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This article explores George Mosse's complex attitude to both nationalism in general and particularly to Zionism and Israel. It examines how Mosse was explicitly caught between a critical analysis of nationalism, and an intellectual commitment to liberalism and Bildung, on the one hand, and on the other, an existential attraction to the blandishments and emotional power of nationalism and, given his Jewish identity, especially Zionism.

Enthält Rezensionen von: Elizur, Yuval ; Malkin, Lawrence: The war within : Israel's ultra-Orthodox threat to democracy and the nation. - New York/N.Y. : Overlook Press, 2013‡‡Pedahzur, Ami: The triumph of Israel's radical right. - New York/N.Y. : Oxford University Press, 2012

AbstractThis paper explores contemporary Jewish identity-formation and the centrality of official Holocaust memory and Zionism – understood as the ongoing settler-colonial project aiming at the formation and maintenance of a Jewish-exclusivist state in Palestine – to this process. It argues that identity politics within the Jewish community are based on an understanding of identity, which assumes it to be static and individual. In doing so, this political approach reproduces the essentialisation of Jewish communities under the banner of Zionism and official state history. The paper aims to show how this process of identification between Judaism, official Holocaust memory and Zionism has been a state-led process, rooted in the historical development of antisemitism and European colonialism. In order to do so, it builds on a critique of classical Marxist analyses of the Jewish question. It finally proposes a more fluid approach to identity, which understands it as socially constructed, contested, and subject to political contestation.

Abstract
This article offers a set of conceptual reflections on the politics of deferral. Beginning with an examination of this idea in analyses of colonialism, human rights, and liberalism, the article turns to Gershom Scholem's well-known opposition between Jewish messianism ("life lived in deferral") and Zionism (concrete political action). The article troubles this distinction by tracing the concept of deferral back into Scholem's earliest writings on messianism and by showing the term's genealogical reliance on the theological-political vocabulary of sovereignty. Against this critical background, the article returns to the present, in order to reframe Scholem's distinction and to suggest that, far from negating messianic deferral, Zionism and Israeli colonial rule capture and redeploy its logic as a secular modality of power. The article concludes by inscribing this secular, political theology of Zionism within a Christian history of deferral, messianism, and empire.

This chapter examines the attitudes of the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (the Austrian-occupied province of partitioned Poland) to Zionism between 1905 and 1920.

This paper proposes to revisit the intellectual trajectory of Norbert Elias on the basis of an article published by the sociologist in a local Jewish newspaper in 1929 and entitled "On the Sociology of German Anti-Semitism." It argues that in this seemingly circumstantial text, Elias asserts his decision to favor sociology, which had come to replace and envelop his engagement in the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weiss. This is evident in the article's somewhat ambiguous final sentence, where Elias presents German Jews with an alternative: collective emigration to Palestine or a lucid vision drawn from a sociological diagnosis of the situation. The paper begins by situating Elias's text within the range of analyses of anti-Semitism in 1920s Germany, comparing its approach to Zionism with that of Franz Oppenheimer. It then contextualizes its relationship to the sociology of Karl Mannheim: Elias was Mannheim's assistant in Frankfurt and his approach contrasted with the perspective developed in the same time and place by the Frankfurt school. Finally, the paper shows that Elias's sociological distantiation would imperceptibly take the place of the political distantiation that had centered on Zionism—a scientific movement that implied erasing from his memory the political Zionism he had long supported. A new French translation of Elias's 1929 text, also by Danny Trom, is included as an appendix.