The next Deans’ Seminar in the 2020-21 series will be held this Friday, February 19, 2021. Benjamin Balthaser, Associate Professor of English, will present his research entitled “Diaspora Against Empire: Jewish Anti-Nationalism and the 20th Century Literary Left.” We will meet at noon (before the Academic Senate meeting) via zoom: https://iu.zoom.us/j/93176192536
Abstract
The year of Israel’s founding as a state (1948), America’s most famous and pugnacious Jewish socialist and writer, Mike Gold, left a one-act play buried in his desk. Rather than celebrating the new Jewish homeland, the play contained a dialogue between ghosts of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Jewish socialist writer in New York. The ghosts accuse the writer that he saw Nazism coming and that he did too little, too late, misled by his faith in American liberal democracy. And on the eve of the founding of the first Jewish state, Palestine is mentioned only once, as but another false dream: where the Nazis would tell the Ghetto residents they are going on their way to Auschwitz. The play concludes with the wistful desire that Jews return to Eastern Europe and rebuild their lives — not in Israel, but in the diaspora.
That Gold left this play in his desk says a great deal about how such articulations have been silenced for the last several decades, lingering as a literal ghosts haunting the Jewish left. This talk examines Jewish left-wing anti-imperialist thought as expressed by Jewish authors and intellectuals from the mid-twentieth century to the present. My research suggests that the supposed consensus around the need for a nation-state in Palestine was at best short-lived, and Jewish writers and thinkers—such as Mike Gold and Robert Gessner in the 1930s and 1940s and Irena Klepfisz and Grace Paley in the 1960s and 1970s—articulated many complex and even contradictory visions of transnational, anti-imperialist, and globally connected Jewish life in critical dialogue with Zionism.