Publishers Weekly
★ 09/04/2023
Magid (Meir Kahane), a distinguished fellow of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, examines modern notions of Jewish “exile” in this unflinching analysis of “significant problems of the Jewish national project... both in the diaspora and in Israel.” According to the author, “exile” is a spiritual and religious concept rather than a geographic reality (it “results because our Jewish ideal is unrealized anywhere in the world,” in the words of late theologian and rabbi Eugene Borowitz), and the birth of a Zionist nation-state provides a false solution, driving a “proprietary ethos that too easily slides into ethnonational chauvinism.” Instead, Magid proposes a “counter-Zionism” that views the state’s founding ideology as one that’s “both done its work and created damage,” and imagines a state that “protects... the rights, cultures, languages, and religions of all constituencies equally.” In the process, he takes aim at “liberal Zionism,” its “increasingly fantastical” belief in a two-state solution, and its practice of deploying “liberal language... to support an illiberal reality” (for example, framing a scaling-back of the occupation of the West Bank as “a dramatic shrinking of the immoral footprint of the occupation”). Magid’s willingness to broach inconvenient truths is enriched by his deep knowledge of debates around Israeli politics and history. The result is a must-read for those concerned about Israel’s future. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
Praise for the author’s Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical
"[An] important and insightful new book."
—David N. Myers, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Meir Kahane remains one of the most fascinating, if disturbing, American Jewish figures of the late twentieth century. Shaul Magid does a remarkable job of explaining not just the man and his thought but the ways in which his ugly legacy haunts us still.”
—Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism
"Shaul Magid’s excellent book is not a guide to opposing the world-view of Kahane. It is a rich resource for understanding how deeply this world-view is rooted in the two centres of modern Judaism: the American Jewish community and Israel. And understanding opens the door for tikkun, or repair."
—Uri Dromi, Times Literary Supplement
“[An] excellent biography . . . which presents provocative arguments aimed at reassessing the Kahane phenomenon.”
—Itamar Ben Ami, Haaretz
“According to a new biography by scholar Shaul Magid, Kahane represented the ‘underbelly’ not only of American Orthodoxy, but of American Jewry writ large. In Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical Magid . . . invites all mainstream American Jewish institutions to grapple with their role in creating Kahane and perpetuating his ideas today.”
—Hadas Binyamini, +972 Magazine
“Magid’s fascinating book is important in sharpening our understanding regarding the sea change and extremism that has taken place in Israeli society and politics from the 1980s to the twenty-first century.”
—Avi Shilon, Israel Studies Review
“One of the great scholars of Judaism of our day, Shaul Magid, presents one of the most despicable characters to emerge in postwar Jewish life. Arising in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Meir Kahane fostered a racist ideology that has influenced and poisoned Jewish politics in the United States and Israel to this day. Magid’s analysis is deeply disturbing and extremely important.”
—Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
“Meir Kahane has long been dismissed as an outlier in American Jewish history, but as Shaul Magid demonstrates in this excellent book, he is an indicator of core trends and tensions that plague modern Jewish life. Magid is the ablest interpreter there is of the intense emotions and hypocrisies that drove Kahane and the movement he sought to create.”
—Lila Corwin Berman, author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex
“Enlightening and accessible . . . a nuanced and eye-opening portrait of an overlooked figure in Jewish political history.”
—Publishers Weekly
“If it wasn't clear already, these essays establish Shaul Magid as America's most insightful writer on the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.”
—Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism
“The complex relationship between exile and diaspora, so brilliantly articulated with regard to Afro-Caribbean experience by George Lamming, is fruitfully and rigorously revisited in Shaul Magid’s forceful essays on contemporary Jewish thought and politics. His efforts to bend difficult pleasure toward transformative necessity deserve admiration and rigorous critical attention.”
—Fred Moten, Cultural Theorist, Poet, and Scholar at New York University
“Shaul Magid's essays on exile, Israel, and Zionism make a vital contribution toward reimagining Jewish futures unmoored from the moral failures of so-called liberal Zionism. Well-argued, well-written, and deeply nuanced, these essays collectively move us forward on the most vital dialogues that Jews must be having right now.”
—Daniel Boyarin, author of The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto
“The Necessity of Exile reopens urgent intra-Jewish conversations concerning the meanings of Jewish self-determination, exile, antisemitism, and sovereignty. Most profoundly, Magid invites the reader to consider and interrogate how Jewish redemption narratives came to be predicated on Palestinian dispossession. In this timely collection, Magid powerfully rethinks proprietary Zionism by reading exile back into Jewish history, ethics, and spirituality—offering an essential critique and alternative to state violence.”
—Atalia Omer, author of Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians
“Countering both Israeli ethnonationalism and American diasporism, Magid calls on Jews everywhere to renew their sense of estrangement from the current state of the world—to rediscover The Necessity of Exile.”
—Elad Lapidot, Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Lille and author of Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Antisemitism
“With great precision and lucidity, these essays lay the groundwork for a desperately needed Jewish liberation theology of exile.”
—Rachel Z. Feldman, author of Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary
“Magid's willingness to broach inconvenient truths is enriched by his deep knowledge of debates around Israeli politics and history. The result is a must-read for those concerned about Israel's future.”
—Publisher's Weekly, starred review
“Magid reaches back into history, reclaiming exile, offering it up to the present. This, to me, was one of the most compelling parts of the book: the argument that Jews all over the world, including but not limited to the United States, can remember that being in exile isn't lesser, and especially isn't less Jewish.”
—Emily Tamkin in The Forward
“Magid's concept of exile invites those in the Diaspora—as well as those within Israel—to rethink a sense of not yet being home, keeping possibilities of other existences and avoiding a 'culture of domination.'”
—Etan Nechin in Haaretz
“Magid's project—over the wide-ranging, moving, and learned essays that constitute the collection—is to do what Jews have always done when they want to mute or subdue the radicalism of a disruptive proposal: he locates the source of his authority in traditional antecedents.”
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker
“For many secular Israelis and non-Israeli Jews in the diaspora, Israel is all there is to define what it is to be a Jew. However, Magid aligns himself with those who see value in a permanent state of exile, one that can spark continued creativity.”
—Martin Green, Jewish Book Council
“Magid builds on the work of Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Martin Buber, and others to explain why Zionism, however necessary it seemed to traumatized Jews after World War II, is now doing more harm than good...He insists that being a counter-Zionist doesn't mean being anti-Israel, and he calls for a new ideological framework that embraces that exilic character of Jewish life.”
—Jessica Mesman in The Christian Century
“[Magid's] new book, 'The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance,' is a record of his painful surrendering of Zionism, a project that he compares to Manifest Destiny. He traces the now largely forgotten history of Jewish movements against statist Zionism: religious anti-Zionists, for example, who believed that a return to the homeland should come only with the arrival of the Messiah, and that anything else was sacrilege. Magid advocates for what he gingerly calls 'counter-Zionism,' and for a solution to the conflict that allows for the self-determination of both Israelis and Palestinians. The state's character, he writes, 'would not be structured on the notion that this land “belongs” to anyone, it would be a true democracy.'”
—The New Yorker, “The Best Books of 2023
