Description
In the US and UK, there is a growing movement of Jewish people practicing self-determination by cultivating Judaism without Zionism. Many of these Jewish people claim the condition of being ‘in diaspora’, mobilizing this concept as a political identity. As theorized by scholars of the black radical tradition, this conceptualization of diaspora, unlike traditional models that stipulate a people relating to a homeland (Safran 1991), describes a community outside the norms of nation-states and borders (Hall 1995, 207), a space of counterculture (Gilroy 1993) whose inhabitants experience a multiplicity of consciousness (Du Bois 1903). Thinking with these scholars, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (2007) coined the term ‘diasporism’, defining it as a political commitment to solidarity and a belief in a Jewish history and future independent of a national homeland.
Through an examination of Jewish community farms outside of Palestine, this paper enters an ongoing debate in international studies regarding the conceptualization of ‘diaspora’. Scholars such as Nadia Abu El-Haj (2012), have criticized the conceptual soundness of a Jewish diaspora connected through genealogy (Boyarin 1993) purporting to be anti-racist or non-national. Others, such as Carolyn Aviv and David Schneer (2005), take issue with using diaspora to describe modern Jewish communities, arguing the word does not aptly describe the dissimilarity of Jewish experience.
Drawing on archival research and interviews with members of Linke Fligl Farm, a “queer Jewish chicken farm and cultural organizing project” in New York, NY, this paper explores the embrace of diaspora as a third space and its deployment as a political ideology amongst Jewish community farm members (Our Story, 2022). This paper asks why members are drawn to diaspora as a political identity and what possibilities they believe it engenders. Amid the potentials and implications of deploying diaspora as a political ideology, this paper attends particularly to the tensions inherent in an ideology that claims diaspora while building communities rooted in land. It asks, if, and in what ways, community members reconcile claims of diasporism with projects for rootedness in a world structured by ongoing coloniality (Grosfuegel 2002).
