A Land With a People by Esther Farmer

Author:Esther Farmer [Farmer, Esther]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781583679296
Publisher: Monthly Review
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

KENAN JAFFE

My ongoing struggles with Zionism have been defined by the fact that it was Zionism that radicalized me in the first place. I grew up in a mainstream and traditional Jewish household and community in which allegiance to Israel and a vaguely right-leaning politics were assumed, but in which few, if any, people actually had a personal or ideological relationship with Zionism. The world changed for me when my parents, just by happenstance, sent me to a summer camp run by a Zionist youth movement. As a specifically Labor Zionist organization, it traced its roots to the original secular founders of the Israeli state and attempted to marry attachment to Israel with a progressive belief in creating a new socialist society. Graduates of similar movements, particularly those, like mine, with very well-cultivated ideological and social worlds, will understand when I say that describing the effect that my upbringing in “the movement” had on me is next to impossible. Suffice it to say that it was utterly transformative, and even liberating for me, both socially and politically, although not entirely in ways that were intended.

It was at summer camp and on affiliated programs that I met some of my very best friends and had some of my most powerful and defining experiences. It was also in Zionist education that I first learned to develop a critique of society and to think about the ways that class and race and gender contribute to privilege and inequity in my daily life. Most significant was the idea that ideology and a critique of society demanded action and the upheaval of one’s life, the highest ideal being living in communal groups in Israel. Today, friends of mine who made that choice live communally in Israel and work toward (mostly) socially beneficial goals.

Some people have fun at summer camp and move on, but I am constituted to fall in with things deeply and emotionally, and I was hooked on Zionist youth movement life. I thought seriously about moving to Israel, but eventually decided it was too ideological and narrow a path for me. I have a distinct memory of being at a seminar in Israel and listening with annoyance as a movement guru gave a distorted and mystical explanation of Jewish history that advocated aliyah to Israel. I realized right there and then that I was not cut out to be a true believer and couldn’t commit. I had academic interests and non-Jewish friends, and the world’s horizons seemed larger than Labor Zionism.

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