No Parting Ways: The Crypto-Zionism of Judith Butler

Abstract

Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism is a curious thing in amalgamating Jewish ethics in terms of self-dispersal and political critique. The book hits its mark by pressing in on Zionism from multiple margin-points. In the form of a negation, its author, Judith Butler, argues the case against Zionism as a historical form of settler-colonialism, while philosophically she positions Jewish ethics against political forms of sovereign power and state violence. As a construction, the utopian core of the project is to advance a common space for Jews and Palestinians as a non-sovereign, binational compact, to open up new forms of cultural, political, and social cohabitation. Readings of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Mahmoud Darwish, Emmanuel Levinas, and Edward Said are themselves exemplary. Iconic figures, they have been brought in by Butler from their place either at the margins or from outside the boundaries of Jewishness. Their purpose is to perform critical work in Jewish philosophy by calling into question static notions of Jewishness in the name of a just and capacious criticalcosmopolitanism. Historically, Butler’s own anti-Zionism recalls the ideological heyday of east European Jewish socialism and of liberal cosmopolitanism and Reform Judaism in central Europe before the Holocaust and then the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. But with no little irony, Butler’s critique of Zionism bears no little resemblance to Zionism itself, historically considered. Indeed, the interpenetration of Jewishness, secularism, and cosmopolitanism were bedrock principles in the classical Zionist theories penned by writers as diverse across the ideological spectrum as Theodore Herzl, Max Nordau, Joseph Hayyim Brenner, Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, A.D. Gordon, Martin Buber, and Vladimir Jabotinsky. While these figures go unnamed and unmentioned in Parting Ways, they all rejected static notions of Jewishness no less vociferously than does Butler today. These were the most important critics undermining models that pegged Jewishness as “religion,” be that the German Jewish liberal religion of ethical monotheism or the orthodox