Jewish Belonging Beyond Zionism: LGBTQ+ Pathways for Relating to Land and Community in Diaspora

• In Event: Sociology of Sexualities Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Sexuality, Belonging, and Community

Abstract

The U.S.-backed Israeli war on Palestinians in Gaza has put American Jews at a moral inflection point: because so many feel as though their belonging now hinges on supporting genocidal Israeli policies, they are seeking new, alternative ways of relating to land and community as a people in diaspora. The late-nineteenth century founding of the Zionist movement was itself a response to antisemitism and a framework for Jewish peoplehood, aligned with settler colonialism. Mainstream Jewish leaders’ conflation of Jewishness with unqualified fealty to Israel persists through active suppression of American Jewish dissent, but the Gaza War has cracked this manufactured consensus. Many American Jews are now searching beyond Zionism for frameworks of belonging and living ethically on U.S. soil. This study synthesizes Jewish, beyond-Zionist ideas of community and land-based belonging though interviews with a group of U.S. Jews who wrestle daily with how to relate to land: farmers. Because patrilineal norms are so enmeshed in settler colonialism, farming, and Jewishness, we interviewed LGBTQ+ Jewish farmers whose positionalities help us imagine Jewish futures of belonging without the constraints of heteropatriarchy. This cohort not only rejects militant Zionism but actively experiments with beyond-Zionist and beyond-heteropatriarchal pathways of relating to land, nation, religion, community, and family. We situate these tensions and possibilities in a history of American Jewish and LGBTQ+ farmers, illuminating the current political moment as part of a longstanding process of American Jews’ contending with antisemitism, settler colonialism, citizenship, racialization, and heteropatriarchy as central social forces in how they seek belonging in community and on land as a people in diaspora. Interviews at this intersection of American, Jewish, queer, and farming identities illuminate how longstanding systems of oppression manifest in American daily life today, while offering pathways toward Jewish national and land-based belonging rooted in ethics of collective liberation.

Authors

• Isaac Sohn Leslie, University of Vermont

• Marjorie Feld, Babson College

• Gianni Solórzano, University of Vermont