Beyond Zionism and Anti-Zionism: A Future of the American Jewish Left and the Negation of the ‘Negation of the Diaspora’

Abstract

This essay engages the challenges and future of the New Jewish Anti-Zionist Left in America. How has anti-Zionism become an expression of progressive Jewishness and in what ways is this anti-Zionism itself a product of the Zionization of American Judaism in the past half century? The essay then turns to ask the ways progressive Jewish America can move past anti-Zionism and in doing so move past Zionization and begin to construct a New Radical Jewish Diasporism that would include new forms of religious/spiritual expression not bound by fidelity to Israel. This final section is more a prolegomenon for a possible future for the Jewish Left today to revive a new form of Radical Diasporism that is both not Zionist, and not anti-Zionist.