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Accepted Paper:
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explores 'diasporism' as a catch-all label embraced by Jewish communities in the US and UK seeking to enact Jewish identity without Zionism, with particular attention paid to the tensions between aspirations for both rootedness and diasporic identity.
Paper Abstract:
In the US and UK, there is a growing movement of Jewish people practicing self-determination by cultivating Judaism without Zionism. Many of these Jewish people claim the condition of being ‘in diaspora’, mobilizing this concept as a political identity. As theorized by scholars of the black radical tradition, this conceptualization of diaspora, unlike traditional models that stipulate a people relating to a homeland (Safran 1991), describes a community outside the norms of nation-states and borders (Hall 1995, 207), a space of counterculture (Gilroy 1993) whose inhabitants experience a multiplicity of consciousness (Du Bois 1903). Thinking with these scholars, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (2007) coined the term ‘diasporism’, defining it by a political commitment to solidarity and a belief in a Jewish history and future independent of a national homeland.
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this project explores the embrace of diaspora as a third space and its deployment as a political ideology amongst Jewish community farm members. This research asks why members are drawn to diaspora as a political identity and what possibilities they believe it engenders. Amid the potentials and implications of deploying diaspora as a political ideology, this paper attends particularly to the tensions inherent in an ideology that claims diaspora while building communities rooted in land. It asks, if, and in what ways, community members reconcile claims to diasporism with projects for rootedness in a world structured by ongoing coloniality (Grosfuegel 2002).
Diasporic mediation in a deglobalizing world
Session 1