The body and messianism

Globalization, Diasporas, and Transnationalism: Jews in the Americas

“…While the “miraculous” experience of the Six-Day War enhanced the links with Israel as the state of the Jewish people, it also reinforced the connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel—a link recovered and channeled by the Orthodox world (Danzger 1989 ). Religious Zionism and the settlers were also nourished by this experience that led to strengthening biblical-mythical beliefs, connections, and symbols (Aran 1991 ; Dieckhoff 2003 ; Don-Yehiya 2014 ; Sagi and Schwartz 2018 ). Over time, this trend grew and reached in the early twenty-first century its utmost expression, in which religious allegiances, ideological worldviews, and instrumental considerations interact in interwoven and complex ways (DellaPergola 2020a ).…”

“…Yet, the paradoxical reversal of the centrality and meaning of the memory of the Shoah today finds expression in central arguments of representatives of post- and de-colonial thought, questioning and condemning it as part of the Western effort to displace and reject other genocides. Colonial racism is analyzed within the framework of the Holocaust and colonialism remembrance, and thus represents the Western, Eurocentric remembrance paradigm (Mignolo 2009 ; Grosfogel 2009 ).…”

Nation-Statist Soteriology and Traditions of Defeat: Religious-Zionism, the Ninth of Av, and Jerusalem Day

“…We will approach this question by retracing the ways in which a political ideology that self-identifies as an instance of religious nationalism—proclaiming, that is, to uphold a commitment to nationalism or nation-statism that views itself as an embodiment and fulfilment of religious tradition itself—negotiates the tension that arises when the message entailed in this tradition conflicts with the nation-statist soteriology. The ideology at play is Religious-Zionism (Schwartz 2008; Inbari 2012; Don-Yehiya 2014; Hellinger, Hershkowitz, and Susser 2018; Sagi and Schwartz 2018; Hadad 2020; Katsman 2020; Yadgar and Hadad 2021), and the specific tradition (or element of Jewish tradition) at hand is that of the commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, the end of Jewish (rather: Judean) self-rule, and the onset of exile in antiquity, marked by fasting and mourning in the Ninth of Av. As we will show below, the message traditionally propagated by the story of the Ninth of Av and the rituals commemorating and propagating it—a story of sin, divine punishment, catastrophe, and a hoped-for eschatology of ultimate redemption—directly contradicts some of the most foundational elements of Zionist nationalism and the political mythology of Israeli nation-statism.…”