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Thinking Beyond Identity, Nationalism, and Empire

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Thinking Beyond Identity, Nationalism, and Empire THINKING BEYOND IDENTITY, NATIONALISM, AND EMPIRE A Dissertation Submitted to The Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Rachael Kamel May 2016 Examining Committee Members Dr. Laura Levitt, Department of Religion, chair Dr. Rebecca Alpert, Department of Religion Dr. Terry Rey, Department of Religion Dr. Peter Gran, Department of History ii ABSTRACT This project explores how and why an Americanized form of Zionism became an effective movement in American Jewish life. In the quest for a just and lasting resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most scholarly attention has been focused on the state (and people) of Israel and the people of Palestine. As a result, we have focused too little attention on the role of support for U.S. nationalism in the American Jewish community in sustaining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I argue that a critical juncture in this process occurred in the early twentieth century, as the United States emerged as an international power. Many of the early leaders of Americanized Zionism, such as Horace M. Kallen and Justice Louis Brandeis, began their careers as Progressive reformers and brought their ideas about social and political action with them into the Zionist movement. Brandeis in particular played a critical role in making Zionism acceptable to American Jews. As this Americanized version of Zionism has become normalized in American Jewish life, the principle of Jewish sovereignty has become widely understood among American Jews to be an essential guarantor of Jewish safety. To understand the roots and implications of this stance, I explore the genealogy of the idea of sovereignty, as well as the binary opposition of “Arabs” and “Jews” in Euro-American thought. Americanized Zionism, I conclude, is less a product of Jewish ethnicity or religion than enactment of a commitment to U.S. nationalism as a fundamental aspect of American Jewish identity. iii ACKNOWLEGEMENTS In deepest appreciation to Laura Levitt, whose belief in me has made it possible for me to believe in myself. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................... iii FOREWORD ........................................................................................................................ vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 1 Nationalism, Sovereignty, and the Quest for Peace ........................................... 1 Theory and Method ............................................................................................... 12 American Jews and U.S. Nationalism ................................................................. 16 Chapter Outline ..................................................................................................... 26 CHAPTER 2. AMERICAN JEWS AND THE CHANGING HISTORY OF ZIONISM .................. 38 Palestine and Jewish History ................................................................................ 43 The End of the Era of Consensus ........................................................................ 53 Enlarging the Compass of Discussion ................................................................ 65 Reconsidering the “Roads Not Taken” ............................................................... 69 CHAPTER 3. ZIONISM AS PROGRESSIVISM ........................................................................97 The Progressive Era and Its Legacies .................................................................. 98 Horace Kallen: A Generative Thinker ............................................................... 103 The Pittsburgh Program ..................................................................................... 111 “Pioneering” and Settlement ............................................................................. 115 Gender Trouble in the Yishuv ............................................................................. 123 Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 131 v CHAPTER 4. LOUIS BRANDEIS ON THE “JEWISH PROBLEM” ..........................................134 Between Idealism and Pragmatism ................................................................... 134 Brandeis and His “Zionist Conversion” ............................................................ 137 “The Jewish Problem and How to Solve It” ..................................................... 141 The Balfour Declaration and Beyond ................................................................ 175 Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 182 CHAPTER 5. ZIONISM AND CRITICAL THEORY ..............................................................186 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 186 Sovereignty and Secularism ................................................................................ 189 Jewish Thought and Political Theology ............................................................ 199 Arabs and Jews ..................................................................................................... 208 Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 289 CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSIONS ...........................................................................................264 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 275 vi FOREWORD I grew up as a secular Jew. Like many of my peers, I gravitated toward the synagogue world in my late 30s, as a way of strengthening my Jewish identity and impelled by a search for community.1 A lesbian, a feminist, and a lifelong antiwar activist, I came to understand only in the early 2000s that each of these identities—or, better said, commitments—was heavily inflected with Jewishness. Secular Jewishness, which flowered in the generation of my parents and grandparents, began to die away in my own generation—perhaps as a subtle aftereffect of the McCarthy period, or perhaps as an indication that the acculturation of American Jews had reached a stage where it was possible for many of the grandchildren and great- grandchildren of Jewish immigrants to “forget” about being Jewish, even as we contin- ued to enact the historical and cultural legacies of that experience. I am far from being alone in forgetting and later remembering many of the Jewish roots of my own identity. I begin with these details of my own history because it provides an essential context for my current project. Despite more than 60 years of living as a Jew, despite spending a good 25 years committed to deepening my own understanding of Jewish 1 The growth of interest in secular Judaism is reflected in David Biale’s Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Also helpful is Laura Levitt’s “Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference: Revisiting Jewish Secularism,” American Quarterly (59:3, Sept. 2007, pp. 807-832). A precursor to each of these discussions is the classic essay by Isaac Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” delivered as a speech to the World Jewish Congress in 1958 and later published in The non- Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1968). vii culture and history, including Jewish religious practice, I still find it very difficult to “own” this experience. Jewishness belongs to someone else, with a different set of knowledge, skills, and experiences—but not, I am sure, to me. This has more than a passing relationship to my own process of coming to affirm that I am a “red diaper” baby (slang for children who grew up in the communist movement). Because my parents were no longer politically involved by the time I was born, I thought for a long time that describing myself in that way was a form of conceit. Later, I came to understand that an integral part of this experience involves under- standing oneself as part of a community that no longer existed—much like the secular Jewish movement that I (did not) grow up in. Such experiences of absence and disruption, I think, also serve as a powerful compass for collective memory. What led me to this project can be best understood in terms of a series of wars, in Central America, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. I grew up in the era of the Vietnam antiwar movement, and I have understood each of these later conflicts in terms of that same basic template. (By contrast, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, so crucial in the “Jewish journey” of so many of my contemporaries, barely registered in my awareness.) For most of the 1980s, I participated in local and national initiatives as part of the Central America solidarity movement, focusing on the U.S.-backed contra war against the Nicaraguan revolution, as well as the deepening violence and terror in El Salvador and Guatemala, both of which were also funded by the United States. As an antiwar activist, I believed it was my responsibility as a U.S. citizen to educate my community about the history and present
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