yom Kippur, the Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father Our King, splits the difference between maintaining vigilance vis-a-vis anti-Jewish violence and communal sin and iniquity. The prayer holds the tense balance between the scourge of people who hate us and the core problem of communal transgression. Deeply skeptical, there’s not much one can do, only God can blot out both.
The vidui recited throught the long day of Yom Kippur is a confession composed of t5wo parts. The “ashamnu” is a short confession, an alphabetical acrostic, a list that starts with the first letter alef scrolling down to the last letter tav. The al chet is a longer confession), each wrong introduced by the statement “Al chet she-chatanu lefanecha” (“For the sin which we have committed before You…”).
The traditional list of personal faults is confessed in the first-person plural. Indeed, modern Jews pride themselves regarding a tradition where fault is communal. The truth, though, is that the litany of faults listed in the machzor channels the expression individual failure and wrongdoing, to the failure of the individual situated in community, not to the failure of the community as such.
Like any ritual form, meaning or content is secondary to the form itself. In this light, the Yom Kippur vidui is a structure or an envelope. The predetermined form is a placeholder prior to personal meaning, the undetermined individual content placed into the structure. The ashamnu is an acrostic chain of floating signifier in rhyme and rhythmic sequence. The repetitions of the al-chet constitute a similar structural form. The form itself is eternal and matters more than the content we bring to it.
“The circle,” claimed Vassily Kandinsky, “is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.” As a ritual of “self-affliction,” the structure of the vidui is a container for personal meaning, a deep interior place undetermined by the external stimuli or predetermined political exigencies. In the face of death, one stands alone with others, situating one’s own misery in the collective space of the congregation, reliant and confident in the mercy and forgiveness of God.
Reflecting on a human skull floating on the face of the waters, the judgment attributed to Hillel by the rabbis in Pirkei Avot is harsh to the point of cruel. Because you drowned others, they drowned you, and they who drowned you will themselves be drowned. The dictum seems to say something basically true about the karma of cause and effect generated by cycles of social violence. Viewed across time from a long critical distance, no one is not guilty on the Days of Awe. In his own commentary at the dawn of the baroque, the Maharal of Prague has his eye on the collective and sweeping power of water as an apocalyptic force of total destruction.
Pirkei Avot 2:6
[Hillel] saw a skull floating on the face of the water. He said to it: because you drowned others, they drowned you. And in the end, they that drowned you will be drowned.
Maharal of Prague, Derech Ha’Chayyim, comment to Avot 2:6
In his (Hillel’s) own words, “He saw, etc.” One must ask, does the matter depend on the fact that he saw the skull floating on the surface of the water? For if he had seen it on the ground, would he not have said the same thing? If so, why does the matter depend on water? And if one says that the matter does not depend on water, then what is the meaning of the brazen language of the interpreter who would lick the dust, whom did the interpreter, God forbid, drown, that they drowned him? And likewise all the martyrs of the kingdom, how can we say, “Because you drowned, they drowned you”?
However, the meaning of this statement is that when he said he “saw a skull floating on the surface of the water,” the intention is not literally on the surface of the water. And likewise, when he said he “saw a skull,” he did not mean a literal skull. Rather, he saw one who was swept away, who was uprooted from his root, so that no name or memory of him remained in the world. And this is what he meant when he said he “saw a skull floating on the surface of the water,” because water is associated with being swept away. And the skull is at the head, which is to a person as the root is to a tree. We have explained this many times, that a person is considered “a tree of the field” (Deuteronomy 20:19), and his root and essence are his head, but this is not the place for that. And he said that he saw one who was swept away from his root, so that no name or memory of him remained among Israel. And this is not the case for the righteous, for they are not considered to have been completely swept away, as their memory remains as a blessing forever and ever, so this is not called “being swept away.” But being swept away is when everything is swept away, and there is no longer any memory or name for them.
