Whitewashing the Diaspora

For Zionists, the formation of a Jewish state marked an end, even if an incomplete one, to centuries of Jewish suffering and lack of self-determination. But what if the diaspora wasn’t so bad after all? That’s the claim David Kraemer, an expert on the talmudic era, makes in his new book. And unlike some works from the past few years, it’s not a fashionable moral argument—it doesn’t praise Jewish powerlessness and lament Israel’s imagined sins. Shai Secunda writes in his review that Kraemer pulls together much interesting history, mixed with occasional shoddy scholarship and some “blithe half-truths.”