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Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 49 • NUMBER 4 • DECEMBER 2023 p646-647 (book review by Spencer Dew, The Ohio State University)

THE NO-STATE SOLUTION: A JEWISH MANIFESTO. By Daniel Boyarin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. pp. 180. $30.00, hardcover.

This book is a manifesto in response to Boyarin’s version of “the Jewish question,” namely what does it mean to be a Jew. He insists that neither “religion” nor member of a “nation-state” can serve as adequate answers to this question. Rather, he offers here “an argument for an ethical form of vibrant Jewish collective continuity.” This vision is explicitly diasporic; Jews are a people, necessarily, of no state. As Boyarin puts it, “We have a diaspora, a ‘family’ of ancestors, grounded in a narrative of genealogy and not sovereignty; time and not space.” There is here, of course, a critique of Israel—“well on the way to being a racist, fascist state,” as Boyarin puts it— but his primary interest is a critique and dismissal of state logic and forms (including that specter of sovereignty) in general. He writes, “It is possible to imagine nations without states, not as an anomaly or deficiency, but as a significantly better way to organize human/Jewish cultural vitality without sacrificing the claims for universal justice.” It is for this imagination of the possibilities of the unstately that this book will most interest scholars and students of religion and law. Boyarin’s unstately vision of Jewishness is indebted to “the black radical traditions,” from Fanon and Césaire to Fred Moten and Charisse Burden-Stelly, traditions that focus both on a celebration of the particularity of a people and on a devotion to liberation for all peoples. Rejecting “Federations; Councils; Leadership committees; sociologists who study Jewish continuity by counting babies and checking out their mothers’ ‘identity’” in favor of “Jews, singing, dancing, speaking, and writing in Hebrew, Yiddish, Judezmo, learning the Talmud in all sorts of ways, fighting together for justice for Palestinians and Black Lives Matter,” Boyarin’s vision rejects both Appiah’s model of “cosmopolitanism” and the logic and form of the state. Tantalizingly, Boyarin offers another logic and form as an alternative to or otherwise than the stately: the “Talmudic,” a vibrancy “rooted ... in conversation,” alternately described as a weave and a mosaic, the past always present, still speaking. The “Talmudic,” as Boyarin explains it, is both an aesthetic (with distinctive “cadences and melodies”) and practice (shorthanded as “study,” but far more dynamic—a matter always of encounter and conversation and exchange, mutual transformation) and a style of the everyday (again, a counter ubiquity, albeit a utopian one, to stateliness). Reading this book during the bombardment and invasion of Gaza—a horror beyond comprehension—and in the wake of the October 7th attacks—likewise, violence and terror beyond imagining—is a stark, I would say crushing, experience. But crushing most, for me, because I feel my own cynicism and despair shadowing over the very “embers” Boyarin says he wants his book to act as “a bellows” for: a revitalized justice-centered model of Jewish collectivity, engaged within the world, devoted to Talmud study, and relishing “Jewish pleasure, Jewish joy. The intimacies of shared history, languages, practices, songs, holy days, literature, political comradeship (Black Lives Matter), things we eat and things we don’t eat, and even, perhaps, the joys of transgression, all the things that all up to my most outrageous coinage, Jewissance ...” Here, it is worth noting explicitly another function of this slim text: it is a love letter, an aching expression of love for Jewissance and an audacious imagining of the best, most moral, possibilities of such Jewishness, a vision of Jews as “a diasporic nation with a culture and the capacity to care deeply and struggle for the oppressed of other nations as well (especially for the nation we have oppressed, the Palestinians).”