The Necessity of Exile

No scholar has chronicled the changes in American Jewishness more succinctly than Shaul Magid. In this most recent collection of essays, he takes his scalpel to the American Zionist consensus and unpacks its functions, costs, and future. Magid’s own history moving into, and out of, Haredi communities and formerly living in Israel gives him a distinct vantage point for this discussion, as does his deep knowledge of hasidism, the Jewish far-right, kabbalah, and the American Jewish Establishment (as Peter Beinart is known to call it). This book features essays on separating Judaism from Zionism, Magid’s own doomed relationship to Zionism, and religious alternatives to the nation state. Magid also introduces the concept of “counter-Zionism” as a new way of thinking critically about, and thinking about, historical Zionism, without incurring some of the backlash associated with anti-Zionism. While these terms are not fixed by any means—and people often mean different things when they say “anti-Zionism” just as when they say “Zionism”—Magid’s concept matches what a lot of people refer to as post-Zionism or simply non-Zionism, to wish the people of Israel well while walking away from the notion that exclusivist Jewish state building is a good solution for either Jewish safety or political ethics. Instead, this in practice would look more like a “one-state solution” or whatever the most practical and morally sound solution could be in our current political schema. More than anything, this belief walks away from the notion that Zionism can any longer be an ideological force in solving the problems for the people who now live in historic Palestine, and that a new civic formulation needs to guide its future if we are to ever see a positive outcome.