Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
Leon Rosselson is in dialogue with Carolyn Karcher, the editor of Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Personal Stories of Transformation, conceived of as “a project that would bring my scholarship and my activism together”.
It was recently published in the US by Olive Branch Press.
This article was originally published by Medium.com on Wed 4 Sep 2019. Read the original here.
Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of personal transformation
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It is good to see the religious Jews are speaking out more and more about the oppression of the Palestinians. One thing I would remark on though, is the statement that “what Jews around the world have in common with each other is only the body of sacred texts on which their ancestral religion is founded”. This appears to ignore the fact that there is a large body of Jews who know almost nothing of their religious or of Jewish culture. This has partly happened through assimilation and (forced) migration. I am one of these people, the son of a German Jewish refugee, who herself was not religious and was assimilated until she was forced to flee and was culturally “more German than Jewish” – and I certainly have even less affinity with Jewish culture, religious or secular. What makes me Jewish is that, according Israeli law, I have the right to live there and that an anti-semite would consider me Jewish. I think there are a lot of people in my position and we are quite likely to get missed in surveys of Jewish attitudes etc., but to me those two factors are sufficient to qualify someone as Jewish.