Jews can reject the violence and inhumanity of Zionism by embracing the diaspora

Among American Jews, Jewish identity has often been framed as a problem in need of resolution, most often through the framework of Zionism and the project of the Israeli nation-state. This perspective insists that Jewish identity must be grounded in statehood, militarism, and loyalty to a specific territory. But what if the impulse to resolve diaspora through nationalism is nothing more than a trap ensnaring us into violence and inhumanity?

Rather than look to the nation-state to resolve Jewish vulnerability, I’ve found greater clarity, strength, and possibility in the work of Black, Indigenous, and Chicanx thinkers whose theories of diaspora reject a nationalist closure. This concept has helped me understand my own identity. As a Jew by Choice, born in Mexico and raised in the U.S., I cannot exist in any other paradigm. These frameworks remind us that diaspora is not a problem to solve, but a condition with its own power, ethics, and wisdom. They model for us a way of being in the world that honors complexity, fragmentation, and historical rupture without rushing to an idea of statehood as the solution.

These diasporic thinkers understand that the nation-state is not neutral, it is a construct forged through empire and maintained through exclusion. In the post-colonial world, Edward Said reminds us that “none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.” Ariella Azoulay deepens this critique by arguing that citizenship itself is a colonial invention, granting rights only by producing outsiders. In her book Potential History, she calls on us to unlearn imperialism and to reject the premise that statehood is the only path to dignity.

Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic challenges classical notions of diaspora by showing that the transatlantic slave trade gave rise to new diasporic formations not rooted in return or assimilation, but in loss, longing, resistance, and cultural creativity. Stuart Hall describes diasporic identity as a process of “becoming” rather than “being,” marked by hybridity, rupture, and reinvention. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera offers an especially powerful lens for thinking through Jewish diaspora. Anzaldúa writes from the experience of Chicanx people who directly experienced borders being redefined around them. After the U.S. conquest, Indigenous people once categorized by a nationalist identity as Mexicans, found themselves recast as foreigners on their own land. For Anzaldúa, the borderlands are not just physical but psychic, emotional, spiritual. Through these experiences she names a form of consciousness that thrives in contradiction and plurality: la conciencia de la mestiza.

Anzaldúa’s framework helps me make sense of the fragmented and layered nature of my own life, not as something to reconcile, but to embrace. This mestiza consciousness doesn’t seek to smooth over difference but to live fully within it. It resonates with what I found in Jewish diasporic tradition: a people shaped not by borders or armies, but by text, memory, ritual, and resilience. It may be why, in my early twenties, I felt called to become part of the Jewish people.

The Jewish diaspora, far from being a historical wound to be healed by nationalism, is a source of strength. Its power lies in its relational ethics, in how it has allowed Jewish people to survive without empire. The creation of the State of Israel did not mark the end of the diaspora as most Jews still live outside of it. This is not a failure. It is a fact. And perhaps, a gift. Diaspora is not something we must overcome; it is something we carry. It can be a space of survival, refusal, and creative possibility.

For many Jews in the U.S., particularly since World War II, Zionism has provided a kind of nationalistic relief, an imagined cure for centuries of displacement and persecution. But the idea that Jewish safety can or should be rooted in a nation-state must be interrogated, and rejected. The dream of statehood has not brought collective security; it has demanded complicity in the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Palestinians and it has locked Jewish identity into a framework that prioritizes borders, sovereignty, and military power over ethics, solidarity, and care.

More than that, it has encouraged Jews to see our trauma as exceptional and to seek redemption through domination. However, Jewish history is not only a story of suffering. It is a story of resilience, creativity, and connection across borders. It is a story of diasporic survival. The traditions that have sustained Jewish life, Shabbat, study, song, ritual, and communal care, were forged outside of national identities and loyalties. They are practices that echo other diasporic ways of knowing and being.

Black, Indigenous, and Chicanx theories of diaspora show us that other paths are possible. They teach us that safety cannot be built on exclusion, and that survival is not measured by assimilation or conquest, but by continuity, relationship, and cultural memory. They ask us to reconsider belonging, not as possession or territorial claim, but as a practice of mutual responsibility and a denial of imperialist notions of exclusion.

Diasporic thinking also refuses purity. It resists the idea that we must be whole or located or loyal to be real. It values the fractured, the plural, the in-between. These traditions teach us how to live with rupture, to remember without return, and to build communities that do not rely on empire to exist.

As Robin Kelley writes, “without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We need a revolution of values.” This is not a call to forsake Jewishness, but rather a call to deepen it. To remember that our traditions were built in exile, that our ethics emerged from diaspora, that our songs and prayers and stories have always held the memory of elsewhere. It is a call to stand in solidarity with other displaced peoples, not by claiming our own state and doubling down on an imperialist, nationalist paradigm, but by refusing the logic that made states necessary in the first place.

Jewishness, in its diasporic form, offers a powerful resource for reimagining community. It teaches us that home can be made in relation, not just in territory. It invites us to practice an ethic of care rooted in mutual aid, memory, and refusal. For Jews and others shaped by diaspora, this is not a liability. It’s an invitation to rethink home, to decenter the state, the violence it inherently carries, and to commit to a politics of presence and repair.