Reflections on the State of Zionist Thought.

Examining the state of Zionist thought, as the State of Israel celebrates fifty years of independence and the Zionist movement passes the century mark, one is immediately struck by how little of such thought there is. In America, the question recently posed by Alvin Rosenfeld concerning Jewish fiction holds no less for Jewish religious and social reflection: “What are we to make of the obvious distance that our most serious and accomplished writers have put between themselves and the astonishing successes of political Zionism?” ¹ In Israel, where the successes of political Zionism pose challenges and opportunities that are seized and confronted in a variety of ways at every moment, there is of course a great deal of Zionist thought. Most of it, however, seems to be devoted to the question of whether there is any longer any point to Zionist thought—or are we perhaps living in a post-Zionist era in which the terms and ideals of the past no longer apply?

My purpose in this essay is to reflect upon the current state of Zionist thought in both countries, taking as my guides two recent works by respected Israeli thinkers: Yosef Gorny’s The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought (1994), and Eliezer Schweid’s collection, Ha-tzionut she-aharei ha-tzionut (1996). The latter book’s title has been loosely translated into English as Zionism in a Post-Modern Era; a more literal translation of the title would take us straight to the heart of the contemporary discussion that I hope to analyze here. What could Zionism, and specifically Zionist thought, become—“after Zionism?” Should we indeed speak, as Schweid’s title does in one possible translation, of a post-Zionist Zionism? And what meaning could such an enterprise have in America, where Zionist has for nearly a century meant something other than that which the founders and major proponents of the movement and its ideology elsewhere than America intended?

The paradoxes of such efforts to “do Zionist thought” are apparent. They are also unlikely to disappear anytime soon. These paradoxes point, as Zionism has tried to do from the outset, to aspects of the Jewish condition that are both troubling and unprecedented.

The View from Diaspora

Rosenfeld’s survey of American Jewish fiction in terms of its attention and (far more common) its inattention to Israel over the past fifty years begins with the presence of an absence worthy of the finest postmodern hermeneutics. The State of Israel, undoubtedly central to the public life of American Jewry since 1967, and arguably central as well to the Jewish identities of countless American Jewish individuals, figures in American Jewish fiction of this period almost not at all. Philip Roth, almost alone (and only in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock), has shown intense interest in the complexities of Israeli society and character, and shown the challenge posed by Israel—often voiced explicitly by Israelis—to the premises of diaspora existence. Why haven’t others joined the chorus? Why no major story by Cynthia Ozick, no substantial encounters in Saul Bellow—no echo in fiction of the insightful reportage in Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back? Bernard Malamud confessed, Rosenfeld writes, that the reason for his own narrative silence on the subject of Israel was simple ignorance. He did not know Israel well enough to depict it. Others, Rosenfeld speculates, have avoided the subject because they did not want to be denigrated (as Ludwig Lewisohn among others had been) as Zionist writers, i.e., propagandists for a cause rather than authentic artists. A third factor strikes Rosenfeld (and me) as more serious still: “most of these writers either do not live with a conception of Zion at all or . . . locate it, or whatever version of a promised land they are ever to know, on America’s shores and not in the Middle East.” ²

The issue, in other words, is not knowledge or artistic integrity but ideology. American Jewish writers, like American Jews more generally, have kept their distance from a reality that calls their view of the world and themselves into serious question...