Slouching Toward Bethlehem: A Critique of Jewish American Literary-Historical Zionism

Abstract:This article critically examines the development and machinery of a Jewish studies–based literary historical approach to Israel-Palestine organized by the largely unexamined assumption that all things "Israel" are fundamentally or properly "Jewish," in the sense of being primarily or even exclusively Jews' responsibility to face and/or address. This includes the political and moral debate that the state and the occupation occasions but also the discursive frameworks in which representations of Israel, Zionism, and the condition of Palestinians are elaborated and analyzed. The article elaborates this assumption as a Zionist form of intellectuality—"Zionist" because it colonizes a field of discourse in the name of Jewish self-consciousness. Like the presumption that American Jews see Zionism and an attachment to Israel as simply part of the experience of Jewish identity—which went hand in hand with a wider American embrace of Zionism and Israel—a Jewish American literary interest in Israel, and the hegemonic rise of Jewish American literary Zionism, are not self-evident, and they have histories. It should be the work of a critical Jewish studies to destabilize the practice and protocols of this epistemological privilege.