“The perceived failure of Western European nation states to accommodate the Jews gave rise to the political Zionism…”

Author Date

The perceived failure of Western European nation states to accommodate the Jews gave rise to the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl and others. To the East, even those (to put it mildly) compromised efforts at liberalization were too much for the Russian Empire to attempt; so it was that the precarious sense of insecurity and regular misery among so the much of the masses of the Pale of Settlement, and the emerging nationalism of those around them, gave Zionism its most pressing moral (and much demographic) heft. It was, moreover, the Eastern European struggle to rethink and reconstitute the tradition that gave rise to a different Zionism, as a project of cultural renaissance and, for others, of cultural and political revolution, not only against exile but also against Jewish history.

Yehudah Mirsky, “What Is A Nation State For?”, Marginalia (11 March 2015) [http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/nation-state-yehudah-mirsky/]

Related posts:

  1. “To understand Zionism in anything more than a superficial sense, we need to examine its indigenous origins in Jewish tradition”
  2. “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”
  3. “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”