Summer Breeze

Combo Breaker 2026 Part Two: The Chilling

2026-06-06T05:00:00Z

Chicago!

Living in Illinois is pretty sweet for a lot of reasons (mostly Chicago (a billion cool museums, substantial public transit, Chicago's music scene, etc etc)), but living within an hour of both Combo Breaker and Frosty Faustings is pretty high up on that list. The major tournament-Chicago combo doesn't get to happen very often, though, since Chicago's a bit of a hike from both venues and it's hard to find time and people willing to bounce away from the venue for a longer stretch of time. Thanks to some funemployment silver linings and airline cost-saving shenanigans, though, things worked out!

My Combo Breaker started on Wednesday if you squint, when my friend Chastity (check out their CB2026 recap here too!) arrived a day early. After a legendarily awful land-taxi-and-just-sit-there combo, we swung by Pequod's pizza,¹ which I think was a great call on their part given: (a) they had never been, and (b) getting there during the event proper would probably be a hassle.

Thursday

Even though I'm pretty local, I do my best to get a venue room at every event, and to book the hotel starting the day before tournament activities kick off. When you register for Combo Breaker, you do in fact have to tick a box that basically says "I acknowledge that this event starts at 10 AM on Friday," so Thursday hotel it is. Dodge the check-in rush, avoid the worst of the badge line, and keep Thursday as leisurely as possible.

Alas, hotel check-in is still at like 4:00 PM, which the first half of Thursday up for grabs for adventure; this much open time could only mean rolling out to Chicago with Chastity. Thursday's routing was as follows:

Four Letter Word Coffee: Pretty hip and bougie coffee shop. I don't drink coffee (maybe it's time to start?) but the donut I got was great, and it was fun watching some of the bougie coffee shop stereotypes be realized in real time. Someone dressed head to toe in Rick, check. Barista using their break to chat with someone about their bike, check. Someone sprinting in, delicately and blissfully sipping an espresso and water in that order, immediately re-applying their stressed work expression, and sprinting out, check. Nice.

TriBecca's Sandwich Shop: Three Beccas, how lit is that? Personal favorite spot of mine, I went for the Cuban as always. It's a true hole-in-the-wall, with exactly one (1) actual booth and barstool seating against the front window. Super cozy, absolutely killer food, excellent vibes for a warm spring day. Also, great vegetarian options for anyone so inclined!

Cubans normally go across rather than up. I'm not complaining.

Bucket O' Blood Records: Super cool small business downtown, a horror themed everything shop with a sick selection of books, records, and horror memorabilia. Pretty wicked metal selection, and I even found a somewhat rare sleeper favorite record of mine (Tears on Tape by HIM), but I wasn't going to be heading back home and I wasn't going to lug it around all weekend, so it was still a skip. Alas.

Onward to the hotel, where I got my badge, did some hello rounds, and met up with my roommate!

Later on, I capped the night off with an excellent large-group Italian dinner at Toscana Restaurant & Lounge, a recommendation from Xrd player Autodidact. I got the chicken marsala and, in a rarity for me, enjoyed a glass of wine! Good times had by all.

At some point after this, I breezed through a liquor store to grab a case of soda for the room, plus some beer and cider for sipping throughout the rest of the weekend. I really cannot recommend having a solid base of non-alcoholic drinks on hand, it makes life at these busy events so much easier, especially in the evenings when a lot of stuff closes and you're probably not trying to jet away from the venue.

I think I also snuck a Buffalo Wild Wings trip in here, right before they closed? Sometimes a brother needs some BOGO Thursday wings. That and a quick visit to the FGC Illuminati™ room (see: like two stage managers and organizers) to cap off Thursday.

Friday

Unfortunately, the hotel pillows were not agreeing me, and I was hit with a pretty massive tension headache, which I only get 2-3x/year but they invariably show up at the most inconvenient times possible. So, I was rolling into bracket day on a solid two hours of sleep and an unmedicated bad headache. Oh well. Anyways, you can catch my +R bracket recap here

After my 10 AM pools, I went and got CM Chicken down the road with a bunch of the college homies, virtually all of whom played fighting games at least casually. Unsurprisingly, it was awesome to see everyone again, and CM Chicken never disappoints. Garlic spicy tenders for me, a huge receipt for table, and a leisurely walk back to the venue, still with plenty of time to kill.

From there, I ran into Deft, who I anticipated I'd be playing shortly deeper into the +R bracket. If memory serves, he had just finished his pools and hadn't eaten, so I scooped him and serial chiller Brent up for... a walk right back to CM Chicken. In my defense, I didn't eat again, I just needed to hawk the the best Korean fried chicken in the area.

After that, we walked back, chilled for a little longer, and played out the rest of bracket. Deft bossed up crazy style, beating me 2-1 in Winners side and 3-2 in Grand Finals when I clawed my way back to him through a brutal Loser's bracket. Anyways, that's all stuff in the aforementioned +R bracket recap, so I want to give special mention to the phenomenal photos taken by HelloItsLi. Being a main game at a major has a lot of blessings, and chief amongst them is the chance to be captured by the endlessly hard-working event photographers.

I engaged in what the kids call 'aura farming.' Peep the stick + Richard Scarry combo.

First (Deft, left), second (me, right), and third (Soup, right, half out of frame)!

So many people were in the crowd when I finally stepped off for good - Clerver folks (you know who you are), Xrd players, college friends, I did my best for y'all as much as I did it for me. Thanks for being there.

Huge shoutout to Chastity, Cade, and Autodidact, who celebrated with me and promptly picked a spot for dinner. Real champion behavior. That spot was the Westwood Tavern, right across the highway. Great food, good times had by all. I did witness one of the most hysterical breaches of the social contract in human history, wherein someone needed to escape the booth and opted to go under, grabbing the knee of an unprepared Potemkin player. Can't 3f grab your way out of this one, bozo.

I also do really need to extend a heartfelt thank you to the Xrd folks. Xrd really isn't my game scene-wise, and it's not where my competitive energy goes, it's not where I've done most of my commentary, but there's always been a seat at the table for me, which I am greatly appreciative of. It's all love.

With my competitive obligations fulfilled, it was time for CHILLIN, the crown prince of all fighting game major activities.

Haters got Scarred. Thank you Chastity for the photo!

Saturday

Late late late late in the night (or I guess early Saturday morning at that point), I yielded to the headache and evil pillows. I drove back home, slammed some heavy-duty painkillers, and slept in my own bed. Not bad for a short drive from a major, and I came into Saturday feeling properly refreshed! Nice!

A good chunk of Saturday was spent watching the conclusion of the Xrd bracket, with top 24 wrapping at around 4:00 PM, followed by a mid-day meal intermission at Phoenix Flame nearby. I had been there the previous year with a huge crowd of +R folks, and loved my steak sandwich. This year I opted for their steak and fries, which I was unfortunately less impressed by. Oh well!

Eventually we made our way back to the venue to chill a little more, and then catch the Xrd top 8, which ran until 10:30 PM-ish? Solstice took the bracket pretty convincingly, which was awesome to see, and watching Cade and Pzooo make it deep was a treat as well. Vibes leaving the Xrd top 8 were pretty great!

Portillo's from there with a handful of Xrd and +R folks, including Mightyjoey, who won the P4AU tournament 6-0 in sets without dropping a game. What a monster. I know a lot of people end up having Portillo's (or Culver's) two times per tournament, I've done it before, but I really think one is my sane limit, especially given how well I was eating this whole tournament.

The rest of the night was just bouncing around the lobby and hotel rooms saying hey to people! A visit to a Nen Impact setup featuring a cosplay I couldn't identify because I don't know ball, a visit to a hotel room with a certain Xrd-affiliated vtuber on an iPad, it was a riot.

Sunday

Free at last. Sunday was all chillin, and with hotel check-out on Monday, I was free to hang loose a little more than usual! This is where I braved the popcorn line to claim an XL bag of my all-time favorite Chili Limon, plus some White Devil and Cheesecake. The Popcorn Baron can do no wrong. Just a lot of making the rounds and chatting.

It was also this day that I had identified... a threat.

Darkness looms over Schaumburg.

A lone soda can, left too close to the cooling element of the mini-fridge. How sad. Witness testimonies include "What the fuck is that?" and "Bro what" and I couldn't agree more.

I also opted for a few shots of Malort, since this was the true final night. One with Digital Watches, one with my GOAT TrifMoney (in part the reason I play fighting games at all!) ft. iDom. An Australian friend of brought some Australian snacks, including one kind of flavored cracker called 'Shapes,' which are the 'shape' of Australia. TO Gunpaw and I mused over the nature of these so-called 'Shapes,' which was quite fun.

Finally, it came time to put the mutant soda can out of its misery. At 3-something AM, a brave crew walked it outside, and I threw it the air (a safe, respectable distance from any valuable property). It survived the fall. Brave stage manager Trinity stepped up where I had failed, and put the can out of its misery at 3:33 AM. Beautiful.

The rest of the night was spent in and out of the hotel, weaving between conversations in the hotel lobby, out front, and in hotel rooms once again. To me, this is what it's out - having so many people to see and talk to, and making it all happen. Huge shoutout to local TO HamJams, always a pleasure to catch up with him.

I was, however, mortally wounded. A certain high-placing Xrd Leo player informed me that I had:

No rectangle (cool fidget toy someone was imploring people to 'hit' like a vape)
No purple (Aviation alcoholic beverage, which I had just finished)
No bitches (women)

Ouch.

Monday

On the opposite end of my wisdom about getting in the day before the event kicks off, I think if you can make it work, getting out the day after is for the best. Again, skip the exit rush, have better selection of flight times if you're flying, and you now have both Sunday night to go hard if you so choose, and Monday to actually make your exit. Thankfully, this was not the end for me!

With a few of the Xrd crew, we hit up Cafe Blessing nearby, dropped one party member off at the airport, and then headed downtown for a last hurrah. We swung by Reckless Records, which as Chastity pointed out, was a great semi-social activity; we could all stretch our legs and do our thing without needing to talk, but we could still say hey to each other as our paths through the store intersected. I snagged a Darkthrone CD on the way out.

From there, we snagged an assortment of sodas, Gatorades, and Monsters, and went to Wicker Park proper to sit down, chat, and relax. Honestly, an outing like this was a much needed break from the bustle of Combo Breaker, and I'm increasingly thinking it might be time to just have a major-less vacation with some friends in the scene and run around somewhere.

One final journey to Devil Dawgs for a solid concluding meal, and it was time to go. Back to the airport, some goodbye hugs, and that was that. Mid-day Wednesday to late Monday is a lot longer than my major adventures typically last, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

If you were along for any of these various rides, you fuckin' rule. Thanks for being there; thanks for being part of CB26.

Footnotes

GOAT Chicago pizza location, Pequod's > everyone else and pan pizza > deep dish forever.⭶

Marathon (2026): End of Season One Review

2026-06-03T05:00:00Z

Delivers on all fronts, design- and gameplay-wise; it's already a personal all-time favorite. A fast track to robber baron Buddhism if your heart is true, with unforgettable experiences like Cryo in spades.

Doubt

Marathon (2026) was not released in a moment of confidence for Bungie. Destiny 2 vaulting (November 2020) had left diehards with an enduring bad taste in their mouth,¹ and dinged many peoples' belief in Bungie's ability to administer a game in the long term. This was also just a weird moment for Marathon of all franchises to make its return. Terms like 'hero shooter' were floated, right around the time Concord had just experienced a world record pace crash and burn. The game's post-reveal pre-launch window was marred by a fairly high profile plagiarism scandal involving artist Antireal, whose assets were used (sometimes seemingly unmodified) in early builds of the game, revealed in May 2025. In June 2025, the release of the game was pushed back indefinitely. I think all but the most devout were smelling a visually striking game that was nevertheless going to be dead on arrival.

Now let me jump back a couple steps, speaking less historically and more personally. I think my friend group (including more than a few OG Marathon superfans) was feeling the way a lot of people were when the announcement trailer hit: "Really? An extraction shooter?" We were split on the aesthetic; the high-contrast, 3D printed techwear brutalism resonated with some and repulsed others. There were intermittent (and in my opinion unfair) jabs of "What if it was singleplayer/cinematic though?"

But there was something there, obviously in the May 2023 announcement trailer. The synth-harpsichord, the silkworms stiching together entire human forms, the surface-of-the-sun colored monitors blaring "IN THE HEAVENS THEY ARE WAITING," the glitch-laden bluescreens showing what seemed to be angels or people burning, the almost Mirror's Edge levels of color contrast, pink flowers in grey plastic hydroponics vats... I wanted to believe this visual style would go somewhere, and I wanted to believe it would be more than just a neat thing to look at from time to time.

The cinematic reveal short dropped in April 2025. Bright yellow prefabricated structures litter an alien shore while the colony ship above it detonates spectacularly, showering colonists in debris. Some exasperated punky robot thing (Vandal) relives her debt briefing a few times back-to-back-to-back, in different colorways, not outfits, each rerun. A radar dish-faced robot (Recon) has her entire face shattered by a sniper while talking to a grey guy (Assassin) about a music chip. The punky robot loots her, and is chased into security force gunfire by the aforementioned grey guy, where she explodes violently into blue gore, dropping grotesquely like a puppet with its strings cut. "Look on my works ye mighty and despair," reads a forlorn voice, as our grey guy is assassinated from offscreen, intercut with shots of an abandoned space colony.

At this point in time, I am now absolutely certain what whatever is happening here, at least artistically and narratively, is special, though I'm really not sure the game will ever even arrive.

Turnaround

I can identify two clear turning points in my hopes for Marathon. One, the announcement of the resolution of the Antireal plagiarism scandal by the artist herself in December 2025.

Two, these gifs:

I'm dead serious. The ability of a game to inspire Posting™, to develop a fun, positive sort of subculture, is something I find very telling.

The real 'hook, line, and sinker' moment, though, was the Server Slam (February 26 - March 2, 2026). I can't speak for anyone else, but almost instantly, all doubt was erased. This game fucking rocked. It was one of those rare, genuine "I'm sad I'll never experience this for the first time again" moments. Stumbling blindly into Marathon with a rotating cast of two friends, always spectated by a half-dozen others waiting to take their turn in our rotation, was a wholly unique experience, one I can't really equate with anyting other than... I dunno, the launch of Tom Clancy's The Division in 2016? In the decade between The Division and Marathon, I don't think there was another time so much of my friend group converged on the same game. It was uncynical, launch Pokemon Go levels of "peace and love on planet Earth."

The game just felt spectacular. Bungie, for all their flaws in administering games in the long term, had struck another core game design home run. Every gun felt and looked distinctive, and Shell abilities were nicely diversified and powerful without being so overwhelming that the game felt like a hero shooter. The maps were drop-dead gorgeous, with Perimeter perfectly setting out the game's visual thesis: this is a world that does not want you here, nearly but ultimately not brought to heel by technicolor prefabrications. Dead colony installations drawing from the visual language of bleeding-edge sports equipment and 3D printing litter the landscape as almost-comprehensible megastructures. The game's soundtrack of eerie, unintrusive, hypnotic electronica was perfect, and I've never been happier to not hear a distorted guitar in my life.

There were so many little moments in the bigness of Marathon that made it stick in my mind. Finding a new gun and showing it off, like laughing at how the CE Tactical (the game's lowest-end sidearm) looked like it was purpose-built to get be ditched in a pond after killing someone. Screaming in mock horror as we all lemming trained our way right into a poison plant's gas cloud. Finding the WSTR ("waster," the game's sawed-off double-barrel shotgun) for the first time, sprinting into a smoke cloud as Assassin, and vaporizing the first vaguely human-shaped blob to move in front of me. Finding my first thermal sight, and assembling a 'Swagnum' (Magnum pistol + muzzle brake + thermal).

Fully half of my main group chat immediately rebranded to MIDA backronyms. I was Mike In Da Attic. Someone else became Most Interesting Dude Alive. A lesbian friend made one I don't have the pass to write.

And this was just the Server Slam.

Making a Dope FPS

Over the course of Marathon I have decided that there are fundamentally four types of FPS, dictated by two pairs of traits:

Utility: Gunfights are dictated by who can use equipment and character tools better
Movement: Gunfights are won and lost almost entirely through maneuvering
Geometry: Gunfights are predominantly about regulating angles and target access
Aimlabs: Gunfights are almost exclusively determined by fast, snappy aim duels

	Utility	Movement
Geometry	Marathon	Apex Legends
Aimlabs	Valorant	Modern CoD

If you ignore the fact that this completely falls apart under closer inspection, or the fact that basically all of this is underpinned by time to kill (TTK), it kinda sorta makes sense if you squint. Really, I just wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek table. Whatever.

