Divertimento

A Portrait of the Theorist as Moishe Pipik

Consider this definition: “a Diasporist is a Jew who believes that the only Jews who matter are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who will survive are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who are Jews are the Jews of the Diaspora.”

We may well wonder who penned these lines. Was it Judith Butler, Edward Said, Alain Badiou, Enzo Traverso? Or perhaps another of the many theoreticians, philosophers, polemicists, pundits, or essayists who have recently written on Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict? All ask endlessly what an authentic Jew is. If garments right off the rack are prêt-à-porter, “ready-to-wear,” the answer these theorists give is no less a prêt-à-penser, a product of the “already thought” industry: the authentic Jew is perforce a Diasporist. In turn, the theorists point to the inauthentic Jew, the traitor to the Jewish condition, who is not a wandering Jew [un Juif errant], but an aberrant Jew [un Juif aberrant]. The negative Jewish figure is none other than the Israeli or the Zionist. This theoretical construct is light-years away from the vision Sartre lays out in the last pages of his Antisemite and Jew, where Zionism emerges as a possible form of Jewish authenticity. Sartre saw Zionism as a response to the alienation resulting from the Jew's having internalized the antisemite's gaze. However, Zionism for him was a partial and temporary response. The best answer to the “Jewish question” would have to be “universal,” revolutionary, Marxist; it would emerge with the abolition of social classes and national identities.

Much has changed in the theoretical climate since Sartre's book appeared in 1946. European and even American intellectuals have turned their backs on Israel. Zionism has ceased being championed by the left, which sees Israel no longer as a socialist, postcolonial society but as a neoliberal, colonial state. The Palestinian cause has in turn gained much ground. It has become good form to say that Jewish authenticity can be vouchsafed only in the diaspora, and that Israeli Jews or Zionists are actually false Jews, traitors to the true spirit of Judaism.

I shall now reveal my hand. The above quotation is not drawn from the prose of a theoretician of post-Zionism.