skygiants

"Where a [Hebraist] nationalist might say 'Our sacred duty is to care first for our own and concentrate our people in its own secure, powerful nation-state and develop our historic language as its official state language,' a [Yiddishist] humanist might say, 'our sacred duty is to stay where we are to help build a multicultural democratic state where we can develop the language of our people, just as others will do alongside us, in friendship, harmony, and mutual respect.'"

I apologize for quoting an extensive excerpt from something I linked a couple of days ago and which you may already have read anyway, but this is from Jacob Plitman's "On an Emerging Diasporism" and you will see why I was reminded immediately of it:

"In her 2007 book, The Colors of Jews, scholar and activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz gave more shape to the idea of diasporism by discussing the meaning of home:

"What do I mean by home? Not the nation state; not religious worship; not the deepest grief of a people marked by hatred. I mean a commitment to what is and is not mine; to the strangeness of others, to my strangeness to others; to common threads twisted with surprise. Diasporism takes root in the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund's principle of doikayt—hereness—the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are...Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don't belong…I name this commitment Diasporism.

"HERENESS is the organizing principle of diasporism, a critical awareness of Israel coupled with a commitment to struggling primarily in the communities in which we live. Hereness invites us to dig in and build a political, spiritual and material fullness. Thereness tell us to search for meaning and well-being elsewhere, to separate our heart and head and displace them from our body. Hereness might have us use our trauma to build close relationships with our neighbors and allies. Thereness encourages us to imagine that isolation will heal our pain.

"Hereness isn't just about place, but about people: centering our politics and spiritual project around those nearest to us, adopting neighborliness as political practice and intergenerationality as a matter of course. Hereness demands that we learn our local histories and resurrect hidden ones of our own. Hereness means we refuse to disappear into the interiority of our liturgy, and equally refuse to stop being Jews in public. Hereness forces us to consider critically our relationship with class and its ordering of our world. Hereness is weird and materialist and queer and fun and angry, and best of all it's already happening."

I think there's a reason that Diasporic callbacks like Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird are taking off like wildfire lately and I don't think it's just romantic nostalgia on the part of American Jews or a nervous dissociation from Israel. It's because there's still something there of immediate, practical relevance to living in the world, in this world as it is taking shape especially.

This isn't the turn of the twentieth century. That moment passed long ago, and romanticizing the past isn't ever a particularly good look, but I can't help agreeing to a certain extent with Sfar. History came down like a hammer on the Yiddishist Jews of Europe; that doesn't mean they were wrong. I don't think they were wrong.

That's well said.