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A review by lpm100
The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance by Shaul Magid
informative
medium-paced
Book Review (1591 words; 5m47s to read)
Shaul Magid
The Necessity of Exile
4/5 stars
"Too many words loses information"
*******
The number one value of this book is that it is an overview of a lot of thought from different Jewish non/anti Zionists.
You have loopy Jewish academics on one hand (Judith "they"Butler) and loopy Jewish rabbis on the other (Teitelbaum, Satmar) that have separate experiences but mutual conclusions.
And in between are a lot of interesting thinkers (all with citations) that see reasons for Jews to stay right where they are. (MM Schneerson (p.280), for example, saw the United States as "a place where Jews could complete the necessary work of purification before Moshiach.")
There are a lot of interesting philosophical questions about what is Judaism.
Is it related to land?
Or is ethical monotheism place independent?
Does the diaspora maintain strong practice and settlement of Israel vitiate the same practice? (Some in the diaspora will assimilate, and others will be extra on guard to avoid assimilation. Not the same dynamic as in Eretz Israel.)
Diaspora Jews are just as Jewish as Israeli Jews, and probably a lot wealthier with fewer headaches. Can Jewish sovereignty be justified on a cost benefit basis given that nationalism is actually more expensive than exile (golah) when you run the numbers?
I thought I would give this type of literature a second try, because the first book that I read of this type ("No State Solution," by Daniel Boyarin) was about as reasonably intelligible as the Sokal hoax paper.
This book does have the advantage of superior readability.
On the other hand: Imagine my surprise when I picked this book up and saw that it was endorsed by.... Daniel Boyarin. Also, Magid cited Hannah Arendt as a source--among many other "interesting" types.
With the Daniel Boyarin book in my mental register: It really is a lot of old wine in new bottles here.
In many cases, we have academics (who tend to live nowhere on this planet) and Rabbis with corresponding training (also not so useful for living anywhere on this planet) compete see just how far from reality each can diverge / how many words can be used to say nothing in particular. (How else can you deal with the sentence (p.209): "In the case of Kook, secular principles were absorbed into a dialectical cosmology founded on a highly romanticized Kabbalistic metaphysics." )
It looks like this author grew up in a secular family, and he became a Baal Teshuva and then went to Israel and lived as a "Haredi hippie" (p.68) in one of their anti Zionist communities for about 4 to 5 years and one marriage and then he became tired of that.
Later he became a Zionist, a citizen of Israel, an IDF soldier ("second tier," one that never saw combat). And finally, a post Zionist/counter Zionist.
All things considered, this is an excellent exposition of critiques of Zionism / cases for non Zionism, but through Jewish eyes. (99.9% of people who call themselves anti-Zionists don't have this level of discourse, but instead use that designation as a fig leaf for anti-Semitism.)
Of the book:
-9 chapters plus a two-page "Outro"/20 page Intro
-297 pages of prose over 9 chapters + intro is about 30 pages each.
-104 sources (22 journal articles, ≈7 magazine articles, 1 lecture).
-≈0.33 sources per page. Not well sourced.
-No index
*******
MAJOR POINT ONE is that this book does not need to be read in order, because it is actually a bunch of freestanding essays (of relative degrees of quality) stapled together as a book.
I will just abstract one each, the best and the worst to review, so as to not to get too Talmudic (defined here as "writing an expansion that is actually many times longer than the source text"-- the Talmud is about 34 times longer than the Five Books of Moses).
MAJOR POINT TWO is that I can tell that this guy has done a lot of Gemara, because:
1. His level of hair splitting is positively...... Talmudic.
Example: In Chapter 7, he asks the question "Are the Jews an oppressed people today?" And then he separates anti-Semitism from oppression based on whether or not anti-Semitism has an effect on the ability of Jewish people to live their lives freely while being identifiably Jewish. (p.165: "In short, oppression is hatred coupled with power.")
But then he pulls (what he must know) is a switcheroo by defining the Israeli Jews as "oppressors" and Palestinians as "oppressed," even though nobody in Israel is saying that Arabs cannot live as Muslims / Arabs; only that they can't set up a state whose manifest function is to destroy Jewish people.
