The Limits of Diasporism

Balthaser takes his book’s title from the end of The Volunteer, an unpublished novel by the Hollywood screenwriter and socialist Robert Gessner, written around 1948. The novel follows Gessner’s protagonist, Roger Jacobs, a young Jewish socialist from Wisconsin, as he moves to Palestine to work on a kibbutz, only to find himself caught up with the Irgun, and in the last moments of the book, about to be killed by a group of Palestinians. (Balthaser mistakenly refers to him as Jacob; similar minor errors about key sources recur throughout his study, evidence of a certain haste.) “All the promise hasn’t gone out of America yet,” Roger realizes, chastising himself for having ever believed that the Jewish state could be the revolutionary promised land: “You’re an alien in Israel, because you are a citizen of the whole damn stupid world.” As Balthaser knows, on its face, the revelation only sounds like a sentimental expression of American socialism; Roger rejects Israel, too late, because of how deeply formed his struggle is by his life and home in the Midwest. But in turning to The Volunteer for an original example of diasporism, Balthaser suggests that we read between the lines, finding a deeper and largely unconscious Jewishness inflecting the internationalism. Characters like Gessner’s show the way in which “Zionism [was] a violation of Jewish ethics of diasporic mobility and an ethic of cohabitation,” he writes, typifying a spirit of moral “homelessness” that runs from the Old Left to our present.

While the political motivations are starkly different, Embracing Exile is also framed by a scene of American alienation in Israel. Kraemer opens his book with a memory from the year of college he spent in Jerusalem in the mid-1970s. “I will never forget the day I heard excited yelling coming from the narrow street beneath my window, which I discovered was in reaction to the uncovering of a famous Byzantine road, the Cardo,” he writes. “How could such experiences not leave their imprint on me forever? How could I not be drawn to the land where the historical roots of my people were to be found?” (Never mind that he presents a Roman road as evidence of Jewish indigeneity.) But as the year abroad went on, the magic wore off. On Shavuot, Kraemer recounts, gathered for prayers with a group of American Jews who had recently become Israelis, he found himself troubled by a rabbinic commentary on the Book of Ruth, which suggested that Naomi’s husband and sons died because they had left the Land:

You can only imagine the enthusiasm of the assembled recent immigrants, inspired by their experience of Israel’s post-1967 “miracles,” for this particular explanation . . . But while they were nearly gleeful, I experienced a distinct sense of discomfort . . . I knew from personal experience the potential of Jewish life in diaspora, and though I, like many young Jews of that time, felt the pull of Jewish life in Israel . . . I felt that America was more my home 
than Israel.

Thus begins Kraemer’s search for traditional sources that validate his preference to live in the United States. But in addition to the Jewish right to be attached to American life, Embracing Exile wants to claim something grander. “Jews are citizens of the world at large,” Kraemer argues repeatedly, uniquely called to universal belonging—or what is ultimately the same, universal non-belonging. Discussing the origins of modern Jewish historiography, Kraemer finds this idea expressed in a line from the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz: “Being nowhere at home,” Graetz argued in his mid-19th-century history of the Jews, “[the Jew] is at home everywhere.” Graetz, of course, was taking an image of Jewish inferiority—the figure of the wandering Jew—and inverting it. His point was not subtle: The Jews carry a unique genius for life. Throughout his book, Kraemer reiterates the same argument in a neutral-sounding tone, overlaying the language of diaspora and cosmopolitan identity to renew Graetz’s case for Jewish superiority.

When Kraemer turns to even earlier examples of Jewish homelessness and adaptability, diaspora becomes evidence not just of world-historical intelligence, but divine elevation. This comes through most clearly in his discussion of Netzach Yisrael (The Eternity of the Jews), a late 16th-century apologia by the rabbi and kabbalist often known as the Maharal of Prague. Over the course of the text, Kraemer notes, the Maharal makes a series of alternating statements about the naturalness and the unnaturalness of the Jews living outside the Land, before seeming to decide that dispersion better suits the Jews’ role in the universe. The Jewish nation has been so intensely scattered by God, the Maharal explains, reworking a rabbinic cliché, because the world was created in order for the Jews to accept the Torah. And since without the Jews “the world would not have been created,” the Maharal writes, “the whole world is their place.”