And he said, “Because you drowned, they drowned you.” For if he had not drowned another, he would not have been drowned, because this matter is related to being swept away, for the one who sweeps away is swept away. And it seems that every one who sweeps away is swept away, for water in particular is the one that sweeps, and every part of the one that sweeps, another part of water comes after it and also sweeps away the first waters, and so on forever, so that you see from this that the one who sweeps away is swept away. And this is why he said that he “saw a skull floating on the surface of the water,” and did not say that he just saw a skull, because this thing is found only in water, which is a master of sweeping, for they sweep with force, and also every part of them that sweeps is swept away. And the intention is that he saw one who was swept away with force like the water, where every part is swept away with force from the one who sweeps. And about this he decreed on him, that if he had not swept away another, he would not have been swept away. But because he swept away another, and he had the quality of the sweeping waters, and they are masters of being swept away, and every part of the water that sweeps is swept away. And so this one also was a master of being swept away to sweep away another, and therefore he was also swept away. And in the end, those who sweep will also be swept away, just as it is with water. And all of this is caused by the force of being swept away, which destroys and brings one to non-existence, and therefore he also becomes non-existent. And this is what he meant when he said, “Because you drowned, they drowned you,” meaning that he was completely destroying one, and was destroying him and sweeping him away with force, therefore he also was swept away with force, because he clung to non-existence completely, and therefore he was swept away with force, and understand this. And this is the meaning of him “seeing it floating on the surface of the water,” meaning that he saw one who was completely swept away.
And you might ask, if so, whom did the first one who was swept away sweep away, for you must have a first one who was swept away. And if we say that the first one had a sin himself and therefore was swept away, then why did he decree, “Because you drowned, they drowned you,” for perhaps this was because of his sin. And it can be said, that certainly the first one, because of his sin, was destined to be swept away, for many wicked people are swept away. And what he decreed about this, “Because you drowned, they drowned you,” and did not say that he was wicked, is because of this he said that he “saw a skull floating on the surface of the water,” which means that he was completely swept away and uprooted, as we have explained, and certainly a sweeping like this can only be said because he also swept away another. For even if he sinned, he is not swept away with force and completely uprooted. But the first one who was swept away, was not like this, for it can be said that he was swept away because of his sin, but not a complete sweeping away. And in any case, the one who swept him away was completely swept away. Like this skull that was floating on the surface of the water, which was completely uprooted. And he used the direct address, “Because you drowned, they drowned you,” and did not say because he drowned, etc., because Hillel said his words to the skull that was floating on the surface of the water, meaning, “You, the skull that you are floating on the surface of the water, whom they swept away.” And therefore he used the direct address, because he spoke thus only about this skull that he saw floating on the surface of the water, and if a skull were on the ground, he would not have said so, therefore he spoke in the direct address, and everything will be resolved. Also, it will be resolved that many murderers died in their beds, for here it is only about the skull that was floating on the surface of the water, which performed a powerful sweeping and completely uprooted another, and about him he said, “Because you drowned, they drowned you,” but about other murderers he did not say this.
And in any case, it is not difficult even without this, for this is the meaning; “Because you drowned, they drowned you, and in the end your drowners will also be drowned.” And if they are not drowned in this world, then all the more so they will be drowned in the World to Come, and this is certainly an even greater sweeping away, and in any case they will be drowned. For every punishment that comes with force is called “sweeping away,” for the term “sweeping away” is used for something that is done with great force, and this is called “sweeping away.” The first difficulty, who swept away the first one who was swept away, is also not difficult, even though it is certainly possible to attribute it to the sin, it is more appropriate to attribute it to the sweeping away that is said to be “because you drowned, they drowned you” than to attribute it to sin, for this matter, which is the sweeping away, is appropriate for one who swept away, but to attribute it to sin, which is more distant, one does not attribute it. As we say in the first chapter of Tractate Berachot (5a), if a person sees afflictions coming upon him, he should examine his deeds, and if he does not find (a reason), he should attribute it to the neglect of Torah study. And in any case, in the first case one should attribute it to sin, for afflictions are more appropriate to come upon one who has sinned, than to attribute it to another matter. And so here, he would attribute it to something that is first and precedes this, because he drowned. But the first one who was swept away certainly was because of the sin, and there is no difficulty.
And now you will also resolve the fact that he used “they drowned you” in the plural, “and in the end your drowners will be drowned,” for he spoke in a general way, and a single person does not sweep away another so much that he no longer has a root, and therefore he said “they drowned you.” But there is another reason for the use of the plural, for he hinted at the explanation we gave, because the main sweepers are the waters, and they are called in the plural everywhere, and you will not find the singular form for water. And in relation to sweeping away it is also said (Psalms 32:6) “for a flood of many waters.” And the reason is that the singular is not associated with sweeping away, and it does not have the power of sweeping, which is an action that spreads and sweeps everything. Therefore, sweeping away is associated with water, which has the power of many, spreading and sweeping in all directions, and this matter is clear.
