Judith Butler has become in the eyes of many—to paraphrase Butler’s own description of Hannah Arendt—the «most avid secular Jewish critic of Zionism» in the twenty-first century. The controversy around their 2012 book Parting Ways, reignited after October 7, 2023, recalls the debates provoked by Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Much like Arendt, Butler is respected as a moral authority by many, while others, especially in Israel and Germany, see them as the embodiment of the moral failure of leftist intellectuals or of «self-hating Jews».

Critics have focused on Butler’s occasional public commentaries. The most recent one, during a talk in Paris in March 2024, defined the massacre committed by Hamas on October 7 as «armed resistance», which was criticized—notwithstanding Butler’s own clarification to the contrary—for condoning the murderous attack. The polemics often neglect the nuanced analyses offered in Butler’s philosophical writing. In regard to Parting Ways, Butler themselves admitted «that there is a great deal going on in this text, perhaps too much».¹ Nevertheless, to assess the merits of current attacks against them, we should make the effort. A serious engagement with the book refutes the accusations. Not only does Parting Ways anticipate the problems raised by Butler’s critics, it also offers a sophisticated attempt to address them, cutting to the core of current debates on the ongoing violence in Israel-Palestine.

Jewish Critiques of Zionism

Parting Ways contests the widespread notion that criticizing the ideological constitution of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state—namely, critiquing Zionism—is inherently anti-Semitic. In recent years, accusations of «Israel-related anti-Semitism» have been used to silence or even criminalize criticism of, and protest against, Israeli state policies. The anti-BDS resolution adopted by the Bundestag in 2019, and its sequel Never Again is Now–Protecting, Conserving and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany, passed on November 24 this year, have enshrined the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in German public life, and its maximalist interpretation has helped authorities to repress manifestations of solidarity with Gaza and Gazans—in the streets, in academic life and in the arts. Benjamin Netanyahu recently dismissed the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against him and Yoav Gallant as decisions of «antisemitic judges».

Butler not only rejects the notion that criticizing Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic (even if the line may be blurry in some contexts), but also argues that Jewish values and resources demand such criticism. In some respects, opposing Zionism may even be considered essential for Jewish life. By affirming this view of the Jewish tradition, Butler draws a line between Jewishness and Zionism, a «parting of ways» that engages in a «struggle over what is done in the name of the Jewish people». Butler criticizes the Zionist vision underpinning the State of Israel, which is committed to the exclusive self-determination of the Jewish nation and to exclusive Jewish sovereignty. This vision, foundational for the State of Israel since 1948, was formalized in the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Based on this conception, Israeli governments have since the state’s foundation promoted Jewish life and suppressed Palestinian life. State violence has been deployed to subjugate, dispossess and expel indigenous Palestinians to settle Jewish immigrants, which Butler denounces as settler colonialism.

The alternative Jewishness Butler seeks to affirm is not premised on Jewish state sovereignty, but on the Jewish ethos of galut, that is exile or diaspora. Contra the Zionist vision of a Jewish nation-state, which excludes non-Jewish Palestinians, Butler identifies in the Jewish tradition of diaspora a vision of «cohabitation» with non-Jews. The goal of Parting Ways is to bring «the idea of diaspora back to Palestine», shifting local politics away from mono-national Jewish sovereignty and towards binational Jewish-Palestinian cohabitation.

The Controversy

Some of the most prominent critics of Parting Ways targeted Butler’s affirmation of non-sovereign collectives—oppressed Palestinians and diasporic Jews. Seyla Benhabib criticized the book for overlooking «that anti-colonial movements are not always emancipatory» and that «political action in the name of oppressed peoples can also carry the seeds of oppression within it», evoking Edward Said who had «criticized the Palestinian resistance movement for its naïve anti-colonial, third-world rhetoric».¹

In the same vein, Eva Illouz denounced Butler’s uncritical commitment to the Palestinian struggle, castigating them for applying the imperative of diaspora only to Jews, never to Palestinians. Illouz also criticized Butler’s conception of diasporism as a guarantee of pluralism, arguing that «the lack of political sovereignty itself contains regressive forms of identity that are highly preoccupied with ethnic boundaries and survival»². Benhabib scolded Butler for ignoring the regressive effects of diasporic trauma on Israeli politics, that is for turning «a blind eye to the lingering collective psychosis of many Jews (…) their fear of annihilation at the hand of a hostile world. The tragedy of Israel is that the stronger Israel has become militarily, the more paranoid and bullyish it has become.»

