Last year, I wrote a mixed review of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. I praised many aspects of the book, and described Klein herself as a “serious person who’s guided by a humane and egalitarian worldview.” But I also said that her anxious desire to sign off on “every piety of radical-liberal identity politics” sometimes led her to strange places that aren’t really consistent with her own best instincts.
In particular, I highlighted what seemed to be the glaring contradiction between her position on Zionism and Jewish identity on the one hand and her attitude toward Canada’s racial reckoning over indigenous issues on the other. In his new book Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, literature professor Benjamin Balthaser claims that this criticism is misguided. He uses my review as an example of a flawed form of Jewish “diasporism” that, in his view, ends up being wretchedly liberal rather than truly liberatory.
As far as I can tell, Klein, Balthaser, and I all agree on quite a lot. We’re all democratic socialists. We’ve all written about the oppression of the Palestinians. We’re all hostile to Zionism on a basic ideological level. Hell, we’ve all written for Jacobin, and my own forthcoming book shares a publisher with Citizens of the Whole World.1 So, I can understand how an outside observer looking at these disagreements might chalk it all up to the narcissism of small differences.
I do think, though, that there’s something at stake here that actually matters.
Should the socialist left start from a belief in universal human equality? And if so, can that be reconciled with the belief that anyone’s rights or status should depend on where their ancestors lived?
In the review, I singled out the chapter of Doppleganger on Israel/Palestine for praise, noting that Klein “rightly abhors the violence and oppression directed by the Israeli state against the non-citizen Palestinian population, and she rightly bristles at the suggestion that her Jewish identity should lead her to be an apologist for this form of apartheid.” I’ve hit similar themes in my own work (e.g. here).
The next part of the review is worth quoting at length to provide the context for Balthaser’s critiuqe.
This sounds like one more entry in the list of creditable egalitarian positions from Klein—and it certainly is that—but what’s particularly interesting to me is that she grounds her rejection of Zionism in an exploration of the history of Jewish radicalism. In a typically sharp passage, she acknowledges a grain of truth in antisemitic tropes about “Judeo-Bolshevism.” It is true that an awful lot of socialism’s early leading lights were Jewish. (Leon Trotsky! Emma Goldman! Rosa Luxemburg! Even Karl Marx came from a secular Jewish family who’d recently gone through the motions of converting to Lutheranism to evade legal discrimination.) A fascist would respond to this list with, “See! I told you so.” Alternatively, Klein writes, you could go with one of the “flattering lefty stories” she herself grew up with—that Jews, having been subject to so much oppression themselves, were more motivated to combat the oppression of other people. But she suggests an interesting third option:
…that Jewish interest in the theoretical side of what we now call Marxism—with its sweeping and scientific explanations and analyses of global capitalism—is an attempt to compete with those conspiracy theories that have dogged our people through the ages.
In other words, it’s not hooked-nosed Jews ripping off hard-working goyim. It’s economic structures that, quite apart from the subjectivity of the people located in them, are geared to “extract maximum wealth from working people.”
She singles out the Jewish Labor Bund in Tsarist Russia for praise:
One of the Bund’s core principles was doi’kavt, or “hereness”—the idea that Jews belonged where they lived, in what was known as “the pale of settlement,” and should fight for greater rights and increased justice as Jews and as workers, alongside non-Jewish members of their class. They should not have to place their hopes in a far-off Jewish homeland, as the early Zionists had begun to argue in the same period. Nor should they have to flee to North America, as hundreds of thousands of German and Eastern European Jews had already been forced to do. Doi’kayt proclaimed that Bundists would stay here—and make here better.
This is great stuff. But it’s a very odd fit with another section of the book, where she discusses the aftermath of the discovery of evidence of mass graves at the sites of Canada’s old “residential schools” for native children. In the countries ensuing racial reckoning, Canadians were, she says, “digging deeper than ever before” in her lifetime. Of this “national excavation,” she enthuses:
In place of the ephemera and boosterism of national mythmaking and official histories, a solid idea seemed to be forming about where we live and how this land came to be available to settlers like me—and what it might take to finally be good guests and neighbors…
The premise that the dispossession of the natives by early European settlers was a terrible thing—a grave violation of rights all humans should have—is certainly correct. It’s similarly true that various forms of discrimination continued long after the initial settlement, and that any such history tends to drag a trail of continuing material disparities in its wake.
But Naomi Klein isn’t even descended from anyone who could sanely be described as a “settler” of Canada. As I understand it, her parents emigrated from the US to Canada so that her father could avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Klein’s self-identification here (“settlers like me”) is a prime example of identity politics making otherwise very smart people stupid. Beyond that, though, there’s a contradiction here that should be visible from space. Jews in Tsarist Russia “belonged where they lived,” but the Klein family apparently doesn’t “belong” in Canada. They’re only “guests” of the ethnic group entitled to be there by a suitable blood-and-soil connection to the territory.
