By Joyce Dalsheim
Author of
Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self-Elimination. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019).
Israel Has a Jewish Problem is a book for people who want to understand the dynamics of citizenship, ethno-nationalism, and settler colonialism in the space of Israel/Palestine. It helps explain the rise of Israel’s current extremist governing coalition by focusing on the struggle over defining Jewishness in the self-proclaimed Jewish state.
The historical “Jewish Question” was about what to do with Europe’s Jewish communities after the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Jews were mostly uninterested in converting to Christianity and were regarded with suspicion even when they chose or were forced to do so. They were subject to accusations of child murder, conspiracy against Christianity, and official and popular programs of expropriation, expulsion, and communal slaughter well into the twentieth century.
With the rise of European nationalist movements in the nineteenth century some Jewish activists proposed establishing a country for the Jewish nation as the best way to ensure its survival and flourishing. But modern political Zionism—the idea of building a modern Jewish state in the Levant—was not the only option considered by Jewish leaders. Others struggled against political marginalization by fighting for equal rights as citizens in their home countries. The chaos and global realignments of Europe’s two twentieth-century wars eventually helped political Zionism gain enough support among the imperial powers to result in the establishment of the state of Israel in historic Palestine in 1948.
But this new state did not end the historical Jewish problem. Instead, the creation of Israel transformed the Jewish Question from what to do with an embattled minority in Christian-majority countries to what it means to be “Jewish” in a Jewish-majority state.
The majority of Israel’s founders hoped to establish a model society: a secular, socialist refuge from antisemitism. But nationalisms are always exclusionary; they always engage in producing their national groups rather than finding them ready-made. If Israel was to be a Jewish state, it had to have Jewish people in much the same way that France must have French people. Israel Has a Jewish Problem explains how the creation of this new state created two new and underappreciated problems.
First, in Israel, the people of the nation—its ethnos—is not “Israeli.” It is “Jewish.” This requires determining what “Jewish” means, but that task is complicated because the modern categories of “religion” and “nation” are simultaneously separated and conflated in the figure of the Jew. The book explains how that separation and conflation works using stories of people struggling to be Jewish in ways they see fit during their everyday life in Israel.
Second, producing and maintaining the nation takes time and ongoing work that we don’t always recognize. An ethnos is produced through socialization in schools and at home, through national historical narratives and holidays. Yet, contrary to what we might expect, determining what counts as Jewishness is not entirely top-down. There are struggles between more secular and more observant Jewish Israelis, as well as struggles between different kinds of observant Israeli Jews over the power to define Jewishness. Because religion and nation are conflated, these determinations can interfere with how people make a living, how and whom they can marry or divorce, as well as their ability to travel within the country.
To reveal the often-Kafakesque quality of these struggles, Israel Has a Jewish Problem is framed with excerpts from Kafka’s writing that demonstrate some of the absurdities involved in Israeli struggles over Jewishness. These struggles include a story about goat surveillance cameras on a farm, and another about a young man’s thwarted attempt to stop being Jewish by converting to Islam. (This turns out to be impossible because of the laws regarding descent.) Some of these stories are amusing, others are strange and confounding. After all, what kind of freedom can Jews find in the Jewish state if they are not free to choose their religion?
Ultimately, Israel Has a Jewish Problem shows that the forms of Jewishness that prevail in Israel, like national identities elsewhere, will be those that support the goals of the country. This means that favored forms of Jewish identity will be those that work with its settler-colonial project. Put simply, Jewish political self-determination has developed in a way that both limits the possible ways of being Jewish while also visiting devastating outcomes on Arab Palestinians in Israel/Palestine.
Joyce Dalsheim is a Cultural Anthropologist and Professor in the Department of Global Studies. She earned her doctorate at The New School for Social Research in New York. Her work interrogates some of the social and political categories through which everyday life is navigated. Employing ethnographic fieldwork, her research has focused on questions of identity and belonging primarily in the space of Israel/Palestine. Applying critical and postcolonial theory, she has used the case of Israel/Palestine to speak to broader issues of identity categories and conflict, temporality, historical narratives, religion and the secular, nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty.