The Complexities of Diasporic Jewish Identity in the 21st Century

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In the twenty-first century, the debates about constituting the antisemitic category of the Jews sharpened after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the debates about colonialism, indigeneity and ethnic identity. If one thinks of Jews as a diasporic category, the very notion of “rooted” and “rootless” or moored and unmoored also comes into play. We can recall how George Bernard Shaw already in 1907 ironically lampooned Broadbent, the ultimate Englishman, who decried everything and everyone who was not English enough:

You are thinking of the modern hybrids that now monopolize England. Hypocrites, humbugs, Germans, Jews, Yankees, foreigners, Park Laners, cosmopolitan riffraff. Don’t call them English. They don’t belong to the dear old island, but to their confounded new empire; and by George! They’re worthy of it; and I wish them joy of it.

Indeed, antisemitisms prove that a society can hold contradictory images simultaneously, such as the fact that the Jews are both anarchists out to destroy capitalism as well as capitalists out to exploit the working class. Actual self-identified Jews in London in the early twentieth century—think of the Jewish labour reformer Samuel Gompers—must deal with the social reality of both change and continuity in their world of early twentieth-century capitalism.

If one thinks of Jews as a diasporic category, the very notion of “rooted” and “rootless” or moored and unmoored also comes into play.

And this is not unique to the image of the Jews: think of the “Irish” in the British imagination (and then, colonial thought—from India and Kipling to Australia and the myth there of the first settlers). But it is also in this world a label for a religious identity, that of Roman Catholicism in its post-Enlightenment (and not Celtic) version. In complex ways, modern Irish national identity dates itself from the famine of the 1840s and the tepid British response to the devastation it wrought, even when evoking Oliver Cromwell and the land seizures of the mid-seventeenth century as the wellspring of Irish political identity.

Remember that even well after the famine, the face of Irish nationalism and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the 1880s was the very Anglican Charles Stewart Parnell. The famine came to define an Irish Catholic identity and thus Irish national politics, at least retrospectively, in opposition to Anglican Britain. Claire Mitchell notes that “the construction of Catholic Irishness was strengthened by the disaster of famine from 1845 to 1849…Religious affiliation became increasingly a surrogate for national identity as the effective agent for communal solidarity.” It can be stated that the “British” were often Scots’ Presbyterians removed to Ireland because of famine in the late seventeenth century and looked down upon by their Anglican (Church of Ireland) “betters.”

Indeed, being Irish and being Catholic came to be interchangeable, so much so that when a Jew, Robert Briscoe, the only Jewish member of the Irish parliament, was elected mayor of Dublin in 1956 and subsequently arrived at the annual New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade the next year, it made the front pages of all of the New York City newspapers, as a pleasing but freakish event. Yet “being Irish” is also non-sectarian, for on St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago the Chicago River is dyed green, for on that day “everyone is Irish.” Yet while an Irish identity seems not to demand any religious subtext, it is also the case that other religious identities played and continue to play a role in both Irish identity and Irish politics (in the Republic as well as in Northern Ireland). Such contradictions and transformations are no different from “being Jewish” and its contemporary variant “being Jew-ish.”

Modern Jewish historians, such as Jacob Neusner in Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of Judaism , have argued for a material understanding of diaspora. For Neusner, it is the model of wilderness and land, the dialectic between tent and house, nomadism and agriculture, wilderness and Canaan, wandering and settlement, diaspora and state, echoing Max Weber’s relationship of nomads trapped between the market and the oikos , the tribe that evolved into the modern state. The Welsh Congregationalist W.D. Davies argued, in The Territorial Dimension in Judaism , that this dichotomy is well balanced in the Bible, that for every quote praising wilderness as the decisive factor in Judaism, there could be found a counterpart in praise of the Land of Zion.

And yet modern Israel was created to nullify the very notion of diasporic Jewry (and secondarily, diasporic Judaism): shlilat hagalut . But it was created as a state composed of diasporic communities, organized on caste lines, some geographic, others religious. This was the call of the second generation of Zionists, such as the German Jew Theodor Lessing, whom we shall meet in our final case on “un-Jews.” In 1930 he wrote:

What if in 1750—when the yellow patch, oppression, anti-Jewish laws, and Kammerknechtschaft gradually began to be lifted, with waivers of oppression, and implementation of full bourgeois emancipation—they would have responded: “For the past 2,000 years, we have lived for the coming of the Messiah, who has been promised to lead us back Home. Now your benevolence and friendship offers us beautiful Europe and great America as fatherlands. But, as payment, we would have to break with our own historical traditions, in order to adapt and grow into the Great Christian West. We cannot do this…You are free to despise us, but we in turn refuse to accept your benefits: your offices and schools, your ways and means. We don’t want to participate in your arts and sciences. We voluntarily carry forward galut and ghetto, awaiting our Messiah to appear out of Bethlehem.”

The notion that the Diaspora was still a form of self-isolation, a charge lodged by many on the left, as we have already seen, damns such a position as untenable in the modern nation-state.

These disparities are normal as identities shift over time and space, even if they do not change; for their contexts always do.

Galut is thus often understood as the experienced reality of being in exile, albeit structured, however, by the internalization of the textual notion of the Diaspora and tempered by the daily experience (good or bad) of life in the world. The Jew experiences the daily life of exile through the mirror of the biblical model of expulsion, whether it be the expulsion from the Garden of Eden or freedom from slavery in Egypt. Galut has formed the Jewish self-understanding of exile, at least for religious Jews. Yet for some thinkers today the involuntary dispersion of the Jews ( galut or golah ) is articulated as being inherently different from the voluntary exile of the Jews ( diaspora or tfutsot ). These two models exist simultaneously in Jewish history in the image of uprooted and powerless Jews on the one hand and rooted and empowered Jews on the other.

It is possible to have a firm, meaningful cultural experience as a Jew in the galut or to feel alone and abandoned in the Diaspora (as well as vice versa)—two people can live in the very same space and time and can experience that space and time in antithetical ways. Indeed, the same person can find his or her existence bounded conceptually by both models at different times and in different contexts. Zionism discards this as essential to its self-understanding. In 1984 Israeli philosopher Eliezer Schweid wrote that the rejection of Jewish life in the Diaspora— shlilat ha-golah —is a central assumption in all currents of Zionist ideology… In its most extreme formulation, the idea of shlilat ha-golah implies that the condition of exile will ultimately destroy the Jewish people, first of all in the moral and spiritual sense, and afterward in the physical sense as well, whether by discrimination and persecution, or by total assimilation.

Yet today there are galuts within galuts ; diasporas within diasporas. The children of Israeli Jews in Berlin become German Jews in New York; Soviet Jews in New York come to see themselves suddenly as Americans when they visit Putin’s Russia. Secular identities in the USSR transform into ultra-religious ones in the post-Soviet world, whether in the Global North or in Israel; religious identities in the Global North, bound to the idea of the completion of Zionism in the Israeli state, suddenly become radically secularized, once that bond is questioned. What at one moment are antitheses come to be felt as complementary situations. These disparities are normal as identities shift over time and space, even if they do not change; for their contexts always do.

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Reprinted with permission from Antisemitisms: A History of Jew Hating by Sander L. Gilman. Published by Reaktion Books Ltd. Copyright © 2026 by Sander L. Gilman. All rights reserved.