So Tablet just published an awful article, ‘The Art of Christmas Avoidance: Feeling Jewish Enough to Enjoy the Spirit of Christmas in Israel’. Articles like this come out every Christmas, shaming American Jews for living in pluralistic societies and insisting that only in Israel, surrounded by other Jews, can one be comfortably, authentically, fully Jewish.
For the author, a Jew in the diaspora feels discomforted, unsettled, and out-of-place within the larger non-Jewish society. Confronted by Christmas and the many other culturally dominant rituals and behavior patterns of non-Jews, Jewishness in diaspora is visualized by the author as a neurotic and burdensome need to assert our difference, an unhappy struggle to maintain distinct from the non-Jew. In Israel, by contrast, ‘the sense of belonging is taken for granted’, one no longer has to work to maintain difference, and surrounded by other Jews in a Jewish-majority society, one can finally relax. Not needing to do anything particularly Jewish, but resting secure in the comfort that, for once, we are the majority and the Christian is a guest within our nation- this, for the author, is what ‘feeling Jewish enough’, feeling ‘secure enough as a Jew’ feels like.
Every Christmas, American Jews hear the ‘good news’ of Zionism from emissaries of the state of Israel. As this author puts it, ‘language, food preferences, traditions—everything stagnates in diaspora’- and only Israel can save Jewish identity in the modern world.
And every year it bears repeating- no, Zionists, Jewishness does not stagnate in diaspora, it is not ‘less than’, it is not insecure in itself. Jewish culture, spirituality, philosophy, and life flourished for *thousands of years* in the diaspora- long before your fledgling Maccabee-cosplay experiment was a twinkle in Herzl’s eye. Diaspora is the lifeblood of Jewish peoplehood.
Yes, it takes work to maintain Jewish particularity and difference within a larger non-Jewish society, but this does not make one ‘not Jewish enough’, ‘not secure enough’ or ‘less than’ anything. In fact, the very substance of Jewish identity, as articulated in the Torah and concretized in ritual developed over millenia, is that we are commanded to mark, perform and reaffirm our difference, to celebrate our particularity by enacting rituals that distinguish us from non-Jews. This isn’t an unhappy burden, as the author asserts; we are commanded to rejoice in it. It is the beating heart of Jewish peoplehood.
Zionism needs to hold a monopoly on Jewish authenticity, in order for its project to remain compelling for Jews worldwide. So it shames Jews all over the world into thinking that Jewish life in the diaspora is an insurmountable contradiction, a curse, and that the only way to remain fully, authentically Jewish in the modern world, is to live in a Jewish-majority society.
Articles like this come out every year around Christmastime, reinforcing the American Jewish inferiority complex, beckoning us to swallow a fantasy vision of Israel as symbol of Jewish fulfillment. This diaspora-shaming mentality is deeply ingrained in Zionism, and not surprisingly, American Jews who internalize this diaspora self-hatred tend to overcompensate by performing the most unflinching, uncompromising support for Israel’s policies at all costs.
Normally, the gospel announced by these Zionist emissaries is that in the diaspora, Jews will assimilate into non-Jewish society, will lose all desire to remain Jewish, and only in Israel can Jews maintain their difference. In this particular article, however, the argument is reversed. Only in the diaspora, the author asserts, do we have do to the tedious work of maintaining our difference, while in Israel we can drop all pretenses, assimilate, and stop working so hard to remain Jewish. The ‘authentic Jewishness’ coveted by the author in Israel is ‘mundane’, as she puts it, in the truest sense- it is a simple, effortless, normalized national identity. One feels ‘fully Jewish’ in Israel like a Frenchman feels ‘fully French’ in France. For the author, this is what our ancestors envisioned when, for generations, they prayed, with tears in their eyes, towards Jerusalem; it’s really as simple as that.
But this is actually a mockery of what makes Jewishness special. For thousands of years, our cultures have flourished precisely through the hard work of maintaining distinctiveness, while also dynamically cross-fertilizing with the cultures around us. Living for millennia across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and around the world, the vibrancy of Jewishness has come from the creative tension generated by dwelling amongst others, influencing and being influenced by the larger non-Jewish world.
Granted, the problems of assimilation in the modern world are real. Ever since the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), modern Jews have been grappling with how to maintain vibrant Jewish peoplehood in pluralistic, individualist modern societies. The internal structure of Jewish communities changed drastically under the liberalizing pressures of the modern, secular world, and like many other cultures, much has been radically transformed, and much has been lost.
But is Zionism- the move to close ourselves off in an all-Jewish society, to live by the sword, and to lord over another people- really the answer to the challenges posed to Jewishness by modernity? Does Israeli Jewish society- dominated by an Ashkenazi elite, addicted to occupation and the racism it engenders, ruptured by religious antagonisms, lurching towards fascism- really represent the apotheosis of Jewish peoplehood, the consummation and deepest flourishing of our culture and life?
I’m sorry writers like this don’t feel ‘Jewish enough’ outside Israel, but that’s their problem, and it’s a sentiment utterly foreign to Jewish history and memory. Living amongst others, navigating our relationship to those others, transforming and being transformed by them, while maintaining a strong sense of our own identity and community- this is what has defined and animated the Jewish experience ‘from time immemorial’. The modern world continues to pose many questions and challenges to Jewish peoplehood, but conjuring up a nation-state of our own to rescue and normalize us is hardly a worthy answer to these questions. It’s a wish-fulfillment that grows more destructive every day, not only to Palestinians, but to the Jewish soul as well.
