A provocative manifesto arguing for a new understanding of the Jews’ peoplehood
Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what “the Jews” are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. The widespread conception is that the Jews were formerly either a religious community in exile or a nation based on Jewish ethnicity. The latter position is commonly known as “Zionism,” and all articulations of a political theory of Zionism are taken to be variations of that view.
In this provocative audiobook, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different—and very old—answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.
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“Daniel Boyarin’s stirring manifesto for a Jewish diaspora nation proposes an expansive anti-statist argument that makes common cause with the freedom of Palestinians and the rights of Black Lives. His rousing call for subaltern solidarity provokes me to ask: how does the ‘no-state’ solution address the claims for an independent nation-state or a bi-national state as articulated by the Palestinian people whose sovereignty has been repeatedly subverted and whose dignity is daily disfigured? Read this daring essay that invites your argument, not your agreement.”
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Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University