The modern securitization of cities has been bound up with the emergence of the nation-state. Cities are made secure in the name of their citizens, and the category of “citizen” has come to overlap increasingly with the category of an ethnically defined titular nation to whom the state belongs. Since the advent of the nation-state, people who fall outside these overlapping categories face a choice: either to demand their own states for their own separate nations, and then to develop their own security systems, or to reject the logic of dividing states among nations, and thus to reject the logic on which securitization is founded. Among European Jewish movements, Zionism chose the first of these paths, and today officially recognized Jewish communities rely for protection on a securitization coupled with rising antagonism, which in turn justifies further securitization. In this paper I’ll discuss the second path: how an alternative current of Jewish culture, past and present, has insisted on the necessity of diaspora. I will focus on contemporary Jewish movements in Central and Eastern Europe that draw inspiration from historic alternatives to Zionism and develop a notion of diaspora that—like its Greek etymology suggests—grows from wherever its seed (spor-) is scattered (dia-). This means developing the conceptual as well as practical tools for living in a diasporic form that is not tied to a faraway state, but grows toward a future. This is done with political displays of solidarity as well as cultural and social practices that reclaim the spaces of European cities as spaces for diasporas, defined not by barriers but by critical and subversive engagement with majoritarian discourses of nationality, citizenship, and statehood.
Joe Grim Feinberg is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he investigates political subjectivity and questions of internationalism in Central and Eastern European history. In addition to authoring several academic works, he has also written a Purim play, The Scroll of the Dregs of Persia, and a political-poetic “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora.”