(AI generated translation; emphasis in bold added)
Look no further if you want to understand why Eric Adams was winning some 40% of the Jewish vote in NYC. Before dropping out of the race for mayor, Adams for the first day of Rosh Hashana went to glad-hand at the Sephardic Lebanese Congregation. One appreciates the political charm and genuine warmth. As reported here at the Forward, “Appearing at a Brooklyn shul, Adams was spotted in a Bukharian Jewish overcoat, known as a chapan, resplendent with Stars of David and ornate embroidery…Bukharian Jews, who hail from Central Asia, take their cue from Joseph, favoring coats of many colors, often using a dyeing technique called ikat in their weaving. Chapans tend to feature ornamentation like Adams’, though this particular garment appears to be bespoke….That frock alone is worthy of his name being inscribed into the Book of Life.”
Here is one way to juxta-position what is the combination of judgment, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the canny confidence with which Jewish tradition meets the new year. The relation is not one thing next to the other as much one on top of the other. It is a palimpsest. On this day, the world came into being; on this day, He [sic] makes stand in judgment all the creatures of the universe. The additional Musaf portion of the morning prayer of the High Holiday Machzor is organized into three thematic sections. Malchuyot, Zichronot, Shofarot are strings of verses drawn from Scripture The group of verses form into a tripartite image of a bright and absolute world. The glory of divine kingship, the complete clarity of God’s attention or remembrance, and trumpet calls that manifest the divine presence are transformed by liturgy into mercy. In this way, the verses are superimposed over the melancholic impression of the flock assembled before the divine judge in the well-known piyyut, the Netana Tokef. Assembled by the liturgist, the verses temper the fleeting balance between life and death that creatures encounter in the actual world. Also in the form of a palimpsest are the shofar blasts that punctuate the day — the clarion sound of God’s presence in the world as imagined and the sound of brute suffering of the animal we are in this space of appearance in a ritual circle.
The last time around, when no one was looking, blue chip Jewish Studies colleagues and elite universities provided cover to the rightwing Tikvah Fund and its network of academic programs and online platforms. The plan then was to use university programs and Jewish Studies faculty to promote the larger project of the conservative fund, namely insinuating anti-liberal content into U.S. universities and the liberal American Jewish public. Most of these programs shut down after having spent out the capital given to them by the Fund, which had at the time $66,000,000 to spend down. The fund moved on to support the anti-democratic coup still underway in Israel.
The one and only reason the Tikvah Fund worked at the time was because they secured what was the unknowing cooperation of Jewish Studies faculty and university programs in creating an anti-liberal echo chamber. That was the plan, about which I wrote at the great but now defunct Zeek Magazine and about which I continued to write at the blog. The Tikvah Fund was an organized shell game. It pretended to be the one thing it was not, a free and open forum, not an ideological platform. A lot of us were attracted by the opportunity and attention and financial support and were simply duped by the idea of “Jewish ideas.” It has since become clear that Tivkah and the related Tablet Magazine were always what they are now, a front for the conservative Jewish right.
The news now, reported the JTA is that the National Endowment of Humanities canned funding for important and innovative research-projects in Jewish Studies while funneling some $10,000,000 to Tikvah in the name of combatting ant-Semitism, etc. The Tikvah Fund, supported by and supporting the Trump Administration assault on civil society, is now in direct competition with Jewish Studies. competition comes at a moment of political straitjacketing and intellectual-budgetary austerity on U.S. campuses. Jewish Studies programs are today under the hatchet by university bureaucrats. It remains unclear how Tikvah plans to spend the money allotted to them. Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen calls the grant from the NEH “an ambitious educational project” that answers “the perverse ideology of anti-Semitism with the enduring majesty of Jewish civilization.” “My answer to the critics: come learn with us,” he wrote to the JTA.
