Zionist intellectuals recast history and masculinity exactly like colonial elites did

Evidence

Zionism galvanized the energies of portions of modernizing Jewry because it promised a national rejuvenation and political independence for an oppressed minority. Indeed, the culture of Zionist and other modernizing Jewish intellectuals closely resembled that of colonial intelligentsias. Both Jewish and colonial elites recast their history to speak of past glories that were lost in part because of the shackles of tradition that destroyed their people’s potential for technical and scientific progress. Both imagined themselves, too, as emasculated and feminized, and presented their national movements as capable of instilling vigorous masculine character into the body politic. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the theme in ‘The Defeat of the Spanish Armada’ and decolonization literature about how colonized intelligentsias adopt colonizer’s frameworks of history and virility while claiming to reject them.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense insight: antisemitism-critical movements inherit their enemy’s own categories — feminization, linear history of decline-and-redemption — while believing they escape them.