Re: Religious vs National struggles…
Jim Devine wrote:
Isn’t Ariel Sharon a secular Jew? the initial Zionist philosophy involved saying that Jews are like Italians (or whatever) and since not all Italians are religious, not all Jews have to be. And the original Zionism was all-Ashkenazi, non-Sephardic. The focus on Yiddish was invented, not traditional. As Jeffrey Fischer points out, nationalism is an artificial creation, for political purposes.
In Image & Reality, Norman Finkelstein argues that Zionism was a nationalist response to the reactionary European nationalisms of the 19th cenutry that declared the Jews to be inorganic outsiders.
Doug