Diasporizing the Diaspora

Such critiques miss Butler’s point. Parting Ways is not simply an affirmation of a diasporic Jewishness against a statist one. Such arguments had been formulated long before Butler by diasporic Jewish thinkers like Franz Rosenzweig and Hermann Cohen. Butler challenges the simple affirmation of diasporic Jewishness and of any collective identity based on non-sovereignty, whether grounded in dispersion or oppression. In the opening pages of Parting Ways, Butler acknowledges that deploying diasporic Jewish resources for criticizing Zionism may indeed reproduce Zionism. «[C]ritique of Zionism, if exclusively Jewish, extends Jewish hegemony.» The risk is that opposing exclusive Jewish sovereignty in the name of diasporic Jewish ethics could reassert Jewish exceptionalism and recreate the same exclusion of non-Jews that diasporic ethics sought to prevent. This dialectic of powerlessness leading to violence is reflected in Benhabib’s admonition that «political action in the name of oppressed peoples can (…) carry the seeds of oppression», or in Illouz’s warning that «the lack of political sovereignty itself contains regressive forms of identity».

Butler’s remedy for such regression in diasporic or decolonial positions is deeper diasporization: diasporic values such as «equality, justice, cohabitation, and the critique of state violence (…) must undergo [their] own dispersion»; diasporicism must be diasporized. This entails splitting the subjectivity of the diasporic subject: a «parting ways» not only between Zionism and the diaspora, but also within the inner fragmentation of diasporic Jewish identity itself.

The dispersed Jewish subject is Jewish insofar as it is defined by its concern for non-Jews. «To ‹be› a Jew», in Butler’s account, «is to be departing from oneself, cast out into a world of the non-Jew». This means that Jewish being does not consist of remaining oneself, but of relating to others and maintaining an «ethical relation to the non-Jew». Diasporic Jewishness does not simply refer to Jews who live in the diaspora, but to a Jewishness that inherently signifies living with non-Jews.

Hermeneutic Drag

The concept of identity as rooted in the ethical relation to others echoes the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas—a central source for Parting Ways—and Butler’s earlier notion of subjectivity grounded in intersubjectivity. There is a strong analogy between Butler on Jewishness and Butler on gender. To ground Jewishness in a relation to non-Jews is, in Butler’s terms, to queer the Jew.

A self-reflective aspect of Parting Ways is Butler’s application of diasporic subjectivity to their own critique of Zionism through Jewish sources. They recognize that criticizing Jewish sovereign by affirming the moral excellence of diasporic Jewishness paradoxically reestablishes the sovereignty of Jewish identity, which in turn motivates the Jewish state. Butler’s response to this circular problem is that the affirmation of diasporic Jewishness must itself be dispersed. Diasporic subjectivity requires, as I would propose, a diasporic hermeneutics.

If diasporic Jewishness is constituted by departing from oneself, then a diasporic hermeneutics of the Jewish tradition must also involve a departure from that tradition; the repetition of tradition must at the same time disrupt it. Butler contends that a diasporic reception of tradition must reach «beyond the community of those who share the idiom». A non-communitarian reading of traditional sources displaces them from their textual, historical, and epistemic grounding. The Jewish «we» formed through such a reclaiming of Jewish sources is not predetermined by tradition but remains indeterminate: «we do not know precisely what we mean by this ‹we›».

For Butler, diasporic hermeneutics is inter-cultural translation. In Parting Ways, Butler problematizes the ideal of full translatability, which seeks absolute universalization by extracting general ideas from culturally specific texts. This ideal treats any cultural formation «like a ladder one climbs in order to achieve a certain goal, but which falls away—or is thrown away—once that goal is achieved». Cultural translation risks becoming a form of supersession.