Yaacov Yadgar releases new book asking what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state

DPIR’s Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies Yaacov Yadgar has published a new book exploring what the designation ‘Jewish’ amounts to in the context of the sovereign state.

In one of the first books to directly question what it means for Israel to be a Jewish State, ‘To Be A Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism’ – published by NYU Press - also examines Zionism’s relationship to Judaism.

The book also provocatively questions whether the Christian notion of supersessionism - the idea that the Christian Church has superseded the nation of Israel in God’s eyes and that Christians are now the true People of God - may now be applied to Zionism, with Zionism understood by some to have taken over the place of traditional Judaism, making the actual Jewish religion superfluous.

The key message Yaacov hopes to convey with the book is centred around the global “script” of nationalism, of which Israel offers a local, specific iteration or interpretation.

Yaacov said: 

“The book is the culmination of my engagement with questions of the theopolitics of the modern nation-state. While immediately centred around those Jewish, Zionist and Israeli questions, my book is ultimately about nation-statism. 

“Specifically, it is about the theopolitics of the modern sovereign nation-state, and the ways in which this theopolitics renders the nation-state—its interests and preferences, its hierarchies and prejudices, its injustices and misdeeds—a “natural” feature of our lives. 

Yaacov’s current interests lie in what in what American theologian William Cavanaugh calls the “migration” of sacredness from theology and religion to theopolitics and the state.  Specifically, he is interested in exploring how political mythology embodies this sacredness that allows modern politics to be “theological” (or “idolatrous") while celebrating itself as “secular” and “rational”.