Diasporic Nationalism: The Accidental Anti-Zionism of Deep Space Nine
Jews are worth saving, so let's use the strategy that works.
(warnings: this post advocates a form of anti-Zionism and spoils a pretty good plot twist, by nineties TV standards.)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ran for seven seasons, rarely having any long-term idea of what story they were trying to tell. Most of the serialized arcs are a mess, and individual episodes are very uneven, some deeply problematic and stupid, others strong showcases of the promise of televised science fiction. I think the one arc that turned out well, probably to the surprise of all concerned, was Odo’s.
Odo is a shapeshifter, but not a very good one. He can look like a human, but the difference is obvious to actual humans, or like a bird, but the difference is obvious to real birds, and so on. Part of the reason for his lack of skill is that he doesn’t have the right personality for a shapeshifter—he’s closed-off, traumatized, avoiding any relationship that seems like it could lead to compromise. The bigger reason is that he’s, as far as he knows at the start of the series, the only one of his kind. He’s never had a shapeshifting teacher and has no knowledge of his origin or cultural heritage.
As Odo and the Federation start exploring a distant part of the galaxy, the Gamma Quadrant, he begins to suspect, mostly through intuition, that the answers to his past are there. He meets Gamma Quadrant aliens who have legends of shapeshifters, mostly ones where they’re adversaries who get tricked and killed by the heroes, inspired by real-world shapeshifter legends like Zeus eating Metis in Greek mythology.
The one time, much later in the series, we hear a positive legend about a shapeshifter, it starts with the shapeshifter fleeing a pogrom, for some reason the legend doesn’t bother to give, as though pogroms against shapeshifters are just a basic law of the universe.
The other protagonists are sympathetic to his quest, but much more focused on a different, more concrete mystery—stories of the Dominion. Everywhere they visit bears terrible scars from a past Dominion occupation, or lives in fear of them, or insists that the Federation will never be welcome in the Gamma Quadrant until they submit to the Dominion. But all of these people have only met subject races of the Dominion, foot-soldiers and enforcers, never the leaders.
Eventually, they split up, with Odo following an intuitive pull towards a seemingly arbitrary planet, and the rest chasing a lead that might finally let them make contact with the Dominion, and hopefully come to some sort of understanding. Odo finally finds his people. They’re almost all hiding on this one world, they tell him, because pogroms against shapeshifters are otherwise inevitable. Here they’re safe to quasi-merge bodies and minds in an ocean-like Great Link, or to explore and cultivate their shapeshifting, finding enlightenment and joy in transforming into plants, rocks, or abstract forms.
Odo was one of a hundred children, they tell him, who they scattered throughout the galaxy, in the hope that they would one day return, bringing knowledge of the outside into their isolation. He’s the first to find them. Odo still feels ties to his adopted people and culture, but here, he feels like he’s finally home.
And then, after a couple of misdirects, we get the cruel twist. Everything they told him is true. But, also, they are the founders and rulers of the Dominion. “Anybody we don’t control and bring order to,” they explain, “will eventually find and kill us. So we have to conquer the galaxy. It’s the only way shapeshifters can be safe.”
Are There Alternatives to Dominion?
The primary case for Israel as a Jewish state, made over and over again, is based on fear. During the Holocaust, even the countries who didn’t surrender to the Nazis, even the United States, denied entry to most Jewish refugees. Global anti-Semitism meant there was nowhere to run. Israel is the solution. When they come for us again, anywhere in the diaspora, Israel will take us in. Israel will ensure, above all else, that they remain a Jewish state, and one that can defend itself. If Israel falls, we’re all less safe.
We’ve all internalized this fear to some extent. It’s both generational trauma and explicit dogma. My progressive shul taught it to me, over and over. It can make it hard to hear anti-Zionism as anything other than genocidal anti-Semitism. Calls for Palestine to be “free from the river to the sea” sound like they necessarily imply extermination of the Israelis. Hence the recent progressive embrace of the “two-state solution,” where part of Palestine is free and part of it remains unfree. Calls for us to abandon our dominion entirely are really calls for us to die, dressed up in disingenuous rhetoric. Rhetoric that we see through so instantaneously that we just hear the subtext as though it were text. “Finally, an excuse to destroy your safe haven.”
I don’t endorse this model of the 21st-century West. But if you do, or if your fear is so strong that it shouts down everything else, I’d ask you, if you can, to sit with it as though it’s a true dilemma. Suppose the choice is between Jews being constantly on the run, with nowhere remaining safe for long, or the end of the diaspora, as country by country, we flee a rising tide of anti-Semitism to Israel, where violence will be eternally necessary to preserve the state. Suppose it’s a choice between eternal pogroms, or the slow cultural annihilation of the diaspora Jewish people as we assimilate into one nation, one that in order to survive must abandon the pluralism and tolerance that have become core to what we are. Is the right choice really so clear, when you make it explicit? Empirically, Jewish culture can survive diaspora. It probably can’t survive Israel.
Anyway, both of those options suck. Let’s find a third one.
The No-State Solution
Daniel Boyarin is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at UC Berkeley. He grew up in diaspora, born to Litvaks in New Jersey in 1946. He spent decades studying Talmud, and was acclaimed as one of the leading religious scholars of the age, within and without his Orthodox community.
Then he moved to Israel, wanting to raise his children there. Within a decade, he began to advocate for its destruction.
Boyarin’s quite a few steps ahead of me, on the same journey I’ve been on. As he says in the linked interview,
“It took years before I could utter the words anti-Zionist. It was like my tongue would stick to the roof of my mouth. But now, of course, it just trips off my tongue.”
