“‘I’m afraid I know the answer:’ Zionism and ‘White Reconstruction’”

• In Event: Symptoms of Twenty-First Century U.S. Empire: Region, Affect, and Refusal

Abstract

The IHRA Definition of antisemitism, which has come to dominate state discourse, claims that condemning Israel is a form of antisemitism. In this presentation, I contemplate ways that anti-Zionist feminist-queer-trans Jewish radical thought in the US left has transgressed this rule in recent decades, "targeting of the state of Israel," not as a form of antisemitism, but rather, as an intimate rebuke of the call to national belonging that characterizes much of Jewish life under Zionism's hegemony, and an intra-Jewish contribution to anti-imperialist discourse in forms of castigation and refusal. To understand the cultural basis of the IHRA definition’s entwinement with US empire in neoliberal times, I consider Zionism’s construction and strategic use of Jewish collective identity to advance a colonial-imperial agenda, and consider the production and effects of this discourse in relationship with Jewish people in the US. My analysis references and emerges from post-1967 Palestine solidarity activism among Jewish feminist, queer and trans radicals operating under and against the US state, alongside whom I argue for alternative genealogies for current Jewish, feminist-queer-trans, anti-imperialist movements–centering anti-Zionism.

Author

• Brooke Lober, University of California-Berkeley