Missing the Point on Universalism
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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General Jewish Labour Bund
14 min read
The article extensively discusses the Bund's concept of 'doikayt' (hereness) as a counter to Zionism, making the full history of this socialist Jewish organization essential context for understanding the diasporist position Klein and Burgis advocate
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Canadian Indian residential school system
12 min read
The article references Canada's 'racial reckoning' over residential school mass graves as a key example in Klein's argument about settler identity, but readers may not know the full scope and history of this system
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Pale of Settlement
11 min read
The article mentions Jews in 'the pale of settlement' where the Bund operated, but understanding the specific legal restrictions and geography of where Jews were permitted to live in Tsarist Russia provides crucial context for why doikayt was a radical political stance
Last year, I wrote a mixed review of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. I praised many aspects of the book, and described Klein herself as a “serious person who’s guided by a humane and egalitarian worldview.” But I also said that her anxious desire to sign off on “every piety of radical-liberal identity politics” sometimes led her to strange places that aren’t really consistent with her own best instincts.
In particular, I highlighted what seemed to be the glaring contradiction between her position on Zionism and Jewish identity on the one hand and her attitude toward Canada’s racial reckoning over indigenous issues on the other. In his new book Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, literature professor Benjamin Balthaser claims that this criticism is misguided. He uses my review as an example of a flawed form of Jewish “diasporism” that, in his view, ends up being wretchedly liberal rather than truly liberatory.
As far as I can tell, Klein, Balthaser, and I all agree on quite a lot. We’re all democratic socialists. We’ve all written about the oppression of the Palestinians. We’re all hostile to Zionism on a basic ideological level. Hell, we’ve all written for Jacobin, and my own forthcoming book shares a publisher with Citizens of the Whole World.1 So, I can understand how an outside observer looking at these disagreements might chalk it all up to the narcissism of small differences.
I do think, though, that there’s something at stake here that actually matters.
Should the socialist left start from a belief in universal human equality? And if so, can that be reconciled with the belief that anyone’s rights or status should depend on where their ancestors lived?
In the review, I singled out the chapter of Doppleganger on Israel/Palestine for praise, noting that Klein “rightly abhors the violence and oppression directed by the Israeli state against the non-citizen Palestinian population, and she rightly bristles at the suggestion that her Jewish identity should lead her to be an apologist for this form of apartheid.” I’ve hit similar themes in my own work (e.g. here).
The next part of the review is worth quoting at length to provide the context for Balthaser’s critique.
...This sounds like one more entry in the list of creditable egalitarian positions from Klein—and it certainly
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