Or, could he mean that anyone who lives as a subject people is "oppressed," by definition?
Of course, he (again) cites Hannah Arendt.
And predictably, Maggid trots out the old canard that "racism is only true if somebody has power over somebody else, and people who are powerless cannot be racist."
2. Reality just does not exist for this guy. (The same way it does not for people who sit in the Beth Midrash for decades on end, avoiding any productive work. And who could tell you anything about any of the Six Orders of The Talmud, but couldn't tell you anything so mundane as the price of a gallon of gas or how to write a CV to seek employment.)
So, he talks about Aviva Cantor and Meir Kahane who insist that America is no exception to ostensible Jewish oppression.
It's almost like the author doesn't notice that 70% of Jews marry non-Jewish people, or that Jews have the first or second highest income of any ethnic group.
The author draws some bizarre symmetry between Jewish reticence to make a fetish of oppression for 20 centuries to militant blacks who do not hesitate to speak of their oppression (p.171).
People (*other* than black people) who live in the world that we wake up in every day realize that part of functioning in present times is to have some sense of closure toward events of the past - - no matter how horrific.
How much do we even believe (the multiply cited) Aviva Cantor? Immigration to Israel is the only solution to "resolve such oppression," but that's exactly where she does not live! (p. 172)
There's also commentary about Jews obligation "to conform to Christian America's perception of them" (p. 175).
I don't know what that could mean, because Americans don't have any religiously rooted perception of Jewish people because they have NO idea about the practice of Judaism. (You ask 100 people EACH in a trailer park/ black ghetto / middle class white bread neighborhood "What is Mincha?" and see if it takes more than one hand to count how many people have any semblance of an answer.)
A few more howlers in this chapter.
1. Frantz Fanon is a "groundbreaking theorist" (p.191).
2. (p.189) According to Deborah Lipstadt, "Philosemites are anti-semites who like Jews."
3. (p. 198) "Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews qua Jews." (Not quite sure how that is an upgrade on "Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews." But time I guess anything can seem profound if you just use the word "qua" enough times over 46 pages.)
*******
The chapter on Jews, un-Jews, and anti-Jews is quite good actually.
Magid shows how people on the opposite side of the Zionist / anti-Zionist camps actually show similar epistemic foundations. (And this is a running theme throughout his book: opposite camps are really on opposite sides of the same circle.)
1. (p. 110) "Stalin said that Jews are not a nation because they lack the two essential attributes of nations: language and territory. And many Zionists agreed with those claims!"
2. (p. 111) Theodore Herzl once, advocated mass conversion to Christianity as the only solution to the Jewish question in European politics.
3. (p. 105) Some Zionist thinkers imagined that it is a replacement for Judaism; returning to the land of Israel was meant to make the Jewish religion superfluous. Mikhail Yosef Berdyczewski thought that he was "the last Jew and the first Hebrew."
Quotes:
(p. 152) Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. (Attributed to Golda Meir).
Vocabulary:
alterity
golah≠galut
Zionist ≠diaspora nationalist
autochthony
Second order thoughts:
Too much talking and thinking has actually made this situation a lot worse-You have a bunch of professional chatterers speculating about so many counterfactual possibilities, that nobody can agree on a single course of action.
I think that Israel should probably take some lessons from China (which has conquered huge swathes of territory with MINIMAL DISCUSSION.)
China started out as 890K mi² and are now 3.7mln mi²-- an acquisition of 2.8mln mi² in 23 centuries. (About 1200 mi² per year. About 34.6 mi on one edge of territory. About 10 times the square mileage of Detroit. Every / single/year.)
Gaza and the West Bank are 2,314 mi² COMBINED--2 years worth of territorial acquisition at Chinese rates.
And this argument has been going on, in fits and starts for about 77 years at this point about whether certain parts are disputed/occupied/respect international law (blah blah blah).
To think: If somebody had started working on the incorporation of the disputed territories from 1948, that would have been exactly 30 square miles per year. (A piece of territory 5.5 mi on one edge.)
