Description
In the context of increasingly militant Zionist consolidation of Jewish identity, this paper examines a transatlantic movement of people in the US and UK enacting Jewish identity without Zionism. This analysis does not seek to define Judaism without Zionism, or purport to detail a singular Jewish condition, but rather, to illustrate one possibility of ‘doing Jewish’. An embodied alternative to the hyper-masculine, ethno-national, exceptionalist ideologies promulgated by the Israeli state, this way of doing Jewish is embraced by communities in the North-Atlantic Jewish leftist milieu. Building on the work of Atalia Omer (2019), Santiago Slobadsky (2014), and Judith Butler (2012), among others, this analysis looks at the role of queerness in these spaces, asking how queer identities and their attendant critiques of sexuality and gender break down conceptions of purity, which often police Jewish communal boundaries. In addition to the productive tensions of unfixed boundaries, this paper looks at the deconstructive possibilities of queer time (Halberstam 2005) and Jewish time, examining the deployment of non-normative temporalities by Jewish people in movement spaces. Using both ethnographic and historical data, this paper asks, what possibilities do alternative relationships to time engender and what limitations to utopic visions remain?