Embracing Exile might have gone down a different path from here, exploiting the intense contradiction at the heart of the Maharal’s thought; after all, religious Zionists have often made the Maharal their patron saint, singling out his affirmations of belonging in the Land and ignoring the accom­panying negations. Instead, Kraemer simply holds up the authoritative stamp on diaspora, while recovering the Maharal’s argument for scattering as the sign of Jewish superiority. The Maharal, Kraemer argues—underlining that the rabbi himself would have been enjoying the comforts of early modern Bohemia—thus assures Jews today that it is “perfectly natural” to prefer a life of comfort in the diaspora to life in the Land (or State) of Israel. “Exile,” Kraemer further argues through the rabbi, confirms the Jews’ “loftiness,” our place above all other peoples, wherever we are. As the book goes on, Kraemer catalogs depictions of diaspora as a spiritually elevated condition across a range of modern Ashkenazi writers and communities. He finds it in Graetz’s argument for “Jewish intelligence” (Kraemer’s term) as the product of millennia of learning to belong nowhere and everywhere; in a mid-19th-century Reform prayer book published in Berlin, in which exile and scattering are held up as necessary for the Jews to carry out their responsibility to do God’s work in all places and at all times; and in a 1963 essay by the literary critic Alfred Kazin, who, in a special colloquium in the Zionist journal Midstream on “The Meaning of Galut in America Today,” reflects that the Jews are “not merely a people, but . . . a people that belongs to the world, that senses in itself a specific historical mission in and to the world.”

But for Kraemer, the key heir to the Maharal turns out to be the Israeli Torah scholar—and West Bank settler—Shagar, whose idiosyncratic blend of neo-Hasidic thought and philosophical postmodernism has gained much attention since his death in 2007. Kraemer extols Shagar’s particular brand of religious Zionism, in which “the Jew’s authentic place is . . . in exile,” as “neither political nor stubborn.” According to Shagar’s framework, which Kraemer wants his reader to call “Israeli diasporism,” Jews in Israel (and outposts in the occupied Palestinian territories) are charged with remembering that they are “first and foremost citizens of the world,” adopting a spiritual homelessness now that they have reclaimed their home. For Kraemer, Shagar recovers the Maharal-like idea that diaspora proves the special status of the Jews, while turning the cosmological argument of the rabbis into a postmodern ethics of the Other. From this perspective, God has historically scattered the Jews so that they might “acquire sensitivity to the suffering of the stranger,” a long moral schooling in anticipation of the day when we “returned to [our] land,” and found ourselves tasked with being sensitive to the “strangers in our midst.” Kraemer, for his part, is honest about who such an ethics is for: “In other words, Zionism needs diaspora, without which it becomes cruel and hubristic . . . Exile, diaspora, is good for the Jews.”

In a single sentence, the diasporist concern for the Other—the very unnamed Palestinian—thus collapses back into pure self-concern. Even when, in an afterthought to his argument, Kraemer suggests that his book might be of benefit to non-Jews, the ultimate point is to restore the Jewish sense that the world depends on us. “We live in a world full of refugees,” he notes. “As I write this, millions of Ukrainians have been forced to flee Russian bombardments to Poland and other lands, nearby and further away.” In our capacity as “the world’s most experienced refugees,” Kraemer goes on, Jews today can offer the model of their intelligence and resilience, gifted to them over 25 centuries, to those wishing to turn the lot of their exile into something positive. With this signaling of concern for non-Palestinian non-Jews—in Embracing Exile, the genocide in Gaza goes unmentioned—Kraemer’s diasporism renews an old theological promise for his Jewish readers: You are at the center of the moral universe.

The few times that Kraemer engages with the diasporism of leftist Jewish scholars, like Daniel Boyarin and Judith Butler, whose worldview might undermine this solipsism and pride, he so fundamentally misconstrues their work that one wonders why he is citing them at all. The effect, intended or not, is a kind of co-optation. Calling for a Zionist ethics of the Other, for example, Kraemer suggests that Shagar finds his closest living approximation in Butler, an ardent anti-Zionist. When Butler suggests that there might be “Jewish values of cohabitation with the non-Jew that are part of the very ethical substance of diasporic Jewishness,” Kraemer argues, Butler, like Shagar, is showing that “diaspora saves ‘Israel,’” benefiting the Jews. While Kraemer acknowledges Butler’s binationalism (for Butler, he adds, “Israel” means “the nation of Palestinians and Jews in Palestine”), even citing their conviction that Israel is essentially colonial, he treats their political judgment as secondary to their ethics, decoupling diasporism from any material interrogation of Zionism. Really adopting Butler’s analysis would have ren­dered this book’s core interest—Jewish elevation—intolerable.

