The Gaza War is dividing Jews. But there’s more to Jewish identity than blind support of Israel.

They have advertised this state for forty years as essential to the existence of Jewish culture, people, heritage; they have tried with all their cunning to advertise Israel as a no-choice reality when, in fact, it is an option to be examined in terms of quality and value.

Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

When George Ziad, a character in Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock who bears an uncanny resemblance to Edward Said, speaks these words, he is on the road to Ramallah with Roth himself, or so it seems. Ziad and Roth are old friends from the University of Chicago, where both had been graduate students. Now, decades later, they have bumped into each other in a Jerusalem marketplace. Roth has traveled to Israel for three distinct but intimately intertwined reasons: to interview his friend and fellow author, the Israeli novelist Ahron Applefield; to observe the public trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American who has been accused of being the notorious Treblinka concentration camp guard “Ivan the Terrible;” and most intriguingly, to track down an impersonator—a doppelgänger—also named Philip Roth, who has been using the writer’s fame to advocate a strange philosophy called Diasporism, in which he proposes that Ashkenazi Jews repatriate from Israel to their ancestral homelands in Eastern Europe for the sake of their moral and existential self-preservation.

When Ziad encounters Roth, he mistakes him for Roth the advocate of Diasporism, not Roth the narrator, who has resolved to get to the bottom of this duplicitous meshegas and expose his doppelgänger for the fraud he is. But it isn’t so easy to distinguish the two. As Roth the narrator accompanies his erstwhile friend to the West Bank—first to observe the trial of a Palestinian youth, and then to Ziad’s home, where he converses with his wife and son—he finds himself unable or unwilling to disabuse Ziad of his mistake. He becomes swept up in the philosophy of Diasporism, which he advocates “eloquently” to the Ziads, embracing, even reveling in, his mistaken identity. “To put all the Jews in this tiny place, surrounded on all sides by tremendous hostility—how can you survive morally?” the real Roth, impersonating his impersonator, asks. “Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else that the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being…Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon,” he opines. “Jerusalem is by now the worst thing that could possibly have happened to us. Last year in Jerusalem! Next year in Warsaw!” Although Roth the narrator expresses dismay at George Ziad’s enthusiasm for his “Diasporist blah-blah,” he cannot help “obeying an intoxicating urge” to continue proclaiming it. On a harrowing drive back to Jerusalem he is stopped and searched by an IDF patrol, one of whose members, it turns out, is an admirer of his novels. When the soldier confesses his misgivings about enforcing the occupation and expresses his desire to leave Israel to study film at NYU, Roth informs him that he must be a fellow Diasporist, that is, “a Jew for whom authenticity as a Jew means living in the Diaspora, for whom the Diaspora is the normal condition and Zionism the abnormality.”

The difficulty of disentangling Roth the narrator from Roth the doppelgänger—whom Roth the narrator eventually dubs “Moishe Pipik” (literally Moses Bellybutton)—lies at the heart of the novel; its plot seems in many respects merely an occasion to entertain a long-running Jewish argument about Israel, an argument that continues to divide not only the Jewish community but individual Jews themselves. Indeed, toward the end of the novel, Roth the narrator even reveals that he has offered to ghost write his impersonator’s Diasporist manifesto, despite his rivalry with him. Internal strife is arguably Operation Shylock’s master theme, as one might expect of a novel that includes this epigraph from Søren Kierkegaard: “The whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against itself. Existence is surely a debate.”

Roth’s Diasporism may ultimately be satire, but like all satires, it only exaggerates reality; it does not invent it. Satire succeeds because it accentuates elements that already exist, and in the case of Diasporism, such elements abound. When, in a phone conversation with Roth the narrator, Roth’s doppelgänger declares that “the great mass of Jews have been in Europe since the Middle Ages. Virtually everything we identify as culturally Jewish has its origins in the life we led for centuries among European Christians,” he barely paraphrases the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, a leader of the Jewish People’s Party, who wrote in 1907 that “Europe has served as the homeland for the majority of Jewish people over the course of two thousand years. The bones of our distant ancestors rest in its soil.” According to Dubnow, “the places where we suffered are no less dear to us than the places where we were happy” because they contain “our holy ancestors’ graves, the sacred sites of our religion, and our historic monuments.” Roth the narrator’s skepticism of, and rivalry with, his doppelgänger signals that Diasporism should not be taken at face value, but its seductive power and historical basis suggest that it can’t be dismissed, either. Rather, it operates as one pole in a dialectic, functioning as a viable, if eccentric, counternarrative to the hegemonic pro-Israelism described by Ziad.

