As I look back on Israel’s sixty years of existence as a Jewish state, I find myself stumbling. Part of what I find so difficult is the complicated and contradictory emotions that mark my ongoing engagement with Israel. And right now, what I feel most profoundly is grief —I mourn the loss of a set of Zionist promises that once comforted and inspired me —and shame in my naiveté for having believed so fiercely in precisely those dreams.  Having said this, I also know that I cannot only talk about this loss. There is too much at stake, too many lives in ruin, too much pain, and too much destruction. And so I look to those working for change on many fronts, especially the work of Israeli intellectuals, artists, and activists who are making a difference. I think of the brilliant and courageous work of so many of my colleagues at various Israeli universities, the powerful feminist work of Tamar El-Or and her ethnographies of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish women and the passionate teaching and writing done by Susan Handelman at Bar Ilan. And more specifically, I think of the theoretically sophisticated, politically principled and courageous work of Adi Ophir, Relly Azoulay, Hannan Hever, and Yehouda Shenhav, among many others whose writings have changed the ways I teach and write about Israel and its history.  Let me be more specific. I believe that all of these scholars—as Laurence Silberstein has suggested in both his Postzionism Debates and his forthcoming Postzionism: A Reader—are helping many of us reconsider the legacy of Zionism to imagine a different future.  

I am also inspired by the work of the many Palestinian and Israeli, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, European, Middle Eastern, and American feminist scholars, especially those I met at Dartmouth during the summer of 2005, and by our efforts there to share our work. I am also disturbed that this kind of exchange had to happen in the United States and not in Israel/Palestine. Nevertheless, for me there is hope in engaged scholarly conversations and writing.

There is also hope in the work of so many Israeli and Palestinian writers, filmmakers, poets, and performers, painters, and photographers. Art offers another kind of opening. Imagination helps us refuse easy answers. And so I think about my former student Inbar Gilboa directing the first Hebrew production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and I consider all of the amazing films, novels, and art coming out of Israel and Palestine.

Even still, I feel a deep and disturbing sense of responsibility and urgency at this very moment. As an American citizen, I am troubled by the ongoing and escalating violence. I am alarmed by attempts at solutions that have only reinforced and made worse some of this same violence, especially in places like Gaza where so many are sick and hungry and dying because of the sanctions.

In the face of all of this, I think of my fellow American Jews, the former socialist Zionist summer campers and the liberal Jewish youth movement kids like me who went on pilgrimage to Israel in the 1970s and 1980s and are now troubled and pained and no longer sure how to talk about our love of Israel and the loss of those promises. And I don ’t want us to be complacent. So I think of people like Gordon Lafer, the union organizer who went back to Israel on Birthright Unplugged and stumbled trying to reconcile all the love and affection he had for Israel with the violence he experienced staying with a Palestinian family on the West Bank. I think of April Rosenblum and Avi Alpert, young, smart Jewish activists and intellectuals here who are using their imaginations and political savvy to address a new generation of young American Jews about the legacy of Jewish nationalism. And I think about all of the long term Jewish and Palestinian activists for peace, many of whom are poets, writers, academics, and artists who continue to be maligned in the mainstream media for speaking out on these issues. After sixty years I know that there is no going back to a lost vision. Instead I find myself asking critical questions turning to the talent, courage, hard work, and imagination of many others —those named and unnamed here—who are also already thinking and acting otherwise. It is their visions that I take with me into my work in Jewish studies.