This week’s posting is a minor departure from precedent. What follows is a somewhat amended version of my Forward OpEd column for the week. My writing for the Forward is constrained by space (950 words max) as also by a certain modesty, in that I cannot assume there as I can here that my assumptions are shared. I think they are to a significant degree, but not nearly as universally as they are by the folks who turn to this space regularly. So, here I’ve added some additional comments in brackets and italics. Enjoy – if that’s the appropriate word.

This is not the first time that some Jews have shunned nationalism. In fervently Orthodox circles, Zionism was (and to a lesser degree remains) offensive because it is an effort “to force God’s hand;” classical Reform Judaism opposed it because it violated their determined universalism; around the turn of the last century, the Bund was against it, believing in Jewish peoplehood and culture but not in the then nascent political Zionism that eventually birthed the State of Israel.

And now, not quite suddenly, here it is again, newly fashionable in certain left-wing circles.
Read on…