That there exists a demand for such counternarratives is proved by the recent resurgence of interest in “diaspora nationalism” among younger American Jews, overwhelmingly the descendants of Eastern European Ashkenazim. (I should say upfront that this essay does not deal with the complex issues raised by other Jewish identities, perhaps to its detriment.) Disillusioned with Israel and its decades-long lurch to the right, indeed often questioning the colonial entanglements and ethnonationalist implications of its very founding, many younger Jews have sought new ways to express their cultural and religious identity, turning toward the diaspora and its radical Jewish movements as a potential source for inspiration. While there are those who would malign non- and anti-Zionist Jews as misguided at best and traitors to their fellow Jews at worst, history shows that they stand squarely within the Jewish tradition.

Diaspora nationalism flourished around the turn of the twentieth century, before Zionism’s hegemony, when lively debates over politics, language, and nationality gripped an Eastern European Jewish community that had recently become aware of itself as a cultural and political agent. According to historian Barry Trachtenberg “diaspora nationalism combined a commitment to a renewed, modernized Jewish diasporic existence with socialist values that protected the rights of all workers.” As Trachtenberg notes, one of the foremost advocates of diaspora nationalism was Chaim Zhitlovsky, a prolific philosopher, polemicist, and Yiddishist. Born in Belarus to Hasidic parents in 1865, Zhitlovsky began his love affair with Yiddish as a teenager, spurred on in part by his youthful friendship with fellow Yiddishist, ethnographer, poet, and playwright Shloyme Rapaport, better known as S. An-Ski. In a series of essays and pamphlets written around the turn of the twentieth century, Zhitlovsky advocated for a secular, cultural, and historical definition of Judaism (Yiddishkayt) and counterposed Yiddish socialism to Zionism.

In his 1898 essay “Zionism or Socialism,” which originally appeared under a pseudonym in the periodical Der yidisher arbeter (The Jewish Worker), Zhitlovsky vindicates socialism against Zionism, addressing several core Zionist arguments and explaining why he thinks they are mistaken. Zionism, Zhitlovsky argues, is an ideology of the Jewish bourgeoisie motivated by its economic competition with other national bourgeoisies. In the battle to produce ever cheaper goods, which Zhitlovsky takes to be a fundamental characteristic of capitalism, Jewish merchants and manufacturers succeed, calling forth antisemitism in the form of social hostility toward, and legal restrictions on, Jews. Zionism represents the interests of Jewish capitalists in shedding such impediments to their success, Zhitlovsky maintains. A clear sign that Zionism couldn’t possibly be in the interests of Jewish workers, he argues, is the willingness of their leaders to collaborate with the tyrannical rulers of imperial powers—Sultans, Kaisers, and Tsars. Indeed, when in 1903 Theodor Herzl tried to draw on Zhitlovsky’s influence within the Jewish socialist movement to persuade it that Zionism was a cause worth fighting for, Zhitlovsky rebuffed him. As historian Daniel Katz puts it, “In Zhitlovsky’s view, Herzl’s strategy was deeply flawed. No movement based on the diplomatic meetings of elite leaders could resolve the crisis faced by the Jewish masses.”

Zhitlovsky raises several problems with the Zionist argument that founding a Jewish state in Palestine is an effective or realistic response to antisemitism. He claims there is no way that immigration to Palestine can happen on a large enough scale and in a fast enough time to accommodate all the Jews living in the diaspora. The rights of the millions of those who inevitably remain must be defended. He also addresses the claim that unlike Zionists, socialists aren’t “fond” of Jews as Jews because they pit themselves against Jewish religious authority. Zhitlovsky argues that the reverse is the case: the Zionists, their proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding, are the ones who are indifferent to Jews. Zhitlovsky says they’re motivated entirely by “necessity” (noyt) rather than freely given love for Judaism. He accuses them wanting to be assimilated goyim rather than Jews; it is only because they’re not accepted into non-Jewish society, Zhitlovsky argues (perhaps unfairly), that they pursue Zionism.

The “simple Jewish worker,” on the other hand, while not self-consciously Jewish in the manner of the Zionists—whom Zhitlovsky accuses of loudly proclaiming their Judaism in the streets—nevertheless possesses a “healthy” Judaism. He draws an analogy to bodily health: one is not explicitly aware of one’s teeth in one’s mouth when they are healthy; it is only when something is wrong that one notices them. In the same way, the “Jewish spark” (dos pintele yid) of the Jewish worker is undimmed, although it may not be (obnoxiously) brandished aloft. Zionists’ excessive proclamations of Judaism, on the other hand, indicate a spiritual sickness. What’s more, the Jewish workers have no animosity toward their fellow non-Jewish workers. To the contrary, they are conscious of their shared status as workers and of the need to work together; Jewish and non-Jewish workers have more in common with each other than they have with their respective capitalist classes, Zhitlovsky argues. Judaism will continue, and even grow, he claims, through a renaissance of the Yiddish language and Jewish cultural institutions. In a passage that neatly summarizes his philosophy—and which we might read as a programmatic statement of “Diaspora nationalism” more generally—Zhitlovsky writes:

In the old world there prevailed the rule: a people is its country. And therefore, every people sought to have its own territory and its own country. In the new world the rule will be: a people is its culture, its education. And thus the Jewish people can continue to live politically and legally dispersed among all peoples, and yet remain Jews, who will live with their neighbors in peace and enjoy the same rights that they do.