What I really mean to convey is that Marathon strikes an odd-but-delightful balance with its combat-focused design decisions. Despite having some very strong movement options (a universal slide, Destroyer's airdash and sprint, Vandal's double jump and power slide), Marathon is not a Movement Game™ where the primary determinant of a gunfight is your ability to track a cluster of 16 pixels moving laterally at Mach nine. TTK runs a pretty wide gamut, with extremely short TTKs happening at extreme near and far ranges, while the midrange is dominated by slightly slower-killing weapons that privilege stability. This is all modulated by the defender's shields, which in following with the rest of the game's items, follow a grey → green → blue → purple → gold hierarchy.

In my experience, gunfights feel more like empowered Counter Strike or detuned Valorant on blown-up maps than anything else, though with guns that (unsurprisingly) feel distinctly Bungie. Angle control and vision regulation are king, where utility is used to secure an advantage and crack open a stalemate, not to steamroll. Collecting information is as important as actually clicking on the opposition. When you ping or shoot people, for example, you get a little popup that tells you what tier of shields they have, which allows for some excellent unspoken communication between teams. I see a team in the distance, fire a volley with weapons I'm iffy about at this range, and see someone on that team has purple shields. That team fires back, their weapons seem better, and I am immediately reminded I have green shields. Do you know what I do? I leave.

Part of the brilliance of Marathon's construction is the unspoken sexual tension between the extraction shooter elements and the satisfying, decision making-driven gunplay. On the one hand, all but the most extreme gear differentials feel outplayable with proper positioning and deployment of Shell abilities. On the other hand, if I have anything worthwhile in my bag, I'm probably not trying to lose it. On the other other hand, if your baseline kit is better than mine, I probably want it. So playing Marathon and embracing the PvP spirit quickly clues you into the game's logic, a constant set of bullet chess calculations on what engagements are worthwhile.

Brushes with death feel genuinely threatening, narrow escapes are thrilling, and avoiding fights altogether often feels like a satisfying decision, not just the equivalent of looking at RTS autocomplete odds and shrugging. At the same time, taking an uphill battle with full information and making it work purely through decision making fight execution is an experience with few direct equivalents.

The Gameplay Loop

I trust you're a reasonably intelligent human being, so I'm just going to bullet point this list, because I think an objective list of things in the game is boring to read, not fun to write, and does a bad job of conveying the experience it provides (which I will talk about later), okay? Okay. Some of this is different in Season Two, okay? Okay. Here's a mega 'too long; didn't play' of what Marathon (2026) is:

Meta-Progression

Accept quests from different factions to gain rewards and faction experience
Trade in looted items and faction experience for faction rewards
Faction rewards grant you persistent upgrades to your character and shop
Read Codex entries to learn about the world and customize your equipment

In-Game

Queue up with up to three total players
Complete objectives in accordance with your faction contracts
Loot points of interest and fight the UESC (non-playable enemies)
Kill other people for glory and for the contents of their bags
Compete for irregular map activities, which grant special high-value rewards
Collect lore items and complete challenges to progress your Codex
Exfiltrate with your gains or die trying

Reeducation

Marathon has somehow also made a great case for adult reeducation, not in the political sense, but in a literal "let's send some adults back to the fourth grade for a bit" way. It is a game that asks you to read. Somehow, this has been controversial. Items do things, and item descriptions tell you what they do. Late-game content has some complex mechanics, which can be understood by reading mission text. Much in the spirit of the OG Marathons, the vast majority of the lore is delivered through text, which you can read. Whatever, like half of Americans are functionally illiterate, so it's no surprise many gamers are not up to the task. I will concede the menus can be a little dense, especially at first, but please just read the words that are on your screen and it will probably work out.

I think this is the real secret to new Marathon's success; cramming this dense world information down your throat in real time would be moronic, and would in all likelihood necessitate the construction of a much less compelling singleplayer experience. Genuinely I do not think this could have worked as a singleplayer package while preserving the same sense of discovery, replayability, and philosophical cohesion. Making it a multiplayer extraction shooter, while definitely a chilling pitch, allows three things to happen simultaneously:

Tasking the player with feeling out the world themselves makes discovery feel organic
The zero-sum nature of an extraction shooter meshes with the themes of intercorporate warfare
Dense lore can be revealed to the player incrementally, complemented by meta-progression

You, the player, are an uninvited scavenger picking through the ruins of a dead colony at the behest of competing megacorporations, and in doing so you face off against other players for access to the limited pool of truly high-value weapons, equipment, and lore items in each run. The play experience and writing make a perfect circle.

When I'm rifling through a locked room on Dire Marsh, low on ammo and health, hearing player footsteps clonk noisily two floors up, and I see an Emotional Support Plushie, the one I need to round out my collection of five to get all the lore entries for that item, my thought is not "I wish you were a gun," my thought is "I will protect this thing with my fucking life."

Basically, I don't know why they decided Marathon (2026) should come back. I don't know why they decided it should be an extraction shooter. Above all else, I have no clue how they stuck the landing.

Finding Your Fun

One of the things I like most about Marathon is it gives you a lot of ways to self-select into the play experience you want, and while you do unlock three additional maps as you progress, they are not sequenced in a "Do one until you get the next" way.

So, as of the very end of Season One, Marathon has three permanent maps (Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost), a windowed Cryo Archive queue, a windowed ranked queue that rotates across maps, and some 'novelty' queues designed to make the game more approachable for duos and new players.

Maps and Queues

Perimeter is the starter map, and probably the most 'segmented,' it has lots of relatively self-contained areas that block line of sight to others, so the overall threat level from players is relatively low, and it's relatively hard to stumble upon another group without discovering each other basically simultaneously. At the same time, the average loot level is pretty low, and without getting into locked rooms or doing the relatively scarce mid-match activities, you're probably not going to be walking out filthy rich. It's a great place to get your bearings, while remaining fun to romp through once you've gotten a little stronger.

Players then unlock Dire Marsh, a sprawling, open map with enormous sightlines; sniper rifles are king and knowing when you can't take a fight is queen. Dire Marsh has much more going on in the way of mid-match activities, and accordingly it's much riskier. More AI enemies are present, they tend to be stronger, and crossing the map in general is more dangerous. More often than not, your notice that you've been spotted will be you getting shot, not you seeing the person aiming at you.

Outpost comes next, not that much smaller but way denser, introducing in-match progression via three distinct types of clearance card, which grant you access to supply drops, locked armories, additional exfiltration options, and Pinwheel, an intensely high-risk area (including a map-wide alarm if you make it in) with excellent payout.

Ranked rotates across maps, and your progression is measured through the value of what you extract with beyond what you brought in. Depending on the map, this can take a lot of forms (Perimeter and Dire Marsh are sniper city, Outpost becomes quite slow with huge bursts of action, etc).

Cryo Archive is open late in the week and into the weekend, offering a more or less PvP raid-adjacent experience. With a minimum loadout value requirement and a labyrinthine, heavily mechanical map, Cryo demands study, preparation, and coordination, and you're going to be universally running into heavily kitted players. Beyond loadout value, Cryo Archive is home to seven Vaults, a series of locked rooms that require you to bring keys in ahead of time, each with escalating in-match requirements to open them, and accordingly escalating loot.

Endgame

Okay, the important question. What do you do in the long haul? As you complete the aforementioned map activities, like killing bosses, finishing lockdown sequences on Dire Marsh, doing UESC convoys on Outpost, and the like, you'll get high value gear and keys. Keys come in two varieties, one for locked rooms on non-Cryo maps and one for Cryo vaults.

Non-Cryo keys grant you access to locked rooms on the indicated map, and depending on their value (blue, purple, gold), you'll get access to different types of highly valuable loot. Blue rooms give you crafting materials to clear the mid-game progression hurdles, purple rooms give you tons of guns, and gold rooms give you the world (EXCEEDINGLY rare keys). They're a major progression engine, helping you both with general faction advancement, and with accruing a solid base of equipment to take into Cryo, Ranked, or just general adventuring.

Cryo keys, on the other hand, let you into Cryo vaults for their own rewards. Cryo Vaults, numbered 1-6, present an escalating series of access challenges, with accordingly better rewards. Cryo Vault 1, for example, only requires five batteries, which you find in Cryo in relative abundance, and its corresponding key, which is not terribly uncommon - by the time of the Season One wipe, I had like five in my inventory, not counting several I had already used. Vault 6, on the other hand, requires nine batteries, a cryo coolant (which must be found and filled for additional batteries, or you can find a filled coolant with higher security clearance, also accrued per-run), anti-virus kits, a secret sequence retrieved from a secret lab, completion of another secret lab with an accompanying boss fight, and that's before you actually do the vault puzzle.

Needless to say, Cryo is a major time- and gear-sink, one that I find to be suitably challenging, and I really appreciate the level of focus and teamwork it requires. It's just one of many ways you can spend your fairly- and ill-gotten gains, though it is most definitely my poison of choice.

Robber Baron Buddhism

Playing Marathon involves, nay, necessitates dying a lot. You will die because you didn't know the map well enough, you will die because you got ambushed, you will die because you thought you could fight that boss and you couldn't, you will die because you couldn't fight that boss and you got ambushed and you didn't know the map well enough to make an escape, so on and so forth. You will lose items you think are cool, and while the weapon mod system makes it pretty easy to reconstruct any lost darlings, things like gold mods² can bite when you lose them. So, you can succumb to gear fear, never using any of your fun equipment until the last days of the season before the wipe, if that. Or...

Or you can embrace what I've come to call 'robber baron Buddhism,' a sort of carefree pseudo-nihilistic approach to the game. Easy come, easy go, kill people, die often. Play the game to have fun, not to amass a dragon's hoard of neat things you will never use. It's the difference between buying a valuable guitar to stare at it, and buying a valuable guitar because you love it and will play it.

Accordingly, some fun truisms have sprung up in my circle, which I find emblematic of our approach to the game:

"Death is a form of motion."
"It can only be so bad, and it's not even that bad."
"It's tricky but it's not hard."
"Inventory space is the absence of riches."

The game is not subtle about the importance of death in both the narrative and the gameplay loop, so why not embrace it? Don't play dumb, but don't play afraid, either.

Closing Thoughts

Marathon is special. Really special. It definitely hit at a good time for me - exhaustion with the sheer volume of 'solo' grinds in my life (fighting games, academics guitar) - and it's the most I've enjoyed a game in a very long time, maybe only matched by the moments where I felt like I really found the 'fire' in fighting games and with the aforementioned The Division launch. Something about it is enduring, visionary even, and missing it would be a shame.

There are still some small flaws, though. Meta-progression has two obvious and harsh hurdles, the first before you get blue shields (baseline for survivability in my experience), and the second as you're trying to round out endgame faction upgrades, which are rightfully difficult to achieve but probably a little too easy if you're farming high-value Cryo vaults and the Compiler (the 'final' 'raid boss,' at least for now), and a little too difficult otherwise. Though, if you're farming Cryo and Compiler, you've worked your ass off to get there, so I guess it's not unjustified. Uhhh, what else... Desynced enemy NPCs can be a little weird and aren't that rare, though you can just ignore them and connectivity for PvP encounters has always been flawless for me. I dunno, that's kinda it. It's telling that my few issues aren't dealbreakers, and are more oriented around meta-progression quibbles than mid-match play, I find.

For a brief time, Cryo was dominated by some bullshit, between sub-two-minute rushing into other teams' spawns, and a meta defined almost entirely by bubble shields and shotguns, which basically let people wiggle back and forth with shotguns behind temporary bulletproof (but player-passable) walls. If you didn't have weapons to match and couldn't make space in time, you'd just get run down without much recourse. Thankfully, though, these have both been fixed with adjustments to routing between spawns, and bubble shield rarity and grenade stack limit adjustments, respectively.

The biggest problem for me is the fact that a couple updates have drawn some clear gear-demarcated survivability lines, which I really don't like, since I find them to be against the game's spirit of correct play trumping reasonable gear differentials. The WSTR shotgun is the main tragedy here, functioning pre-nerf as a ridiculously high-lethality point-blank range weapon to offset the knife (really strong, in a good and fun way), and to punish lone players for ignoring the game's emphasis on maintaining key weapon ranges and angles by straying too close. However, post-nerf, the gun is outright incapable of instantly downing players with blue shields, even on back-to-back point-blank headshots, which defangs it significantly. I don't like that you can recognize someone's gun and, based solely on your shield tier, completely disrespect it in a binary fashion. Whatever, it's not the end of the world, I just think it's kinda stupid.

It's an audiovisual home run, it plays phenomenally, and it's a total blast to pick up with friends, either as a group of collective beginners or as starry-eyed newcomers trying to keep pace with a veteran or two. The world of Marathon (2026) is so compelling no matter how you approach it, and while you can never always avoid disaster, you also shouldn't want to. The catastrophes, the heartbreakers, and the I-don't-know-how-we-did-that miracles are where this game finds so much of its memorability, so just get in there and have at.

In my media tracker thingy, I've given it a 9.5. It's unforgettable. It's visionary. There's nothing else quite like it, in terms of presentation, gameplay, narrative, or the cohesive synergy of all of these things. And it's still evolving, with resets and free weeks offering great on-ramp moments and chances to try before you buy.

Credentials

Okay, to prove my words are at least coming from a place of experience with the game:

Hours	Achievements	Season Level	Cryo Vaults
416.4	14/14 on Steam	155	1-7

Footnotes

I am going to be up front and tell you I really do not care about vaulting. Yes, I think it was clunky and ugly, but I really don't know if there's a good answer to "We have far too much video game, not all of it is at the same quality bar, and we're not remaking things." I understand being frustrated by it but a lot of people seem burned in a way that is wildly out of proportion with the offense.⭶
Gold mods are the 'pinnacle' of every slot, with unique ones per weapon. For example, rather than having a generic gold gun magazine, there is a gold magazine specifically for the Bully SMG. In return, they have insane, unique bonuses and jacked stats.⭶

Combo Breaker 2026 Part One: The Run

2026-05-29T05:00:00Z

This is more of a story or a diary entry than a real 'blog post.' Sorry! Enjoy! Whatever!

Hardware Nightmares

Basketball would probably be a lot less popular if you couldn't walk into any store on planet Earth and get a ball pretty much like every other ball. $20 is a low price of admission to be playing the same game Steve Nash played. This baseline level of internal consistency is more or less mandatory for a satisfying playing experience; it's why nobody likes those sickos who tell you that you can't tag them when they have one foot on the woodchips and the other on the asphalt. For a long time, playing Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R (+R hereafter) was not like that.

Playing +R competitively was a nightmare until the past two-ish years. When rollback first dropped on October 29th, 2020, it proved to the world that solid netplay could singlehandedly bring a game back from the brink of death, but it also demonstrated that dormant games cannot adjust to daily life without a lot of help. Specifically, +R had a problem with tournament hardware. The first handful of in-person +R tournaments after the game's resurrection were on PS3, which was widely acknowledged as sub-standard owing to its high latency. Given +R is oriented around high execution and omnipresent two- and three-frame cancel windows, +R was 'back' but tournament results had a fairly large asterisk next to them.

I'm walking into Dick's, trying to buy a basketball, and walking home with a bowling ball.

Nobody was happy with the PS3s. High-execution characters and playstyles were appreciably nerfed (I myself am in the middle of that venn diagram), and players that couldn't spontaneously adjust to PC-to-PS3 differences were doomed from the get-go. Around late 2022 / early 2023, office-grade mini PCs hit the scene; +R was incredibly small and easy to run, making it light work for even dated computers, and mini PC prices and form factors made them an excellent choice for tournament setups. With some heavy tuning, a relatively high degree of consistency could be achieved, though Windows still presented some driver issues and unresolvable variability.

I'm walking into Dick's, trying to buy a basketball, and walking home with a soccer ball.

Finally, the scene makes the jump from Windows to a specialized Arch Linux setup, and the mini PC model of choice gets nailed down. Setups are highly consistent, and are unlikely be more than one frame off of anyone's home setup (not the Linux box's fault, you just never know what anyone has at home). They're fast, responsive, easy to troubleshoot, and they actually feel like playing the game on modern hardware.

I'm walking into Dick's, trying to buy a basketball, and walking home with a basketball.

+R's setup woes always left me feeling a little hollow after tournaments. Come tournament day, I'd have to haphazardly hack off parts of my playstyle that consciously stuck out to me as at-risk, and simply give up on other things as I discovered them to be infeasible in the moment. Whoever was playing at those setups, on that stage, wasn't really me. At tournaments I was a shadow of myself. That doesn't happen anymore.

So, thank you to ChemicalJade, OmegaTomHanks, Chastity, and DigitalWatches. I literally could not play the game the way I do without your dedication to making our game worth playing.

Scrub

A little bit before Combo Breaker, I was talking someone in the Xrd scene who asked me point blank: "So how good are you at +R?" He had only ever known me as the scrub who could barely play Venom in Xrd, and all of my growth and competition was happening out of view in the +R scene.¹ 3,000 hours of hard work later, I... didn't have a good answer.

