About Us
jews who ponder, not just wander. we’re writing about stuff. thinking critically. eating jewishly (because we all know how important food is to jewishness, and we all love that that is so).
We are unashamedly left-wing radical ratbags, diasporists, feminists, queerying gender and sexuality, anti-racist, embracing of nuance, working within the academic and activist worlds, bringing the humour and entertaining writing, and wanting to do it all from and within our jewishnesses.
Our tagline—‘pondering jews’—points to two things: pondering and wandering. We want to embrace the idea that living in diaspora is the most significant way in which Jewishness can exist. When we’re in diaspora we’re without state power: this need not be disabling, but can be a source of empowerment and richness. As Daniel Boyarin has stated, “there is power to living on the margins”. Power here is not to be understood as ‘power over’—after Foucault we know that it is too simplistic to think of power in those terms. We’re thinking instead of power as productive of identities, languages and knowledges. In living in diaspora—living diasporist lives—we can interact with other peoples, ideas, cultures. Others need not be so other. We can learn from different peoples in open exchange. Diaspora is about movement and knowing that home is not about claiming exclusive territory, but about peoples and ideas.
Diaspora is about having opinions, but being open to change. Diaspora is about rejecting hierarchies and binaries.
Living in diaspora means, to us, being open to new ideas, to complexity, to challenges and change. We start from the position that there is never one truth—there are always many truths. Not that we agree with all of them. Diaspora does not mean eschewing history and politics. It’s about bringing the history and the politics to the fore.
It is these sentiments which we hope the blog will reflect.
Diaspora works for us because of our historical and material conditions—as left-wing Jews, descendants of Holocaust survivors, coming from traditions of movement, we embrace that tradition. We also deeply respect Indigenous peoples claims to sovereignty. The two systems can coexist. And so we acknowledge that this blog and our lives take place on stolen Indigenous land, primarily the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We take this seriously: not just the stealing of land which enabled our lives in Australia, but also the continuing colonial rule which exists in so many ways in Australia today.
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The purpose of this blog is to open up conversations and discussions. As is clear from our posts (we hope!) in terms of ideas we value the intelligent, the critical, the original, and the engaged. We’re hoping people will disagree with us, pushing us to consider other ideas and ways of thinking. But we’re not liberals – we’re not guided by arguments of ‘freedom of speech’. This is a blog, a small space of the internet that we’re carving out for critical, progressive thinking (and, as we all know, there are always limits to freedom of speech.) So we’re hoping you’ll engage and contribute, recognising and reciprocating the spirit with which we offer our thoughts.
jew on this 
Hi,
Have you tried contacting IAJV and asking them for a blog at the site? They could be receptive.
Best wishes,
Michael
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the tip – i think we’re probably both filled up with this blog though, so hopefully people will come and read us here.
cheers.
“When we’re in diaspora we’re without state power”
Well, *no you’re not* actually.
Are you not citizens of Australia, with access to as much “state power” as any other ordinary citizen of Australia? And you are citizens of Israel too, no doubt.
It’s kind of self-indulgent of you to make such a big show of your fictitious “exile” status when there are plenty of real refugees out there, doing it hard for-real. Isn’t it?
(And don’t publish this comment either – see if I care! But I will watch for some kind of reply).
Hi Peter,
I guess that was a bit of a shorthand that I used! the kind of ‘state power’ I was thinking of is that which is nationalistic and exclusivist: it demands a solid relationship between one nationality and a nation-state. Yes, as Australian citizens we are in a position of state power, but as Jews living outside ‘the Jewish state’ – Israel – we are refusing to enact Jewishness as that nationalistic exclusivist relationship. It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that though. And no, we’re not citizens of Israel. Israel might have the law of return, but neither of us has ever taken it up. Moreover, there’s a vast difference between being white, anglo and Christian in Australia, and being first generation Australians from Jewish, Polish backgrounds. But we’re also not denying the relative power with which we are able to live our lives in Australia.
I’m thinking here particularly of the work of Ghassan Hage on the idea of a ‘homely nation’, where the boundaries of the state are established through the idea that one makes themselves at home by declaring others to be outside the nation/home; and of the work of Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, who has written a great deal about diasporism. Also, I suppose, of both Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin.
So of course we’re not comparing ourselves to refugees. I don’t see how you could read the writing above in that way (unless, for some reason, you wanted to).
[…] do them justice. Like Jewschool, it’s a group-authored blog from a progressive viewpoint. In their own words, they are “jews who ponder, not just wander. we’re writing about stuff. thinking […]
I am an 83-year-old gay Jew from South Africa, living in Australia for 33 years. I am an atheist and do not subscribe to the Jewish religion in any way. My parents were both Jewish, one from Australia with German, English, Australian ancestry, and one from South Africa with Lithuanian parents. I do NOT live in the diaspora – I do not in any way see how Israel could be my spiritual home any more than apartheid South Africa could have been my spiritual home.
I am a socialist and an internationalist and do not believe I owe allegiance to any particular country just because I live in it. How could anybody owe allegiance to a country where the governments are either ALP or Coalition and behave as if asylum seekers were the scum of the earth. How quickly they have forgotten that this country was stolen from the Aborigines who were then ethnically cleansed from the face of the earth, leaving but a small isolated group behind subjected to apartheid on a grand scale.
Life is certainly more comfortable here than it would currently be in South Africa or many other countries, but it is not a great social success on many levels.
So I remain with the conclusion that the term diaspora does not represent who I am in any way.
Hi, all. I liked most of Mannie’s comments so I am responding here, but I love this website! I’m not Jewish, but I’ve been working on Palestine solidarity for awhile.
I’m also an atheist internationalist and just had a dreadful day watching a bunch of moneyed democrats flocking to a fundraiser for obama and his henchpeople.
Anyway, I did try to shame them as much as possible for funding the war on the world. Which I know you all (website folks and Mannie) would be doing too.
Cheers,
Linda in Seattle
well said Mannie!
Hi there, I think you might have promoted or tweeted my candlemaking project last year- http://www.Narrow Bridge Candles.org.
would you consider putting a post up about it on your blog this year? I got some orders from Australia last year!
I was just interviewed on 613 radio in Kingston, have a lot more photos I could send you, there is a video etc so it seems like there is some material to share!