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Paper short abstract

Ecologies of anti-Zionist Jewish space are proliferating across the world. Their premising on polarity responds to a context of violent unity. Ethnographic engagements with them require principaled 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 reveal the boundaries of a violently enforced unity. In order to ethnographically understand and attune to such socialities, 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 unified. 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 and Dublin and my current preparations for fieldwork with anti-Zionist Jews across Oceania. I begin by assessing the currency of polarization in the context of Israel's genocide, and what unities are presupposed by such poles. Next, I describe the poles revealed as alternatives to Zionist unities, and how 'diaspora' emerges as a way of simultaneously inhabiting them. In doing so, I draw on Ghassan Hage's notion of the 'lenticular' as a way of thinking beyond the 'ambivalent', before situating such ideas within my fieldwork plan.