17/92 at CB2022. 9/22 at RH2022. 25/237 at FF2023.

Not bad for two years in. I was pleased with myself.

17/110 at CB2023. 2/18 at Garage Gear. 17/223 at FF2024.

I was the top of the little pond, and the bottom of the big pond. My losses were inglorious.

13/128 at CB2024. 4/8 at RH2024. 13/175 at FF2025.

It started to hurt. I wanted so badly to prove that the work meant something. I didn't know if it did.

9/94 at at CB2025.

I stopped commentating at events. No more consolation activities. Do or die.

7/18 at RH2025.

Where did the blood, sweat, and tears all lead?

17/184 at FF2026.

I was sick of losing, sicker of playing, and sicker still of grinding.

I've seen the Sanford Kelly video. I had pointed countless others to strong characters. I thought everyone floundering, insisting on doing it 'their way' with gunshot wound-sized holes in their gameplay was kidding themselves. I don't know why I felt I was any different, and at many times I was crushingly certain I was the least different. I felt so often while spectating that the better player lost to raw differences in character strength, and honestly I still feel that way about the game. I felt robbed by unconquerable matchups. But I was unwilling, maybe even unable, to envision myself doing it differently. I wanted to win on my terms. I wanted to play Venom.

In the background of all this was my actual life. Graduating from college. Job hunting. An internship that didn't go anywhere. Job hunting. Getting my Master's in September 2025. Job hunting. 200 job applications, three interviews, zero offers.

My faith in the ability of hard work to deliver had been ground into dust.

Combo Breaker 2026 will be the last dance.

Bracket

Pools

After a Thursday spent gallivanting around Chicago and making it to the hotel, it was time for bracket on Friday, 10 AM to 10 PM. For my money, having a first-day one-day bracket is a blessing. No matter which pool you're in, you're guaranteed that the vast majority of the middle of your day will be open. Early pools? 4-6 hour break until Top 24. Late pools? Do it all in one run at the very end of the day. Nobody is getting iced out by a full night, the house party vibes aren't stepping on the toes of competing, and there's plenty of time after to do whatever. My pool was at noon.

For those unfamiliar with fighting game brackets, they're structured to keep strong players as far away from each other as possible, ensuring as bracket progresses, average skill and difficulty rise. This also means that for stronger players, your first match or two will probably be kinda whatever. That was the case for me.

My first strong opponent was Agendine, a Potemkin player. Superficially a grappler vs. zoner matchup, I actually really dislike Venom-Potemkin. Venom has a tendency to die on his back if Potemkin is allowed to run offense; Venom's backdash is easily covered, he has no reversals, the damage differential is massive, all very standard Venom problems. Potemkin's neutral is also quite solid against Venom between Flick, Slide Head, and j.D, making the matchup an exercise in containment and staying outside of Potemkin Buster range. I approach the matchup as one that demands opportunism, turning weird stray hits into knockdowns and understanding where the Potemkin wants to be. Once Potemkin gets knocked down, though, he's definitely a victim in the matchup. His slow, long-duration backdash is completely invalidated, his mash options are too slow, and Venom can easily run offense without ever getting within Potemkin's grab range. 2-0 my favor, I advance to Winners Finals of my pool.

Waiting in Winners Finals of the pool was Excalibur (playing under the name Mr. Two), notable for getting 2nd at CB2025 and CB2023. The moment pools were solidified, this was the run-defining match I was looking forward to. I was seeded to lose here. Excalibur plays Justice, who I identify as one of Venom's three worst matchups. I frequently describe her as a sort of 'proto-Happy Chaos,' where her oppressive fullscreen game against Venom means Guilty Gear's universal defensive systems - designed to build space and reset to fullscreen - allow Justice to turn losing situations into winning ones at the drop of a hat with Burst and Dead Angle. The core of the matchup comes down to ball vs. nuke interactions. Justice's nukes have infinite durability, meaning they delete Venom's pool balls off the screen without detonating, leaving Venom in the awkward position of needing time-consuming thread-the-needle ball formations to fight Justice setting a nuke. Add onto that Justice's fullscreen laser super, menacing air presence, and high damage... get me out.

That said, it's one of my most-prepped matchups, and I think Excalibur plays in a way that is bad for Venom in the broad strokes but doesn't include some of the truly matchup-breaking particularities that make me want to eat my arcade stick. The set came down to Excalibur landing an awkward hit while I had burst, and he spent 50 meter just to stabilize the route before spending another 50 meter on a super to kill - which whiffed. I identified the whiff spacing and held burst, which let me gold burst, dump 100 meter on shutting him out in neutral, and close the set. 2-1 my favor, I advance to Top 24.

You know I got that Chipotle card at CB's first official +R bracket.

Top 24

You know what's really nice about making it to Winners Top 24? If you win one set, you're in Top 8. I was up against Axl player and flying kick-doer Digital Watches. In some ways, I think she's the perfect +R player. Or rather, the perfect player for +R. She's wily, down to scrap, unpredictable, doesn't believe in matchups,² and if you get clipped by the nonsense you'll lose half your health bar. I, on the other hand, am afraid of what happens when other characters start just Doing Shit™, which I think is a major strategic impasse between how Digital Watches and I play the video game. She is a committed thing-doer and I am a dedicated thing-stopper, which means I can get good mileage out of just playing containment. It was scrappy for sure, but I took the win through solid patrolling of screen space and tight lockdown on offense. Axl is endowed with like five tools that approximate reversals, and keeping a lid on that entire defensive suite is my main path to victory against her most of the time. We met at Frosty Faustings previously with similar results; 2-1 here my favor, I advance to Winners Semi-Finals in Top 8.

Winners Semis

Betrayal hurts. I had to face the man who played top lane with me when we were warriors on the Rift. The man I made a jpeg for when he needed an exhibition graphic made. Deft. More seriously, he's one of the hardest-working players I know, an American member of the Japanese Sportsland arcade scene come home to the US with a vengeance. He's also suffered a bit of a bridesmaid's curse. 2/184 at FF2026 in a showstopping match against Hotta from Japan, and 2/128 at CB2024 in an all-timer set against Gatchaman. A myriad of other high-but-not-first placings.

I think once I broke out of pools in Winners side, the tone of the rest of the bracket was set. This was a battle between my dark horse run and his bid for the gold medal after so many rejections. No animosity, no beef, just two arcs that had to clash because only one competitor can win. It was a blast. Some of the most fun Gear I've ever played, and the vibes on stage were phenomenal. We had just gotten food earlier that day, even!

The set was a nailbiter, and if I may, I think I kinda threw. A horrific burst in the last moments of the second-to-last round left me high and dry in the last, where he ran away with it. But that's what competition is about, and +R is a difficult game defined by slim wins on narrow margins. There were other times where I went for ambitious mixup options, where I probably should have focused on simplicity and lockdown. At the same time, Deft played neutral pretty much flawlessly and ran safe mix, I think respecting my defensive ability and willingness to punish small timing errors with Venom's throw OS.

Deft's composure was his X-factor, though as a silver lining, I'd rather lose to my own bad decision making than mark down my millionth 11th hour failure because Venom sucks. Adrift in an ocean of bad matchups, I was losing to me, not to the character select screen's collusion with a programmer 10 years ago.

As an easter egg, our set ended up being an accidental callback to elder god Millia Woshige stomping out GOAT Venom N-Otoko 4-0;³ same character colors, and I think the same stage. I did better than N-Otoko though. 2-1 Deft favor, he plays Winners Finals against Dizzy player Soup while I drop into Losers Quarter-Finals.

Losers Quarter-Finals

I need to air a grievance about +R. I feel like a very dominant playstyle in upper-middle to high levels of play is what I call the 'anti-level one.' No real effort towards winning the game, just a lot of work put into absolutely vaporizing normal decision making. "I will try to make you lose" versus "I will try to win," you feel me? People who do nothing but forward tech late double jump fall on you, that kind of thing. Playing ExoticJamm's ABA was a breath of fresh air because he did none of that. He played like he wanted to win on purpose.

ABA is a scary character, basically built entirely to snowball. Even played well, she drags you into the mud with some truly belligerent jump-ins, disgusting frame data, and a thousand ways to reset you into death. The Venom matchup is somewhat unique for ABA because Venom's low damage lets ABA play pretty comfortably in normal mode, without transforming and risking getting IK'd. There are also some small ABA-isms that really bug Venom, like the fact that you can't crossup overhead her in K Ball oki because her blockstun animation reels her out of j.S's crossup hitbox, giving her a landing throw punish. That said, Venom f.S is a complete nuisance in the matchup, and once in Moroha mode, Venom's easy-bake vortex goes from inconvenient to apocalyptic real quick. I got (deservedly) heckled/coached by Badoor and Hursh, two Venoms I respect immensely, for failing to IK ABA when I put her in Suka motion, but in my defense I wanted to be 100% certain and I prefer metered IK setups that I didn't realize I'd get the 25% for.

Anyways, the set was a brisk 2-0 in my favor, sending me to Losers Semi-Final.

Losers Semi-Final

A rematch against Digital Watches! I honestly feel like we just played a pretty linear second take on our first set, with the addition of Digital Watches making heavy use of Axl's FB guard point followup to really throw off game one. Games two and three were pretty straightforward vortex games. This is also where I noticed that Digital Watches leaned really heavily on wakeup burst, showing what read to me as obvious discomfort with dealing with my offense, since outside of the FB guard point, I think I was doing a good job of containing the Axl defensive rotation. I also got to show off my favorite setup, a midscreen metered combo that (in my opinion) helps solve some of Venom's midscreen damage woes. I still don't know what I'm going to call that setup... In any case, a sketchy 2-1 in my favor! Digital Watches out, me in Loser's Final.

Loser's Final

I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice.

Sorry.

I think this set was a miracle. "I'm seeing the matrix" levels of correct. I don't know if I've ever played that well in my life and I don't know if I'll ever reclaim it. This was a set against the Dizzy player Soup, who knocked me out of FF2026 and himself took 4th. First of all, Soup is an extremely strong player, obviously. Second, Dizzy is one of the many al-Qaeda members on the +R roster. Her damage is absurd, her mixups are oppressive and looping, her grounded and airborne buttons are disgusting, her projectiles can absorb hits for her, her blockstrings are incredibly scary, she has two airdashes, and her j.2S is UNTHROWABLE. ArcSys must fix bug. One of my least favorite matchups as Venom, and one of the most overtly bad for him in my opinion; the problems Dizzy presents are overt, front-and-center, and unavoidable. It really feels like Dizzy is just always in the game, and until the round is over, she is a contender.

None of that matters because I played the cleanest neutral in human history for three games, only dropping one round across all of them. I challenge you to find another human being alive who has gone three games against Dizzy and only gotten knocked down and put into oki once. I just felt very... awake. I was keeping close track of every Fish option, the offense was tight, I was 6Ping every airdash in offense, I was disengaging in my own offense when I knew Dizzy nonsense was about to end my turn anyways, I was reacting to burst. Like, what? Venom masterclass.

The most miraculous 3-0 of my life. Back to Grand Finals with Deft.

Grand Finals

I just wanna say, I'm so glad Grands was against Deft. Both 4-0 in pools, we got lunch together in our pools-Top 24 gap, we had a phenomenal set in Winners side, and here we were! It really was going to be bridesmaid versus dark horse.

We were both on one gameplay wise, and I think that fun factor showed through in how we played and communicated on stage; the commentators (thank you Brett and Klaige for the stellar commentary!) and crowd both seemed to love the energy, which brings me more joy than maybe anything else.

You know how I said my Losers Semi's set with Digital Watches was a pretty neat rehash of our Top 24 set? Perhaps superficially underwhelmingly (to be clear, I do not feel this way), that was my set with Deft too, in a way. I think that's kinda beautiful though; we were both playing how we wanted to out the gate, and it was just a matter of who was more on the ball at the end of this grueling bracket. As in Winners, his composure was the decision-maker; a few bad bursts by me, a few truly clutch plays by him, some great defense from me, more than a few truly absurd conversions from him, and the cards fell where they did.

3-2 Deft favor. Gold for him, silver for me.

I wouldn't have it any other way.⁴ It was a close enough set that, as was the Winners side one, I think it's easy to envision ways in which I won, either through Winners or a bracket reset. But that's not what I'm dwelling on, beyond the normal 'what can I do better next time?' and 'It'd be so cool to have a trophy' thinking. This isn't a haunting loss. I think we both got what we wanted. Deft earned a major win, one that's been a long time coming, and I got to finally play the Venom I know I've always been capable of playing on a big stage, in front of a crowd screaming my name. I will never forget it.

I like to think they loved me, and I certainly loved them. My popoffs (my first ever) are evidence of that.

Me (left) and Deft (right) before Grands.

Postmortem

As I said in the first part of this long post, I've been grappling with my relationship with this game, with competition in general, and - this is the part I didn't say earlier - with finding community in the fighting game scene. Finding bonds deeper than 'we play the same game.' Getting 2nd at Combo Breaker is not some silver bullet; the 'fire' of competition isn't magically back, I'm not ready to put in another thousand hours, you will not catch me mega-grinding netplay... but I think I'm at peace with the things I struggled with so much. I'm grateful for everyone who showed up for me, at the event and online, and that means the world to me too. I'm starting to think I've found my people.

Likewise, I know I said it a little earlier, but my biggest struggle with tournaments has always been feeling like I was forced to leave the 'magic' in my play behind. I love how I play when I'm 'on,' I really do. I think my play is audacious and distinctive, and I don't think you'll find another Venom out there who plays quite like me. My Venom is as much a window into who I am as something like my music taste, and that's not just flavor, it's something... integral, foundational, structural to how I understand and play the game. When I have to shelve that, it hurts, both emotionally and performance-wise. So finally feeling unchained by hardware limitations, feeling backed into a corner by my own relationship with the game, and then putting on a monstrous dark horse run, having the crowd cheering for me until the very last hit? That's special. That's vindicating.

All I ever wanted was to put on a show, and I finally did.

He knew...

Footnotes

Save for one in-person set at a major where I think I played Anji? Not very many data points.⭶
I do.⭶
Weird set count catch your eye? Yeah, N-Otoko was allowed to play as himself four times in a first to one four-person team tournament.⭶
I will say, he brutally left me hanging for the pre-set fistbump. Harrowing.⭶

Every Crossing is the Crossing of the Desert: Bernard Lazare and French Jewish Intellectual Responses to Theodor Herzl's Zionist Movement, 1890-1905 (2022)

2026-05-12T05:00:00Z

Preface

"Every Crossing is the Crossing of the Desert" is my history thesis, completed in mid-2022, part of the completion of my BA in History. I've been sitting on it for a while, having shared it with effectively nobody. It discusses Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), a French Jewish literary critic, and a man distinguished by the early seriousness and rigor with which he attempted to discuss antisemitism as a historical phenomenon.

Jewish anti-Zionism is a woefully under-discussed phenomenon, for reasons that are likely highly obvious. The founding of Israel collapsed a wide range of attempts at resolving questions about Jewish identity and national belonging/affiliation into simple 'for' and 'against' camps, and many of these old reckonings with Jewish existence and assimilation have been left behind. This thesis was an attempt at diving deeper into one such buried branch.

Learning more about Jewish anti-Zionism, its ties to anarchism and various socialist movements was very comforting to me, especially in those moments of initial discovery. Obviously I think anti-Zionism is the only correct position on basic moral grounds, but a sense of historicity is validating and invigorating alike.

Also, I can't attach a footnote to the title like I could on the actual submission of my thesis, so I'd like to share with you how I arrived at it, and introduce my footnoting system in one.¹ Click through to navigate to the footnotes below.

Some extremely minor error corrections have been made from the original, but nothing substantial. Without further ado, I present my thesis.

Introduction

My least favorite question in the world is “What do you think of what’s happening with Israel and Palestine?” This is not owing to any uncertainty on my part, any contradiction or shame I feel over being a Jew who supports Palestinians, or even any difficulty answering the question. My ire comes from the fact that the question is always immediately preceded by the discovery that I am Jewish, and the presumption that my Jewishness would link me to Israel and turn me towards it in a sympathetic manner. This was further complicated for me by my own family’s practice of Judaism, which emphasized Jewish culture, with minimal importance being placed upon religious practice, and zero time being devoted to Israel, or even interest in Israeli politics. My Jewish self-identification, while perfectly sensible to me, was frequently received as idiosyncratic by people around me, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who saw Israel as looming larger in my life than I did.

Recently, that annoyance and confusion has turned into a burning question – “why am I expected to be sympathetic to a state I have no ties to?” That brought me thinking about the early phases of Zionism, where I hoped I could discover how Judaism and the “Jewish state” became linked, or in the infancy of the territorial Zionist project, how people sought to keep Jewishness and a prospective Jewish state disentangled. If I was part of the Jewish people, why was it expected that my worldview be coterminous with a state?

