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Jewish Nationality and Diaspora Nationalism: Reading Daniel Boyarin Through Louis Brandeis

Daniel Boyarin: The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto. Yale University Press, 2023, 195 pp.

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Notes

  1. Here Dubnow may be closer to Leo Pinsker (1821–1881) than we normally think. Pinsker’s Autoemancipation, written before Herzl’s The Jewish State, was not about a nation-state (and certainly not in Palestine) but a kind of “autonomism” where Jews could lead a national life within a multinational state. (See Shumsky 2018)

  2. Even earlier, the failed revolutions of 1848 mostly in Central Europe exposed how the supposed unification of nations were threatened by ethnic conflicts. This would rise to the level of all-out war half a century later.

  3. ^[See Halpern (1956): 24-69]. The “if” was essentially put to rest in George Washington’s (1790) letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, in which he wrote: “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

  4. Butler’s (2012) Parting Ways also makes an argument for Jewish cosmopolitanism (See my reading of Butler in Magid 2023b: 75–96).

  5. I owe this last observation to my colleague and friend Tsiona Lida.

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  1. Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA

    Shaul Magid

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Magid, S. Jewish Nationality and Diaspora Nationalism: Reading Daniel Boyarin Through Louis Brandeis. Cont Jewry (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-024-09560-y

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