The Decline of the Diaspora Jewish Nation: Boundaries, Content, and Jewish Identity

Abstract

Jewish (and, probably, a Palestinian Arab) nation in Israel, but it did not create a world-wide Jewish nation. Jews in the Diaspora remain an ethnic group but one that is eroding because its content is diminishing and its boundaries are blurring. Thin culture and symbolic ethnicity are replacing thick culture for most Jews. Therefore, the state that was supposed to be created by the nation is being called upon to preserve or re-create the nation, if only in order to maintain the reservoir from which future immigrants to the Jewish state could be drawn.