If you called a family of Guatemalan immigrants who’d been naturalized as Canadian citizens last week “guests” rather than fully paid-up members of Canadian society because their ancestors didn’t live there a hundred years ago, Naomi Klein would presumably call you a fascist. So how is it that someone like her who was born in Canada is nevertheless a “guest” because she’s white and her ancestors didn’t live there before the first wave of European settlement? And, come to think of it, why isn’t she a Zionist? After all, wouldn’t Jews be mere “guests” everywhere in the diaspora—always having to mind their Ps and Qs in front of the various gentile groups who actually belong in their various ancestral lands?
In Citizens of the Whole World, Balthaser writes:
What does it mean to embrace the diaspora? In one sense, there is a kind of liberal, commonsense diasporism of American Jewish life. We can hear echoes of it in Seth Rogan’s “No, I am not going to live in Israel” and Larry David’s defense of a Palestinian American restaurant defiantly opening next door to a Jewish deli as an affirmation of American multiculturalism: “This is America; people can open a restaurant wherever they want.” Both are statements less of solidarity with Palestinians or grand visions of internationalism and more of a liberal-American common sense of personal freedom.
It’s worth pausing here to recall that we live in a time when civic nationalism and even birthright citizenship are under attack from reactionaries who believe that America should belong to “heritage Americans” rather than to everyone who lives here. It seems to me that there’s quite a bit to be said on behalf of a “a liberal-American common sense of personal freedom.” I’m all in favor of pushing beyond liberal civic nationalism if we get to the point where we can have borderless *Star Trek-*style global socialism instead. Until then, though, instead of being dismissive of this kind of democratic common sense as insufficiently radical, it seems to me that the socialist left should defend it as an immensely important achievement and a vital starting point for our own goals.
After exploring Philip Roth’s novels The Counterlife and Operation Shylock as expressions of the bad liberal kind of “diasporism,” Balthaser turns to me.
Jacobin writer Ben Burgis evoked the idea of diasporism-as-cosmopolitanism in his critique of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. While applauding her rejection of the blood-and-soil nationalism of a Jewish supremacist state in the Levant, Burgis takes her to task for suggesting that as a white Canadian, she is but a “guest” in the northern republic, a settler in a settler-colonial state. For Burgis, the diasporist idea of doikayt—hereness—suggests that Jews belong wherever they live; there are no real indigenous people, just as there are no real nations. Suggesting that diasporism is synonymous with universal humanism, Burgis argues that “cosmopolitan, egalitarian universalism,” and not relational identity, has “historically formed the normative bedrock of the socialist Left.” Much like Roth’s invocation of Jewish diaspora, for Burgis, to be a Jew is little different from, or perhaps just another way of articulating, a deracinated, modern subject who belongs nowhere and thus belongs everywhere. While Klein I believe would argue that it is precisely the idea of doikayt to critically analyze the structures of power within the political and economic system in which one lives, Burgis’s reading of diasporism as just another name for cosmopolitan universalism begs the question of what, if anything, diasporism means beyond a rejection of Zionism. In Burgis’s framing, diasporism rejects Zionism, but then is a modality to erase settler histories elsewhere: to not belong in Tel Aviv is another way of naturalizing belonging in Toronto or New York City.
This is a mess. Balthaser is running together several very different issues.
Just for starters, I have no clue where he’s getting the idea that my Doppleganger review advocated any sort of position about what it is “to be a Jew.” I was writing about core socialist principles as they have been and should be espoused by people of all ethnicities, religions, and cultural backgrounds. If you want to know what I think about Jewishness and my own (fairly ambiguous) relationship to it, that’s something I’ve written about elsewhere, but it’s a separate issue from anything I touch on in the review.
A “cosmopolitan, egalitarian universalism” about the rights and status of all human beings doesn’t entail that there’s anything wrong with anyone identifying with any particular culture or religion, or having that identity be important be important to them. If as a Jewish person you want to be a “deracinated, modern subject’“ (which I take it is Balthaser’s way of saying “not having a particularly strong sense of Jewish identity”), that’s fine. If you want to embrace such a strict and traditionalist form of Judaism that you start saying prayers every time you pee or wash your hands, that’s fine too. So is anything in between.
Again, this is just a separate issue from universalism about rights and status. Whatever religion you practice, whoever your ancestors were, and whichever aspects of your cultural background are meaningful to you, you and everyone who lives in the same society that you do should have an equal claim to being full members of that society. That, and not anything about how “deracinated” a “subject” you are or should be, is the point of “cosmpolitan, egalitarian universalism.”
Then there’s the question of “hereness” (doi’kavt). Again, Balthaser writes:
For Burgis, the diasporist idea of doikayt—hereness—suggests that Jews belong wherever they live; there are no real indigenous people, just as there are no real nations.
If Balthaser had read more carefully, he might have noticed that I never once used either the Yiddish or the English word for “hereness” myself. The only time either word appears in my review is in a quote from Klein where she suggested that hereness means Jews that belong wherever they live (or certainly at least that the ones in Tsarist Russia belonged there).
Klein was the one who wrote that one of “the Bund’s core principles” was “doi’kavt, or ‘hereness’—the idea that Jews belonged where they lived” and thus that they shouldn’t have to migrate either to Palestine or the United States to find a better life and that it was better to stay and fight for a better society where they were. Her emphasis on this point was what led me to object to the apparent contradiction.
