The Political Theology of the Feminine Jew and Anticolonial Criticism in the Writings of Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (R. Binyamin) during WWI

During World War I, Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (R. Binyamin) published in the newspapers Ha-@herut and Ha-po'el Ha-tsa'ir a series of reports and commentaries. In these articles, Radler-Feldman severely criticized the ongoing state of war, which he considered lacking any semblance of political logic or moral reasoning. His main criticism was directed toward the Allied powers, which, in his view, bore the major responsibility for the outbreak of the war. Radler-Feldman determined that the Allied powers also caused the war to drag on in order to protect and enhance their own colonial interests. However, they obfuscated these interests in order to implant the feeling that the war was inevitable.

This essay examines the way the critical approach of Radler-Feldman to World War I reveals the unique Jewish cultural position that he wished to put forth. It shows that he integrated into his writings elements of the pacifist-feminist philosophy of his time, as well as theological views of the Jewish feminine and anticolonial criticism. Through this unique cultural amalgamation, Radler-Feldman intended to uncover the political-cultural order that enabled the war to continue and that influenced the modes of creation of modern nations in general. Furthermore, disengagement from the prevailing political-cultural order would have given the rising Jewish existence in Palestine, according to Radler-Feldman, freedom from the patterns that such an order imposed on its formation and would have turned it into an entity unlike, and inimical to, the one that the European nations were determined to replicate.