hereness

Der veg tsu undzer yugnt embodied the diaspora nationalist ideology of doikeyt, or “hereness," an East European Jewish political principle that championed the legitimacy of Jewish communities wherever they found themselves.

1996 08, Deborah Dash Moore, Yivo Annual Volume 23, →ISBN

What do I mean by home? Not the nation state; not religious worship; not the deepest grief of a people marked by hatred. I mean a commitment to what is and is not mine; to the strangeness of others, to my strangeness to others; to common threads twisted with surprise. Diasporism takes root in the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund’s principle of doikayt — hereness — the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are...Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong…I name this commitment Diasporism.

2007 06, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, →ISBN

Hereness isn’t just about place, but about people: centering our politics and spiritual project around those nearest to us, adopting neighborliness as political practice and intergenerationality as a matter of course. Hereness demands that we learn our local histories and resurrect hidden ones of our own. Hereness means we refuse to disappear into the interiority of our liturgy, and equally refuse to stop being Jews in public. Hereness forces us to consider critically our relationship with class and its ordering of our world. Hereness is weird and materialist and queer and fun and angry, and best of all it’s already happening.

2018 April 16, Jacob Plitman, “On an Emerging Diasporism”, in Jewish Currents, archived from the original on 25 Mar 2023