It came as a surprise to me a few years ago that I appear on the Jewish S.H.I.T. List—a right-wing American list of 7,000 “Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening Jews.” My name was featured alongside a clumsy caricature, in which I am seen sharing a bed with Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Tali Fahima, in an erotic situation. My inclusion on this list, along with many other Israeli scholars whose work reflects criticism of Israeli policy, has always aroused a snicker of amusement in light of the narrow-mindedness of American neoconservative discourse, which believes in issuing blacklists sponsored by the Masada 2000 project. Ironically, this “honorable mention” is now considered by some activists a symbolic achievement in itself—a stamp of (dis)approval of their political critique. The paradox is that while my anthropological writings in Hebrew on Jewish–Arab relations in Jaffa and my political positions are rarely read as radical by Israeli readers, once published in English for some Diaspora Jews, they merited blacklisting. Physical distance, vague knowledge of facts, and a powerful commitment to “defend Israel” radicalize positions and suffocate critique.
Obligation in Exile proposes a systematic theorization of the contradictions and complexities of a “global diasporic community having an overriding loyalty to its homeland” (p. 21). Ilan Zvi Baron convincingly argues that rather than viewing the Diaspora/Israel relationship in terms of loyalty, we should reframe it as a matter of obligation. To the standard loyalty paradigm that posits relations of equivalence between being Jewish and being Zionist, Baron introduces the variables of identity and power, thus opening up a critical analysis of transnational political obligation sentiments. While methodological nationalism and normative statism prevented a critical engagement with the diversity of Jews’ positions, this new outlook gives pride of place to the ongoing tribulations, conflicts, and alienation that mark post-war Diaspora/Israel relations.
Chapters 1 and 2 offer the theoretical scaffolding of the book. While the author warns the reader that due to their conceptual density they “will probably not be of interest to the more general reader,” I found them quite accessible. Chapter 1 opens with the fascinating story of the Damascus Affair of 1840, which pitted French Jews against their government’s colonial aspirations and in solidarity with the Syrian community in the wake of a blood libel. The story exemplifies the link between security concerns and a transstate religious community. Baron describes the Diaspora community as a national community, but this seems premature considering that in 1840, half a decade before the First Zionist Congress, Zionism was yet to be born as a political movement. Analyzing the conflict of political obligation in the case of Diaspora Jews working on behalf of Israel, Baron critiques political obligation theories (Horton, Klosko, Simmons, and others) and rejects the “particularity principle,” which conflates community, citizenship, and territory. Political obligation, Baron argues, “transgresses the sovereign borders of the modern state” (p. 53). Moving beyond Weber’s definition of the state as providing security exclusively to its citizens, obligation theory should deborder the state to explain what Jasmin Habib termed “Diaspora nationalism” (p. 68).
Chapter 2 further elaborates on the security aspect of political obligation by introducing a post-Weberian notion of power, which extends beyond the methodological statism advocated by Klosko, Simmons and Horton. Hannah Arendt’s notion of deterritorialized power amid human plurality provides the first step away from the paradigmatic theory of state-bound obligation. Following her lead, Baron states, “the transnational political obligation between Diaspora and Israel is not one of specific practice, but of commonality, so that the obligation becomes having a relationship with Israel and in the process participating in the public life of contemporary Diaspora Jewry” (p. 103). The second step involves incorporating subjectivity, identity, and power into obligation theory. Michel Foucault here offers insights not only about disciplinary power but also about “how Jewish subjectivity is constituted” (p. 109) in the Diaspora.
Following these relational insights on decentered power and transnational obligation, Chapter 3 links historical Jewish internationalist discourse to contemporary Diaspora/Israel relations. Both, Baron argues, are framed by security concerns rather than by questions of sovereignty. Linking transnational obligation to the universal ideals of Jewish internationalism provides a powerful historical reframing of the truly remarkable commitment of Diaspora Jews to Israel. Diaspora, Baron writes poetically, “became not a place of exile but a place of many homes” (p. 138). Since 1948, however, the State of Israel is striving to reduce this multiplicity and bring Jews “back home.”
Chapter 4 addresses the generational experiences and self-understanding of Jewish transnational obligation. Highly institutionalized, the activities of the Joint Distribution Committee or the Alliance Israélite Universelle are facing new challenges that the author empirically unravels through interviews with key actors, diplomats, activists, and officials. These observations reveal political obligation as a product of a sense of self, rather than of questions of belonging and peoplehood. This yields a fascinating narrative field where “ambivalence” and sometimes “confusion” shake Jews’ taken-for-granted “loyalty.” Here, unsurprisingly, the Palestine question triggers the most emotional and “personal” reactions.
