Mapping Diasporism: Documenting TransnationalEngagement of Jewish non-Zionist Communities in the US and UK

This project examines the praxis of radical imaginaries in Jewish non/anti-Zionist communities. There is a growing movement of Jewish people practicing self-determination by cultivating Judaism without Zionism. Many of these Jewish people claim 'diasporism' as a political identity. This conceptualization of diaspora, unlike traditional models that stipulate a people relating to a homeland (Safran 1991), describes a community outside the norms of nation-states and borders (Hall 1995, 207), a space of counterculture (Gilroy 1993) whose inhabitants experience a multiplicity of consciousness (Du Bois 1903). Thinking with scholars of the Black Radical Tradition, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (2007) coined the term 'diasporism', defining it by a political commitment to solidarity and a Jewish identity independent of a national homeland.
Combining archival, ethnographic, and participatory research methods this project asks why members are drawn to diaspora as a political identity and what possibilities they believe it engenders. This research attends particularly to the tensions inherent in building utopic communities in a world structured by racial capitalism and ongoing coloniality (Grosfuegel 2002).
In order to better contextualize this contemporary movement and to interrogate movement myths of provenance, this project uses archival documents from the early 20th and late 19th century. These documents, primarily written in Yiddish, showcase an alternative futurity present before the consensus of support for Zionism predominated in Jewish institutional space. In addition, this project examines contemporary movement spaces from Jewish community farms to Yiddish singing retreats through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and a photo-voice participatory research process.