The No-State Solution (Daniel Boyarin 2022) – frontispiece and title page
A graphic I prepared for a 2016 essay I had written on alliances between right-wing Jews and Christian nationalists got itself published as a frontispiece in Daniel Boyarin’s The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (Yale University Press: 2022). Dr. Boyarin contacted me in 2022 in preparation for his book’s publication, but I’m only seeing the frontispiece this morning and had just assumed that it had been forgotten. I look forward to reading his manifesto!
The original graphic dates to a Bundist poster from Kyiv in 1918 that got resurrected for an album cover of the band Black Ox Orkestar around 2003/4. My own minor contribution here was adding the translation of this Yiddish declaration of Doikayt — דאָרטען, װאוּ מיר לעבען, דארט איז אונזער לאנד (Wherever I live, that is my homeland) — and cleaning up the graphic just a bit. The English font I used is called Chapbook. A beaten up print of the original 1918 poster is shared at the Wikimedia Commons.
Now 2024 is not 2016 (or 1918). Any invocation of Doykeit (Hereness) explicit or suggestive, needs explanation so as to avoid it becoming shorthand for someone else’s understanding. So here’s a comment I wrote about 2½ months ago in response to a claim that Doykeit “failed disastrously”:
I think Doikayt, at least in its cultural expression, survives in every living expression of Jewish secular and religious culture situated where Jews actually live, anywhere on Earth, in space, or on other worlds — so long as it doesn’t make apologies for not living somewhere else. This is the essence of Doikayt, that Jews should be permitted to be Jews wherever they live without demands that they move, be assimilated, or be exterminated. And the murder of so many of its Bundist adherents hasn’t proved its failure.
Some will say that the Holocaust proved that such permission couldn’t be guaranteed in lands where Jews themselves did not rule — that liberal democracies were not reliable guarantors of the rights of Jews to be Jews in all the different ways Jews are (religiously, secularly, or simply as living beings), given the antisemitic totalitarianism that arose in Germany and the USSR. Some will also say that so long as Jews are not ruling themselves, Jewish culture will always be shaped by the gaze of the non-Jew, and thus some significant degree of Jewish autonomy is needed… somewhere — a center from which Jewish culture can thrive in its own self-determinative place.
To these, I would say that political Doikayt remains in conversation with political Zionism. Neither has failed or succeeded. The achievement of Zionism, with all the significant caveats, is that it succeeded in creating that center of autonomous rule. The failure of Doikayt is pretty much limited to those lands which were never good faith guarantors of religious rights (like the Soviet Union’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast). It’s just that I believe the failures and successes of both Zionism and Doikayt are overstated. Jewish culture and rule are still shaped to some degree by the gaze of the non-Jews and Jewish freedom to be Jewish in different ways is strained inside Israel in ways that seem absurd in many open and multicultural liberal democracies.
My suggestion, for people drawn to ideological centers, is to resist this impulse, and to question, tachlis, what and where being Jewish is actually imperiled, culturally or existentially. Some Jews are concerned that certain humane rabbinic Jewish values will be overwritten in a state with majoritarian Jewish rule. Ideas of Jewish exceptionalism obscure that tendencies towards autocracy and totalitarianism threaten Jewish diversity on the one hand, and minority rights on the other. God-willing, we will continue to listen to one another and observe the actual impact of Jewish ideas in the world, and have the freedom to act differently where necessary.
The No-State Solution (Daniel Boyarin 2022) – title page verso
This post was originally published to Facebook on 9 August 2024 where it very quickly ran askance of FB’s span algorithm (don’t ask).
““Wherever we live, that is our homeland” – a frontispiece in Daniel Boyarin’s The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (2022)” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.
Leave a Reply