In the final substantive chapter, Baron argues that the Diaspora/Israel relationship reflects the profound link between critique and the future of contemporary Jewish identity. “Critique,” he writes, “is the primary site in which transnational political obligations encounter their normative potential” (p. 197). Silencing such potentially disastrous critique is attempted by portraying doomsday scenarios, and erecting dichotomies, which often collapse. Especially for left-leaning Jews, political obligation is not about obedience but about the ethics of critique, while for right-wing Jews, the chief task is to protect Israel’s boundaries. For Judith Butler, her (Jewish) diasporic ethics brings into conversation immanent critique and obligation. In all these cases, despite the growing divergence between the Diaspora and Israel, Diaspora obligation amounts to retaining an active relationship with Israel.
Throughout the book, Baron masterfully dissects the mechanisms of transnational political obligation by productively deploying classical and contemporary theories on power, identity, critique, and the self, and by reading these theories against the empirical realities of Jewish institutions and individual experiences. In what follows, I offer a few reflections on the methodological, analytic, and theoretical thrust of the book.
First are the case studies and research design. The book draws on interviews with North American and British social actors who come to represent the Jewish “Diaspora.” This opens up both a methodological and conceptual problem. If global Jewish communities make up a triangle of the Americas, Israel, and Europe, the absence of what Diana Pinto called “the third pillar” is apparent. How do Diaspora/Israel dynamics play out in Hungary, France, and Sweden? The often-automatic conflation between English-speaking diaspora and the Diaspora with a capital D is sometimes disturbing. I would expect to read more about the differences not just between UK, Canada, and U.S. Jewish discourses but also with and within continental Europe. What Freud called the narcissism of small differences could play an important role in shedding light on the variations between different Jewish communities worldwide and in Israel. The argument thus ends up with a somewhat monolithic view of the “Diaspora.” An even more radical critique could question the political ontology of the very concept of Diaspora, which functions as an ideological operator that presupposes and even constitutes Israel as “homeland” and, conversely, Jews elsewhere as “exiles.” Analytically subscribing to these terms reproduces ipso facto a methodological (even if not normative) nationalism that many Jews oppose. Considering the bifurcated histories, divergent trajectories, and diverse social contracts of European Jews, the American model cannot be generalized.
My second reservation concerns the research method. The notion of Jewish obligation and Diaspora loyalty is akin to what anthropologist Michael Herzfeld called “cultural intimacy”—a sense of groupness that disavows any form of external attack on the group’s imagined coherence. Cultural intimacy, however, is challenged also from within, which makes the dynamic all too fraught. While the author identifies his methodology as an interpretive ethnographic approach, from an anthropological perspective interviews do not amount to ethnography, which requires in situ and often long-term participant observation. A thicker description and deeper fieldwork would also expose the differences not only in discourse but also among theory, statement, and practice.
Third is the question of dialectics and reciprocity. Throughout the book, obligation seems to operate as the unilateral responsibility of the Diaspora toward Israel. But we can rescale it in terms of reciprocal relations, and rethink Diaspora disillusionment and alienation as a result of failed reciprocity. Indeed, the book concludes with what could have been an important insight to begin with, namely, “the one-sided character of the relationship” (p. 223). Perhaps “the Diasporization of Jewish identity seems absurd,“ as Baron critically observes, but this is precisely what writers like Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin are arguing for in their critique of the negation of exile as an Orientalist and anti-Palestinian discourse. Similar criticisms could be found in the cosmopolitan writings of Jacqueline Kahanoff and others that do not take Israel as axis mundi. A dialectic perspective on both the Israelization of Diaspora Jewish identity and the potential diasporization of Israeli identity could fruitfully expand our understanding of Israel/Diaspora relations as an ongoing exchange and negotiation. With the growing out-migration of Israeli Jews to places like Berlin, and with the growing political critique even among Taglith graduates, the conceptual boundaries between Diaspora and homeland can be reframed as a system of relational reciprocity.
Baron’s Obligation in Exile and my Jaffa Shared and Shattered seem complementary, as they suggest a potential comparison between Jewish and Palestinian Diaspora/homeland relations. Further research could compare the sociological mechanisms that connect Jews to Israel while simultaneously disconnecting Palestinians from Israel and Palestine. Indeed, the very notion of Jewish Diaspora looms large in Palestinian discourse on the Shatat (dispersion) and ‘Awda (return) in terms of what Edward Said called the “myths of imagination.” In both the Palestinian and the Jewish case, the image of the Diaspora is profoundly ambivalent—at one and the same time triggering longing and negation, a cosmopolitan potential of connectivity and a reality of ethno-territorial fixation.
