Hospicing Zionism: Counter-Memory and Jewish Futurity

This paper theorizes hospicing Zionism as an ethical, political, and memorial practice for a Jewish futurity in the face of planetary collapse. Rather than treating Zionism as the inevitable future of Jewish life, it reads Zionism as a dying structure that continues to reproduce violence through dominant regimes of memory. The paper argues that counter-memory is the central practice through which Zionism can be hospiced, since haunting names the ethical demand issued by histories that cannot be successfully buried. These histories include Palestinian death and dispossession as well as the suppressed inheritances of non-Ashkenazi, non-Zionist, diasporic, queer, disabled, and racialized Jewish communities. Integrating historical and theological analysis, ritual interventions by diasporist Jewish communities, and personal narrative, the paper imagines Jewish futurity beyond sovereignty, exceptionalism, and trauma, toward accountability, relationality, and repair.