The NEH announcement makes reference to promoting “the best of humanities scholarship.” The funding will support “the creation of a Jewish civilization curriculum for middle and high school students, implemented through teacher training and school partnerships; an expanded fellowship program for high school students providing intensive seminars on Jewish civilization; development of university courses in the Jewish humanities, to be offered in partnership with new Western Civilization BA programs at various major academic centers; public programs on the problem of anti-Semitism and the significance of Jewish civilization; a series of scholarly books on the meaning of Jewish resilience in the history of the United States and the Western world; and a fellowship program for early-career journalists who seek to write about anti-Semitism and advance knowledge of Jewish history and culture.”
But who wants to come learn with Tikvah? Who are the scholars who are going to come train this new cadre of Tikvah fellows? Who will teach these new seminars and university courses in “Jewish Humanities” at a time when the Humanities are being throttled in the larger university ecosphere? What “major academic centers” will host MAGA based BA programs promoting Judeo-American exceptionalism? An indelicate and unpleasant onus falls on Jewish Studies faculty. Who will teach the classical texts and modern Jewish literature, art, and philosophy? Will the Tikvah Fund even plan this time around to go to Jewish Studies colleagues in what is now, clearly, a bald attempt to fold Jewish tradition and Jewish life into the new authoritarianism in the Age of Trump? It is hard to imagine they succeed in getting much traction the second time around, if that is, in fact, the idea.
Jacques-Louis David, Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814)
“The emphasized man in the center, presumably Leonidas, instantly draws the viewers’ eyes to him. Not only is Leonidas more bathed in light out of any of the partly shadowed figures in the painting, he also has the most static pose while almost everyone else is in motion. In this brief snapshot of a glimpse into an intense battle, he takes a moment to reflect on the war. While he is the leader of his army, Leonidas cannot do this alone; his eyes are upturned toward the heavens, as if to look up to God and beg for help. His facial expression is one of contemplation and almost defeat, as if he knows the fate of him and his army in the battle…On the left side, a soldier carves in rock the famous phrase (in Greek), “Go, passer-by, to Sparta tell/Obedient to her law we fell”, conveying that Leonidas and his Spartans know their fate and are prepared to die, in the name of their country.” (Wikipedia)
Memorial stickers and flyers of dead soldiers are all over Israel. In Jerusalem, there is a predominance of religious messaging. I took these photos outside the Yitzhak Navon Train Station in early August. “Don’t touch our soldiers,” Know what we’re fighting for: expecting and preparing for the construction of the Temple,” “seeing redemption,” “No coexistence with them, Transfer now,” “Until victory,” “Why? Because it’s necessary,” “Bibi is weak in the face of Hamas, Likud is left,” “Not Area A, Not Area B, not Area C/ All the the Land of Israel is mine.” They express the values of the Religious Zionist community in Israel. Reports speak to the disproportionate number of soldiers from West Bank settlements fighting and dying in Gaza. But for what purpose? Will it all have been in vain. The signs in Jerusalem are saturated by religion. There is a lot of talk about what for this community was the trauma of the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza. One can only imagine the order of trauma and disillusion and rage this community will face when one day the war ends, Israel leaves Gaza without the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian civilian population, without building a single settlement.
I was in Israel this summer to give a talk about Zionism and the national home idea at a conference about People, Society and State after October 7. My talk focused on place and space and house and utopia at a moment of catastrophe and crisis. I stayed for 3 weeks. In almost constant motion, I went on long daytrips on the road; up north to Majdal Shams in the Golan and then alongside the Lebanon border and down to Akko, another south along the “Gaza Envelope;” another to Beersheva to look at architecture. From a position of great privilege, I went to see the country, saw landscape, art, antiquities, and architecture, went to protests. Except for one trip not in my control, I did not cross into the occupied West Bank, and that was into the desert between Jerusalem and Jericho before heading down to Ein Gedi. I talked non-stop with family and friends and colleagues and with their friends about the war and politics and religion. Stuck in place, all of the impressions drawn from the trip reflect in Israel the distance of a Diaspora Jew far away from the polemics and apologetics that dominate most of the discourse about the country back home in North America.
