“Opposition to Zionism was as obvious to the Bund as opposing fascism and any other nationalist violence: Jewish nationalism was just as ugly, just as contemptuous as any other,” Eyshe Beirich, who translated an upcoming collection of Yiddish Bundist writings, We, Traitors, told MEE.

…

Reflecting on Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, Arendt wrote in 1946: “Only when we come to see ourselves as part and parcel of a world in which we, like everybody else, are engaged in a struggle against great and sometimes overwhelming odds, and yet with a chance of victory, however small, and with allies, however few… only then will we be able to rid the world of its nightmarish quality.”

For anti-Zionist Jews like Moser, the role for these conscious pariahs is now more important than ever.

An open access paper linked in this article goes into depth on aspects of this in a well thought out way.

academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/2/3/…/6672592?log…

*longer quoted section of paper*

> Whatever their differences, Schulman and Galili share a set of implicit understandings regarding a peculiarly “Jewish” wordlessness vis-à-vis the theory and practice of armed conflict. > For both, this wordlessness is tied both to an account of the broad arc of Jewish history and the challenges that late-modern politics was said to pose to Jewish individual and collective survival. That wordlessness was not specific to Hebrew; it included the vernacular languages most Jews actually spoke.9 Prior to the founding of Ma’arakhot, Galili’s collaborator and protégé Gershon Rivlin noted in 1988 that no “clear, precise, Hebrew-language military terminology” existed.10 For his part, the author Isaac Bashevis Singer told the Nobel Prize Committee in 1978 that the Yiddish language, being both landless and stateless, “possesse[d] no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, [or] war tactics.”11 Such wordlessness contrasted sharply with other aspects of the Jewish Diaspora, in which texts, words, and arguments were said to function as a kind of “travelling homeland.”12 > That metahistorical narrative can be summarized as follows: these languages had no such words because Jews had not needed them—at all events, not since the suppression of the final Judaean revolts in the second century CE.13 In the intervening millennia, it was said, Jews had embraced a Diaspora existence predicated on political quietism, prayer, and faith. Power politics, sovereignty, and worldly glory had given way to divine service: a life lived (as the Rabbinic expression put it) within “the four cubits of the Torah.”14 > “The greatness of this people,” Hannah Arendt wrote in a widely cited letter to Gershom Scholem in 1963, “was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear.”15 That break—the historical moment that came after Arendt’s “once”—marked the passage into a new kind of “homogenous empty time,” which only new words and new worldly political visions could fill.16 As Nick Onuf (and before him, J.L. Austin) has noted, “turning the ineffable into the prosaic—into moderate-sized dry goods” is a primary function of such language.17 > On this account, the question of Jews and their relationship to power politics was not merely a matter of acquiring new practices, values, or habits. The “house of language” in and through which Jews lived was so configured as to stymie the emergence of a shared, worldly political vision. Latter-day Jewish princes—whether subtle Machiavellian “foxes” or would-be “Hebrew hammers”—could not accept this.18 How could one lead soldiers into battle, voters to the polls, or workers to the barricades without the confidence and mastery of words? How could one build a political or military power base without a comparable reservoir of tactical expertise, strategic vision, and practical-operational savoir-faire?19 … > One response to this problem was to develop broad programs of literary translation. By the 1940s, a variety of such efforts had been underway for some eight decades. The result was a range of new offerings and forms: novels, essays, penny books, epic and lyric poetry, historical works, weekly and daily newspapers. A range of reference works also appeared in this period: dictionaries, encyclopedias, literary anthologies, and style guides. > These functioned as “bridges,” the historian Israel Bartal has explained, “between the traditional text and new texts”—between Hebrew as a medium for the interpretation of divine revelation and as a medium for mimetic–rhetorical representation.23 > Translation, it was believed, would extend the language’s “reach” into new fields, forcing the creation of new words and literary styles, and would raise up a new generation of Hebrew-language writers and “wordsmiths.” It would also widen readerships by placing a range of contemporary materials on offer, from novels to general nonfiction to technical and specialist literature in a host of fields.24 The aim of these efforts, the editor and ideologue Berl Katznelson (1887–1944) noted, was to “bequeath” a revived Hebrew language to an emergent Hebrew nation.25 > The process by which Hebrew was vernacularized—transformed and/or reinvented, from a vehicle largely reserved for the “ineffable” into a medium of everyday social and political use—has been studied extensively across a range of fields: literary and political theory, structural and historical linguistics, rhetoric, and translation studies. > That scholarship informs much of the analysis that follows. However, this article recasts such scholarship along two lines. > > First, much of that work is retrospective and critical-demystificatory in perspective and orientation. The existence of Hebrew as a capacious “national” vernacular—as a set of conventions, words, and perspectives through which the common experience of a world may be sustained or must be defended—is taken for granted; it is the “problem” whose artificiality the critic wishes to recover and/or underscore, post facto. The obligation to do this follows from the myopias, doxologies, and exclusions to which it gives rise, and from the violence in which it is implicated or complicit: not least, in the discursive and physical destruction of Arab Palestine.26 > > Alternatively, such work tends to the more purely descriptive, retracing the migration and/or emergence of a variety of those conventions, words, and perspectives and the processes that brought them into being.27 > The present project proceeds along different lines, but hopefully not orthogonal ones. The current state of Hebrew as a technical and/or aesthetic medium and the limits of its communicative possibilities are not questions I take up directly. My interest is rather in the moment before this medium had fully come into being—when Hebrew was not yet what it is now said to be. For matters of strategy and security, that “before” time corresponds roughly to E.H. Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis: the decades between the world wars, in which the Zionist movement increasingly understood itself as a project committed to a sovereign national state in Palestine.28 > Then as now, Hebrew’s “narrowness” was a matter of great concern. However, “narrowness” at that time meant the fear that it might never acquire the figurative capacity to represent the entirety of a political–historical “lifeworld.” It is perhaps closer to the fear that Hebrew might become a kind of second Esperanto—what if we invent new words, but no language emerges? > Put differently, the Hebrew authors in whom I am interested were actively committed to a language of expression that was itself a source of doubt and unease. It was not only that they struggled to express themselves in it, although that was certainly the case. It was also that the means of such expression did not wholly exist, and perhaps never would: “our dormant language,”to paraphrase the literary historian Zohar Shavit, was not yet “wholly revived.”29 For them, Hebrew lay closer to Eco’s disiecta membra (“scattered fragments”), as described in the third epigraph earlier: the “sinews” of a language that had not quite emerged, rather than an autonomous discourse that “spoke through” those interpellated by it. > That moment is important, I will argue, not only for what it can tell us about the Israel–Palestine conflict. It is important as well for what it might say about the figurative limits of language and reflexivity in the context of late-modern security politics more generally. The imperative to “nationalize” Hebrew followed from an acute sense of crisis in which the existing terms of political discourse felt radically insufficient. That feeling is what drove the search for new ones. The remainder of this article considers the messiness and indeterminacy of that effort—the will to a kind of discursive power—in the context of a growing body of work that considers political realism as both a series of artful-rhetorical, and expert-technical, performances.30