New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora
By Caryn Aviv and David Shneer
New York University Press, 2005
New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora opens with a provocative declaration: the Jewish diaspora is over. But not, authors David Shneer and Caryn Aviv hasten to say, because the Zionist dream of ingathering is complete, or because there is no future for Jewish communities outside the state of Israel, but because we have reached a new point in Jewish history which can no longer be described in the terms used until today. Their suggestion is a serious one, rooted in a wide-ranging excitement about the vibrant diversity of Jewish life in the early 21st century and a critical rethinking of traditional Zionism, both of which many, if not most, Jews share.
The bulk of New Jews investigates current ideas of Jewish identity propagated by major Ashkenazi Jewish cultural institutions in the US, Russia, and Israel. These chapters deftly untangle the tensions between Jewish particularity and universal messages, especially the “obsession with identity and ethnic sameness and difference” that is particular to the US (105). Throughout, however, few voices are heard but those of institutional leaders — almost no museum-goers, for instance, only architects, founders, and curators. The only exception, interestingly, is the chapter on queer Jewish life and its multiple allegiances. There alone does New Jews live up to its promise to voice the many ways Jews — and not just the big machers — “use travel, money, memory, organizations, and power to constitute new identities and to create new relationships to real and mythic homelands” (22).
But what exactly is the “end of the Jewish diaspora”? Shneer and Aviv declare, “this book suggests the end of diaspora because the majority of Jews in the United States, Russia, Germany and elsewhere. . . see themselves at home, not pining for a Promised Land” (xvi). Indeed, they mount a sharp and persuasive critique of the Israel-centered notion of Jewish life propagated by many Jewish organizations (xv), marshalling striking evidence — more Russian Jews have migrated from Israel to Russia since 2001 than the reverse (49), for instance. But the opening chapter of New Jews makes it clear that this sense of being at home is not new, and that in fact the purpose of ‘diaspora’ has always been to “allow [Jews] to be at home wherever they were” (4).
Aviv and Shneer never do elucidate what exactly is new. The closest they come is a suggestion that Jews now have access to “the power of rootedness” (25), on top of “affluence, power and privilege. . . in many of the societies in which they live” (22), marking an end to diaspora, which to them “connotes powerlessness” (20). This, however, ignores the present experiences of many Jews – in particular Middle Eastern and North African Jews in Europe and Israel, but also all those who are not wealthy or are otherwise marginalized. It also refuses to engage with the histories of rootedness visible in the deep differences between diasporic Jewish cultures, from Bukhara to Bialystok, and the specific “powers of diaspora” (in scholars Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin’s phrase).
Perhaps these blind spots can be traced to the source of their definition of “diaspora” — the Israeli Hebrew word ”galuti,” whose degrading connotation of “ghetto-like” (3) comes straight from the founding Zionist principle of “negation of the diaspora.” The Yiddish equivalent, ”golus,” on the other hand, implies suffering, but not existential crisis; rather, the pain of being at home in the world. It is a strange decision, to understand “diaspora” through “negation of the diaspora” rather than through the experience of Jewish life therein.
Luckily, many of the voices heard in the book do not share this approach. They go unanswered as they assert a Jewish identity rooted in the history that Aviv and Shneer reject. Lawrence Schimel, a New Yorker living in Spain, identifies himself as one of those who “construct our Jewish identities closer to home and embrace our diaspora identity,” declaring “I plan to stay right where I am” (112). Similarly, Ilan Sheinfeld, an Israeli, “seeks solace and refuge in ‘the diaspora,’ where he finds his ‘homeland’” (128).
These voices of diasporic belonging are loudest in the chapter on queer Jews, whose complicated relationship to difference, sameness, and belonging means that even more than most, they deliberately “connect emotionally and culturally with multiple places. . . but are nonetheless rooted in a specific place they call home” (136). New Jews gives us new terms for this mode of being, but it need not have. For centuries, Jews have given it a name; it is “diaspora,” and it is where we live.