I’ve only just gotten past roof-of-the-mouth stage myself. It still feels terrible to say or write. But Boyarin’s been thinking for decades about what a pro-Jewish anti-Zionism should look like. His 2023 book, The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto, builds on earlier essays about what he calls “diasporic Jewish nationalism.” Jews should not assimilate. We should remain ourselves, and retain our sense of connection to all other Jews. At the same time, we should embrace the diaspora, and with it, pluralism and universal compassion. As Jews, we all need to look out for each other. And as humans, we all need to look out for each other too.
The two goals become aligned, once you take Zionism out of the equation. Where would you advise Jews fleeing persecution today to go? New York City is a sanctuary city. It failed us as a sanctuary in the twenties and thirties, giving in to xenophobic racial quotas around immigration. But that was a hundred years ago, and even then, it was one of the best places to try, thanks in part to centuries of Jewish activism. New Amsterdam became a city in 1653. Only one year later, Jewish immigrants from Holland, and Jewish refugees from Portuguese Brazil, arrived, and the city reluctantly took them in due to pressure from powerful Jews back in old Amsterdam. Immigration gradually, fitfully, became part of the city’s identity. Not “we take in Jewish refugees.” We take in everyone. If you call yourself a New Yorker, you’re a New Yorker.
Emma Lazarus, who wrote the poem that’s now inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, was a Jew who set out to help Jewish refugees. Some of her poetry is explicitly about Jewish nationalism, and some about Jewish pride. But the poem of hers that’s helped Jews the most doesn’t mention us at all.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
A general culture of taking in refugees, of tolerance, of pluralism, is a more robust protection than any specifically Jewish institution. In 1883, Jews in New York were fighting for all minorities, everywhere, not just the eighty thousand Jews in the city. At the same time, Jews in France were fighting for about thirty thousand Algerian Jews, a community with a history going back to the ninth century. Both succeeded, in the short term. In France, they won a decree stating that Algerian Jews, and Jews only, would no longer count as indigenous Africans. In the long term, this policy divided the Jews there from their neighbors more thoroughly than ever before. Today, there are well over a million Jews in New York City. There are about two hundred left in Algeria. To build a sanctuary for Jews that will survive surges of anti-Semitism, build a sanctuary for people.
And to remain the sort of people who would write Emma Lazarus’s poem, we need to remain Jews. Specifically, says Boyarin, we need to remain diasporic Rabbinic Jews, if only because keeping kosher will always set us that little bit apart. I’m not sure as he is that the Talmud itself is still essential to who we are today, although he’s far enough ahead of me that I’m not confident I’m right. But I agree that we should remain the people the Talmud made us into. And that Zionism is not the way to do that.
Here’s another poem that Emma Lazarus wrote. This one is for the Jews.
I saw in dream the spirits unbegot,
Veiled, floating phantoms, lost in twilight space;
For one the hour had struck, he paused; the place
Rang with an awful Voice:
'Soul, choose thy lot!
Two paths are offered; that, in velvet-flower,
Slopes easily to every earthly prize.
Follow the multitude and bind thine eyes,
Thou and thy sons' sons shall have peace with power.
This narrow track skirts the abysmal verge,
Here shalt thou stumble, totter, weep and bleed,
All men shall hate and hound thee and thy seed,
Thy portion be the wound, the stripe, the scourge.
But in thy hand I place my lamp for light,
Thy blood shall be the witness of my Law,
Choose now for all the ages!'
Then I saw
The unveiled spirit, grown divinely bright,
Choose the grim path. He turned, I knew full well
The pale, great martyr-forehead shadowy-curled,
The glowing eyes that had renounced the world,
Disgraced, despised, immortal Israel.
That poem is called The Choice. It’s still the choice today. We can make peace with power, and blind ourselves to what it’s doing. Or we can lift the lamp.
Coming Home
When Boyarin first started studying Talmud, he says, it was like a shot of heroin. His blood sang to him. He knew that this was who he was, and what he wanted to do.
I can relate. Writing these essays this past month, being as Jewish as I know how to be, has felt like finally coming home. It feels like a part of me always knew this was who I was, a part I was running away from because of my discomfort with power. I don’t know where, exactly, this sense some of us have of being born a scholar comes from. How much is cultural, how much is genetic, how much is selection bias? But I know that it’s Jewish, and it makes me proud to be. Jews are 0.2% of the world’s population, and over 20% of the world’s Nobel Prize winners. We outperform in every category, with the highest being Medicine at 26%, if you don’t count the quasi-Nobel for Economics, which is over 40% Jewish. And almost all of these winners are diaspora Jews, so we’ve been contributing to the world at that outsize level even while on the run. I’m pretty sure that ratio holds at less selective levels too. They tried to kill us, and not only did they not succeed, we invented about a quarter of the world’s medical knowledge with one hand while we foiled them with the other. We’re awesome. However it happened, the sacrifices our ancestors made to keep the lamp lit were worth it for that alone. We’re worth more than just our lives. We should resist assimilation, including by states that call themselves Jewish and claim to be protecting us.
Odo comes home too, this time for good, at the very end of the series. The Dominion and the Federation fight a long brutal war, with Odo conflicted the whole time, mostly on the Federation’s side but not always. But finally, Odo figures out how to share his values with the Great Link, ending the war. He was sent out into the wider universe to learn about it, and bring that knowledge home. The knowledge he brings home turns out to be that pogroms are not inevitable, that people who aren’t shapeshifters are capable of empathy and tolerance, when their culture leads them there. They didn’t expect that to be what they learned from their children’s diaspora and aliyah. But if you know ahead of time what you’re going to learn, what’s the point?
