Andrew Tait explores the decline of radical political traditions and rise of Zionist reaction in Israel. First published in The Commonweal Volume 6, October 2024.
Absent from the book was any mention of the fact that younger Jews (and a few of us oldies) are finding ourselves increasingly attracted to the heritage left by the Bund, with its notion of 'doikayt', hereness, as opposed to the ‘dortikayt' of zionism. This complements Walter Benjamin's term Jetztzeit, or ‘the time of the now’. Anyone interested might like to check out this Substack post:
One can generalize that the most oppressed sections of the working class globally have taken their revenge on the left (that is, the "social democratic" parties supported by the more affluent sections of the working class including the lower ranks of the professional managerial class, state servants and so on) by helping to elect the right to power. So this is not a uniquely Israeli or Zionist phenomenon.
The problem here is not anti-Semitism as such. More widely, it is Jewish exceptionalism. That is, the view held both by Zionists and anti-Jewish fascists, that the Jewish people are in some way exceptional, neither bound nor protected by the rules that normally govern the conduct of civilized peoples.
Absent from the book was any mention of the fact that younger Jews (and a few of us oldies) are finding ourselves increasingly attracted to the heritage left by the Bund, with its notion of 'doikayt', hereness, as opposed to the ‘dortikayt' of zionism. This complements Walter Benjamin's term Jetztzeit, or ‘the time of the now’. Anyone interested might like to check out this Substack post:
https://tuwhiri.substack.com/p/doikayt-is-not-a-word-in-pali
One can generalize that the most oppressed sections of the working class globally have taken their revenge on the left (that is, the "social democratic" parties supported by the more affluent sections of the working class including the lower ranks of the professional managerial class, state servants and so on) by helping to elect the right to power. So this is not a uniquely Israeli or Zionist phenomenon.
The problem here is not anti-Semitism as such. More widely, it is Jewish exceptionalism. That is, the view held both by Zionists and anti-Jewish fascists, that the Jewish people are in some way exceptional, neither bound nor protected by the rules that normally govern the conduct of civilized peoples.