Borns Jewish Studies Program

This course investigates normative discourse around Israel as a "homeland" for the Jews and/or a/the "Jewish state." But which “Israel”? Should this indicate Eretz Israel, which itself refers to either the land or the nation of Israel, or both? Or Am Israel, the people of Israel construed as living in “diaspora” or “exile” or which, after the establishment of the modern State of Israel, is sometimes thought to coincide with Eretz Israel? Or does “Israel” “simply” mean Israel or Israel/ Palestine, understood but not universally recognized as the modern nation-state that, since 1948, bears a tortured relation to Palestine and Palestinian people?  Our course attends to all of these senses of the name “Israel” and in so doing aims to map out the interwoven and incompatible ways in which Judaism and the Jewish state bring to the fore the deeper and perhaps universal tensions inherent in the very idea, and surely in the practice, of secular modernity.

We proceed in three movements. The first focuses on Hermann Cohen’s influential and controversial approach to the role of Judaism in the west—his “Messianic Liberalism”—and the Antizionism that he saw as a logical and necessary consequence thereof and the “afterlife” of this text first through his students Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig just before and after the Great War and continuing in the interwar period with major figures like Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Otto Heller. The second unit follows this debate about Israel, Judaism and Zionism forward into the time after the establishment of the State of Israel, featuring the interventions of the Jacques Derrida (forbearer of the contemporary Antizionist camp) and Emanuel Levinas (intellectual luminary of liberal Zionism) alongside Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. The third unit unites the main concerns in the first two units by tracing their further development through the contemporary debates, featuring voices from Palestine and Israel such as Lama Abu-Odeh, Omri Boehm, Yehouda Shenhav, Elia Zureik, , in conversation with Judith Butler’s Parting Ways and Vattimo and Marder’s Deconstructing Zionism.