Summary
Jewish radical writer and Jews for Urban Justice member whose Freedom Seder (Passover 1969) and The Bush Is Burning! (1971) Feldman treats in chapter 3 of A Shadow over Palestine as the fullest expression of a post-1967 revolutionary Jewish diasporism (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 731-755).
Details
- Waskow was a lead organizer of the August 1967 National Conference for New Politics in Chicago; criticised in a New Yorker article for endorsing the Black caucus’s thirteen points, he replied in the New York Review of Books that he had opposed adopting the points and had called their acceptance “an act of self-castration by the white liberals present” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 731-733).
- In The Bush Is Burning! Radical Judaism Faces the Pharaohs of the Modern Superstate (1971) Waskow retold the conference confrontation in a “Giant dress” analogy in which the Israeli government was “auditioning for the role of the American Jewish Establishment; Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular seeming to play the part of the Blacks; and the American Empire abroad adopting the role of the American Empire at home” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 737).
- Waskow and Jews for Urban Justice produced the Freedom Seder haggadah for Passover 1969, framed as a response to the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the subsequent “uprising of Black Washington against the blank-eyed pyramid-builders of our own time”; the first seder, conducted by Rabbi Balfour Brickner with Reverend Philip Berrigan at Lincoln Memorial Congregational Temple in Washington, D.C., drew eight hundred people (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 741-745).
- Feldman presents the Freedom Seder’s theorisation of diaspora as “multiparticularist”: a “liturgy … that asserted the liberation of the Jewish People alongside the liberation of other peoples—not theirs as against ours, or ours as against theirs” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 747-749).
- Waskow disarticulated Zion from Israel: against both the Jewish establishment and an “Ideological Hard Left” enthralled to a Palestinian nationalism committed to the “abolition of the Israeli state,” he envisioned an “anti-imperialist Israel at home in the Third World” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 759).
- In a 1970 New York Times column Waskow wrote that after the June war “the Diaspora is no longer a necessary evil,” highlighting a prophetic Judaism whose vocation is to warn “America to give up the war against Indochina, H-bombs, racism, and pollution of the earth” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 761).
- Feldman’s limit on Waskow: his revolutionary diasporism, like much of the anti-imperialist Jewish Left, tacitly obscured “the settler structure of the Israeli people’s own becoming-native,” taking the indigenization of Jewish democracy as its necessary point of departure (A Shadow over Palestine, line 769).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Daniel Berrigan, Exile, Negation of the Diaspora, Black Power’s Palestine