Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Ecologies of anti-Zionist Jewish space are proliferating across the world. Though premised on polarity, they prefigure new kinds of unity. Ethnographic engagements with them require principalled reintroductions, rather than mystifying reconciliations, of polarization.

Paper long abstract

Jewish rejections of the Israeli genocide have accompanied their own rejections by communities, families and institutions. Emerging anti-Zionist formations accordingly participate in political solidarity, communal reorganization, and spiritual reimagination in the wake of reductive narrativizations. Articulations of polarity –– the very designation of “anti-Zionist” itself –– thus concomitantly figure new possibilities for unity. In order to ethnographically understand and attune to such futures, polarization must be treated as a pole in itself -– a moral, tactical positioning that is continuously negotiated with commitments to solidarity, belonging, and imaginaries beyond the polar. This cannot be done through bypassing polarization, but rather by reintroducing it as a valid site of anthropological inquiry against epistemological and structural constraints that have historically obscured it from disciplinary focus (Deeb & Winegar 2016).

This paper draws on ethnographic movement mapping of anti-Zionist Jewish formations in London, histories of entanglement between the disciple of anthropology and the Zionist project, and my current preparations for fieldwork with anti-Zionist Jews across Oceania. I begin by tracing the mobilizations of polarity within new ecologies of Jewish space as both moral refusals and pathways towards belonging. Next, I problematize the lack of ethnographic scholarship on anti-Zionism within the anthropology of Jewishness with reference to disciplinary entanglements with the Zionist project. Finally, I discuss the stakes of reintroducing polarization to anthropological analysis in terms of my forthcoming ethnographic fieldwork.