Free The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics by Gilad Atzmon

way around, an anti-Semite is someone the Jews hate.’ The politics of hate can be effective, as well as being vicious. And you’d think tribal Jewish activists would be the first to understand this. We all know that Jews have been suffering hatred and discrimination for centuries. Yet the Jewish ethnic activists seemto have learned hatred from their enemies so well that the secular Jewish political discourse has been totally shaped by it.
    Moreover, hate has become the main matrix of negation: the Israelis hate the Arabs, the Zionists hate the Goyim (in general), Jews against Zionism also hate the Goyim but they also hate Israel as well as Atzmon (in particular). But why do they hate so much? The answer is simple. Once Judaism is renounced, what remains of Jewish identity is pretty threadbare. Once stripped of religious spirituality, all that is left of Jewish-ness is a template of negation fuelled by racial orientation and spiced up with some light cultural references such as matza balls and chicken soup.
    Sadly, I have to say that though very many emancipated and assimilated Jews have adopted universal humanist ideas and intermingled with humanity, secular collective Jewish identity has never matured into adopting a universal humanist ideological standpoint or even a philosophical insight.
    The reasons are simple:
A.   Racial, tribal or even ethnic orientation cannot form a basis for a universal ethical argument.
B.   Chicken soup or even Jewish humour (culture) does not make an ideological, ethical or political argument.
    It was Moses Mendelssohn, an 18th century Jewish ‘progressive’ scholar, who coined the famous Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) insight: ‘Be a Jew at Home and a Goy on the Street’. Mendelssohn’s revelation for the modern Jew doesn’t leave much room for doubt. Rather than encouraging the modern Jew to genuinely assimilate into a homogenous authentic universal ethos of equality, the Haskalah Jew is destined to live in a dual, deceptive mode, if not practically a state of schizophrenia. He is split between the solitary pleasure of a cosy, homely Jewish identity and the public appearance of the surrounding reality. The Haskalah Jew is deceiving his or her God when at home, and misleading the Goy once in the street.
    In fact, it is this duality of tribalism and universalism that is at the very heart of the collective secular Jewish identity. This duality has never been properly resolved. Instead of redeeming the Jews it imposes a certain level of dishonesty.
    A few attempts have been made to brush it off but they have all failed. Zionism for instance, offered to abolish the ‘abnormal’ condition of the ‘Jewish Diaspora’, in other words, it suggested that in a ‘Jewish State’ (intended as being for Jews Only) the differences between the ‘home’ and the ‘street’ would disappear. Though it managed to do this, at least for a while, there is no trace of universalism in either the Zionist’s ‘street’ or in his ‘home’.
    The carnage Israel left behind in Lebanon (2006) or Gaza (2008) doesn’t leave much room for doubt – Israel doesn’t really offer us any lessons in universal cosmopolitanism. Marxism also attempted to make people look equal. In other words, it promised to make all ‘homes’ and people look the same. This idea was very appealing to a few West European and many East European Jews who even formed the Bund, a Jewish Socialist Party. Marxism was indeed successful for a while, however, nowadays it is actually consumerism that makes us all look homogenous (iPod, coca-cola, jeans etc’). Clearly, there is not much to celebrate there either.
    It is from within the failure of these two competing grand ideologies that the matrix of negation marched triumphantly. The search for a contemporary, collective, secular Jewish identity is a perplexing endeavour. Just as in Mendelssohn’s time, it aims at integrating the opposing categories of tribalism and universalism.