#herzl — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #herzl, aggregated by home.social.
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Israel is fully becoming the colonial project it was always intended to be. As I understand it, #Boyarin’s work is essential here: #Herzl’s obsession with the “feminized” diaspora Jew (the Galut body, bookish and unbounded) was itself a colonial desire, a wish to forge a “muscular Judaism” that could match European “imperial masculinity” at the precise moment settler colonialism was winding down. The tragedy is that Herzl succeeded aesthetically: The sabra (borrowed word) mythology, the soldier-farmer, while failing politically, because a century later Israel exists less as the sovereign project he imagined and more as a client state dependent on US military and diplomatic cover.
And who’s providing that cover? Largely Christian nationalists, whose support is not philo-Semitic but eschatological. Their theology DEMNADS Jewish sovereignty over biblical Israel as a precondition for the Second Coming, after which Jews either convert or are destroyed. This is Zionism-as-antisemitism in its starkest form: Jews instrumentalized as props in a Christian end-times drama, their survival irrelevant or actively undesired. Yet Israel is banking its future on an alliance with people who, in their own theological framework, have a death wish for Jewish continuity.
Herzl wanted to escape the contempt of Europe. He built a state that now depends on the rabid perverted sick eschatological fantasies of its successors.
I must qualify as I always forget, we’re talking about Eastern European and Ashkenazi jews. They form a part of and are not “the Jewish people”.
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@aral Many scholars argue that (the main stream of) Zionism reproduced the logic of European antisemitism, and the idea of the “new Jew” is central to that mindset. This outlook carried over into Israel proper; there is little doubt Israeli society is racist, both within Jewish communities and, especially, toward Arabs. But unlike pathological Christian European antisemitism, it’s probably an aspect of Western Jews’ sense of failed integration after emancipation (#antisemitism did not subside). People like Herzl and Ruppin did infact believe they are superior Jews and keepers of the old tradition even when they assimilated. #Herzl wanted to convert Eastern European Jews to Christianity but not himself and #Ruppin believed only German Jews were racially pure.
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“bad information”
I love how the U.S. remains blind to the small Makher nation. You can leave the shtetl, but the shtetl mentality (common among many Israeli leaders of Eastern European descent) persists. It’s manipulation and outright lies because surviving on stolen Palestinian land outweighs self‑respect or compromise. #Herzl must be rolling in his grave.
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New #podcast w/ Rachel Cockerell about her amazing new #book, MELTING POINT! We talk #Jews, #migration, #assimilation, #GalvestonTX, #history, #Herzl, #Zangwill, #family, & more, so GO LISTEN: https://chimeraobscura.com/vm/episode-645-rachel-cockerell
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Rabbi Moritz Güdemann
Regarding #Zionism, Güdemann was critical of Theodor #Herzl’s political Zionism. Although he initially showed some interest, he opposed Herzl’s ideas on theological grounds, arguing that Judaism was primarily a world religion rather than a nationalistic movement. He protested attempts to remove references to the return to the Holy Land from Jewish liturgy and wrote a detailed anti-Zionist rebuttal titled "Nationaljudenthum" in 1897, before the first Zionist Congress. He saw Zionism as a form of national chauvinism incompatible with Judaism’s religious character.
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#Austria / First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress
📍 Vienna, Austria
📅 June 13-15, 2025[...] The world watches in horror the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people committed by Zionism in partnership with the West. It is our duty to take action, as this is done in our name. We must join our Palestinian brothers and sisters in their darkest hour, and work for freeing and decolonising Palestine! To achieve this just aim, we must have progressive organisations and individuals across the world with us, working against Zionist Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide as the last devastating evidence of #colonialism which must be terminated.
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Jewish voices worldwide are uniting to declare opposition to #Zionism and stand with #Palestinians. The gathering will bring together activists, scholars, #Holocaust survivors, and community leaders to reclaim #Jewish identity from Zionist appropriation.
Featured Speakers Include:
• Ilan Pappé (historian, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine")
• Ghada Karmi (Palestinian physician & writer)
• Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur, online)
• Stephen Kapos (Holocaust survivor & activist)
• Rima Hassan (MEP, born in Syrian refugee camp)
• Katie Halper (journalist, censored for calling Israel apartheid)
Key Themes:
• Jewish traditions of anti-Zionist resistance
• Live connection with Gaza medical professionals
• Reclaiming anti-fascism from genocidal appropriation
• Building solidarity with Palestinian liberation
• One Democratic State solutions
The congress takes place where #Herzl wrote "The Jewish State" (1896) and where Jewish opposition first emerged through Rabbi Moritz Güdemann.
Invoking the Mauthausen survivors' oath against "imperialism and hatred between peoples," organizers declare: "Judaism is not Zionism".