Thesis and Road Map

Zionism, though frequently discussed in the context of Theodor Herzl’s dream of establishing a Jewish state (“territorial Zionism”) was but one strand of conceptions of Jewish national belonging that existed among many others, all with distinct and competing visions of what defined the Jewish nation, and what the future of that Jewish nation was to be. Discussions of Zionism, as well as pre-Zionist though, go back centuries, but the founding of Israel seems to be a concrete end-point to the multitude of Zionisms in existence. With the objective of one strand of Zionism achieved, the question of Zionism ‘answered,’ debate about Jewish nationalism has fundamentally re-oriented itself around Israel, rather than being centered around the Jewish people and what it means to be a diasporic people.

Ultimately, my argument is that, in the 1890s and early 1900s, Bernard Lazare posited a separate and incompatible vision of Zionism, built upon his anarchism and understanding of the evolving French landscape around him, which was magnified by his brief- and highly repelling- encounter with Herzl’s territorial Zionism. Furthermore, though some have claimed that the Dreyfus Affair created a brief moment of interest in territorial Zionism, I reject the idea that the Dreyfus Affair was highly influential on Herzl, or relevant to the accretion of the territorial Zionist movement in any meaningful capacity.

Accordingly, this paper will trace a few key figures, events and debates. It will discuss France as it would have been seen through the eyes of Bernard Lazare (1865-1903) - who ran the gamut from symbolist to socialist to Zionist to anarchist- and Lazare’s own ideological trajectory. From there, the first two Zionist Congresses (1897/1898) will be discussed, as well as the debates and falling-outs they encapsulated, using other Jewish thinkers to corroborate and expand upon Lazare’s break from Herzl’s territorial Zionist movement. Indeed, this disillusionment with the Zionist project was hardly unique to Lazare, though, and is highly relevant to Ahad Ha’am, the other key individual in this essay. Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927, born Asher Zvi Hirsh Ginsberg) will serve primarily as a foil to Lazare, to offer a perspective that is no less Jewish, but radically different in its origin and priorities, to highlight not only disagreements with Herzl, but the multitude of viable competing expressions of Jewish nationalism.

There are also two parallel relevant cases that bear mentioning, though they will be noted in separate sections to keep the argumentative timeline relatively clean; the main body of the paper will be chronological and I am simply separating two more minor threads for clarity. These two threads are of the impact of Lazare’s involvement in the pro-Armenian cause on his experiences with Herzl’s Zionist movement, and on how Herzl sought to invent the Dreyfus Affair as a moment of Zionist epiphany, when by all accounts Herzl’s Zionism was largely untouched by the Affair. Though Herzl repeatedly identify the Dreyfus Affair as a key event in his political evolution, and in his firm belief in the necessity of a Jewish state, Lazare, the esteemed Dreyfusard, would bitterly separate himself from Herzl in the five years between the closing of the Second Zionist Congress and Lazare’s death, an arc which is best emblematic of the argument I intend to trace.²

Existing Scholarship

The reading and writing of Jewish history is highly complex, due to the cognitive magnetism and historical weight of two key events: the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel. To some, this list could be expanded to three entries, including Jewish immigration to the United States. In any case, be it two or three, Jewish history has been drawn towards these events, with an emphasis on explaining the arrival at these key points, making for motivated, presumptuous, and teleological historiography.

The spirit of my argument is derived from a now somewhat dated article in Jewish Social Studies, wherein author Robert S. Wistrich reflects on the notion that the ‘success’ of the territorial Zionist movement, looking at whether or not the establishment of Israel is in fact indicative of such a victory. Not so!, he argues, saying that the eventual success of territorial Zionism “does not necessarily prove that they were right or that they always had the best arguments,” or that they were even necessarily popular in their time.³ More directly, Shlomo Sand argues in The Invention of the Jewish People that Jewish history as we know it today is a relatively modern construct, inextricably linked to expressions of nationalism across the Jewish diaspora, and necessarily related to the Zionist movement by that romantic nationalist tendency. Shlomo Sand’s line of argument is not accepted as fact and is, rather, quite contentious. That said, I find it compelling in that it combats the teleological nature of much of the written history of Jews, which is the tendency of writing history with the intention of explaining known events, namely the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, and the arrival of Jews to the United States. Shifting away from those strictures, in my view, allows for a more interesting and honest discussion of the multitude of Jewish nationalisms, rather than just wondering how the Dreyfus affair ‘caused’ territorial Zionism, as some have done.

I will be zeroing in on the Dreyfus Affair as the moment of focus for my argument, spanning from 1890 to 1905, which contains all but the last year of the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), as well as the first two Zionist Congresses (1897, 1898 respectively). The Dreyfus Affair is notable in that scholarship on it is divided regarding its relationship with the Zionist movement. David Aberbach, for example, has argued that the Dreyfus Affair made Zionists of many Jews,⁴ and Shlomo Sand has likewise suggested that if the Dreyfus Affair had not panned out precisely as it did, “Zionism would have been born elsewhere and perhaps later.”⁵ These two works together paint the Dreyfus Affair as a flash of Zionist inspiration, wherein the Jews of Western and Central Europe at large suddenly woke up to the looming shadow of antisemitism and, recognizing the danger, mobilized behind the territorial Zionist movement. This leaves major, lingering questions, however: What are we to make of Theodor Herzl’s close proximity to the Dreyfus Affair,⁶ what of the fact that Israel would not be founded until over 50 years after the beginning of the Affair?

As such, I find a different reading of the Dreyfus Affair by Gabriel Piterberg to be much more compelling. Rather than approaching the Affair as a paradigm shift within Western European Judaism, Piterberg views this framing of Affair-as-Zionist-moment as a construction driven by Herzl who, relatively deep into the Affair, “proceeded to… invent the Dreyfus Affair as a moment of Zionist epiphany.”⁷ It sufficiently explains, for example, the complete lack of invocation of the Dreyfus Affair at the First Zionist Congress, or in Herzl’s writings from the period of the Affair, which Herzl directly covered. Additionally, it helps contextualize Lazare’s absence at the first Zionist Congress; if Herzl’s Zionism was truly a Dreyfusard project, one would expect one of the most esteemed Dreyfusards to appear. In this paper, looking at this argument as scaffolding, I will examine the writings of Bernard Lazare and Ahad Ha’am to discuss why territorial Zionism did not find long-term purchase among Western and Central European Jewish intellectuals, even those who bore witness to the Dreyfus Affair.

The trajectory of this essay will trace two distinct threads- that of the French-aligned socialist anarchist Jewishness and Bernard Lazare, and of the Eastern European-aligned exclusive and culturalist Jewishness of Ahad Ha’am- and draw them together over the course of the Dreyfus Affair and early Zionist Congresses, to reveal where these two landmark Jewish thinkers departed so profoundly from Herzl’s vision for a Jewish future and Jewish state. They crossed paths only once at the Second Zionist Congress, but the interactions between their texts, worldviews, and priorities underscore a diversity of opinion that I believe has been largely forgotten as the extant state of Israel has become the focal point of Zionist discourse.

The France of Bernard Lazare

Bernard Lazare was born to an acculturated, secular Sephardic Jewish family in Languedoc, France.⁸ Broadly speaking, Sephardic Jews were both emancipated and acculturated,⁹ being regular participants in French society – even the moment of their legal emancipation in the 1790s, French Sephardim never lost their legal protections until the fall of France during the Second World War.¹⁰ Likewise, their integration, which preceded legal emancipation by centuries, was ongoing since the Inquisition pushed many Jews to France, where they slowly unmasked the Catholicism they performed for their own safety.¹¹ This is not to suggest that Jewish acculturation was a done deal however, as Ashkenazi Jews were much less integrated into French society, with some Sephardic representatives even taking care to “[separate] the status of Sephardim from that of Ashkenazim, predominant in Alsace and Lorraine… Unlike the Ashkenazim, [the Sephardim] were not a nation within a nation.”¹² The term ‘nation within a nation’ was frequently invoked in debates surrounding Jewish emancipation (and acculturation to a lesser extent), used to describe the specific political situation of French Jews, wherein they held legal rights and protections, and were highly autonomous, but not socially integrated; they were, in effect, a social island within France.

While important for understanding the history of Jews in France, this ‘nation within a nation’ status would have been experiencing its twilight during Lazare’s youth, as emancipation brought with it some demands of acculturation, including the “introduction of vernacular languages and subjects in Jewish schools and worship,” alongside changes in “ritual, dress, and religious services.”¹³ At this time, laws that were used to belittle Jews- such as the ‘body tax,’ applied only to animals and Jews- were also being rescinded, showing the French government sinking back from antisemitism as an official policy pillar.¹⁴ While it would be inaccurate to say that French Jews- especially the less acculturated Ashkenazi- had reached parity with their countrymen,¹⁵ Lazare was growing up in the late 1870s and early 1880s, which were a period emblematic of very real progress and optimism.

This is perhaps best summarized by Paula Hyman in The Jews of France, who wrote of the 1860s as a period where “most French Jews had adapted themselves and their public institutions to French bourgeois culture and had integrated into the general educational and civic institutions of France.”¹⁶ As we well know, the Dreyfus Affair is just beyond the horizon, but this period allowed for the existence of Lazare’s attachment to the ideal of the republic as a place of genuine equality, and this steady approach towards equality also allowed Alfred Dreyfus to ascend to captain-hood in the first place. So, this is our background: Bernard Lazare grew up during a period of broadening prospects for Jews- a process which had been ongoing for over 50 years now- and was born into the maturing era of Jewish emancipation to a family that was from the beginning poised to reap the benefits of this period better than many other Jews in France. As such, he was raised in a largely secular family, which privileged tradition and culture over religious practice.¹⁷

Lazare slowly rose to prominence in French literary and artistic circles over the course of his education and travels within France. At the age of 21, “he went to Paris, traditionally the meeting place for gifted young Frenchmen from the southern provinces.”¹⁸ During this intellectual period, Lazare fell in with the Symbolists,¹⁹ and became a regular writer in their publications. It was also at this moment Lazare witnessed two formative events that likely rocked his faith in the stability of the Republic, and which may have shown cracks in the seemingly ascendant trajectory of the Jews. One of these events was Georges Boulanger nearly reaching presidency in 1889, as a man who styled himself as a conservative royalist and was widely feared as a possible dictator in the making.²⁰ The other was the Panama scandal (1892), where a French attempt at constructing a Panama canal went awry, resulting in massive financial losses and a protracted under-the-table cover-up. This spiraled into an antisemitic scapegoating incident, where Édouard Drumont’s antisemitic newspaper La France juive helped popularize and cement the idea of Jewish corporate conspiracy in the French public imagination.²¹

The Panama scandal’s specter would haunt French politics until at least 1899, with “Panama!” remaining a nationalist rallying cry until then.²² These two led to an explosion of the popularity of the French Socialist party, and were arguably the beginning of Lazare’s movement towards Socialism, given they were emblematic of grave threats to the progress made in the decades before, especially with respect to the emancipation and acculturation of Jews. Bernard Lazare was not alone in this, and with the arrival of the Dreyfus Affair, Lazare would find himself among a small cohort of intellectuals who shared similar inclinations, including prominent politicians like Joseph Reinach and Georges Clemenceau.²³ Unique to Lazare, however, was his timing; he was distinguished by the early seriousness and academic rigor with which he addressed antisemitism,²⁴ leading to Lazare's eventual characterization as prophetic by Charles Péguy after his passing.²⁵

Lazare, himself a fully secular Jew, was nevertheless concerned about what seemed to be a shifting of the tides in France. He wrote extensively about Jewish history, culminating in L'Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (Antisemitism, its history and its causes), published in 1894.²⁶ As a pre-Dreyfus Affair work, L'Antisémitisme is highly curious in that it places a large part of the blame for antisemitism on Jews for their exclusive behavior.²⁷ As an example, he wrote in L'Antisémitisme:

[The Jew] has kept his national pride, he always fancies himself a superior individuality, a different being from those surrounding him… he generally refuses to mix through marriage with the peoples surrounding him. Modern Judaism claims to be but a religious confession; but in reality it is an ethnos besides, for it believes it is that, for it has preserved its prejudices, egoism and vanity as a people a belief, prejudices, egoism and vanity which make it appear a stranger to the peoples in whose midst it exists, and here we touch upon one of the most profound causes of antisemitism.²⁸

L'Antisémitisme also reflects Lazare further shifting towards anarchism- and beginning to shy from acculturation, at least in a maximal sense- as he identified an ascendant class of rich Jews who had effectively abandoned their Judaism in an effort to become liberal, successful, and most damnably, capable of passing as secular Christians.²⁹ Lazare was not content to distance himself just from those above him, however, as he also condemned more religious, un-integrated, and heavily persecuted Eastern European Jews, who he heaped insult upon:

...Nor did [his commitment to social justice] reach to his less fortunate coreligionists. An assimilated and nonobservant Jew, Lazare condemned the invading “hordes” of Orthodox Jews, those “coarse and dirty, pillaging Tartars,” as he wrote in 1890, “who come to feed upon a country which does not belong to them.” Understanding the full acceptance of French Jews (whom he called israelites in contrast to foreign juifs) would only follow from their total disappearance into [the nation].³⁰

Lazare’s opinion would change with time, but in 1890, L'Antisémitisme was emblematic of a belief that antisemitism was driven by Jewish exclusiveness and economic strains, alongside effectively being a successor to “the anti-Judaism of the Middle Ages.”³¹ As such, antisemitism was a rational phenomenon which, if its causes were eliminated, would fade from existence.

Lazare’s animosity- for wealthy integrated Jews, for Jewish exclusiveness, and for poor Eastern European Jews- changed markedly when the Dreyfus affair began.³² The Dreyfus Affair (1894), in which Alfred Dreyfus- a French Jewish military captain- was accused, tried, and convicted of passing French military secrets to the Germans, was a galvanizing moment with few equals in French politics. The Dreyfus Affair was unfortunate, but not intrinsically shocking – save for one thing. It was taking place in France, where Jews were emancipated;³³ in few other countries in Europe at the time could a Jew actually reach such a high rank in the military, and this contradiction between emancipation and rabid antisemitism was equal parts confounding and striking.³⁴ In Germany and Austria, Jews could reach similar statuses in the military but were not nearly as integrated; Hyman convincingly argues that the unique interaction between emancipation, rising public antisemitism, and the success of Jewish acculturation were what made the Dreyfus affair possible in France specifically.³⁵ From the outset, conservative, antisemitic, and pro-military authors campaigned fiercely to cement the idea of Dreyfus’s guilt in the public imagination, with Édouard Drumont’s newspaper La Libre Parole alleging “All Israel is in a state of agitation,” and claiming that absolute proof had been discovered.³⁶

Notably, the use of “Israel” as a marker for Jewish people is unique to the French context, where “Israélite” became seen as far more neutral than “the older, often pejorative term ‘Juif.’”³⁷ Thus, to use “Israel” in this case would be to specifically suggest agitation among French Jews, who were a part of mainstream French society. Furthermore, La Libre Parole concluded their opening salvo on Dreyfus with the claim that it was “not a true Frenchman who committed such a crime,” referencing his Judaism in no uncertain terms.³⁸ Alfred Dreyfus was swiftly sentenced to life in exile, and the Dreyfus family protested his innocence, mounting a fierce publicity campaign to rally support for the exiled captain.³⁹ Defenses of Dreyfus were initially entirely removed from his Judaism, approaching the Affair as a moment of crisis for the French Republic, rather than as a crisis of Judaism. One prominent socialist and to-be leading Dreyfusard,⁴⁰ Jean Jaurès- himself not Jewish, or even initially interested in Dreyfus’s guilt- took interest in the Affair based on his suspicion that the military was orchestrating the Dreyfus trial to rehabilitate its image and manufacture renewed popularity.⁴¹

Given what the Affair actually was, though, how did that transform Lazare’s orientation towards Judaism? Lazare himself was initially disinterested in the Affair, but his rapid ascendance in the literary world caught the eye of the Dreyfus family, who hired him as a publicist, in spite of significant reservations regarding his anarchist tendencies.⁴² His first significant work for the Dreyfus cause was “A Judicial Error” (1896) which opened without mention of Dreyfus’s Judaism. Rather, Lazare assaulted the indifferent general public, who failed to rise up to protect Dreyfus “even in the instinct of self-interest.”⁴³ The public, Lazare argued, should have taken the speed of the Dreyfus trial as a death knell for liberty, as it underscored a trial that was at best rushed and at worst deceitful – fundamentally illegitimate, in any case. Eventually, however, Dreyfus’s Judaism is brought to the fore. Enter, Lazare’s curveball in “A Judicial Error:”

Did I not say that Captain Dreyfus belonged to a class of pariahs? He is a soldier, but he is a Jew, and it is as a Jew that he was prosecuted. Because he was a Jew, he was arrested; because he was a Jew, he was tried; because he was a Jew, he was convicted; because he was a Jew, the voice of justice and truth could not be heard in his favor, and the responsibility for the condemnation of that innocent man falls entirely on those who provoked it by their vile excitations, lies, and slander.⁴⁴

This one snippet is perhaps a tell-all of the true implications of the Dreyfus Affair for Jews as Lazare saw- and experienced- it. Prior to the affair, Judaism was something experienced exclusively in the private, domestic sphere; Jews were French in the world and Jewish at home. In the immediate post-Revolution, this was as extreme as Jews being compelled to work during the Sabbath under threat of arrest, though this cooled substantially by the late 19th century.⁴⁵ Still, less extreme regulations governing the public expression of Judaism were long-lasting. Jews were, for example, encouraged to set aside their faith in times of military service, which was consistent with the broader decline of religious affiliation in the military.⁴⁶ A clear delineation was drawn – in service of the state and public, Jews were French. The Affair, however, drew Judaism out of the household, and Lazare responded in kind, by brazenly exposing the antisemitism contained in the Dreyfus Affair.