If this incorporation had been started in 1967, that would have been about 39.9 mi² per year.(6.3 mi² on one edge per year. )
Shaul Magid
The Necessity of Exile
4/5 stars
"Too many words loses information"
*******
The number one value of this book is that it is an overview of a lot of thought from different Jewish non/anti Zionists.
You have loopy Jewish academics on one hand (Judith "they"Butler) and loopy Jewish rabbis on the other (Teitelbaum, Satmar) that have separate experiences but mutual conclusions.
And in between are a lot of interesting thinkers (all with citations) that see reasons for Jews to stay right where they are. (MM Schneerson (p.280), for example, saw the United States as "a place where Jews could complete the necessary work of purification before Moshiach.")
There are a lot of interesting philosophical questions about what is Judaism.
Is it related to land?
Or is ethical monotheism place independent?
Does the diaspora maintain strong practice and settlement of Israel vitiate the same practice? (Some in the diaspora will assimilate, and others will be extra on guard to avoid assimilation. Not the same dynamic as in Eretz Israel.)
Diaspora Jews are just as Jewish as Israeli Jews, and probably a lot wealthier with fewer headaches. Can Jewish sovereignty be justified on a cost benefit basis given that nationalism is actually more expensive than exile (golah) when you run the numbers?
I thought I would give this type of literature a second try, because the first book that I read of this type ("No State Solution," by Daniel Boyarin) was about as reasonably intelligible as the Sokal hoax paper.
This book does have the advantage of superior readability.
On the other hand: Imagine my surprise when I picked this book up and saw that it was endorsed by.... Daniel Boyarin. Also, Magid cited Hannah Arendt as a source--among many other "interesting" types.
With the Daniel Boyarin book in my mental register: It really is a lot of old wine in new bottles here.
In many cases, we have academics (who tend to live nowhere on this planet) and Rabbis with corresponding training (also not so useful for living anywhere on this planet) compete see just how far from reality each can diverge / how many words can be used to say nothing in particular. (How else can you deal with the sentence (p.209): "In the case of Kook, secular principles were absorbed into a dialectical cosmology founded on a highly romanticized Kabbalistic metaphysics." )
It looks like this author grew up in a secular family, and he became a Baal Teshuva and then went to Israel and lived as a "Haredi hippie" (p.68) in one of their anti Zionist communities for about 4 to 5 years and one marriage and then he became tired of that.
Later he became a Zionist, a citizen of Israel, an IDF soldier ("second tier," one that never saw combat). And finally, a post Zionist/counter Zionist.
All things considered, this is an excellent exposition of critiques of Zionism / cases for non Zionism, but through Jewish eyes. (99.9% of people who call themselves anti-Zionists don't have this level of discourse, but instead use that designation as a fig leaf for anti-Semitism.)
Of the book:
-9 chapters plus a two-page "Outro"/20 page Intro
-297 pages of prose over 9 chapters + intro is about 30 pages each.
-104 sources (22 journal articles, ≈7 magazine articles, 1 lecture).
-≈0.33 sources per page. Not well sourced.
-No index
*******
MAJOR POINT ONE is that this book does not need to be read in order, because it is actually a bunch of freestanding essays (of relative degrees of quality) stapled together as a book.
I will just abstract one each, the best and the worst to review, so as to not to get too Talmudic (defined here as "writing an expansion that is actually many times longer than the source text"-- the Talmud is about 34 times longer than the Five Books of Moses).
MAJOR POINT TWO is that I can tell that this guy has done a lot of Gemara, because:
1. His level of hair splitting is positively...... Talmudic.
Example: In Chapter 7, he asks the question "Are the Jews an oppressed people today?" And then he separates anti-Semitism from oppression based on whether or not anti-Semitism has an effect on the ability of Jewish people to live their lives freely while being identifiably Jewish. (p.165: "In short, oppression is hatred coupled with power.")
But then he pulls (what he must know) is a switcheroo by defining the Israeli Jews as "oppressors" and Palestinians as "oppressed," even though nobody in Israel is saying that Arabs cannot live as Muslims / Arabs; only that they can't set up a state whose manifest function is to destroy Jewish people.
