conomic and governmental into cultural criticism. Such practices enable the interrogation, subversion, and disruption of globalizing capital. Feminist scholarship that is relational rather than comparative helps us critique the material conditions that construct and put in motion the production of feminist knowledge.
The Zionist narrative has multiple points of textual origins, and its interpellation—or production of agencies and subjects—is doubled by pedagogic texts and historical practices (Bhabha, 1994). The idea of a secular national collective return to Zion, the Jewish homeland, was articulated by Moses Hess ( 1945), who presented it as a necessary social and political step in the process of the normalization of the Jews and their inclusion in the family of nations. In response to the false emancipation of the Jews by the European nations, Leo Pinsker ( 1935) advocated self-emancipation. Theodor Herzl ( 1970) proposed an establishment of a Jewish state in collaboration with and under the auspices of established political powers, including the Ottoman regime and European governments. A nonpolitical cultural Jewish center in Zion was proposed by Ahad Ha'am ( 1961), who interpreted Zionism as a humanistic and moral responsibility.
Cultural Zionism was reenergized in the 1920s and 1930s by H. N. Bialik, the poet laureate who engaged in a massive modernization and recirculation of Hebrew classic sources (Schweid, 1971). The philosopher Martin Buber rethought Zionism as a theory of humanistic ethical Hebraism modeled on biblical prophetic traditions. In the early years of the state, after the establishment of Israel in 1948, Zionism emerged as the object of historical reconstruction and contested political interpretations. The triumphs and failures of Zionism were ironically represented by the novelist S. Y. Agnon, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967 (Fuchs, 1985). In the 1960s and 1970s, Zionism became the object of academic analysis. The scholar Gershom Scholem (1971) insisted on scientific distance even as he read Zionism as a modern modality of Jewish mystical traditions of paradoxical redemption, rather than as a secular revolution in traditional Judaism (Kurzweil, 1971).
In the 1980s a “new” or “revisionist” historiography emerged that questioned Zionism as a nationalist ideology. The terminology of hegemonic Zionist histories was questioned. Thus, the terms “aliyah”—immigration—or “yishuv—settlement—were questioned as nonobjective and nonscientific substitutes for settler–colonial activities during the pre-state foundational period of Israeli nation building (Kimmerling, 1983). The Labor Zionist terminology of “redemption of the land” and “redemption of labor” were critically re-examined as nationalist legitimizations of class warfare between an early capitalist model of colonization based on Arab labor, and a second socialist–collectivist model that excluded Arab labor (Shafir, 1989). New histories were written of the War of 1948 that questioned its representation as the “war of liberation” (Silberstein, 1991; Rogan and Shlaim, 2001). The fate of Arab Palestinians who fled as a result of the war and became refugees beyond the unstable borders of the new state was revisited as the tragic result of both Arab and Israeli policies (Morris, 1987, 1999). The status of Arabs who remained in Israel as a national minority was critically examined (Lustick, 1980). Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Ella Shohat (1989) questioned the exclusion of Mizrahi Jews from Eurocentric representations of Zionist identity. In the 1990s new cultural critiques of Zionist meta-narratives appeared, targeting militarization and heroism (Zerubavel, 1995; Kimmerling, 2001), Zionist rejections of traditional European Diaspora culture (Boyarin, 1997), Israeli interpretations of the Holocaust (Porat, 1990; Zertal, 1998), the idealization of the Sabra (Oz, 2000), ideals of the body (Weiss, 2002), and heterosexual norms of masculinity (Raz, 2004). The politics of literary canonization was critically reexamined, notably previous