Open to people of all backgrounds supporting Palestinian rights and opposing ethnic cleansing.
https://www.juedisch-antizionistisch.at/en
https://www.juedisch-antizionistisch.at/
www.juedisch-antizionistisch.at/en#speaker
@palestine
@israel
#AcademicChatter
#AntiZionistCongressVienna2025 -
"It is a crime to exploit patriotism for works of hatred" - Emile Zola
On this day 127 years ago, Emile Zola published J'accuse!, reigniting the Dreyfus affair, wherein an innocent man was convicted of treason for being Jewish.
A young journalist watching concluded Jews couldn't trust Gentiles for safety; a Jewish state was needed. Theodor Herzl devoted the rest of his life to Zionism.
Read it in full: https://www.famous-trials.com/dreyfus/2613-j-accuse-by-emile-zola-texts-in-english-and-french
#mazeldon #jewish #history #zionism #onthisday #law #france #herzl
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Book review: **Dimitri Shomsky**. Did Zionism Seek to Establish a Nation-State? The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (1882-1948)
Dimitri Shomsky's book challenges the conventional narrative of Zionist aspirations, arguing that before the Peel Commission's 1937 proposal to partition Palestine, the dominant Zionist vision wasn't necessarily a fully independent nation-state. Instead, Shomsky posits that many Zionist leaders favored a model of Jewish autonomy within existing empires, drawing parallels to similar aspirations of other nationalities within the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires.
He examines the writings of key Zionist figures like #Herzl, #Jabotinsky, and Ben-Gurion, highlighting instances where their proposals suggested a degree of autonomy rather than outright independence.
The book also explores the influence of the "Helsinki Program," a plan focusing on securing equal rights for Jews within the Russian Empire. Shomsky's work introduces previously unknown Russian-language materials, particularly concerning Jabotinsky's dual commitment to both Jewish nationalism and his deep-rooted connection to his Russian identity.
The author ultimately presents an alternative historical perspective on Zionism, suggesting a path that could have been, but wasn't, taken.
Review by Anita Shapira, Professor Emerita, Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University.
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22 | Der Zionismus 22. WORTHAUS-Podcast aus der Reihe "Das Wort und das Fleisch" (2:12:04). Kaum etwas wird heute so kontrovers diskutiert wie das Thema »Zionismus«. Kaum etwas wird heute so kontrovers diskutiert wie das Thema »Zionismus«....
https://material.rpi-virtuell.de/material/22-der-zionismus/
#Lehrerbildung #antizionismus #herzl #israel #landnahme #nahostkonflikt #palaestina #religionsgeschichte #zionismus -
@ruby I recall a quip the young #WalterBenjamin made in a letter to a friend circa ~1920 relating that on several occasions he sent money to zionist bookstores in #Palestine for works of Kabbalah, but all he received in return were troves of cowardly jokes about Palestinians. Already by the turn of the 20th century, Karl Kraus had roasted Theodore #Herzl and the Zionist movement in his "Krone for Zion", revealing that the ideas presented in Herzl's Der Judenstaat as a mere Jewish appropriation of the ideas of the proto-fascist pan-Germanist antisemites, making Zionism a mockery across the Jewish intellectual world which was then at its peak despite skyrocketing antisemitism.
From my engagement with thousands of years of Jewish philosophy from Moshe Rebbeinu and the Sages to Rambam & HaGra, to Marx, Freud, Butler and so on, I can only conclude that Zionism was an extremely reactionary movement from the outset. The mainstream of so-called progressive Zionists like Gershom Scholem partook in seemingly every celebration of the brutal violence of 1948 which they were invited to, with outspoken opponents of the oppression of Palestinians like Martin Buber being marginal (and its worth mentioning that he ceased to have illusions about zionism after 1948), with the largest body of #Jews opposed to the Nakba being representing by haredim, guided by "the Pharisees" community of the old Yishuv who had already criminalized Zionism in a firey series of responsa at the turn of the 19th century (how little has changed!)
The myth of a progressive element of the Zionist movement is entirely that: a myth. There was no hijacking, #Zionism is quite literally the Jewish appropriation of pan-Germanism; its rooted in the same ideas as national socialism and thus doomed to pursue such policies insofar as #Israel exists.
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@johndoepe @BellisColdwine @imstilljeremy @baruch @raf
Please be aware that Theodor #Herzl himself was a political, i.e. #secular #Zionist.https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/secular-zionism/
#Enlightenment in #Europe, the very foundation of #secularism, was strongly influenced by jewish philosophy, art and science. It would seem futile to seperate that heritage from the rebirth of #Israel and her role as the only democracy in the middle east today.
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"If you will it, it is no dream." --Theodor Herzl
Happy 74th Birthday Israel!
#YomHaatzmaut #IsraelIndependenceDay #Israel #Herzl https://t.co/qNSV55dqjM
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/JewishTweets/status/1522232448611979264