A Wandering Jew

In the tradition of the classic road narrative, Charles London's new book, Far From Zion, gives us everything we have come to expect: he visits exotic places, encounters colorful people, and experiences adventures you couldn't make up if you tried. But there is something else that sets the book apart. It's not your ordinary road trip; it's a Jewish road trip. Think Jack Kerouac meets Jackie Mason, resulting in a picaresque travel journal, with impressive intellectual ambitions that London only just misses.

Looking to reestablish his own Jewish identity, the author, a young Baltimore native who grew up alienated from his roots, makes up for lost time by embarking on a global trek that takes him to Jewish communities in Burma, Bosnia, Uganda, Iran, Cuba, Israel, and the American South.

In a Ugandan hillside village, for instance, he finds himself "bopping and dancing" the night away while welcoming the Sabbath with the local Jewish community (who knew?) in a celebratory ritual mixing African tribal rites with ancient Jewish traditions. In Iran, he experiences a different spiritual awakening: overwhelmed by the blending of local sights, sounds, and smells, he feels compelled to recite—out loud and in Hebrew—the sacred Jewish prayer of Shehekianu, commemorating a moment of joy, in the last place you would expect: the Jamkaran Mosque near the holy city of Qum, known to be one of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's favorite hangouts. There is Shlomo, the "oldest living Jew" in Cuba, who doesn't miss an opportunity to hit you up for a couple of pesos and to repeat his signature one-liner every time London is around: "Watch out for this guy, he is a lawyer for the mob." And Yossi, a trigger-happy Santa Claus look-alike ex-cop from Arkansas, who moved to the West Bank in search of action.

But London's ambition is bigger than simply chronicling the quirky Jewish Diaspora. In chasing Jews around the world, he is slowly building the case for a kind of alternate Zionism—a spiritual and humanistic Zionism of the kind developed by Jewish intellectuals like Ahad Ha'am and Martin Buber. There's only one thing standing in his way: actual Zionism in its political form—which is to say, the state of Israel. "I wanted to find a place where another narrative was being lived out ... I wanted to find the stories of peaceful coexistence ... I wanted to find a Judaism that was meaningful without politics, and grounded without dominating ground."

By the end of the book, it appears he has found what he's looking for. Invigorated by the relentless capacity of isolated Jewish communities to persevere by "creating a culture of respect" with their neighbors, he concludes that "the greatest achievement of the Jewish people was not the long struggle for their own state but the richness of their Diaspora. The state of Israel was necessary, for the time being, as a haven."

In other words, London, looking beyond the conventional borders of the modern nation-state, is convinced that those same humanistic principles so prevalent in the Diaspora—and not the state of Israel—are what will ultimately ensure the collective survival of the Jewish people.

There's a serious problem, though, with this idealized approach: it overlooks the fact that political Zionism (that is, Israel) arose because of the catastrophic failure of the Diaspora to preserve itself. And then London fails to consider the possibility that these communities continue to survive not in spite of the Jewish state, but because of it.