ReOrienting Jewishness, Palestine Solidarity, and Prophetic Pastiche

Abstract

I am honored to have my book Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (Chicago University Press, 2019) be the subject of a focused conversation in ReOrient. I am in debt to Salman Sayyid and Santiago Slabodsky for their support and their scholarly interventions, which have deeply influenced me. I am honored that Sara Roy, Sophia Sobko, and Sa’ed Atshan all highlight, through different prisms, generative dimensions about the book and what it conveys. In what follows I will reflect with these interlocutors about their insights. At the same time, I will highlight where David Landy is misreading the book. The book centrally traces how and why seeing the crimes of Jewish power against Palestinians participates in a relational reimagining of American Jewishness as multi-racial, multi-gender, antior non-Zionist, and social justice-oriented, seeking to reclaim diasporic ethics, prophetic traditions, and Jewish histories of protest and resistance to sociopolitical and ideological sins. Roy’s engagement with Days of Awe captures so much of what this book signifies concerning the consolidation of a movement of Jewish-American critics of Zionism and Israeli policies, as well as the role of Palestinian rights and freedom struggle in this process of reimagining Jewishness otherwise. I share her sense that a lack of fluency in the history of Jewish prophetic rejection of the Jews’ complicity with the crimes against Palestinians is problematic. It is problematic for the movement’s sense of being a vanguard (a point that came through in my numerous interviews and triangulated with other public outputs of activists) and its young leaders’ sense of a prophetic charge to save Jews from Zionism and to pull the Jews out of their enslavement in the “wilderness” of Zionism. Regardless of how Landy caricatures my argument, it is only this point about saving Judaism from Zionism (more than seeking freedom for Palestinians, though those two sites are not mutually exclusive, but indeed constitutive) that, in my final chapter, I highlight how settler postzionists and American Jewish critics are both invested in saving Judaism from Zionism, albeit grounded in different ethical frames, which I highlight (e.g., Omer 2019: 259).