December 2025 Book Review

Review of Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance. Brooklyn, NY: Ayin Press, 2023.

Rich Robinson

Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile will encourage some, frustrate others, and hopefully encourage thoughtfulness and engagement across the board.

Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and rabbi of Fire Island Synagogue in New York. In his book, he takes the correctness of liberalism and progressivism as starting points, but never really defines them. For that matter, he only defines Zionism in passing.

The book is a series of essays, some new, some previously published and revised for this volume. Despite the title, it is really more about Zionism than about exile per se (though both are of course necessarily intertwined). In the introduction, Magid sets out a statement that can be taken as programmatic for the entire book:

While some may read this book as anti-Israel, that is not at all my intention. Like many others, I believe Israel is mired in an increasingly chauvinistic ethnonational project, one that has undermined the more humanistic attempts of certain earlier iterations of Zionism. However, unlike many others, I do not believe those earlier humanistic strains of Zionism can be recuperated, or, as I’ll argue in this book, that liberalism and Zionism can be seen as compatible in any easy way. (p. 17, Kindle edition)

And again:

This book is therefore, in some sense, anti-Zionist—or more precisely, as I suggest below, counter-Zionist. I try to sever Zionism as an ideology from Israel as a nation-state. In so doing, I fully acknowledge the land of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and the same land as the homeland of the Palestinian people. (p. 18)

Chapter 1 argues that “liberal Zionism” is mired in an “illiberal reality,” namely, the occupation. In chapter 2 he gives the story of his own pilgrimage through different ways of thinking about Israel and Zionism. This essay is lively, insightful and engaging. It’s always important, in my view, to know something about an author as a person lest we reduce them to mere positions or ideologies.

Chapter 3 argues that Jewishness needs to be separated from Zionism, while chapter 4 speaks to the claim that only Zionist are really Jews, or that Zionism is the sine qua non of Jewish identity. Here Magid shows the importance of not forgetting history: “These simplistic thinkers who attack non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews don’t realize that the Zionism they take as coextensive with Judaism today was, for many of its architects, meant to be the alternative to Judaism.” (p. 106)

In chapter 5, Magid argues that the settler movement and the BDS movement, despite coming from opposite ends of the spectrum, are actually unintentionally working together to erase the distinction between the occupied areas and Israel proper. And for Magid, both undermine the liberal version of Zionism.

Chapter 6 gives us some trenchant thoughts on owning the land versus being stewards of it. Chapter 7 is about antisemitism and oppression. Do they always go together? What about antisemitism when Israel acts, in Magid’s wording, as an “oppressor”?

Two essays round out the book. Chapter 8 is the most impenetrable essay on the postmodern, post-Zionist thought of Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg). While you could pick up the book with any of the essays, I advise against starting here! Finally, chapter 9 lays out four positive views on the diaspora/exile by four Jewish thinkers.

How to think about all this? For those who are staunch Zionists, the temptation will be to write off people like Magid. But he needs to be heard—and there is not a little to learn from him. First of all, The Necessity of Exile is not a call to dismantle the state of Israel. What Magid wants to do is to revisit some of the founding presuppositions of Zionism as an ideology. Some may be surprised to learn that in some key ways Magid aligns with mainstream Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber and Daniel Boyarin, the latter a well-known and respected contemporary scholar.

Magid admits that his own project to move away from ideological Zionism may be unviable. He envisions a future Israel as a homeland for both Jews and Palestinians. The word “terrorism” occurs only twice, and he never mentions that the goal of eliminating Israel is hard-wired into Palestinian groups such as Hamas. It is frustrating that he never at any one point gives us a definition of Zionism as an ideology. He certainly understands it to be more than simply “the right of Jewish people to have their own land.” It is doubtful that the majority of Israelis today are “ideological” in their understanding of Israel and Zionism. While the left and, especially now, the right in Israel can be undergirded by ideological commitments, most Israelis born in Israel simply see it as their country and want to live in security and peace.

Nevertheless, I’d encourage anyone who calls themself a Zionist to read The Necessity of Exile. It will challenge your thinking and identify some of the problems and points of tension in the modern state of Israel, whether or not it ends up changing your views. “Iron sharpens iron,” says Proverbs 27:17. Let Magid sharpen you.