Jewish Anti-Zionism

… The other fragments, hundreds upon hundreds, were scattered helter-skelter, and a great yearning, alongingwithoutend,fillsthemall: first name in search of family name, date of deathseeks deadman’sbirthplace,son’snamewishesto locate name of father, date of birth seeks reunion withsoul that wishes to rest in peace. And until they havefound oneanother,theywillnotfindperfectrest. Only this stone lies calmly on my desk and says“Amen.” (OpenClosedOpen,translatedby ChanaBlochandChanaKronfeld) Ghosts of Home collects the fragments of one place and provides us with an artifact that is as close as we will ever come to “perfect rest.” I SidraDeKovenEzrahiisprofessorofcomparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.In2007,shebecameaGuggenheim Fellow for her current project on “Jerusalem and the Poetics of Return.” JEWISHANTI-ZIONISM ATHREATFROMWITHIN:ACENTURYOF JEWISHOPPOSITIONTOZIONISM byYakovM.Rabkin;translatedfromFrench byFredA.Reed FernwoodBooks,2006 Review by Rafael Chodos E very once in a while an importantbookfliesunderour radar systems; this is one of them. Although the original French edition (2004) was reviewed in some small periodicalsinCanada,Mexico, and Europe, it did not receive anything neartheattentionitdeserves.Thebookhas been published in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic,Dutch,Polish,Italian,andRussian, but it came to my attention only because my wife is Japanese: she reads the Asahi Shimbunevery day and there was a long, highly favorable review of the Japanese edition of this book in the May 10, 2010, editionofthatnewspaper. Many American Jews will be surprised to learn that when the notion of establishing the State of Israel was first proposed, andeversince,therehasbeenstrongopposition to the idea from within the Jewish community. This opposition is based on many grounds. It arises partly from the convictionthatJudaismisareligionrather than an ethnicity or a political enterprise: many see Zionism as an insidious effort to transform the religion into a kind of statism , replacing its focus on God with a focus on building the kind of state that arose in Europe during the nineteenth century and that Mussolini cast as the centerpiece of a fascist, power-seeking “nationalidentity.” Jewish opposition to the State of Israel arisespartlyfromthesensethatJudaismis a religion of introspection rather than political action. The image of the “muscular Jew,” which is so much a part of the new StateofIsrael,doesnotfitwellwiththenotion of the Jew who bends over a desk or table to study books. For some the opposition also arises from the Orthodox Jewish belief that the return to the Land of Israel should not take place until the Moshiach comes: to return in organized fashion before that is a sin. For other Jews it arises from a revulsion toward the violence and force used against the inhabitants of the land. Some see violence toward the Palestinians as a sin for which the Jewish people will be required to pay a heavy price—like the many sins of the Jewish people recounted in the Bible for which they paid through the destruction of the Templeandexile. Rabkin’s book traces the history of these ideas in detail, mainly analyzing sources from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, but also identifying their roots in talmudic, medieval,andrenaissanceJewishtexts. ZionismwasoneresponsetotheEuropean ,post-Enlightenmentdisillusionment with religious orthodoxy. Rabkin quotes the rhetoric of the early Zionists who said the Jewish spine needed straightening— that it was too long curved both by the weight of oppression and by the weight of and Lotte and their generation who carry its traces. “Many of us thought, Romania is not Germany,” Carl told us, [recalling the mindset of the Czernowitzers in the late 1930s]. Wehadinterruptedourwalkthroughthecity inordertohavecoffeeandapastry,butcontinued to videotape Carl and Lotte as we carried on with our conversation. “We were hopingthatwarcouldbeavoided.” Carl’s narrative, which is often cast in the first-person plural, has the immediacy of memory and the force of history. But theinterruptionforcoffeeandpastrymay be the most powerful testament to the “afterlife” of Czernowitz in the appetites and life projects of Carl’s and Lotte’s daughter and son-in-law. It is a modest counterpart to both the hapless pledge of the Jewish partisans during the war— “mir zeinin do!”—and the arrogant flagwaving of Israeli youth in Krakow or Auschwitz today. There are three layers of history and memory represented in this book: prewar , wartime, and postwar. But it is the last that is the most gripping: the journey that Marianne takes...