Although his formal affiliation with it was brief, one of the organizations strongly influenced by Zhitlovsky’s ideas was the Jewish Labor Bund (Der algemeyner yidisher arbeter bund), which would go on to develop them into the ideology of “national cultural autonomy” and doykayt or “hereness”. (Indeed, the Bund printed a slightly shortened version of “Zionism or Socialism” as a pamphlet.) While scholarly works on the history of the Bund have long been available, they can be intimidatingly academic. A recent graphic history of the Bund supplements traditional scholarship by presenting the organization’s history in a popular form. Edited by the historian Paul Buhle, with a narrative by Sharon Rudahl and color illustrations by Michael Kluckner, The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labor Resistance presents a visually compelling narrative of the Bund’s history and leading personalities. Beginning with its origins in the Russian Empire’s “Pale of Settlement”—a region on the western edge of the empire to which the vast majority of the empire’s Jews were legally confined—The Bund explains how anti-Semitic laws, violent pogroms, and the coming of industrialization created the conditions for the Jewish Labor Bund’s formation.

The Bund was founded in an attic in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1897, the same year that the first World Zionist Congress met in Basel, Switzerland. Not unlike the two Roths in Operation Shylock, Bundists and Zionists form a sort of weird mirror image of each other. Whereas the Bund was oriented toward the fight for rights in the diaspora and emphasized the centrality of Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Jewish masses, to Jewish cultural identity, the Zionists looked toward territorial statehood in Palestine and sought to transform Hebrew into a living, vernacular language for a new Jewish nation.

While the tension between Zionism versus Bundism isn’t its only, or even its main, theme, The Bund nevertheless stresses its role in the formation of the Bundist ideology. This occurs in the book’s third chapter, “The Mother Tongue” (an English translation of mame loshn, i.e., Yiddish), which explains how the Bund’s emphasis on the Yiddish language accompanied its embrace of the diaspora as a locus of Jewish cultural and spiritual being. A series of panels dramatizes debates among Jews over Zionism, Hebrew, and Yiddish, depicting a man who argues that in Israel, Jews will “reclaim our original language, Hebrew.” “What good is Hebrew for a joke or telling off a husband?!” a woman rejoins. “I’ll stick to Yiddish, thank you!” Another man responds that “Yiddish is vulgar street slang, fit only for criminals and low lifes.” Despite such heated arguments, “Bundists would not abandon their mother tongue, lands where they had lived for centuries, their struggle for civil rights, or the rich, unique culture Jews had created under oppression,” the book’s narrative explains. The Bund cites I.L Peretz, who, along with Mendele Moykher-Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, formed a trio of pioneering writers known as Di Klasiker. In Peretz’s words, “Zionism cannot be the solution for the whole Jewish people…We have grown in the diaspora, and the diaspora is our battlefield. We do not run away from the battlefield.” Once again, the voice of Roth’s doppelgänger, while exaggerated for rhetorical effect, rings true. “Grandpa did not hail from Haifa—Grandpa came from Minsk. Grandpa wasn’t a Jewish nationalist—he was a Jewish humanist, a spiritual, believing Jew, who complained not in an antique tongue called Hebrew but in colorful, rich, vernacular Yiddish,” he tells Roth the narrator.

As the Bund explains, Bundism flourished in the Russian Empire during early years of the twentieth century but faced political and legal challenges after 1905. In the 1920s, following the consolidation of Bolshevik power, the Bund “vanished as a formal party under Soviet pressure.” Outside the Soviet Union, it commanded significant support in interwar Poland, where, as Jack Jacobs has recently argued, its creation of a vibrant “Bundist counterculture” helped make it a political force to be reckoned with on the eve of the Holocaust. As late as 1938, as Benny Mer observes in a recent article in the Yiddish edition of the Forward, Polish Bundists printed their own widely circulated newspaper in which they criticized Zionism and sought to place acts of anti-Zionist terrorism in “context,” anticipating today’s arguments both within and beyond the Jewish left. Ultimately, the Bund did not withstand the Nazi onslaught, although Bundists contributed heroically to the anti-Nazi resistance, as the example of Marek Edelman, a Bundist and leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, testifies.