Whereas in Embracing Exile, Butler’s ethical diasporism is a passing reference, in Citizens of the Whole World it serves as a key through line, enabling Balthaser to tie together a range of differently left and differently situated American Jews. He finds a prototype of Butler’s ethics in Howard Fast’s “An Epitaph for Sidney” (1947), a short story about a poor Jew from New York who spends his life fighting fascism in Europe and at home. Like Gessner’s hero, Balthaser suggests, Fast’s fictional leftist carries the “diasporic sensibility of Jewishness as a kind of anti-colonialism, equally at home and not at home anywhere in the world, adhering to a portable Jewish ‘law’ of supporting the weak against the strong”—or “Jewish values of cohabitation with the non-Jew.” Unlike Kraemer, Balthaser understands the politics of Butler’s project. But as Balthaser finds the same principle of Jewishness as “relational” and “dialogic” repeated across his book’s contexts, the Jewish concern for the non-Jew increasingly gives way to self-concern, and the relationship between affirming diaspora and ending Zionism becomes muddy.

Indeed, in a number of Balthaser’s examples, the diasporist ethic does not generate an anti-Zionism. Some of the most persuasive, even thrilling, moments in Citizens of the Whole World turn on Balthaser’s revelation of the Old Left’s common sense about American Zionism: For many if not the majority of American Jews in the 1930s and ’40s, he shows, the bankruptcy (and capitalism) of the ideology went without saying. But as he insists on the return of diasporic Jewishness in the New Left, in neo-Bundism, and in an array of groups and activists today, this default refusal of Zionism turns into a tradition of ambivalence, or “a non-Zionist Jewish identity.” Ultimately, Balthaser’s offering to the present rests on the link between diasporism and anti-Zionism, and yet his history shows that such a link is far from a given.

As Citizens of the Whole World progresses, the translation of an internationalist rejection of Zionism into an identitarian non-Zionism accompanies Balthaser’s methodological shift from fiction and types to interviews and personal experiences. Where the Old Left’s diasporism is argued for in terms of a law of solidarity, the New Left’s diasporism thus tends to be argued for along the lines of what Jewishness means for a given interviewee. It is in the midst of the shift to Jewish self-experience that the tenuousness of the link between diasporism and actively opposing Zionism becomes most visible. Often, as Balthaser himself underlines, the reasons his subjects give him for rejecting Israel have nothing to do with Zionism’s founding or ongoing violence. Reflecting on an especially representative interview with Myron Perlman, a former member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and founder of the Chutzpah Collective, he writes:

[Perlman] did not express the political problems of Israel—its occupation of Palestinian land and displacement of Palestinians, its militaristic culture, its hostile and aggressive relationships with neighboring countries—but simply, its foreignness. Israel is so often treated by Jews . . . as the fifty-first US state, that to hear it discussed as just another country was sort of shocking. Israel for Myron was over there, something alien and far away; his own life, Jewish, working-class, Chicagoan, was right in front of him.

You can see how Perlman’s experience might work to summon an American Jewishness that does not have Israel at its center. But insofar as Balthaser holds up his particular socialism as a model for us today, it is worth noticing that the first step of the diasporism on offer is to turn away from the material reality of Zionism, away even from internationalist solidarity with the Palestinians, and toward oneself. If there is a notion of doikayt (the Bundist concept of “hereness”) at work in such a commitment to the place where one lives, in describing the neo-Bundist rejection of Israel, Balthaser emphasizes what amounts to a feeling of irrelevance. And when that feeling does take on an urgency, it turns on a sense of personal violation, to the point that Israel becomes first of all an assault on Jewish identity: “The price of such a nation-state is the Jewishness it claims to represent,” Balthaser thus explains the attitude of another interviewee. Looking back, we might hear in this a kind of culturally identitarian echo of the Bund’s assertion, in 1948, that the Jewish state was primarily a threat to “the entire Jewish nation,” or “the Jewish population the world over.” Looking at the present, Balthaser insists that today’s Jewish left derives its shared essence from the diasporist self-regard of neo-Bundism, insofar as we organize “as Jews first,” before coming to anti-Zionism.

To be sure, “Jewish diasporic disgust”—Balthaser’s appealing phrase—can be a real political starting point; it can also, being disgust, mean closing up into oneself. In either case, the Jewishness that Balthaser describes is not endlessly undone by non-Jewishness, as Butler might have it, but constant and rooted, an identity that precedes every ethical turn. Elsewhere in his book, Balthaser argues that diasporism is not in fact defined by relationality alone, but by a “process of egocentrism and relationality,” or a “tense alternating dialectic,” in which the Jew, as a Jew, moves back and forth between an attachment to all Jews and a commitment to all persecuted non-Jews. Then, in a later chapter, Balthaser uses this line from a study by Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin as an epigraph: “Diaspora is not equivalent to pluralism or internationalism. It is egocentric.”