At Home in Exile ─ Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews

An eloquent, controversial argument that says, for the first time in their long history, Jews are free to live in a Jewish state—or lead secure and productive lives outside it

To validate life in Diaspora has been akin to heresy for many Jewish thinkers since the beginnings of Zionism in the nineteenth century. Zionist thinkers wrote with disdain and even cruelty of Jews living their lives outside Israel (“a life of pointless struggle and futile suffering”), and even after the Holocaust, many Zionists wrote disparagingly of those Jews who hadn’t left Europe before the war. This thinking, in a more understated but no less pernicious form, continues to the present: only in Israel is it possible for Jews to lead fully Jewish, and, hence, human, lives.

In At Home in Exile, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals, Alan Wolfe, writing for the first time about his own heritage, argues that not only have Jews living outside the Jewish state flourished but their universalistic outlook is desperately needed if Israel is to survive. Wolfe’s book turns our attention away from the Jewish state, where half of world Jewry lives, toward the pluralistic and vibrant places the other half have made their home.

Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. The author and editor of more than twenty books, he is a frequent contributor to the New York Times,Harper’s, and the Atlantic. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.