Friday, February 08, 2019

It Is Now "Now" But Then It Was "Here"

The slogan "Peace Now", while not specifically Jewish as evident in the phrase 'peace in our time', has always perturbed me, as if only the "now" counts. Not the past nor, actually, the future.

And then I came across this and I grasped how non-nationalist, aka Zionist, Jews, performed semantic acrobatics to avoid the true essence of Jewish communal identity:

As a legal party in the independent Polish state, the Bund sharpened its ideological positions. While the party had always been opposed to Zionism (considering it to represent only the interests of bourgeois Jewry), the movement responded to the increased appeal of Zionism after the Balfour Declaration of 1917. At this point Medem strengthened a central component to the ideology of the Bund, doikayt (hereness), and made this concept the trademark of the movement during the interwar period. Supporters of doikayt insisted that the future of the Jewish people would best unfold in the same places in the Diaspora in which it had experienced its past, and where it had developed and created its cultural resources. The party began to portray itself as the guardian of secular Yiddish Jewish culture, fighting against what it perceived to be an irresponsible illusion that would concentrate all Jews into a national homeland in Palestine, and vigorously warding off attempts to cultivate Hebrew culture in Poland at the expense of the original Yiddish culture.

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