Zionism on the diasporic front

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the participants of the Jewish History Circle at Stanford University, and in particular Steven Zipperstein, Sophie Roberts, and Dan Heller, for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

 1 Dubnow, “Diaspora,” 126–30.

 2 “List of Diasporas,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diasporas (accessed 3 October 2010).

 3 Fortier, “Queer Diaspora,” 183–98; Neal and Bohon, “The Dixie Diaspora,” 181–212; Bauman, Dixie Diaspora; Ayres and Entinger, Deaf Diaspora; Everett, Digital Diaspora.

 4 Minahan, Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations.

 5 Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 3.

 6 Smith, “Zionism and Diaspora Nationalism.”

 7 Tölölyan, “The Contemporary Discourse of Diaspora Studies,” 648–49 and 653. The irony is that a decade earlier Tölölyan was among those who extended the concept to apply to an increasing number of cases, including some in which there was no clear connection that the displaced community maintained with a homeland. See idem, “Rethinking Diaspora(s).” It is noteworthy also that since its launch in 1991 the journal Diaspora has sparsely dealt with Jewish diasporas.

 8 Sen, Identity and Violence, esp. chaps. 7–8.

 9 Myers, Between Jew and Arab; Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken.

10 Brodetsky, Memoirs, 123, 124–25.

11 Blumenfeld, Erlebte Judenfrage.

12 Yehoshua, “The Meaning of Homeland.”

13 Probably the most influential tract in this respect is Raz-Krakotzkin, “Galut betokh ribonut.” Although Raz-Krakotzkin's essay criticized primarily the “Negation of Exile” in Jewish-Israeli culture, it became almost a truism that this idea provides Zionism's ideological kernel and creates the rather misleading illusion that this was a common denominator uniting all Zionists. See for example a recent analysis of Leo Strauss's approach towards Zionism, which relies heavily on this presupposition, in Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile. Such a reading is highly problematic, to say the least.

14 Endelman, “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England.”

15 Dubnov, “Between Liberalism and Jewish Nationalism.”

16 Relatively recent examples of the search for this “core” idea in Zionism (which tends to label ideological diversity as “heresy” or “deviation”) can be found in Gorny and Netzer, “‘Avodat ha-hoveh ha-murhevet’”; Halpern and Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society; and Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology. Older studies which are based on a similar presupposition include Heller, The Zionist Idea, and most famously Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea.

17 Calhoun, Nations Matter, esp. chap. 5. See also Skey, “‘A Sense of Where You Belong in the World.’”

18 Serhan, “Palestinian Weddings,” 28.