I’ll start with the four types of signs I saw consistently across city streets, roads, and highways. [1] In Israel, the hostage flyers and yellow flags and ribbons everywhere represent opposition to government policy in Gaza abandoning the hostages and continuing the war, often if not always in opposition to the government itself. [2] In blue and white, “together we will win” signs represent the government and signal support for the government policy of forever war. They are typically slapped onto state-sponsored public infrastructure (trains and prisons). [3] Stickers of dead soldiers, always smiling and brave, with encouraging, kitschy messages are posted everywhere, at bus stops and train stations and public utility poles. [4] Signs of political protest against the war and government. What didn’t I see? I know terrible and genocidal things are said, as if casually, in private conversations and across social media and at government dominated media outlets about the war and about Arabs; and about the deadly violence in the occupied West Bank and territorial fever dreams particular to the national religious sector. What I did not see on the main roads and streets in Israel are signs and stickers calling for revenge, the destruction of Gaza, death to Arabs, support for Jewish settlements in Gaza, and the like. One would have thought there would be more of this, some of this. It was as if Hamas and Iran and Palestine barely registered at all in public spaces. As always and especially now, the Jewish discourse in Israel is closed-in and purely internal. Polls show only the Arab/Palestinian Israeli public has kept its moral and political compass.
What one sees in Israel is a demoralized country, a state of simmering rage and political listlessness, a small place still reeling from the impact of the Hamas attack on October 7. Only a small minority believe that the Prime Minister is acting in the national interest. People understand that more fighting in Gaza puts the hostages at grave risk, that the army is burned out after almost two years of intense conflict, that the country is isolated internationally. Polls consistently indicate that most people in Israel don’t even hear the word genocide and they deny that there is starvation in Gaza or even that there are innocent people in Gaza. At the same time, people also seem to understand that none of this is sustainable. The overwhelming majority of people want all hostages home and the war to end now. In the meantime, they do what normal people do. They go about their normal lives; restaurants and coffee shops are full; the streets are busy with traffic; but people are sad and anxious, except, it seems, on the religious right. I am not sure if I only imagined it, an almost mute state of suspended shock and silent disbelief pervading the public sphere. I left a week before a large national strike and the huge hostage and anti-war protest on August 17 that drew a million people out onto the streets over the course of the day.
In contrast to the clamor for ethnic cleansing and Gaza settlements on the religious Zionist right and pro-Netanyahu media platforms, the silence in the public at large reflects a systemic failure of leadership both in government and in the opposition. There is no clear political horizon in mainstream public discourse. No one knows what happens next. If Israel is catatonic, it is because there is no “day after.” After October 7, almost no one in Jewish society can say “peace.” No one will talk about Palestinian statehood, despite the vague talk about some alternative Arab governing authority in Gaza. From Netanyahu, there is nothing but spin and nothing is to be trusted. But this impression is part of the problem. According to polls, most people think that what motivates Netanyahu and his hold on power is a matter of pure political cynicism, not the national or public interest. This is, in fact, a misapprehension which blinds people to the ideological core that animates cynical bad faith in Israel and keeps him in power. Netanyahu wants to destroy the possibility of Palestinian statehood; and he understands that he, truly, is the only one who can secure that end. The “total victory” promised by Netanyahu and the religious right is already pyrrhic. Against Palestine, the full-on rightwing government of Israel elected in November 2022 has caused severe damage to the social solidarity that once defined the State of Israel and the social ethos that once marked Zionism as a secular movement resting upon collectivist-humanistic values.
For my entire adult life, what has continued to draw me to Israel relates to the centrifugal power of place and politics, indeed the power of a bubble. In my professional and personal life, I have come, over many years, to understand the country as a distinctly modern built environment, a deeply social enclave, a network of roads across a miniscule landscape, a place politically fraught to the core, an ingathering full of intelligence and creative potential and human warmth, a secular and global Jewish site and home, a house as it were. The State of Israel is not the negation, but the quintessence of diaspora. In Tel Aviv, I went to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People to see synagogue models, the image of little heterotopias lit up in the box-like container of the exterior shell, encased in glass vitrines. At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem there are lions and birds at reconstructed synagogue interiors stare back at you; human faces from the Chalcolithic period, and Canaanite ritual art. Representing the ancestors, these are human faces staring back at us today from time. From their estranged locus in the museum space, they are an index of contemporary Israel, a discordant mix of things at a hideous moment of crisis –a beautiful country, a grotesque political culture, bad social structure, sharp social tensions, and worn-out people who see no clear future ahead of them. Never not political, the place and its potential are buried alive in the pursuit of a religious war.