This reorientation from public French-ness to public Judaism was also reflected in Lazare’s writing, where he pivoted rapidly both in his explanations of antisemitism and in his prescribed solutions (and who those solutions drew him to affiliate with). In 1897, Lazare penned “Jewish Nationalism,” which represents a complete about-face from his writings decrying rich and poor Jews alike as spiritually failed. “Have [the descendants of emancipated Jews] succeeded,” he asked, “in erasing from their minds their hearts what seventeen hundred years have imprinted thereon?”⁴⁷ This insistence on a common origin - and therefore a common fate - as a bonding point is a complete refutation of his past argumentation, and signals a shift towards what might be identified as Jewish nationalism. Not territorial Zionism, which was but one of many Jewish national ideologies, but Jewish nationalism nonetheless; stressing uniqueness, common experience, and shared suffering, which might be called culturalism, or cultural nationalism.⁴⁸

It is impossible, of course, to separate attempts at defining Jewish nationalism from the threads of European nationalism at large; Jewish nationalism was equal parts adopting and responding to the changes in the European climate presented by romantic nationalism. In all forms of modern nationalism- to promote the view of a homogeneous collective- “it [is] necessary to provide, among other things, a long narrative suggesting a connection in time and space between the fathers and the ‘forefathers’ of all the members of the present society,” or where such a narrative does not exist, “to invent it.”⁴⁹ Bernard Lazare’s insistence on Jews recognizing themselves a descendants of long-suffering forefathers and diasporic survivors, then, is an essential component of constructing belief in a common Jewish nation.

As Shlomo Sand argues in The Invention of the Jewish People, “every step in defining the outline of the nation and determining its cultural profile was taken deliberately… the national project was, therefore, a fully conscious one, and the national consciousness took shape as it progressed.”⁵⁰ When Lazare used shared experience and diaspora as defining traits of the Jewish nation, then, he also established its boundaries; history, tied to suffering rather than a place, defined the nation, so a coterminous nation and state were not requisite for the ‘success’ of a Jewish nationalist project. This framework of suffering-as-identifier was used, well before Lazare articulated it in 1897, by Charles Péguy, a close friend of Lazare’s and frequent patron of rising Jewish writers.⁵¹ Péguy, through his Catholic lens, looked at suffering as a forge, which would produce redemption and solidarity.⁵²

Others, like Herzl, viewed territorialism as an absolute requirement, where the nation could not be without a state to both define it and separate it from the rest of the world. As Noam Pianko notes in Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, imagining nationalism that is simultaneously liberal and compatible with concepts of solidarity is extremely difficult, due in no small part to how nationalism is discussed in modern times.⁵³ So how did Bernard Lazare manage to accept Jewish nationalism without implicitly accepting territorialism? There is a hint of regret to be found in “Jewish Nationalism,” where Lazare recants his condemnation of those who failed to integrate and acculturate. He muses that, though he was lambasted for his “alliance with the antisemites”⁵⁴ in his description of antisemitism that blamed Jewish distinctiveness for antisemitism, he was right about Jewish distinctiveness.

Rather than prescribing acculturation, Lazare suggested that there were not enough nations within the state, emphasizing uniqueness as a source of freedom, over territorialism and assimilation alike.⁵⁵ The nation, then, were a people that were defined and free, but not constrained to single state or allegiance. This is not to suggest that Lazare did not flirt with other expressions of Jewish nationalism, though this affinity for comfortable and peaceful difference would be by far the most enduring. Much of this flirtation, perhaps surprising, came in the form of Lazare’s cooperation with Herzl's territorial Zionist movement in its early years.

Lazare’s work for the Dreyfus family brought him in close contact with Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian journalist covering the Dreyfus Affair. Herzl, who would soon rise to prominence for his particular articulation of Zionist thought, emphasized territorial exclusiveness as a solution to Jewish woes in Europe. Drawing on proto-Zionist writings like Leon Pinsker’s 1882 “Auto-Emancipation” which, reflecting on a particularly severe 1871 pogrom in Odessa, fundamentally questioned the ability of acculturation to guarantee the safety of Russia’s Jews. Pinsker’s conclusion was grim, settling on the belief that Jews were in stasis, always moving but incapable of settling, no matter how fiercely they tried to integrate; the world’s Jews were in a state of limbo, unable to live or die.⁵⁶ Herzl built upon this foundation, arguing in the late 1890s that territorialism was the logical outcome of emancipation, and a necessary one at that.⁵⁷

Notions of intelligibility also come to the fore here. While Lazare and Ha’am operated in the abstract realms of Jewish shared history, culture, and diaspora, Herzl spoke the language of states and people. As argued by Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri, one of the crowning achievements of Herzl was his success in “bringing ideas that had been germinating for a long time to the attention of world public opinion and into the general consciousness of the age.”⁵⁸ Herzl was not the first territorial Zionist, but he was cognizant of the power of his role as a publicist with more reach than “obscure Jewish publications [which] would not mobilize” the public, and of the fact that statehood was a language that Europeans would understand.⁵⁹

We see here the beginning of a teleological retelling of recent history, wherein Herzl recontextualizes emancipation not as its own project, but as a mere stepping stone towards a Jewish state. Though Herzl was initially met with limited interest- even outright hostility- to his territorial Zionist proposals, especially among wealthy and integrated Jews,⁶⁰ Herzl eventually managed to convene the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, with the goal of defining and advancing a territorial Zionist project.

The Congresses

Before proceeding further in discussing the Zionist Congresses, one thing must be made abundantly clear: Though they were indeed explicitly pursuing of some sort of territorial Zionism, the Congresses were not engineered as a means for Herzl- or anyone else, for that matter- to mine for consensus. The Congresses were, at least initially, the sites of very real, earnest, and consequential debates about the future of Jews in Europe and, if there was to be a Jewish state, what it would look like and how it would happen. Some debates were procedural, like deciding which board positions outranked which others, but others were substantive, like the debate that raged over how the Zionist Congress would relate itself to unaffiliated Jewish movements.⁶¹ One delegate, Joseph Ezekiel Massel, fiercely advocated for the merging of the Hovovei Zion, the Zionist Congress, and other colonization societies. Herzl, dissenting, rejected the notion that it was the duty of the Zionist Congress to absorb and unify colonial projects, while others disregarded these differences entirely, hyper-focusing instead on colonization as a goal regardless of affiliation.⁶² Likewise, they were also the site of groundbreaking defections from the movement, notably Bernard Lazare’s break with Herzl over Lazare’s belief that Herzl harbored latent anti-democratic tendencies.

The First Zionist Congress, held from August 29th to August 31st of 1897 was opened by a handful of speeches, including one by Herzl, where he described the Congress as a “historic moment for world Jewry,” fixating on the achievement of a Jewish territory in Palestine, carved from Ottoman territory by European states.⁶³ Herzl plainly set out his ambition- and therefore, definition- for his strand of Jewish nationalism: it was to be “a returning home to Jewish identity before the return of the country of Jews;” Herzl worked to popularize his particular conception of a common Jewish identity and then assign it to a state, and render the two coterminous.⁶⁴

While this does not implicate a rejection of acculturation and emancipation outright, it does reveal a belief- possibly genuine, possibly in service of his Zionist project- on Herzl’s part that acculturation and emancipation had been unsuccessful; it had not stemmed the rising tide of antisemitism. More generally, voices at the Congress were far less charitable to the idea of acculturation; many headlining speakers at the Congress went to great lengths to underscore assimilationists as “cowardly and deluded, but above all as naive,” even as the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, while under attack, held faith in the power of acculturation and assimilation.⁶⁵ Herzl additionally indicated the Congress itself as proof of a Jewish nation,⁶⁶ rather than doing as Lazare had done, by defining the Jews as a nation through a combination of shared experience and common culture.⁶⁷

Beyond just defining the Jewish nation, the First Zionist Congress also set out several goals for the development of a Jewish state, all of which laid the groundwork for some future disagreement by Lazare, Ha’am, or both. These goals- or perhaps more accurately, prescribed solutions to the problems described on the first day of the Congress- were enshrined in the “Basel Plan,” which was the subject of fierce debate.⁶⁸ The language of the Basel Plan prescribed the acquisition of territory in Palestine, in plain language without any mentions of “return” or “homecoming” to an “ancestral homeland,” suggesting that the insistence on Palestine was more about moving with existing Jewish sentiment, rather than a religious bent among the Zionist planners themselves or belief in some unifying origin story.⁶⁹ The central priority of the Congress was discussing a plan for funding - for the acquisition of land, payments to the Ottomans, the production and distribution of propaganda, as well as travel expenses⁷⁰ - and the resulting prospective Jewish Colonial Fund (finalized during the Second Zionist Congress) would be a massive source of friction.

There were two notable omissions from the First Zionist Congress, one being the exclusion of the Dreyfus Affair as a key topic, and the other being the absence of Bernard Lazare, both of which raise major questions about the Congress’s proceedings. The First Zionist Congress, despite taking place during what might be considered the most inflamed period of the Dreyfus Affair, also contained literally no mention of the Dreyfus Affair; not in reference to Lazare, not as a demonstration of the rising (or perhaps risen-but-ignored) tide of antisemitism in ‘enlightened’ Europe, nothing.⁷¹ Herzl had covered the affair by now, as “Account of the Dreyfus Degradation” was published in newspapers in January of 1895, and as reported in “Jubilee of the First Zionist Congress, 1897-1947” several other delegates from France were present at the First Congress⁷² - not to suggest that only the French could know of or weigh in on the Dreyfus Affair, rather, much of the First Congress was dedicated to discussing the present state of Jews in Europe, so an invocation of Dreyfus would seem pertinent, no?

As Gabriel Piterberg notes in The Returns of Zionism, Herzl also made no mention of the Dreyfus Affair in any of his writings that began to formalize his conception of Zionism, and only covered the Affair in very matter-of-fact terms; the non-discussion of the Dreyfus Affair even at the Zionist Congress further highlights the notion that though Herzl made use of the Affair, he was not truly touched by it, nor were others present at the First Congress.⁷³ While Dreyfus was invoked during the Second Congress, such mentions were brief and sparse, used in reference to other topics, rather than being a topic in and of itself. It is abundantly clear that Dreyfus was largely out of the picture, except when relevant for narrative purposes. Though Herzl did claim that the Dreyfus Affair- which he did cover as a journalist- was what truly made him a Zionist,⁷⁴ and though some scholars have taken this as fact⁷⁵ and even gone so far as to apply it to Jews broadly,⁷⁶ it is a notion I would like to challenge.

Herzl’s presence at the Dreyfus trial and degradation is unquestionable, but his description of the proceedings have been characterized as “indifferent and matter-of-fact,” which betrays the notion that the Dreyfus Affair was a moment of revelation.⁷⁷ Herzl explicitly noted the strange mood of the crowd, who were in a “curious state of agitation,” simultaneously inflamed by Dreyfus’s alleged crime and profoundly moved by the captain’s resolute nature.⁷⁸ Meanwhile, he had nothing to say of the effects of the affair on himself. The writings most relevant to Herzl’s descriptions of Zionism, such as The Jews’ State (1895), and key correspondences in this period, also make no mention of the Affair whatsoever.⁷⁹

Evidently, Dreyfus was perhaps the least of Herzl’s concerns. His main struggle, throughout the entirety of his territorial Zionist project, was finding support among the general public. Many of Herzl’s attempts at convening territorialist sentiment were highly alienating to assimilated and Orthodox Jews simultaneously, on the grounds that his attempts at carving out a distinct Jewish whole were disturbing the comfortably separate and comfortably acculturated alike.⁸⁰European Jews, eastern and western alike, had high hopes in the power of emancipation and acculturation, so Herzl’s movements were an unwelcome intrusion.⁸¹ “Culturally inclusive nationalism,” Shlomo Sand argues, “was invigorated after the Dreyfus Affair,” and Dreyfus himself was, in time, “reattached” to the French nation.⁸² While it would be incorrect to say the French state was at peace- the Dreyfus Affair was indeed a tremendous cleavage in French society- the Dreyfus Affair was not cataclysmic enough to precipitate any sort of large scale exodus movement.

As noted by social historian Paula Hyman, from the 1840s and beyond, though “Jewish victims of discrimination rarely found redress for their situation, the sense of belonging to a nation based upon law fueled the self-definition of those French Jews who spoke publicly for the community...”⁸³ Though this faith in the binding power of law in the French state was shaken briefly by the Dreyfus affair, such injury did not scar, and “most French Jews seem not to have been affected in the long term by their encounter with the open and virulent antisemitic prejudices that flourished briefly during the Affair.”⁸⁴ The French Republic held, as did belief in the republic as a place that could provide for its citizens. Given this timeline, and the continuity of French Jews’ faith in France, how did Herzl insert change where it did not exist?

Given the lack of an audience who saw themselves as imminently in danger, Herzl’s Zionism struggled to stand on its own two feet in the climate of the 1890s. Linking the Dreyfus Affair to the creation of Zionism, then, helped lend credence to his Zionist cause; as argued by Gabriel Piterberg, it is highly likely that Herzl constructed the narrative of the Dreyfus Affair as a moment of “Zionist epiphany.”⁸⁵ This linking meant that Herzl’s Zionism was no longer just an idea, but one that was fundamentally connected with rebuttals to one of the most stunning outbursts of antisemitism in European history. As evidence of this inventing, Herzl claimed to have written Das neue Ghetto- a play reflecting on his Jewish experience- following the Dreyfus trial, but manuscripts and drafts of the play date to over a month before the trial’s opening day.⁸⁶ Similarly, Herzl made no mention of Dreyfus in The Jews’ State (1895) - one of the earliest of Herzl’s Zionist works. It is highly likely that Herzl was only made aware of Dreyfus’s innocence and significance during “his meeting with Lazare in July 1896, and [Lazare’s] pamphlet, published four months later.”⁸⁷

Curiously, Lazare made no appearance at the First Zionist Congress. What transpired at the First Congress, however, was no doubt the groundwork for Lazare’s eventual departure from the territorial Zionist movement, as well as being a key moment of intersection for Jewish thought in general; Jews from Paris, Vienna, Odessa, and New York gathered in Basel, which was a truly remarkable conference. One key figure present was Ahad Ha’am, who for the purposes of this paper, will act as a foil both to Herzl and to Bernard Lazare, by offering his own original, radically different interpretation of Jewish nationalism. Like Lazare, Ha’am would break from Herzl quite rapidly, though he would not make a full exodus from the movement as Lazare did.

