1. Deuteronomy 8:12–20.
2. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 126.
3. Its origins can be found already in an essay by the scholar brothers Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin published in 1993, the same year as Operation Shylock, titled “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 693–725. They wrote, “We want to propose a privileging of Diaspora, a dissociation of ethnicities and political hegemonies as the only structure that even begins to make possible a maintenance of cultural identity in a world grown thoroughly and inextricably interdependent. Indeed, we would suggest the Diaspora, and not monotheism, may be the most important contribution that Judaism has to make to the world.”
4. This kind of Diasporism has come to be explicitly opposed to Zionism. In 2007, the writer Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz put it this way: “Diasporism takes root in the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund’s principle of doikayt—hereness—the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are … Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong … I name this commitment Diasporism.” Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). For a more recent essay revisiting the work, see Jacob Plitman, “On an Emerging Diasporism,” Jewish Currents, April 16, 2018, https://jewishcurrents.org/on-an-emerging-diasporism.
5. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 15.
6. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 42.
7. See Noah Feldman, The Arab Winter: A Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 113–17.
8. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De‘ot 1:7; cf. Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 6:3.