B ETWEEN ZIONISM AND LIBERALISM:OSCAR J ANOWSKY AND DIASPORA NATIONALISM IN AMERICA by James Loeffler* Of all the varieties of modern Jewish politics, none has experienced a more curious fate than Diaspora Nationalism. This nonterritorial strain of Jewish nation- alism, also known as Autonomism, was once widely regarded as “together with Zionism the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era.” 1 From its fin-de-siècle origins in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, it spread rapidly across Eastern Europe, sprouting various movements for Jewish national-cultural autonomy. After World War II, however, Diaspora Nationalism vanished almost overnight. So too was its intellectual afterlife marked by silence, as postwar historians of Jewish political thought largely ignored its legacy. 2 Recently, however, Diaspora Nationalism has emerged as a growing field of scholarship. 3 The results are impressive: a striking new wave * This article was written with the support of the University of Virginia Jewish Studies Program and Dean’ s Office, and the Posen Foundation. Jennifer Cole at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Elizabeth Vernon and Vardit Haimi-Cohen of the Harvard College Library Judaica Division, the staffs of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and American Jewish Historical Society, and Jessica Kirzner provided very helpful research assistance. I thank David Myers, Benjamin Nathans, Noam Pianko, Simon Rabinovitch, Eugene Sheppard, Nancy Sinkoff, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of AJS Review for their valuable comments and suggestions on various versions of this article. 1. Melvin Fagen, “Review: The Jews and Minority Rights,” Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, 26, no. 1 (July 1935): 38. 2. An important exception to this trend was the continued focus on the career and posthumous intellectual influence of Simon Dubnow. See, for example, the following works: Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958); Robert M. Seltzer, “Simon Dubnow: A Critical Biogra- phy of His Early Years” (Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1970); Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnow: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History , trans. Judith Vowles, ed. Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds. Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 3. For a recent reflection on this academic trend, see Allan Arkush, “From Diaspora Nationalism to Radical Diasporism,” Modern Judaism 29, no. 3 (2009): 326–50. AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 289–308 © Association for Jewish Studies 2010 doi:10.1017/S0364009410000358 289