You might be interested in Daniel Boyarin's The No-State Solution for a similar take to Coates's from someone who *does* feel "qualified to assess the souls of the Jewish people." For Boyarin, "the Jews" is indeed a nation and one worth preserving, but it is and ought to be a diaspora nation, not a nation-state.
I haven’t read Boyarin's book, though I’m familiar with the concept of Jewish diaspora nationalism. Theoretically, I can see the appeal, but I’m not convinced of its practicality either in its pre-WWII heyday or today. Most Ashkenazi Jews lived as an unwanted national minority within and among other nations in Eastern Europe. A famous quotation from Russian statesman Konstantin Pobedonostsev summarizes the intended effects of the Russian Empire’s anti-Jewish laws: “One-third will die, one-third will leave the country, and the last third will be completely assimilated within the Russian people.” After World War I, the new states of Eastern Europe generally had the same attitude. The 1930s Polish government was actually pro-Zionist in order to encourage Jewish emigration. It was not interested in recognizing Jewish autonomy within Poland, and Polish Jews lacked the power to enforce their collective will (a root problem with statelessness). The Soviet Union’s brief period of promoting secular Yiddish culture also proved transient and illusory, and I don’t need to recount the rise of Nazism in Germany.
Perhaps if the Austro-Hungarian Empire had survived WWI, Jews could have achieved collective, non-state autonomy in the context of a liberalizing, multinational empire. Or maybe if America hadn’t shut its doors in the 1920s, the Jews of Eastern Europe could have migrated en masse and established statehood in the US. But any practical case for diaspora nationalism relies on such what-ifs. History simply did not work out that way, and on the whole, the Zionists were more prescient about the direction Europe was headed. Theodor Herzl grew up in the same Vienna as Hitler, with its officially antisemitic mayor, and knew which way the wind was blowing. Proto-Zionist Moses Hess wrote that “The Germans do not hate the religion of the Jews as much as their race, they hate less their peculiar faith than their peculiar noses” as far back as 1862. And thus the Holocaust destroyed the Yiddish-speaking masses that would have formed the core of any viable Jewish diaspora nationalism.
Today, the Jewish state is an established fact, so diaspora nationalism is inevitably anachronistic. Nearly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel, so it must loom large in any unitary Jewish worldview. Jews elsewhere lack the critical mass, or frankly, the will, to form a real alternative nationalism anywhere else. Perhaps Yiddish-speaking Satmar enclaves like Kiryas Joel represent a sort of alternative, non-state Jewish nation, but they do not provide a practical or attractive model to most non-Haredi Jews. My read is that Jews who are highly critical of the Israeli government, even those who think that the country's founding was a mistake, must accept the reality of its existence and acknowledge that the extant alternatives (eg, a binational state that would immediately descend into civil war) are worse.
To put that sentence in context: "Nations seek statehood both to ensure political representation and cultural preservation, and to avoid oppression and assimilation. Nation-states are expressions of humanism insofar as they reflect a universal human desire for identity and belonging. Thus the solution to national conflict isn’t the quixotic abolition of nation-states; it’s mutual recognition of national rights."
Humanism needs to start with a recognition of humans as we actually are. For example, humans are naturally tribal. Nationalism is humanistic when we acknowledge both our own need for identity and belonging, and that of people who belong to other nations. Thus nationalism can serve positive goals (eg, ensuring political representation and cultural preservation) within a universalist framework (one that acknowledges that other nations have the same desires and rights).
You might be interested in Daniel Boyarin's The No-State Solution for a similar take to Coates's from someone who *does* feel "qualified to assess the souls of the Jewish people." For Boyarin, "the Jews" is indeed a nation and one worth preserving, but it is and ought to be a diaspora nation, not a nation-state.
I haven’t read Boyarin's book, though I’m familiar with the concept of Jewish diaspora nationalism. Theoretically, I can see the appeal, but I’m not convinced of its practicality either in its pre-WWII heyday or today. Most Ashkenazi Jews lived as an unwanted national minority within and among other nations in Eastern Europe. A famous quotation from Russian statesman Konstantin Pobedonostsev summarizes the intended effects of the Russian Empire’s anti-Jewish laws: “One-third will die, one-third will leave the country, and the last third will be completely assimilated within the Russian people.” After World War I, the new states of Eastern Europe generally had the same attitude. The 1930s Polish government was actually pro-Zionist in order to encourage Jewish emigration. It was not interested in recognizing Jewish autonomy within Poland, and Polish Jews lacked the power to enforce their collective will (a root problem with statelessness). The Soviet Union’s brief period of promoting secular Yiddish culture also proved transient and illusory, and I don’t need to recount the rise of Nazism in Germany.
Perhaps if the Austro-Hungarian Empire had survived WWI, Jews could have achieved collective, non-state autonomy in the context of a liberalizing, multinational empire. Or maybe if America hadn’t shut its doors in the 1920s, the Jews of Eastern Europe could have migrated en masse and established statehood in the US. But any practical case for diaspora nationalism relies on such what-ifs. History simply did not work out that way, and on the whole, the Zionists were more prescient about the direction Europe was headed. Theodor Herzl grew up in the same Vienna as Hitler, with its officially antisemitic mayor, and knew which way the wind was blowing. Proto-Zionist Moses Hess wrote that “The Germans do not hate the religion of the Jews as much as their race, they hate less their peculiar faith than their peculiar noses” as far back as 1862. And thus the Holocaust destroyed the Yiddish-speaking masses that would have formed the core of any viable Jewish diaspora nationalism.
Today, the Jewish state is an established fact, so diaspora nationalism is inevitably anachronistic. Nearly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel, so it must loom large in any unitary Jewish worldview. Jews elsewhere lack the critical mass, or frankly, the will, to form a real alternative nationalism anywhere else. Perhaps Yiddish-speaking Satmar enclaves like Kiryas Joel represent a sort of alternative, non-state Jewish nation, but they do not provide a practical or attractive model to most non-Haredi Jews. My read is that Jews who are highly critical of the Israeli government, even those who think that the country's founding was a mistake, must accept the reality of its existence and acknowledge that the extant alternatives (eg, a binational state that would immediately descend into civil war) are worse.
To put that sentence in context: "Nations seek statehood both to ensure political representation and cultural preservation, and to avoid oppression and assimilation. Nation-states are expressions of humanism insofar as they reflect a universal human desire for identity and belonging. Thus the solution to national conflict isn’t the quixotic abolition of nation-states; it’s mutual recognition of national rights."
Humanism needs to start with a recognition of humans as we actually are. For example, humans are naturally tribal. Nationalism is humanistic when we acknowledge both our own need for identity and belonging, and that of people who belong to other nations. Thus nationalism can serve positive goals (eg, ensuring political representation and cultural preservation) within a universalist framework (one that acknowledges that other nations have the same desires and rights).