Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack God’s authority in order to take his place, freed from all constraints. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the early modern justifications for secular politics. While she agrees that secularism is a means of empowerment, she argues that we have misunderstood the sources of secular empowerment and the kinds of strength to which it aspires. Contemporary understandings of secularism, Cooper contends, have (...) been shaped by a limited understanding of it as a shift from vulnerability to power. But the works of the foundational thinkers of secularism tell a different story. Analyzing the writings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau at the moment of secularity’s inception, she shows that all three understood that acknowledging one’s limitations was a condition of successful self-rule. And while all three invited humans to collectively build and sustain a political world, their invitations did not amount to self-deification. Cooper establishes that secular politics as originally conceived does not require a choice between power and vulnerability. Rather, it challenges us—today as then—to reconcile them both as essential components of our humanity. (shrink)

As the prospects for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have dwindled, Jewish scholars in the United States have increasingly invoked the concept of diaspora to counter a purported Jewish consensus regarding Zionism. In this essay, I critique prominent exponents of this approach from a diasporic standpoint. My concern is not that Butler and the Boyarins attack Israel publicly, endorse a binational solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and/or support the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—rather, it is that (...) they lack a compelling vision for diasporic politics. Their visions prove wanting because they contest Zionism on the terrain of Jewish identity. To loosen Zionism’s hold, Butler and the Boyarins recover alternative approaches to the attainment or grounding of Jewish identity. Yet when framed as an ethic of particular identity, diasporic thinking can neither rebut Zionism’s political arguments, nor can it develop alternative models of Jewish self-rule. Instead of theorizing Jewish identity, I argue, diasporic thinkers should envision Jewish political solidarity beyond the confines of the nation-state. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars of Jewish politics have invested political hopes in the revival of “political imagination.” If only we could recapture some of the imaginativeness that early Zionists displayed when wrestling with questions of regime design, it is argued, we might be able to advance more compelling “solutions” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet how does one cultivate political imagination? Curiously, scholars who rehearse the catalogue of regimes that Jews have historically entertained seldom pose this question. In this Article, I (...) revisit a historical episode—the appropriation of diasporic historical narratives by Zionists in mandatory Palestine—in an effort to cultivate a richer political imaginary. I analyze the labor Zionist deployment of Simon Dubnow’s influential master narrative, focusing on a 1926 speech in which David Ben Gurion depicts the autonomist regime that he advocates as a variation upon diasporic political practices. On my reading, this episode illustrates the dilemmas that confront thinkers who invest political hopes in regime design. To realize the promise that new political configurations may emerge from reflections upon Jewish history, I argue, we must develop a new account of political agency, once foundational assumptions of the nation-state have been suspended. (shrink)

If politics is about the state, can a stateless people be political? The field of Jewish political thought examines how Jewish individuals and communal organizations have behaved politically both within and beyond statehood. The study of Jewish political thought promises to expand received conceptions of what counts as "political.".