Israel Has a Jewish Problem

This book examines the struggle over Jewishness in Israel. Although the state was founded to liberate the Jews, some Israelis must leave the country to get married, while others are denigrated for trying to live the Torah life. The Kafaesque nature of such struggles illustrates how modern democratic nation-states, meant to liberate citizens through rule by the people" and for "the people," instead create "a people" for the state and its projects. The book argues that self-determination becomes a form of self-elimination as it produces the ethnos for the nation, inevitably narrowing the possible forms of personal and cultural identity. Sovereignty, secularism, nationalism, citizenship, self-determination, assimilation, Israel, settler-colonialism, religion, Jewishness"--