Or, could he mean that anyone who lives as a subject people is "oppressed," by definition?
Of course, he (again) cites Hannah Arendt.
And predictably, Maggid trots out the old canard that "racism is only true if somebody has power over somebody else, and people who are powerless cannot be racist."
2. Reality just does not exist for this guy. (The same way it does not for people who sit in the Beth Midrash for decades on end, avoiding any productive work. And who could tell you anything about any of the Six Orders of The Talmud, but couldn't tell you anything so mundane as the price of a gallon of gas or how to write a CV to seek employment.)
So, he talks about Aviva Cantor and Meir Kahane who insist that America is no exception to ostensible Jewish oppression.
It's almost like the author doesn't notice that 70% of Jews marry non-Jewish people, or that Jews have the first or second highest income of any ethnic group.
The author draws some bizarre symmetry between Jewish reticence to make a fetish of oppression for 20 centuries to militant blacks who do not hesitate to speak of their oppression (p.171).
People (*other* than black people) who live in the world that we wake up in every day realize that part of functioning in present times is to have some sense of closure toward events of the past - - no matter how horrific.
How much do we even believe (the multiply cited) Aviva Cantor? Immigration to Israel is the only solution to "resolve such oppression," but that's exactly where she does not live! (p. 172)
There's also commentary about Jews obligation "to conform to Christian America's perception of them" (p. 175).
I don't know what that could mean, because Americans don't have any religiously rooted perception of Jewish people because they have NO idea about the practice of Judaism. (You ask 100 people EACH in a trailer park/ black ghetto / middle class white bread neighborhood "What is Mincha?" and see if it takes more than one hand to count how many people have any semblance of an answer.)
A few more howlers in this chapter.
1. Frantz Fanon is a "groundbreaking theorist" (p.191).
2. (p.189) According to Deborah Lipstadt, "Philosemites are anti-semites who like Jews."
3. (p. 198) "Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews qua Jews." (Not quite sure how that is an upgrade on "Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews." But time I guess anything can seem profound if you just use the word "qua" enough times over 46 pages.)
*******
The chapter on Jews, un-Jews, and anti-Jews is quite good actually.
Magid shows how people on the opposite side of the Zionist / anti-Zionist camps actually show similar epistemic foundations. (And this is a running theme throughout his book: opposite camps are really on opposite sides of the same circle.)
1. (p. 110) "Stalin said that Jews are not a nation because they lack the two essential attributes of nations: language and territory. And many Zionists agreed with those claims!"
2. (p. 111) Theodore Herzl once, advocated mass conversion to Christianity as the only solution to the Jewish question in European politics.
3. (p. 105) Some Zionist thinkers imagined that it is a replacement for Judaism; returning to the land of Israel was meant to make the Jewish religion superfluous. Mikhail Yosef Berdyczewski thought that he was "the last Jew and the first Hebrew."
Quotes:
(p. 152) Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. (Attributed to Golda Meir).
Vocabulary:
alterity
golah≠galut
Zionist ≠diaspora nationalist
autochthony
Second order thoughts:
Too much talking and thinking has actually made this situation a lot worse-You have a bunch of professional chatterers speculating about so many counterfactual possibilities, that nobody can agree on a single course of action.
I think that Israel should probably take some lessons from China (which has conquered huge swathes of territory with MINIMAL DISCUSSION.)
China started out as 890K mi² and are now 3.7mln mi²-- an acquisition of 2.8mln mi² in 23 centuries. (About 1200 mi² per year. About 34.6 mi on one edge of territory. About 10 times the square mileage of Detroit. Every / single/year.)
Gaza and the West Bank are 2,314 mi² COMBINED--2 years worth of territorial acquisition at Chinese rates.
And this argument has been going on, in fits and starts for about 77 years at this point about whether certain parts are disputed/occupied/respect international law (blah blah blah).
To think: If somebody had started working on the incorporation of the disputed territories from 1948, that would have been exactly 30 square miles per year. (A piece of territory 5.5 mi on one edge.)
If this incorporation had been started in 1967, that would have been about 39.9 mi² per year.(6.3 mi² on one edge per year. )