Category Archives: Zionism
“Zionism was not the only program on offer to ameliorate Jewish disability”
“So while many Zionists often relate to the Jewish people as an object with a problem…, I relate to my people as a subject with desires”
“The perceived failure of Western European nation states to accommodate the Jews gave rise to the political Zionism…”
“Our dilemma today is that at the very time that we desperately need an ideological linkage between powerful Israel experiences and the creation of robust Jewish communities for young Jews in America, Zionism is absent from the mix”
“…there is ample room for both people to live next to each other, with each other, in peace”
“After decades in which Israeli and Diaspora Jews were raised on the belief that the refugees left of their own volition, Shavit models a different narrative tack”
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Shavit offers new insight into the motivations of Israeli soldiers and officers involved in...“To understand Zionism in anything more than a superficial sense, we need to examine its indigenous origins in Jewish tradition”
To describe Zionism purely as a modern, socio-political phenomenon makes about as much sense as to explain my career entirely in terms of events since the day I was ordained a rabbi, as if my genetic heritage, my childhood and adolescence, my undergraduate studies and extracurricular activities had nothing to do with making me what I am today.
Of course there have been external tendencies and trends which have helped shape the nature of Zionism, among them Emancipation, Enlightenment, massive anti-Semitism, and the burgeoning of nationalism throughout the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But these have been like the winds and rains which influence the ultimate growth of a tree. Without seeds and roots, wind and rain would produce only gullies, not living organisms. To understand Zionism in anything more than a superficial sense, we need to examine its indigenous origins in Jewish tradition.
Roland B. Gittelsohn, Partners in Destiny: Reform Judaism and Zionism (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1984), 1.