Ahad Ha’am could not have been more different from Lazare, by any conceivable metric. Born in Kyiv to a Hasidic family, in a place he would describe as “one of the most benighted spots in the Hasidic sector of Russia,” Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am being his Hebrew name and pen name) found his attachment to Palestine-as-Zion in the Hasidic culture that surrounded him, which emphasized a warm, emotionally-driven connection to Palestine, and blossomed into the “foundations of the ‘Lovers of Zion’ movement… that arose in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century.”⁸⁸ He developed a deep, consuming belief in the value of the Jewish religion and culture, but still conflicted with the Orthodox norms that surrounded him. Nevertheless, Ha’am remained deeply entrenched in Jewish culture and practice.⁸⁹ In the twilight of the 19th century, he wrote extensively on what it meant to be Jewish, and to be a diasporic people. In 1891, he visited Jewish settlements in Palestine, and was deeply disillusioned at what he beheld, between agricultural failures, reliance on external finances, and incipit conflict with the local Palestinian population.⁹⁰

Ginsberg, similar to Lazare, was briefly affiliated with Herzl’s Zionist movement, but likewise fell away due to ideological concerns about the trajectory of the project, especially regarding his conviction that Herzl’s Zionism was laughably non-Jewish. He worried profusely that Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state being an escape from antisemitism would lead to it being little more than a refugee camp, related only to Jewish suffering, but not to Jewishness. Ha’am obsessed with Palestine as a place of spiritual healing, and therefore rejected Herzl’s plans as being little more than secular statecraft, with nothing anchoring them Judaism.⁹¹

Despite his fundamental disagreements with Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state, he was a life-long member of the Zionist Congresses. Indeed, Ha’am remained long after Herzl’s death, becoming one of the primary directors of the territorial Zionist project.⁹² When Herzl died of pneumonia in July of 1904, the Zionist Congress lost its director, main voice, and most notable publicist. Additionally, Herzl was a major secularizing force in the Congresses, keeping the proceedings focused on material challenges.⁹³ With Herzl’s death, Ahad Ha’am and other cultural Zionists rose to the uppermost positions of the World Zionist Organization, and focused on Palestine as a Jewish home and, breaking from Herzl’s secular vision and directly pursuing Ha’am’s goal of Palestine as a polestar for Jewish spiritual revival.⁹⁴

By 1897, Ha’am was well-known within the Zionist Congress, but notable for one thing above all else: unlike many other Congress members, he had already been to Palestine in 1891. Jewish settlement was not a concept or an aspiration to Ha’am, rather, it was a reality, and he was not at all pleased with what he had seen. Ha’am was adamant that Palestine was promising as a site of settlement, but remained concerned about agricultural prospects, the possibility of angering Palestinians⁹⁵ in the region, and above all else, feared that any settlement project in Palestine might just be the blind leading the blind; “let anyone actually arise and act [regarding Jewish political prospects],” he mused, “even if improperly and on the wrong basis, and he at once has numerous pupils who follow his lead and blindly imitate his actions.”⁹⁶ The prospect of a Jewish state, while perhaps exciting- as evidenced by the assembly of the Congress- was not proof of its own viability, and Ha’am harbored profound concerns about the stability of such a project.

In his 1891 reflection on his travels to Palestine, “Truth From Eretz Yisrael,” Ha’am laid bare his most profound concern of all regarding settlement in Palestine: “with no system and no order and no unity in any of our actions, where every intellectual (and, often, true lunatic) sees himself as a miniature Messiah and jumps in front to redeem Israel – now it is impossible to overstate the damage this trait causes.”⁹⁷ Though not expressly written with reference to Herzl, he inevitably comes to mind as the described ‘miniature messiah.’ Fundamentally, Ha’am accepted diaspora as the natural state of Jewish being.⁹⁸ Within that lens, attempts at true territorial unification were less like linking arms and more akin to being fit into a trash compactor. Though Ha’am would never fully break from the Zionist movement as Lazare did, given these overriding concerns about attempts at ‘leading’ the Jews, and first-hand experience with the suffering and endemic risk in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, it is perhaps no surprise his objections to Herzl’s plan ran deep and, ultimately, only faded from view with Herzl’s death.

Despite having such pertinent experience, Ahad Ha’am appears to have said precisely nothing during the entire course of the First Zionist Congress; not a word has been attributed to him.⁹⁹ We can, however, look to his writings up to 1897 to trace his ideological trajectory, and where he stood at the time of the Congress - and to clarify that while he rejected Herzl’s brand of territorial Zionism, Ha’am had no qualms about the establishment of a Jewish state in and of itself. In “Truth From Eretz Yisrael,” Ha’am’s 1891 reflections on his journey to Palestine, he was adamant that the land of Palestine was ready to “return to life” for the Jews, as its “fields and vineyards [bore] their fruit despite the indolence of the Arabs.”¹⁰⁰ Ha’am held obvious disdain for the non-Jewish occupants of Palestine, but remained adamant that the land itself would always be ready to receive a Jewish ‘return.’

It was the Jewish people who were ill-prepared to mount a return, he wrote. This was a long-held belief, as at the 1884 Katowitz Convention, he rejected attempts at colonizing Palestine that focused on humanitarianism, favoring an explicitly exclusive national aim.¹⁰¹ In 1893, Ha’am wrote “Imitation and Assimilation,” attempting to answer the question of how to balance Jewish integration and nationalism. While he wrote off assimilation as a threat to the Jewish people, he warned that the Jewish people being further subdivided posed an existential risk,¹⁰² the solution to which was “through the agency of a local centre, which will possess a strong attraction for all of them.” This belief in the spiritual attraction of some sort of cultural and linguistic center was a hallmark of Ha’am’s form of Zionism, which has been termed ‘cultural Zionism,’ to contrast with Herzl’s territorial Zionism.¹⁰³

This ‘local centre,’ however, was not local in the sense that we know it. Rather, the Jewish state in Palestine was to be the ‘local’ home of cultural reinvigoration that Jews worldwide would turn to. “And so all those who desire to see the nation reunited,” he wrote, “will be compelled, in spite of themselves, to bow before historical necessity, and turn eastwards, to the land which was our centre and our pattern in the ancient days.”¹⁰⁴ Just as the seat of the British empire acted as a point of magnetism for the British colonists abroad, the prophesized Jewish state would function as a similar national home away from home; Ha’am’s vision was spiritual and cultural where Herzl’s was secular, but it was colonial all the same.¹⁰⁵ A Jewish state was still required, similar to Herzl’s territorial Zionism, but it would act as a beacon of Jewish culture and faith, rather than functioning directly as a state for Jewish people. These stances, while perhaps seemingly minimally separate on paper, were arrived at via radically different lived experiences, and led to radically different notions of what a Jewish state would need to do and be.

The Second Zionist Congress would arrive exactly a year later, running from August 28th to August 30th of 1898, again in Basel. It was largely a fairly linear extension of the first, including another round of recaps of the status of Jews in various areas. Of note, however, was the finalization of the Jewish Colonial Trust project (which would be fully established in 1899); the Jewish Colonial Fund was established in Britain, and helped magnify British attention on the Zionist project, especially with respect to its potential as a boon for British expansion in the Middle East.¹⁰⁶ The Second Congress also included a series of updates on the state of affairs in Palestine, ranging from the assessments of the landscape and agriculture (perhaps responding to Ahad Ha’am’s conviction that the land, while arable, had been terribly mismanaged) to reports on the status of different Jewish settlements in the region.¹⁰⁷ Reporters were adamant that, among Jewish settlements, all was well, with particular emphasis given to how completely Jewish settlements outclassed local Palestinian developments in their vivacity and success.¹⁰⁸

Bernard Lazare was in attendance at this Congress, and this Congress only, which renders it quite distinct. Although he would soon bitterly depart from Herzl’s Zionist sphere, Lazare was received with a degree of admiration that far surpassed the warmth any other individual delegate was given, owing to his status as the hero-Dreyfusard, and one of the highest profile people in attendance.¹⁰⁹ Though it was expected that Lazare would decline,¹¹⁰ he was nominated to the Zionist Action Committee and, to the shock of the crowd, accepted.¹¹¹ By all accounts, he said very little, but did raise his voice when it came to procedural matters. Relatively late in the Congress, he spoke up to express his concern about the speed of the proceedings, and the fact that by just the Second Congress, the Zionists were already operating as a small, decision-making elite without consulting the broader Jewish population they ostensibly represented.¹¹² Herzl responded with perhaps the worst thing possible to say to a Dreyfusard and anarchist, chiding Lazare and telling him that “If we wanted to ask all the people first, we would never get anything done,” establishing expedience and uniformity of opinion as priorities above democracy.¹¹³

Lazare’s concerns were swept aside, and never touched on; Herzl proceeded right into the vote Lazare was objecting to. Though but a small moment, this speaks to the sentiment that would boil over in the following years, and lead to an intractable rift between Lazare and Herzl. Though Herzl would go on to claim the Dreyfus Affair as a formative moment in his turning towards territorial Zionism, Lazare, the esteemed Dreyfusard, would excise Herzl from his political sphere over the course of the next years.¹¹⁴

The Rift

Lazare emerged from the Second Zionist Congress hardened, and immediately upon his return home, launched back into his circuit of lecturing, writing, and speaking. He brought with him a simultaneous rejection of acculturation and of Herzl’s Zionism, inextricably linked to the Second Congress as a point of inflection.

Lazare did not pivot back away from Zionism towards acculturation, rather, he maintained in an 1899 lecture (which became “Nationalism and Jewish Emancipation”) that assimilation was a “bastard doctrine… [which] consists in saying: ‘Do not distinguish yourself in anything from those among whom you dwell...’”¹¹⁵ More notable, however, was Lazare’s revision of his understanding of antisemitism, owed both to lengthy reflections on the Dreyfus affair and his attendance of the Second Zionist Congress. In the past, he had adopted an understanding of antisemitism that at least partially hinged on the assumption that Jews engaged in exclusive, isolated behavior.

By this time, he entirely abandoned that model of antisemitism, and leaned further into his anarchist tendencies, using class and conflict as his new lenses for putting antisemitism under a microscope. He rebuked the idea that antisemitism was a passing phase, and characterized it as an immutable characteristic of Christendom, a “religious pathology.”¹¹⁶ “In vain,” he wrote, “the Jew will metamorphose himself” to escape antisemitism and earn his place among the European states. In Lazare’s mind, Jews were absolved of inviting the antisemitism that had been rained upon them for centuries, for the Sisyphean endeavor of adapting was little more than self-erosion.

The other rejection Lazare wielded was of Herzl’s Zionism, and this separation was acrimonious and, thankfully, well-preserved. Given Lazare’s anti-statist tendencies, this split was inevitable, barring some inexplicable fundamental ideological reversal on Lazare’s part. In writings following the Second Congress, Lazare characterized Herzl’s Zionism as “bureaucratic… capitalist and antidemocratic,”¹¹⁷ and colonial at heart. Lazare was adamant in his belief that “it is the duty of every human to resist oppression,” leaning on his anarchism to push back on Herzl’s notion of settling on occupied land, deftly balancing his anarchist and Jewish worldviews to answer with a comprehensive and cutting critique of Herzl’s plans.¹¹⁸

Indeed, though Lazare identified the Jews as a people without a land, he refused to complete the “theological-colonial myth,” by actively refusing to suggest that the Jews needed one territory for their nation.¹¹⁹ In the ideological struggle between Lazare’s anarchism and interest in a Jewish state, his anarchism won out; Herzl’s Zionist project had come to resemble simply the establishment of a new European autocracy in Palestine, and Lazare wanted no part. In 1899 Lazare penned his ultimate letter to Herzl, containing his resignation from the Zionist Action Committee and withdrawal from the Zionist Congresses entirely:

You are bourgeois in your thought, bourgeois in your feelings, bourgeois in your ideas and bourgeois in your conception of society. As such, you want to guide the people, our people, who are poor, unhappy, working class… You act outside of them and above them: you’d like to have them follow you like a herd of sheep. Like all governments, you want to disguise the truth… you want to be a proper government whose principal obligation is not exposing the national shame.¹²⁰

Lazare, on the other hand, demanded to see “poor Job on his dungheap, scraping his sores,”¹²¹ a harsh and brilliant metaphor for his enduring desire to candidly discuss the problems facing both Jews and Jewish nationalism. We also see here a centering of class as a central component of Lazare’s Jewish nationalism. Before, as in L'Antisémitisme, Lazare discussed antisemitism as caused in part by economic factors, namely that as Jews accrued wealth and status along the processes of emancipation and acculturation, they ran against the incumbent elite, who saw them as encroachers and threats. Notably, Lazare also pinned some of the blame on wealthy Jews for showing themselves off “with ostentation,” inviting attacks from Christians.¹²² To Lazare, Jewish assertions of status were naive and, though intended to rally against the “centuries of humiliation” that they had endured, only succeeded in “[weakening] the voice of conscience within” the Jewish people. To engage with public displays of wealth was simultaneously emboldening to antisemites and degrading to Jews themselves.

After the Second Congress, his focus shifted to discussing Jews as a primarily working-class body, put off by the elitist nature of Herzl and his circle, and he closed “Nationalism and Jewish Emancipation” with a declaration that “We have labored enough upon the fields of others; let us now till our own.”¹²³ This, ultimately, was the final evolution of Lazare’s Jewish nationalism: the ability of the Jewish people to labor for themselves, as for too long they had been either scapegoated or mined for labor in hostile states. As argued by Piterberg, this re-focusing on nationalism-as-freedom underpins a continuity that was only briefly modulated by the Second Zionist Congress, wherein “the Enlightenment and the [French] Revolution as he understood them continued to underpin Lazare’s politics throughout his life.”¹²⁴

Zionism did not just exist within the world of ideas, however. The Zionist Congresses effected real change, as with the establishment of the Jewish Colonial Trust. Accordingly, Lazare’s rejection of Herzl’s worldview did not just hinge on ideas and style; Herzl had adopted means of advancing territorial Zionism that Lazare found profoundly objectionable. Fully cognizant of the need for an actual place to locate the Jewish state, Herzl sought to collaborate with Ottoman authorities to build friend rapport, which he hoped would lead to the acquisition of land in Palestine – or at the very least, the willingness of the Ottomans to turn a blind eye to Jewish movements to Palestine. In 1896, a representative of Abdülhamid II suggested to Herzl that “Jewish power” be leveraged “on the sultan’s behalf, especially in the Armenian matter.”¹²⁵

This would prove rather difficult, as sympathy for Armenians was at an all-time high, especially in western Europe; Herzl then undertook the task of softening the image of the Ottomans in the eyes of the general public, with full knowledge that Abdülhamid II had just orchestrated a series of attacks on Armenians “between 1894 and 1896, now referred to as the Hamadian massacres.”¹²⁶ Eventually, a tentative agreement was reached between Herzl and Abdülhamid: if Herzl could successfully mount a newspaper campaign to rehabilitate the image of the Ottomans, and assist the Ottomans in acquiring the acquiescence- or at least silence- of the Armenian diaspora, he would be granted an audience with the Ottoman government.¹²⁷ In June of 1896, Herzl’s collaboration with the Ottomans was nearly made public during an interview with the Daily Graphic, where Herzl was questioned about rumors of Abdülhamid’s seeking of “Jewish support against the Armenians in return for benevolence towards Herzl’s plans” in the region, which Herzl fervently denied.¹²⁸ Though the exact depths of Herzl’s collaboration with the Ottomans was not well-known, Ottoman discrimination against Armenians was well-documented. Additionally, given Lazare’s high-profile work as a writer and publicist, it is hard to imagine that he did not at least catch wind of this.

Some academics, such as Yair Auron in Banality of Indifference, without denying that some Jews indeed showed earnest concern for the Armenians, argue that interest in the plight of the Armenians was largely driven by self-interest and fear that the fate of the Armenians might be extended to the Jews,¹²⁹ but I find this claim to be highly disagreeable, at least as it pertains to the internationally minded. Bernard Lazare in particular was not content to let this malicious collaboration simmer unnoticed, nor was he inexperienced with what was happening in Armenia. In “Jewish Nationalism,” penned in 1897, Lazare made a vague, cynical allusion to these same massacres Herzl- managing the First Zionist Congress that very year- overlooked.

He sarcastically wrote that, since Christianity was a primary source of antisemitism, perhaps wiping out the Christians was the solution; “I am well aware,” he spat, “that for the Christian peoples, an Armenian solution is available, but their sensibilities cannot allow them to envisage that.”¹³⁰ The ‘Armenian solution,’ of course, was murder, which was evidently well-known across Europe to be used as a euphemism. Herzl’s continued closeness with the Ottomans, particularly Abdülhamid, never ceased to be a major source of friction, and Lazare vocally objected until the day he died; in 1902, Lazare participated in a pro-Armenian congress in Brussels and, the following year, “chastised the Zionist Congress for paying public tribute to Abdülhamid II, calling him ‘the worst of assassins.’”¹³¹

With territorialism, acculturation, and Herzl’s very methods rejected, that inevitably begs the question - if not accepting of endless diaspora, how did Lazare reconcile the twin impossibilities of an acculturated life in Europe and a moral life in Palestine? Pulling from Ahad Ha’am’s writings on the Jewish diaspora, Lazare came to accept diaspora as an enduring factor of Jewish existence, formulating his own vision of Jewish nationalism that rejected Ha’am’s insistence upon Palestine as a cultural beacon, but embracing the idea of a unified identity still being able to encompass a diasporic people.¹³² In some sense, this meant Lazare’s ambitions for Jewish nationalism were simple, but universal: he asked for nothing but freedom for a nation that existed in constellation, to shift away from conceptions of the Jewish nation that were defined by tragedy, suffering, or the need for escape.

This also contained Lazare’s final rejection of Herzlian Zionism, where in an unpublished note written after 1902 (shortly before his death in 1903), Lazare turned away from territorialism altogether: “You want to send us to Zion? We do not want to go… We do not want to go there to vegetate like a dormant little tribe. Our action and our spirit lie in this wider world; it is where we want to stay without abdicating or losing anything.”¹³³ This embrasure of diaspora, not as a state of stasis or purgatory, but as a simple mode of being, where Jews could both be themselves and belong to the broader world, was the culmination of Lazare’s argument about Jewish nationalism.