Jews in Tsarist Russia “belonged where they lived,” but the Klein family apparently doesn’t “belong” in Canada. They’re only “guests” of the ethnic group entitled to be there by a suitable blood-and-soil connection to the territory.
And here, one more time, is Balthaser’s response:
While Klein I believe would argue that it is precisely the idea of doikayt to critically analyze the structures of power within the political and economic system in which one lives, Burgis’s reading of diasporism as just another name for cosmopolitan universalism begs the question of what, if anything, diasporism means beyond a rejection of Zionism.
This is so muddled that it’s hard to know where to begin, but a good first step when you’re trying to impose clarity on a passage like this is to sort out the descriptive part (the claims about how things actually are) from the normative part (the claims about what’s good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust). I’m all in favor of “analyz[ing] structures of power within the political and economic system in which one lives.” But what exactly is that supposed to do with whether white Canadians like Klein should humbly understand themselves as mere “guests” of Canadians whose ancestors were there before the first European settlers?
Balthaser’s claim surely isn’t that existing political and economic structures actually do relegate white Canadians in present-day reality to a secondary status analogous to a literal “guest” in someone else’s home. Presumably, he’d say just the opposite—that white Canadians are treated by the existing structures as if they were Canada’s “homeowners,” and the less privileged First Nations population is structurally in a much worse position, as if they were mere houseguests.2 Pretty clearly, the issue in dispute is not anything about the political economy of contemporary Canada or anything about the history leading up to present conditions, but whether some people have a better normative claim on Canadian belonging than others because of their ancestry.
My position is that no piece of land anywhere in the world has ever “belonged” to some ethnic unit defined by common culture or ancestry, but rather that every human being has an equal normative claim on wherever they live. I’d reject any normative claim that Jews in Tsarist Russia should have humbled themselves as “guests” of ethnic Russians, for example, or that people who’s parents came to the United States from India in the 1980s are not full-fledged Americans but mere “guests” of properly credentialed “heritage Americans,” and I’d equally reject any other such claim about any other pair of ethnic groups without exception. We should object to the oppression of indigenous Canadians and the oppression of Palestinians not because “indigeneity” conveys some special moral status, but because of a universalistic moral objection to the oppression of anyone.
If Balthaser disagrees with that normative standard, I’d be fascinated to hear why. But chiding me for supposedly not wanting to “analyze the structures of power within the political and economic system in which one lives” is just an evasion.
The same fact/value confusion shows up in the final line of his critique:
In Burgis’s framing, diasporism rejects Zionism, but then is a modality to erase settler histories elsewhere: to not belong in Tel Aviv is another way of naturalizing belonging in Toronto or New York City.
You don’t have to “erase settler histories” to believe that the descendants of settlers and the descendants of the people who lived that piece of land when the settlers showed up have precisely the same normative claim on belonging now. Nor do you have to erase the relevance of those histories to explaining disparities in present-day conditions. You just have to believe that no one’s rights should depend on where their ancestors lived, full stop.
Nor do I think, as Balthaser oddly implies that I do, that Israeli Jews don’t belong in Tel Aviv in some sense in which American or Canadian Jews do belong in Toronto or New York City. I believe (with Klein, when she’s talking about the Bundists, and against Klein, when she’s talking about Canadians) that everyone belongs wherever they are. That’s why I’m an anti-Zionist. I reject Zionism’s core premise that Jews have a special claim to their ancestral homeland, and that it’s thus acceptable to do things like encourage Jewish migration there from all around the world while blocking Palestinian refugees from coming back. It’s also why I reject the cutting-edge ethnonationalism of the “heritage American” freaks. I think Israel should be a pluralistic state equally belonging to Jews, Palestinians, and everyone else who lives there, and America should be a pluralistic state equally belonging to “heritage Americans,” people who took their citizenship exams last Tuesday, people who’s ancestors showed up around when mine did in the early twentieth century, people who are Ojibwe on both sides and have had ancestors continually living on this continent for thousands of years, and everyone else who’s here. The whole point of the political project I share with Naomi Klein and Benjamin Balthaser is that everyone should have all the same civil and democratic rights, everyone should have housing and healthcare and a decent standard of living, and everyone should have a democratic say in their workplaces, just for being a person.
That’s it. That’s the beginning and end of the point about universalism.
Somehow, though, it’s a point that Balthaser manages to badly miss.
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All three of us even seem to share some level of fondness for Philip Roth novels. In the review, I describe the extensive use Klein makesof Roth’s book Operation Shylock. In Citizens of the Whole World, Balthaser extensively discusses Roth’s work and describes the novelist as “perhaps” the “most articulate champion” of the “liberal version of diasporism” that he otherwise attributes to Seth Rogan, Larry David, and…me. And for some sense of I feel about Roth, see the write-up I did of American Pastoral in this roundup of book recommendations from Jacobin writers a few years ago.
In a sense, this is clearly correct, although I also think it’s important for reasons I wrote about two weeks ago to be careful about not conflating statistical facts about disparities between broad demographic groups with facts about the actual material position of any particular member of one of those groups.
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