Description
Jews have been largely overlooked in IR. When they appear, Jews are addressed as victims of the Holocaust, bearers of traumatic memory and/or Israeli settler colonizers. Connecting these stories, Jews seemed defined by victimhood and statehood: the holocaust is central and its legacy is trauma; today, Jews outside of Israel are ‘in diaspora’ from that state. In its analysis of Jewish diasporist activism, this paper argues against projecting modern concepts of religion, race, nation and state onto Jewish history, instead exploring diasporist Jewish political agency on its own terms. Diasporist Jews do not orient themselves towards nation-statehood or to ‘private sphere’ religiosity. Instead, they centre the many forms of Jewish community that pre-date and/or challenge religion, race, nationhood and statehood (and respond to the ways these were constructed, in part, through antisemitism). Nor do diasporist Jews define Jewish diaspora vis-à-vis the Israeli state: Jewish diaspora precedes that state and its homelands are multiple, including Eastern Europe and the MENA region. The paper further shows that, for diasporist Jews, memories of the Holocaust are grounds for shared struggle with non-Jews against fascism and genocide. Overall, then, the paper undermines a vision of Jewish international politics as defined by victimhood and/or statehood.