Before the big strike + demonstrations of August 17, I asked a friend why there were not hundreds of thousands on the streets to put an end to a war almost no one supports. She said very simply that they are all in reserves. The powerful democracy protests of 2023 were mostly divorced from the occupation, as if the occupation was not at the very heart of the democracy crisis in Israel and the war in Gaza. In a similar vein, the first hostage protests after October 7 were not necessarily anti-government. Yet in the many long days since then, the protests for hostages have since become anti-war. This summer, the destruction and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza began, bit by bit and sotto voce, to fold into mainline protests. It seems clear by now, but not clear to everyone, that allof these things are part of one total meta-crisis –the anti-judicial and anti-democracy coup engineered by Netanyahu and the religious right, the religious exemptions and Jewish supremacy tearing at the social contract, the collapse of good government over more than a decade of rightwing rule, the self-inflicted disaster of October 7, the plight of hostages abandoned by their government, the war and the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the dead and wounded soldiers, the violence of the occupation in the West Bank, fallout from the Second Intifada, the settlement project on steroids, and international isolation threatening the country.
Religion –namely Judaism, namely religious Zionism– is at the root of this meta-catastrophe. Polls indicate that Israel remains a rightwing country. At the same time, polls also indicate that only a minority, predominantly religious, align consistently with the government. Mainstream Israeli Jews recoil at the “messianists” from the occupied West Bank and their representatives in in the government willing to sacrifice the hostages for the sake of ethnic cleansing and building Jewish settlements in Gaza. But people won’t talk about religion or about Judaism itself. Since the Second Intifada, Jewish religion has become sacrosanct in Israel, a political talisman too dangerous to touch; or secular people on the liberal-left simply don’t completely understand religion and the power of myth; or Judaism is a hegemonic force, simply taken for granted and barely noticed, like an ambient element barely noticed in the air and water. But religion is at the core of this human debacle shaking contemporary Jewish life. In support of religious supremacy in society, the principle actors in government today against democracy and in support of the forever war in Gaza, apart from Netanyahu himself, come from religious sectors. They are the ones who represent Judaism in Israel.
As I heard at a conference panel from one prominent Jewish Studies scholar from the left in Israel, the problem isn’t simply the rightwing settler Judaism of Bezalel Smotrich. The struggle between civil society and religion in Irael today touches upon Judaism itself, including “our Judaism.” This was ata special panel, organized with some controversy, at the World Union of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University devoted to “The War in Gaza: Facts, Law, and Judaism.” (I went to listen and support colleagues.) Presentations included the reading of testimony from Palestinians civilians suffering in Gaza at the height of the starvation crisis. A legal scholar provided data and basic points relating to what is permitted and what is FORBIDDEN according to international laws of war. The final speaker addressed the place of Israel and the question of Jewish culture in the international community, in the world today, and human life as a universal value. She was not the first speaker highlighting that this war in Gaza is a “Jewish war,” i.e. the first war in the history of the country using Judaism in such an overtly cynical and violent way, the first war to secure what are the uniquely religious ends of the national right, i.e. ethnic cleansing and Jewish settlement in Gaza and the West Bank at all cost.
Representing more mainline liberal Jewish politics, it turned out that civil society, politics and social democracy, secularism and Judaism occupied the primary focus at the conference on “People, Society and State: Between Destruction and Hope: Israel as National Home of the Jewish People?” This was a one-day conference hosted by the Eliezer Schweid Center for Society and Culture in Israel, hosted at the Hebrew Union College, also in Jerusalem. Invited to participate, Expecting normative “Jewish and democratic” discourse from the Israeli Jewish center-left, I was surprised by the more radical turn percolating at the conference. As framed by one of the conveners, Israel is in the middle of what is nothing less than a culture war. At this normative Zionist institute, with roots in Labor Zionism, colleagues, religious and non-religious, reversed the familiar “Jewish and democratic” formula in favor of a “democratic and Jewish”script. Gone was the “empty cart” critique of secular Israel and political Zionism. After the judicial coup and October 7 and the war in Gaza, more than one speaker insisted that democracy must come first and foremost, that the state has no legitimate role defining Jewishness or the Jewishness of the country, that Jewish religion in political life is a mortal threat to the State of Israel. Broadly recognized was the view of one speaker that the virtues and values of secular political Zionism and represent the only viable response to the catastrophe today wrought by the destructive synergy of nationalism and Judaism now represented by religious Zionism.