The finality of Lazare’s position, however, did not mean he had concluded his assaults on Herzl’s position. Possibly the last written work Lazare produced before his untimely death, “Job’s Dungheap” (likely penned in 1903, perhaps late 1902) is raw, scathing, and final, owing to its lightly edited nature. As noted by the editor, “Job’s Dungheap” was composed of “fragments and aphorisms, notes jotted down, were all that was left when he died.”¹³⁴ In a sub-section entitled “The Jews of Today,” Lazare raged against the servility of Jews, who were spiritually immature, and celebrated the opulence of their leaders, becoming like Christians in their worship of gold.¹³⁵ He rejoiced, however, in his observation that there seemed to be an awakening among the Jewish working class, who were becoming more and more inclined to reject solidarity with the rich Jews who had always rejected the poor and downtrodden Jews of their own country and eastern Europe.¹³⁶

To the anarchist Lazare, this sense of horizontal solidarity among Jews was the way towards successful Jewish nationalism, rather than attempts at vertical association with the elite, who wanted nothing to do with the poor. Lazare continues: “From his long enslavement, the Jew has retained an extreme distrustfulness. And yet his ever precarious state leads him to show enthusiasm for all those who tell him that they will lead him into the Promised Land.”¹³⁷ It is impossible to ignore the subtext here, accusing Herzl of mining poorer Jews- hopeful, and looking for an end to the torment of antisemitism- for support for his movement. More broadly, as well, it encapsulates his anarchist approach to the notion of Jewish nationalism. This anarchism embraced pluralism, a multitude of nations within nations and states within states, all of which would be free, rather than Herzl’s nationalist definition that sought to render the Jewish nation coterminous with a single state.¹³⁸

Just as Lazare’s anarchism cannot be set aside, it is similarly impossible to ignore Lazare’s attachment to the Armenian cause as a highly important driver for his political conclusions. Ultimately, I believe this enduring dedication to the Armenian cause is essential for understanding the true nature of Lazare’s objection to territorial Zionism. By 1903 a long-time anarchist, Lazare’s perception of Herzl’s latent autocratic tendencies were not just vague red flags, rather, they pointed to a very specific end – if there was to be a Jewish state on occupied land, it would necessitate the clearing of that land, just as the Ottomans sought to obliterate the Armenian presence on their land. Though the term genocide would not exist for decades, Lazare clearly perceived an inextricable link between formal statist institutions and violence, which he refused to partake in.

Furthermore, Lazare clearly identified strong similarities between the Armenian and Jewish struggles for identity and autonomy, and declared in the Armenian journal Pro Armenia that those who collaborated with the Ottomans were “inundated by mud, curses, and venom,” blasting the Zionists for refusing to own the error of their ways in collaborating with the Abdülhamid, as the Ottoman crimes became more and more obvious by the dawn of the 20th century. Lazare had been conscious and supportive of the Armenian struggle for liberation since at least the mid-1890s, perhaps longer, and he saw in Herzl the same illiberalism he saw in the Sultan; a tyrant in the making rather than a tyrant at present.

The diasporic Jewish nation, as Lazare saw it, would have no state, no individual leaders, no councils, and certainly no Zionist Action Committee, who would sway the working class masses according to politics and their own greed. A Jewish nation, without structures above them, would be emancipated from mismanagement, which was essential for emancipation as a nation.

Ahad Ha’am similarly rejected Herzl’s vision for a Jewish state, but essentially on inverted grounds; rather than Herzl’s project being too statist, it was not nearly Jewish enough. In “A New Savior,” written in 1901, Ha’am mocked those who sought to ‘save’ eastern European Jews by delivering to them Western European ideas, such as those that had guided the emancipation of Jews in France.¹³⁹ Herzl, Ha’am thought, sought not only to colonize Palestine- which Ha’am did not object to- but also to colonize the Eastern European Jewry, as an interloper without comprehension. The Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), founded in 1860, was emblematic of this.¹⁴⁰ Founded in France as an organization centered on the principles of Jewish solidarity and defense, the AIU tackled these issues with a uniquely French angle, focusing on ‘civilizing’ the “backwards” Jews in Ottoman territory, North Africa, and Eastern Europe.¹⁴¹

Ha’am takes a moment to invite laughter- “One is inclined to smile at the simplicity of this learned scholar” – before pausing, noting that “it is men of this kind who stand at the head of powerful organizations, whose yea or nay determines the fate of measures of the highest importance in our national life.”¹⁴² Though this criticism is not based in anarchism like Lazare’s similar complaint about Herzl’s autocratic nature, Ha’am clearly harbored a parallel worry that Herzl’s Zionist project was little more than groping in the dark by powerful men who over-estimated their understanding of the condition of the world’s Jews. Ha’am went on to remark that “men of this kind, themselves without any vestige of true Jewish feeling” cannot be brought to understand the conditions of downtrodden and observant Jews.¹⁴³

This lack of comprehension disproportionately affected eastern European Jews, who western Jewish Zionists frequently saw themselves as the caretakers of. Herzl, for example, never quite shook the realization that he had become a man of the poor, as western Jews like Lazare, alongside wealthy acculturated Jews like Baron Edmund de Rotshchild, harbored less interest in territorial Zionism than he expected.¹⁴⁴ Ha’am shot back at the French Jews, who he charged with having accepted “slavery in freedom:” the chief failure of French Jews in Ha’am’s eyes was not their complicity in colonialism via the AIU, but rather, their collective complicity in the French state itself, where they had surrendered their uniqueness in exchange for belonging. “Slaves that you are,” he challenged, “emancipate yourselves first!”¹⁴⁵

The western European- particularly French- Jews, he thought, had invested themselves too much in appealing to the secular world around them, and had accordingly been drained of Jewish feeling, which both damaged their attempts at realizing territorial sovereignty, and blinded them to the substantial plight of Jews elsewhere in the world. Ha’am closes “A New Savior” (1901) by vowing to ‘refill’ the Jewish inclination of the Western European Jews, swearing that it would “change [their] tune” about slavery and emancipation, and push them to realize the necessity of some sort of Jewish cultural beacon, rather than subservience to a culture that, as far as Ha’am thought, was still hostile, though most French people felt otherwise.¹⁴⁶

In 1902, Ahad Ha’am went on to speak in front of a Russian Zionist conference in Minsk, which was then transcribed into “The Spiritual Revival,” published the same year. He lambasted the Basle Congresses for fixating on the Jewish people- as with their stated goal of founding “in Palestine a safe refuge for the Jewish People”- rather than on the Jewish nationality.¹⁴⁷ This framing, he argued, set aside the cultural work that he felt needed to be done, failing to deliver on “work for the revival of the national spirit and the development of its products,” which was necessary to save Zionism from what Ha’am saw as radioactive secularization.¹⁴⁸ In essence, Ha’am feared that Herzl’s Zionism would deliver a state, without any affinity for the nation; it would be a refugee camp, if even that.

As if to spit on Herzl’s ideas, Ha’am published an extremely late review of Herzl’s “The Jewish State” (1896) in 1902, effectively demanding to know exactly what would be Jewish about this state Herzl promised to deliver.¹⁴⁹ It must be made abundantly clear that Ha’am’s program was heavily flawed as well. The idea of a theocratic and exclusive state was highly problematic for secular Jews, who were, at least in France, integrated citizens who bounced back quickly from the struggles of the Dreyfus Affair; Dreyfus himself remained loyal to France until his death.¹⁵⁰ Additionally, French Jews were generally viewed neutrally or better by their countrymen; abandonment of a generally successful project of emancipation and acculturation for a theocratic pipe dream was, bluntly, political suicide.¹⁵¹

This conflict was magnified at the 1903 Sixth Zionist Congress (unlike Lazare, Ha’am kept attending Zionist Congresses as a dissenting voice), where Herzl was “prepared to consider a British proposal for an autonomous Jewish entity in East Africa,” while the eastern European Zionists and cultural Zionists wholeheartedly rejected the maneuver, which they saw as an attempt to pry the Jews from their ancestral homeland; a fate worse than death.

On death, it is impossible to ignore the role of death in the shaping of the Zionist project as we know it today. Lazare died tragically young at 38 years old in September 1903. The fact that many of Lazare’s extant writings are transcribed from lectures, paired with the adoring tone used in Charles Péguy's brief biography-eulogy,¹⁵² paints a picture of a man full of fire and revered for his ideological spark, gone far too soon. His unique articulation of Jewish nationalism was not only a valuable counter-balance to Herzl’s, but also remarkable in its optimism. Herzl died soon after of pneumonia in July of 1904 at the age of 44, and so within a year, two instrumental and radically different articulators of Jewish nationalism had died.

From there, Ahad Ha’am and several other more culturally-minded Zionists took the reins of the World Zionist Organization, and reestablished land in Palestine as an absolute necessity; there would be no Jewish state without the land they called home.¹⁵³ Herzl became naught but a spectre, and his seeking of a refuge for Jews was replaced by Ha’am’s vision of a Jewish cultural center. Palestine was re-centered as the key Zionist Congress objective.

Conclusion

The topic of death has been unexpectedly pertinent to this essay. The likening of Jewish diaspora to a form of deathless life by Leon Pinsker, the untimely death of Bernard Lazare halting one of the intellectual greats of his time, and the death of Theodor Herzl indirectly emboldening Ahad Ha’am’s dogged pursuit of Palestine as the site of a Jewish cultural beacon. Perhaps there is yet another, which persistently hangs over the topic of pre-Israel Jewish national identification, while also going unnamed: the founding of Israel as a great dying-off of ideological diversity. This essay is but a tiny slice of the field, but even still, looking at Lazare’s writings and how they evolve with French political happenings and parallel ideological developments- as with Herzl and Ha’am’s conceptions of Jewish nationalism and national belonging- it is impossible to breadth and, in my eye, beauty of ideology present.

With the founding of Israel, though, this has all condensed remarkably. Whether aligned with it or against it, Israel has become something of an ideological black hole; anything less massive has been swallowed, and what remains is forever altered by its gravity. Lazare and Ha’am, while doubtlessly influential, are seldom invoked today, other than in the corners of academia or street names in Israel; they were swallowed. Herzl’s vision, meanwhile, ‘won’ by being realized in the world around us. The same happened with the establishment of the Soviet Union, where a previously extant constellation of beliefs, ranging from anarchist strains to trade unionism to the Jewish Bund, was dissolved and reoriented into simple camps for or against Soviet Communism.

I find Bernard Lazare to be a magnetic figure, whose articulations of Jewish being have been equal parts touching and vindicating. Though quite short-lived, over his life he ran the gamut from Dreyfusard to Zionist affiliate to proud diasporic anarchist, and that development can only be properly understood by tracing his interactions with France as he saw it, the Dreyfus Affair, and the young territorial Zionist movement.

Primary Sources

Ha'am, Ahad. “Truth from Eretz Israel.” 1891.* Gale General OneFile* (accessed November 17, 2021).

Ha'am, Aḥad and Neumann, Joshua H. Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am. New York: Tarbuth Foundation, 1967.

Lazare, Bernard. “Antisemitism: Its History and Causes.” Internet history sourcebooks project, 1894.
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/jewish/lazare-anti.asp.

Lazare, Bernard. Job’s Dungheap. Translated by Harry Lorin Binsse. (New York: Schocken Library, 1948, originally posthumously published in 1928).

Pinsker, Leon. “Auto-Emancipation.” October 17, 1882.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-auto-emancipation-quot-leon-pinsker.

Reimer, Michael J. The First Zionist Congress: An Annotated Translation of the Proceedings. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2019.

World Zionist Organization. “Jubilee of the first Zionist Congress, 1897-1947.” Jerusalem: Executive of the Zionist Organisation, 1947.

Zionist Congress. (1898). Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des II. Zionisten Congressesgehalten zu Basel vom 28. bis 31. August 1898. Wien: Buchdruckerei "Industrie".
https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/3476258.

Secondary Sources

Aberbach, David. “Zionist Patriotism in Europe, 1897-1942: Ambiguities in Jewish Nationalism.” The International History Review 31, no. 2 (2009): 268–98.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40213810.

Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. “‘Down in Turkey, Far Away’: Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany.” The Journal of Modern History 79, no. 1 (2007): 80–111.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/517545

Auron, Yair. The Banality of Indifference: Zionism & the Armenian Genocide. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000.

Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Burns, Michael. France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999.

Charnow, Sally Debra. Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France. London and New York: Routledge, 2021.

Hyman, Paula. The Jews of Modern France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Jaher, Frederic Cople. The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Forth, Christopher E. The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 2006.

Goldberg, Harvey E. The Life of Jean Jaurès. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.

Pianko, Noam. Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn. The Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Piterberg, Gabriel. The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel. London: Verso, 2008.

Robson, Laura. States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016.

Sand, Shlomo, and Yael Lotan. The Invention of the Jewish People. Englished. London: Verso, 2009.

Sand, Shlomo. The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth. Semiotext(e) Active Agents Series. Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2011.

Sorkin, David. “Introduction: Ambiguous and Interminable Emancipation.” In Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries, 1–12. Princeton University Press, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvdmx0kk.4.

Wistrich, Robert S. “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897-1948).” Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 59–111.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4467521.

