Conclusion

Summary

The conclusion of the book is used by Yadgar to retrace three main themes, some of which are more prominent in the text itself than others, but which all flow throughout the text: First, a coherent, flowing summation of his argument regarding Israel’s Jewish identity crisis, its origins in Zionism and its hold over the very soul of the Israeli polity. Here, Yadgar utilizes an utterly amazing report to the Israeli government, where a “Judaising” initiative by the state, driven by the same racial logic of Jewish identity defined by “blood,” would reshape world Jewry as a whole. Second, Yadgar goes again “beyond the Israeli case” to consider how this case reflects upon the larger questions of modern nation-states, liberalism, and democracy. He argues that the Israeli case should in effect be counted as but one instance of a series of histories (some contemporary) of the tensions lying at the very basis of liberalism and nation-statism. And thirdly, Yadgar offers what I take to be a promulgation, or introduction, to what must be a separate project emanating from this book: the idea of a Jewish critique of the politics of the state of Israel, and a comprehensive, systematic formulation of the meaning of Jewish politics that is not forced into the framework of the modern European nation-state.