Far From Zion in Newsweek
Think Jack Kerouac meets Jackie Mason, resulting in a picaresque travel journal, with impressive intellectual ambitions…
Over at Newsweek.com, Yoav Fromer has a thoughtful and generous review of Far From Zion, in which he asserts that the book’s argument
overlooks the fact that political Zionism (that is, Israel) arose because of the catastrophic failure of the Diaspora to preserve itself. And then London fails to consider the possibility that these communities continue to survive not in spite of the Jewish state, but because of it.
I actually agree with him there to an extent, and though I mention it only glancingly in the book, many of the communities I profiled have relied on Israel as a place to send their young in times of crisis, or to find freedoms lacking at home. In the journey, I certainly did not pay great attention to those well-documented and catastrophic failures of Diaspora assimilation that made Israel urgently necessary, as I was focused on telling a different kind of Jewish story.
I am grateful for the fact that Fromer, in spite of disagreeing with the conclusions I reached, could see the point of my journey and my writing about it, and I’ll leave the last words here to him.
Despite some questionable conclusions, London’s book remains a genuine attempt to examine Zionism through an all-too-overlooked alternate scope. With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict subject to “professional” punditry on cable networks, London’s method of inquiry is refreshing. His ability to go out into the field—and confidently to switch between the storyteller’s, the anthropologist’s, and the historian’s hat—produces a rich and personalized narrative immensely different from the hollow polemical crossfire we’re accustomed to. And even if he occasionally seems naive, London’s moral critique of Israel emanates not from animosity but from deep admiration—a quality that clearly differentiates him from the anti-Israel left.
It’s worth reading the whole review.