Footnotes

Bernard Lazare, Job's Dungheap (New York: Schocken Library, 1948), 38. A selection from “A Portrait of Bernard Lazare,” by Charles Péguy describing Bernard Lazare’s funeral procession, likening his casket’s final journey through Paris to diaspora itself.⭶
Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008), 8.⭶
Robert S Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897-1948).” Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 62.⭶
David Aberbach, “Zionist Patriotism in Europe, 1897-1942: Ambiguities in Jewish Nationalism.” The International History Review 31, no. 2 (2009): 274.⭶
Shlomo Sand, The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth (California: Semiotext(e), 2011), 34.⭶
Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999), 54. Herzl spent much time stationed in France as a journalist covering the Dreyfus Affair.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 7.⭶
Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, 5.⭶
Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 54. “Acculturated” is preferred to “assimilated,” as acculturation does not imply disappearance into an undistinguished whole; French Jews remained a unique group with their own traceable cultural impact.⭶
David Sorkin, “Introduction: Ambiguous and Interminable Emancipation,” in Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries, 1–12 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 5.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 3. It should be noted that not all Marranos (New Christians, or Jewish converts to Christianity who “retained a private identity as Jews”) converted back to Judaism, but a large amount did.⭶
Ibid.⭶
Frederic Cople Jaher. The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 134.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 19.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 66. Even through the early 1810s, French Jews displayed tremendous reluctance at the prospect of attending French public schools, as they were still “seen [as], quite accurately, suffused with Christianity rather than religiously neutral.” Jews could readily attend public schools, were invited to attend, but were still dealing with a de facto state religion and culture that discouraged public Judaism.⭶
Hyman, 76.⭶
Lazare, 5.⭶
Ibid.⭶
19th century European artistic movement.⭶
Lazare, 5.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 97.⭶
Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair, 5, 132.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 104.⭶
Lazare, 6.⭶
Lazare, 18.⭶
Bernard Lazare, “Antisemitism: Its History and Causes.” Internet history sourcebooks project, originally written 1894.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 6.⭶
Lazare, “Antisemitism: Its History and Causes.”⭶
Ibid. Internet history sourcebooks project, originally written 1894. “Thanks to all these privileges, there sprang into existence a class of rich Jews which came into contact with the christian society... it had given up, like so many Christians, the letter of religion or of the faith even, and retained nothing but a mystic idealism...”⭶
Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair, 74.⭶
Ibid.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 103.⭶
Hyman, 53.⭶
Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair, ix.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 99.⭶
Burns, 33-34.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 66.⭶
Hyman, 34.⭶
Forth, Christopher E. The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 2006), 1-2.⭶
A term used to denote people that rallied behind their belief in Alfred Dreyfus’s innocence.⭶
Harvey E. Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 131-132.⭶
Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair, 75.⭶
Burns, 76.⭶
Burns, 77.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 32.⭶
Hyman, 69.⭶
Lazare, Job's Dungheap, 57.⭶
Ibid.⭶
Shlomo Sand and Yael Lotan, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), 15.⭶
Sand and Lotan, 45.⭶
Sally Debra Charnow, Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 37.⭶
Charnow, 129.⭶
Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 14.⭶
Lazare, Job's Dungheap, 60.⭶
Lazare, 61.⭶
Leon Pinsker, “Auto-Emancipation.” October 17, 1882.⭶
Laura Robson, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 12.⭶
Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 104.⭶
Ibid, 93.⭶
Aberbach, “Zionist Patriotism in Europe, 1897-1942: Ambiguities in Jewish Nationalism,” 273.⭶
Michael J Reimer, The First Zionist Congress: An Annotated Translation of the Proceedings (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), 68.⭶
Reimer, 303-304.⭶
Reimer, 50.⭶
Reimer, 93.⭶
Reimer, 55.⭶
Ibid.⭶
Lazare, Job's Dungheap, 57.⭶
Reimer, The First Zionist Congress: An Annotated Translation of the Proceedings, 60.⭶
Reimer, 60-61.⭶
Reimer, 63.⭶
Reimer, The First Zionist Congress: An Annotated Translation of the Proceedings, entire work.⭶
World Zionist Organization, “Jubilee of the first Zionist Congress, 1897-1947,” (Jerusalem: Executive of the Zionist Organisation, 1947), 96.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 8.⭶
Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair, 53.⭶
Sand, The Words and the Land, 34.⭶
Aberbach, “Zionist Patriotism in Europe, 1897-1942: Ambiguities in Jewish Nationalism,” 274.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 8.⭶
Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair, 54-55.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 8.⭶
Aberbach, “Zionist Patriotism in Europe, 1897-1942: Ambiguities in Jewish Nationalism,” 279.⭶
Reimer, The First Zionist Congress: An Annotated Translation of the Proceedings, 55.⭶
Sand and Lotan, The Invention of the Jewish People, 254.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 64.⭶
Hyman, 112.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 7.⭶
Piterberg, 7-8.⭶
Piterberg, 8.⭶
Aḥad Ha’am and Joshua H. Neumann, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, (New York: Tarbuth Foundation, 1967), 10.⭶
Ha’am and Neumann, 12-13.⭶
Ahad Ha'am, “Truth from Eretz Israel,” 1891.⭶
Ha’am and Neumann, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, 17.⭶
Ibid.⭶
Reimer, The First Zionist Congress: An Annotated Translation of the Proceedings, 74.⭶
Ha’am and Neumann, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, 17-18.⭶
Ha'am, “Truth from Eretz Israel.” Palestinians were frequently generically referred to as “Arabs,” reflecting some combination of lack of knowledge and lack of interest.⭶
Ha'am, “Truth from Eretz Israel.”⭶
Ibid.⭶
Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, 45.⭶
While some small interjections were stricken from the record or excluded for being untranslated during the production of the official Congress minutes, no major speeches were cut. This means Ahad Ha’am truly said nothing.⭶
Ha'am, “Truth from Eretz Israel.”⭶
Ha'am and Neumann, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, 14.⭶
Ha'am and Neumann, 107-108.⭶
Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, 56-57.⭶
Ha'am and Neumann, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, 110.⭶
Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, 57.⭶
Robson, States of Separation, 13.⭶
Zionisten Congressesgehalten zu Basel, 1898, 104. “Die deutschen Colonien bilden ebenso, wie die jüdischen, geradezu Oasen. Mit Recht nimmt man an, dass jene Gegenden wüst sind, weil sie nicht liinreichend cultiviert sind, weil noch nicht einmal der Versuch einer rationellen Gultivierung gemacht wurde, da wir den Beweis haben, dass aus Sand.”⭶
Zionisten Congressesgehalten, 113. “Die meisten jüdischen Colonien üben durch Aeusseres auf den Beschauer einen ungemein günstigen Eindruck aus. Kaum vorzustellen ist die Differenz zwischen einem arabischen Dorfe mit den eng nebeneinander aufgebauten Lehmhütten und einem jüdischen mit den schmucken Häuschen, den breiten Strassen oder Alleen, den zahllosen Eucalyptusbäumen und grossartigen Anlagen.”⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 9.⭶
Zionisten Congressesgehalten zu Basel, 1898, 234. “Ich frage deshalb, weil Collisionen entstehen könnten, da meines Erachtens und Wissens es nicht sehr wahrscheinlich ist, dass Herr Bernard Lazare die Wahl annehmen wird.”⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 9.⭶
Zionisten Congressesgehalten zu Basel, 1898, 175. “Herr B. Lazare sagte, die Vorlage, die Ihnen gemacht wurde, sei noch nicht reif genug, um von diesem Congresse angenommen zu werden. Er wünsche nichts dass ein Beschluss gefasst werde, von dem die jüdische Bevölkerung vorher nicht so genügende Kenntnis hatte, um diesen Plan in allen Einzelheiten studieren zu können.”⭶
Ibid. “Da ich Herrn B. Lazare das Wort gelassen habe, so erlauben Sie mir kurz zu bemerken, dass ich glaube, dass, wenn wir erst alle Leute fragen wollten, wir nie etwas zustande bringen würden.”⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 8.⭶
Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, 82-83.⭶
Lazare, 83.⭶
Charnow, Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, 150.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 18.⭶
Piterberg, 12.⭶
Piterberg, 10.⭶
Ibid.⭶
Bernard Lazare, “Antisemitism: Its History and Causes.” “Economic antisemitism to-day is stronger than it ever was, for the reason that to-day, more than ever, the Jew appears powerful and rich.”⭶
Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, 107.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 14.⭶
Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “‘Down in Turkey, Far Away’: Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany,” The Journal of Modern History 79, no. 1 (2007): 87.⭶
Charnow, Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, 150.⭶
Anderson, “‘Down in Turkey, Far Away,’ 88.⭶
Ibid.⭶
Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism & the Armenian Genocide, (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2000), 75.⭶
Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, 68.⭶
Charnow, Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, 150.⭶
Ibid, 150-151.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 14.⭶
Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, 41. Editor’s note.⭶
Ibid, 42.⭶
Ibid, 43.⭶
Ibid, 44.⭶
Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 12.⭶
Ha'am and Neumann, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, 231-232.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 77.⭶
Hyman, 81, 88.⭶
Hyman, 234.⭶
Hyman, 234-235.⭶
Aberbach, “Zionist Patriotism in Europe, 1897-1942: Ambiguities in Jewish Nationalism,” 273.⭶
Ha'am and Neumann, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, 237.⭶
Ibid, 238.⭶
Ibid, 241.⭶
Ibid, 244.⭶
Ibid, 17.⭶
Ibid, 113.⭶
Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 90.⭶
Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, 19. Péguy directly and frequently described Lazare as prophetic.⭶
Ha'am and Neumann, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, 17-18.⭶

Rebirth of Suck (Uncool Like Dat)

2026-05-10T05:00:00Z

The Crisis of Suck

I think it's time for calling things uncool to make a comeback. We need to call things just plain lame. I'm tired of 'cringe,' I'm tired of 'mid,' I'm tired of... 'ick?' Am I using that one correctly? Point being, I think the plot has been lost at least a little bit when it comes to saying things are just wack.

Allow me to present to you a landscape, a landscape of the death of just saying things suck:

'Cringe' now has its natural counterpoint in 'based,' where people compete to depict themselves as the one with the strong jawline, and even setting aside the weird space 'cringe' and 'based' occupy in right-wing social spaces, it still has the baggage of often being used to point and laugh at slightly embarrassing but ultimately harmless earnestness. 'Mid' has completely broken the language of review and criticism, and still has its foil in the judgment of 'peak.' 'Ick,' I dunno, I just kinda needed to bring my list of false gods of calling things dumb to a clean three, but much like 'cringe,' I tire of words that are basically shorthand for "You were too enthusiastic and/or vulnerable."

Call Things Lame

I appreciate the insult cluster of uncool-lame-wack for a lot of reasons. It's more or less value-neutral, and doesn't necessarily function as a judgment of quality (though it absolutely can), and it doesn't reflect some particular cultural moment or political framework (the problem being absolutely beholden to context, not belonging to context). It doesn't say the other party or offending object has done something wrong. It's also basically subject-neutral, capable of being leveraged against pretty much everything in an identical way. I can call a movie lame, and you'll understand what I'm saying about my thoughts on it in the exact same way as if I had called a restaurant or a person lame.

Most significantly, however, getting called uncool is a fatally untenable position. You know what's the least cool thing you can do? Adamantly insist that you are, in fact, cool after getting called uncool. Automatically zeroes all the wind in your sails, if you even had any. All your cool is void, potentially forever. Based-cringe naturally devolves into a dynamic of who's depicting who, mid-peak at least approximates value judgments, but are you really about to say to someone "No, you're wrong, I am cool?" Hell no. Because insisting on your own coolness is, fundamentally, lame. It's wack. It sucks. It's uncool.

Let me spit about some uncool things.

Sol 2P

Round starts in fighting games are pretty neat. In some ways, they're the closest fighting games get to actual rock paper scissors -- two people select options and throw them basically simultaneously in a highly regulated context. They're a great place for people to showcase their matchup knowledge, or tell on themselves for lacking such knowledge. You know what makes round start Sol 2P so beautifully uncool (in Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, specifically against Venom)? It actually accomplishes both of those things at once. It's a stellar showcase of lab time spent badly, of an overcooked theoretical game plan that's just a little too charred in reality.

In GGXX, Venom's 2S is generally regarded as the ultimate bet-hedging tool when it comes to round start. At six frames, it's a ridiculously premium option at that range, since virtually nothing else occupies the entire grounded round start space in the same timeframe. Its relatively short overall duration also protects it from most of the game's scariest mid- and low-crushing moves, and from forward jump round starts. And while it's not ridiculously threatening, 2S > H Stinger Aim is a fairly low-risk buffer that nets Venom decent damage off a poke, though it does leave him at an overall frame disadvantage. Point being, 2S is a solid "man, whatever" input to slam.

Many characters find Venom 2S quite vexing at round start. Sol Badguy does not. He can Grand Viper it for ~50% damage, backdash to build space, block and RPS against the worse set of options Venom presents after a blocked distant 2S, and he can actually threaten it with a forward jump because his j.H denies Venom's anti-airs at that specific spacing and timing. You know what many Sols choose to do? They hit 2P.

Yes, Sol 2P beats Venom 2S at at round start. 2P is five frames and clips the non-disjointed portion of Venom 2S. It beats it if both options are timed perfectly, for a grand total of eight damage in a game where characters have (basically) 460 health. If the Sol mistimes their input and the two normals trade, they reset to a spacing that's very amenable to Venom. If Sol 2P works, he can gatling into 2S for 30 total damage and a spacing that is, yet again, more comfortable for Venom than it is for Sol.

This is what I call a 'desert island' option; it feels like an option that has been arrived at in a vacuum. The gains are so small, so easily erased, and so lacking in momentum, that I would describe it as basically being a technicality. The best possible outcome immediately leads to a losing interaction, because Sol is now at more than round start distance from Venom with the slimmest of life leads and no real frame advantage or unreactable pressure.

I could tell you all that. Or I could just call it uncool, which it is. Are you really going to tell me Sol 2P at round start is cool?

First Pick Annie

You ever watch drafting in mobas? It's actually really cool. Watching teams arm wrestle for meta picks while trying to piece together strong overall compositions, individually winning lanes, and viability at different game phases is fascinating, even absent off-meta curveballs. I won't break down how drafting is structured on the whole, but here are three key facts about how it works in League:

Blue side picks the first champion
Red side picks two champions after blue's first pick
Red side picks the last champion

What this means is that blue side is always picking at least one champ blindly, and red side is always guaranteed the opportunity to pick a strong pair of champions, and the opportunity to counterpick an opposing champion with a strong matchup. As a result, blue side's first picks are often extremely high-priority meta picks or highly useful champions that are somewhat difficult to counterpick.

Annie has popped up as a not-infrequent first pick for Korean teams, which honestly drives me nuts. She's picked basically exclusively for her early skirmishing power because her passive turns every 4th (offensive) spell into a stun, which synergizes well with her high-range point-and-click Q; low-counterplay crowd control is somewhat premium in the mid lane before champions get their ultimates. Additionally, Annie is generally viewed as something of a neutralizer, with her long attack range and relative degree of safety. So why is this a problem?

First of all, Annie being a neutralizer does not actually mean she makes it out of every lane unscathed. Aurora and Ahri do quite well into her, for example. Neutralizers aren't an opt-out of lane matchup troubles, they're a middle position that still present problems. Annie is also ultra-low mobility, ensuring the team picking her has a sidelane liability; Annie gets into trouble easily and doesn't tend to make it out, and thus will need cover from the jungler or to be rotated somewhere safe. First picking mid also guarantees the enemy team can generally counterpick every solo lane or pick a strong duo (mid/jungle, top/jungle, or bot/support) unopposed, while still reserving ultimate last pick.

There's also a more subjective, aesthetic matter: Annie has been first picked for ultra-elite mechanically skilled midlaners like Showmaker and Chovy, which is agonizing because she's one of the most no-hands expression-less champion in human history. I've watched Showmaker 1v4 on LeBlanc and express dissatisfaction that he didn't solo-pentakill the entire enemy team, I've watched him make Swain look competitively viable, so we're putting him on the dog with a 1ft leash? Sure man.

I could tell you all that. Or I could just call it uncool, which it is. Are you really going to tell me blue side first pick Annie is cool?

Sigh: Imaginary Sonicscape Review

2026-05-04T05:00:00Z

Imaginary Sonicscape (2001) by Sigh is a technicolor black metal masterpiece, the sound of a brilliant experimental band at the absolute pinnacle of their power and clearly having a ball with it. Sigh weave a rich tapestry of unrelated, maybe even opposed, influences, pulling it all together into one shimmering cohesive whole. Even compared to their own discography, I find Imaginary Sonicscape is a high water mark, the perfect intersection of ambition, absolute disrespect for genre convention, and a genuine avant-garde sensibility.

Imaginary Sonicscape sits at a turning point in Sigh's discography. Scorn Defeat (1993) through Ghastly Funeral Theatre (1997) were meditations on doom, folk, and some early flirtation with electronica, mostly in the form of spooky synthesizers and open soundscapes. Hail Horror Hail (1997) and Scenario IV: Dread Dreams (1999) bring in more uptempo rock and industrial influences. On the other side, much of what would come after after Imaginary Sonicscape pushes in a more orchestral, symphonic direction, somewhat less overtly chaotic than what's found here, before Sigh would finally settle into a more streamlined guitar-forward synths-and-shred sound. The midpoint between these is... extraordinary. Imaginary Sonicscape is the sound of a band that have realized just how far they can push the envelope, and just how flexible they are as composers and musicians. Importantly, this means all of the genuinely stunning musical changeups feel like the best tool for the job, not ways of jumpscaring the listener. There's an authenticity to even the most absurd moments on this album, a lack of winking at the camera that elevates the entire thing.

Atop soaring synthesizers, nested self-interruptions, and surreal, glitchy soundscapes, this album is... catchy. Like, catchy in the way Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" is catchy. The anthemic chorus of "Corpsecry - Angelfall" lands with even the most intractible of distortion haters in my life, and the completely inexplicable lounge music break in "A Sunset Song" brings an incredulous smile to my face every time. It's an album with perfect control of its own atmosphere and tone, surely aware of its own absurdity but delivered with a seriousness that never has you questioning why Sigh have a tighter grasp of the concept of groove than anyone not belonging to ABBA or named James Brown.

Special attention must be given to lead guitarist Shinichi Ishikawa's work on the album, which catapults this album into prog brilliance, while also delivering the most major key music you'll ever hear on a black metal album. There's no doubt Ishikawa is a monster shredder, but his choice to stay firmly in the blues dimension for virtually all of his soloing on this album lends a certain je ne sais quoi, a conventional grounding that helps contextualize the rest of the album's surreality. "Dreamsphere (Return to the Chaos)," for example, is awash in recessed whispers and coarse synthesizer swells, and when it comes to Ishikawa to close it out, he cuts through the chaos with a clean, uplifting blues solo before sending it home on a call back to the song's main motifs. The solo on "Corpsecry - Angelfall," likewise, is shepherded in by a handful of sparkling guitar arpeggios before moving towards a sequence of simple, embellished, bluesy bends.

Whatever the call, Ishikawa is more than upy to the task, unquestionably a major reason this album is as lush and vivid as it is. Over ten minutes, "Slaughtergarden Suite" ascends from industrial soundscapes to hopeful guitar calls, from vocoded screams and strings to off-the-rails game show music, and then to simple, tight, cutting riffs... over a distinctly g-funk synthesizer trill. At this point, the song still has four minutes to go. "Ecstatic Transformation," meanwhile, closes with a delightfully upbeat duel between Ishikawa's guitar and frontman Mirai Kawashima's organ, set atop a bed of claps.

The brilliance of this album comes in no small part from its sense of restraint. For a black metal album, Imaginary Sonicscape rarely tears out of more straightforward rock tempos, and drummer Satoshi Fujinami keeps things relatively laid back for the most part. There's not a single blast beat to be found on this album, and I think that's for the better. Not to say the drums don't put in work; they're recorded exceptionally well, and are complemented by a suite of claps, snaps, shakers, bells, and tambourines, all serving to add color rather than density.

The real tragedy of this album is you will only hear it for the first time once. Imaginary Sonicscape is blindingly brilliant, spectacularly fun, and intensely emotional at times. It is a truly singular experience that I cannot recommend enough.