The Holocaust looms large in Operation Shylock, and Pipik does not deny the role it plays in justifying Zionism, at least up to a point. “I do not wish to be misunderstood…In the immediate postwar era, when for obvious reasons Europe was uninhabitable by Jews, Zionism was the single greatest force contributing to the recovery of Jewish hope and morale,” he tells Roth the narrator. “But having succeeded in restoring Jews to health, Zionism has tragically ruined its own health and must now accede to vigorous Diasporism.” For Pipik, this entails a “transfer” of Israel’s Ashkenazi population back to Europe—an absurd idea that is nevertheless rife with subversive undertones, especially when one thinks of how Palestinians have historically been—and continue to be—the object of “transfer” schemes today. But one does not have to take everything Pipik says literally to acknowledge that he has a point.

Cultural expressions of latter-day Bundism can be found in the work of musicians such Isabel Frey, whose 2020 album Millennial Bundist contains Jewish labor and folk songs, including the Bund’s anthem, “Di Shvue”(The Oath), whose lyrics were penned by the aforementioned S. An-Ski. Frey rose to prominence in her native Austria as a protest singer, leading crowds at regular Thursday protests of the country’s rightwing government as they belted out her Yiddish-German version of Daloy Politsey, a Russian Jewish revolutionary anthem whose lyrics she adapted to Austria’s political situation. Channeling the Bund’s unique fusion of demands for economic and minority rights, Frey in one breath rejects the Austrian right’s ethnonationalism while calling for a shorter working week. (The recording of the song on Millennial Bundist includes audio from the protests, lending it a powerful, haunting quality.) In a 2021 interview on the Yiddish podcast Vaybertaytsh, hosted by Sosye Fox, Frey explains how she became skeptical of the Zionist ideology that defined her Jewish childhood after spending time in Israel, an experience which inspired her turn toward Yiddish language, music, and radical history.

Its historical context may have disappeared, but the Bund’s legacy lives on in palpable cultural traces and institutions, such as the Workers Circle (formerly the Workmen’s Circle), a North American organization with roots in the early twentieth century that continues to advocate for social justice and promote Yiddish language and culture today. (It was recently the subject of a profile in the New York Times under the headline “Why a 123-year-Old Jewish Nonprofit Won’t Choose Sides in Gaza”). As The Bund puts it, “The branch of Jewish culture identified and nurtured by the Bund—secular, humane, activist—was not exterminated. It survived transplant across continents, expressed in the work of Jewish authors, judges, artists, performers, political leaders, and troublemakers.” Buhle underscores this point in his afterword, citing the work of Bund scholar Frank Wolff, who argues that memory has been an integral part of Bundist politics since its inception. As Wolff writes in his recent book Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration (which The Bund recommends as further reading), “The history of the Bund as a party may have come to an end, but the effects of its cultural and political work and their unifying humanitarian yet activist spirit…continue to matter today.”

As its connection to the Workers Circle suggests, one place to look for the Bund’s relevance is in the United States, where, as Daniel Katz observes in his book All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism, the ideology of diaspora nationalism espoused by Zhitlovsky and the Bund nourished the American trade union movement and fed into the civil rights movement of the 1960s, especially in the figure of A. Philip Randolph, whose connections to Jewish labor activism Katz details. The world of non-Bolshevik, non-communist Eastern European socialism may have vanished, but the civil rights era is hardly ancient history, and its appeal to cross-racial, cross-cultural solidarity in the name of a common working-class project remains arguably the most promising model for radical egalitarian politics today. As Katz has argued elsewhere, Bernie Sanders in many ways embodies the spirit of Yiddish socialism.

The tragedy of the Bund is that its world was destroyed, primarily by the Nazis and but also by the Soviets, who, after initially supporting the flourishing of Yiddish culture, purged Jewish communists in the 1930s and again in the ‘50s. In the wake of the Holocaust, Zionism became Judaism’s de facto political expression. But the need for a counternarrative has never been clearer. The dire situation described in Roth’s novel—in which Jews, under the banner of Israel, face the twin threats of terroristic hostility (fueled, some would insist, by their own settler-colonial project) and moral corruption engendered by military retaliation—has only become more acute after October 7, lending Operation Shylock a prophetic quality. If ever there were a time when Jews needed “options,” as Ziad puts it, it is now. Zionism is not Judaism. Jews need—and many clearly want—myriad ways of expressing their religious and cultural identity beyond allegiance to an increasingly illiberal state seemingly unable to renounce military occupation and violent colonial expansionism. There is no shortage of Jews for whom Judaism means opposing such conduct, for whom “never again” means “never again for anyone,” Palestinians included. The turn toward the diaspora, and the neo-Bundist forms of cultural production and political action it has called forth, is an urgent contribution to rethinking the meaning of Jewish history and identity today.