Jerusalem Report logo small (credit: JPOST STAFF)
Jerusalem Report logo small (credit: JPOST STAFF)
In his recent, controversial Hebrew bestseller (now translated and published in English), Diaspora scholar (Tel Aviv University) and member of Knesset (Yisrael Beiteinu) Yossi Shain insists that the pendulum of power and influence within the Judeosphere has shifted markedly from the lands of exile to the homeland.

“We thus find ourselves in the Israeli Century, an era in which the majority of Jews will come to live in the historic Land of Israel and enjoy the protection of the State of Israel,” he writes. “Jewish sovereignty will overshadow – and even define – all other modes of Jewish life in the Diaspora.”

Shain recognizes that the Diaspora is not the suspension of Jewish history (only the history of Jews as a majority in their ancestral homeland was suspended), but a parallel historical line to which the central focus shifted for 1,813 years (135-1948). He readily designates America “the most powerful and prosperous Diaspora community in Jewish history,” but accents that “Israel has displaced the United States as the center of global Jewry and as the long-term definer of the Jewish people’s interests and identity.”

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