My own presentation at the conference looked at the idea of a “Jewish national home in Palestine” as premised on the claim that place is subject to basic polarities that are, on the one hand, essential to human flourishing, and, at the same time, subject to grotesque malformation. I cited Seyla Benhabib that, in response to crisis, it is the task of the critic “to illuminate those cracks in the totality, those fissures in the social net, those moments of disharmony and discrepancy, through which the untruth of the whole is revealed and glimmers of another life become visible.” In response to social crisis, humanist norms modulate the centripetal or ingathering power of placemaking on a foundation of democratic values. In tandem with norms, the utopian impulse affirms the centripetal power of space, opens out a critical and capacious sense of human community that flies in the face of a reality that can only be described, in the words of one Israeli columnist, “barbaric and belligerent.” Reflecting on the writing of essayist Jacquline Shohet Kahanoff from the 1950s and 1960s, I offered a utopian thought for today, one that imagines the place of the Jewish national house at peace and integrated into the space of the Levant.
In contrast to the Ashkenazi ethnocentrism of the classical Zionist project, it was my argument that we look for utopia imagined by writers such as Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, born in Egypt, she moved to Israel after statehood, and more contemporary writers on the Mizrachi left like Amiel Alcalay, and others. Their signal contribution to the discourse is to loosen up the conceptual field of Jews and Arabs, especially today when these formations seem so calcified, first, by nationalism and now super-hardened by religion. Levantine writers put under question the kind of nomadic placelessness with which Jews and Judaism are figured in so much postmodern and critical theory. Unlike most forms of post-Zionism and anti-Zionism, Kahanoff and other Levantine writers after her took for granted that the Jews are not a foreign, European implant in the Middle East and North Africa. Contrasting Levantine writers to Kafka, Alcalay speaks to a “concrete and sensual attachment to the fact and memory of a native space.”
Finally, I looked to Herzl’s vision of the New Society in Palestine projected in the novel Old New Land. Imagining new and utopian possibilities of cosmopolitan friendship and fellowship at peace with its neighbors, networked to Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad. No doubt a product of colonial wish-fulfillment, the reader is given to see in the image of the Old-New Land Jews and Arabs and European mixing together. They do so imagined on the normative basis of equality and friendship, not prejudice and domination (i.e. those essential features that defined for Albert Memmi the relation of the colonizer to the colonized). Imagined as a product of cooperative action, the cultivated landscape itself has been rendered open, not closed. David Litvak, Herzl’s prototype of the young Zionist, insists that the New Society established in Palestine belongs to everyone. Opposed to the forces of Jewish religious supremacy, Litvak proudly declares, “Religion had been excluded from public affairs once and for all. The New Society did not care whether a man sought the eternal verities in a temple, a church or a mosque, in an art museum or philharmonic concert.” In this utopian vision, the New Society was not even a state, but rather a cooperative association composed of affiliate cooperatives. But this was the danger. Anticipating the future, Litvak warned his fellow citizens that “all your cultivation is worthless and your fields will revert to barrenness unless you foster liberal ideas, magnanimity, and a love of mankind” (p. 153, see also pp.259, 284).
In one way, and only in one way, can Israel be called a “model society.” Israel is a model society not because it is “Jewish and democratic,” and certainly not because it is “democratic and Jewish,” or a fair and just society. Without confusing ethos and ethics, what defines Israel as a “model society” is the internal solidarity, one with deep roots in Jewish tradition, that defines Jewish society, a social contract bonding people together. The democracy crisis in Israel demands more democracy and better democracy, new social contracts and new social relations, a fair resolution to the war with Palestine, stronger pluralism, and Arab-Jewish cooperation and co-existence. After a long and bitter summer, representing majority public opinion, hundreds of thousands of citizens went on strike and were out on the streets in mid-August to support 50 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, only 20 of whom are still alive, and to end the war in Gaza. Israel is at once a normal place and a place of trauma. After the complete shredding of social contracts and the status quo ante, the death and destruction and waste of life, the future has to rest on a hope that can only be utopian. Utopias are, to this point, “very much wish-fulfillments, and hallucinatory visions in desperate times” (Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p.233)
