The Unbearable Lightness of Exile

One of the most famous Yiddish songs of the past century is “Oyfn Pripetchik,” a shtetl threnody about a melamed teaching the alef-beys on a cold winter’s day. Backlit by the heater’s glow, the teacher reassures his charges, promises them prizes, and closes with a soulful clincher:

When you grow older, children,​​​​​​
You will understand by yourselves,
How many tears lie in these letters,
And how much lament.

When you, children,​​​​​​ will bear the Exile,
And will be exhausted​,
May you derive strength from these letters,
Look in at them!

When “Oyfn Pripetchik” was composed at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews had been living on the European continent for more than a thousand years, yet many of them still considered themselves to be in exile. The religious prayed for God to ingather the exiles and restore them to Jerusalem, visionaries dreamed up utopias where Jews would finally belong, and people sang songs like “Oyfn Pripetchik” and “Di Shoyfer shel Moshiach” (“If but David would hear the sound of the Messiah’s shofar . . . the great waters would be calmed, the leaves of the forest trees would be stilled, while David plays his fiddle and sings his song, oh his song: ‘Israel is not yet lost; Israel will be reborn!’”). Exile was something to be borne—golus shlepn in the evocative Yiddish—to be forgotten when the times allowed for it; to be overcome, as Zionists and Communists heatedly argued; but not really to be embraced. In his new book, Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora, David Kraemer whistles a more cheerful tune.

Over a long and productive career at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, Kraemer has written a series of monographs on the history and literature of the Talmud. This book is aimed at a wider audience, which it may actually reach. It won a coveted spot on The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2025 list and sports a gushing blurb from Jonathan Safran Foer, who “cannot imagine a more timeless or timely book.”

Apparently, our endless exile is having a moment. 2024 saw the publication of Nancy E. Berg and Marc Saperstein’s wide-ranging anthology, Exile and the Jews: Literature, History, and Identity, along with Malka Simkovich’s latest study, Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity. In 2023, Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance was showcased in a New York Times article and featured in The New Yorker’s Best Books list of 2023 (and reviewed in these pages by Daniel B. Schwartz). And since October 7, 2023, there has been a steady drumbeat of think pieces discussing how Hamas’s assault returned Israeli Jews to a sense of exilic vulnerability. Meanwhile, Israel has seen a considerable rise in emigration, the diaspora has witnessed an increase in antisemitism, and Jews across the world are reconsidering their own relationship to the Jewish state and to exile.

Curiously, there’s hardly a whiff of this urgency in Embracing Exile. Despite its 2025 publication date, the Gaza war and the recent rise in antisemitism go unmentioned. And unlike other diasporist manifestos, seldom is heard a discouraging word about the State of Israel. In fact, the only palpable disquiet is in its origin story. When, some decades ago, Kraemer was a junior at Brandeis on a year-abroad program in Israel, he attended a Shavuot event in Jerusalem and was subjected to Zionist sermonizing from recent American olim:

While they were nearly gleeful, I experienced a distinct sense of discomfort. I was, like most of them, a child of the American Jewish diaspora. But unlike them, I had not decided to make Aliyah, and I was soon to return to my home in the diaspora. . . . I knew from personal experience the potential of Jewish life in diaspora, and though I, like many young Jews of that time, felt the pull of Jewish life in Israel, I certainly did not feel myself a stranger or foreigner. . . . On balance, I felt that America was more my home than Israel. Were my feelings condemnable in the eyes of Jewish tradition?

That question stayed with Kraemer, and when he got back to Brandeis, he wrote a senior thesis on “The Commandment to Settle the Land of Israel in Rabbinic Literature.” Later, as a professor at JTS, Kraemer began to assemble Jewish texts presenting the view that exile is neither a punishment for sin nor a holding station for a people awaiting redemption but a privileged place of scholarly creativity, spiritual opportunity, and even material ease. Kraemer’s students insisted that he “had an obligation to help make this part of Jewish tradition better known.” And so, he wrote a book that takes readers on a long, winding, and surprisingly comfortable journey from biblical times to the day before yesterday.

The aim of Embracing Exile is to explore the “diaspora idea in Judaism.” Organized chronologically, the book begins with the Hebrew Bible’s treatment of exile and wandering as states of being and becoming. Indeed, it is curious that a foundational text like the Torah does not present an autochthonous origin story about the rise of the chosen people from the Holy Land. It instead follows an Aramean drifter who exiles himself from his country, his people, and his father’s house to wander toward an unspecified place of promise. Ambling some more, he ended up going “down into Egypt, and sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous” (Deut. 26:5).

What explains such a foundation myth, and how might we explain the exilic texture of other parts of Tanakh? Kraemer argues that if the Hebrew Bible seems diasporic, it’s because it is.As Bible scholars have argued, most of the biblical books achieved their final form only in the Babylonian diaspora, so it should not surprise us that they speak in an exilic voice and feature such a rich cast of exilic characters, like Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, and Mordechai in Persia, each of whom models how an exiled people might achieve success while keeping the faith.

As Embracing Exile advances from the murkier biblical age to more historically accessible periods, Kraemer uncovers several distinct “ideologies of diaspora.” He shows how an old rivalry between the rabbinic communities in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia led some to claim that the Babylonian center should be seen as the new Zion. This is the origin of the notion that Zion can be found wherever Jewish life flourishes, whether in Salonika, “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” Vilna, “the Jerusalem of the North,” or Southern Italy—of which the twelfth-century tosafist Jacob Tam rhapsodized: “For out of Bari goes forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Otranto.” As Kraemer continues foraging for diasporic ideas, he picks up a medieval teaching in which exile is an opportunity for Jews to attract converts, a Hasidic notion that reimagines the Land of Israel as a spiritual quality, and the nineteenth-century Reform position that exile and its sorrows are a thing of the past.

This is all true and important, but as I encountered one cheery idea after another, I felt a growing sense of unease. Kraemer’s embrace of exile seemed so tight that there is a near total avoidance of Jewish difficulty and discomfort in the book. To be sure, Kraemer admits that the normative Jewish view conceives of exile as a form of divine punishment and sees a redemptive return to the Promised Land as Judaism’s only great and true hope. He also frames his book as a collection of “affirmations of diaspora,” not “a complete, balanced representation of Jewish traditions of exile and redemption through the ages.” And yet, his dogged desire to present splendid diasporic ideologies untainted by negativity ultimately yields an unsophisticated, two-dimensional, and uncompelling Jewish exilic idea.

The problem with Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora is already present in the clashing terms in its title and subtitle. Kraemer concedes that “it has become customary to use ‘exile’ and ‘diaspora’ dichotomously, with the former implying a negative experience or judgment and the latter being more neutral.” Oddly, he rejects this distinction, alleging that “traditional Hebrews had no word for ‘diaspora,’ so Jewish expressions about diaspora had little choice but to use the term ‘galut,’ whatever the message or affect of the speaker.” This is a curious claim, since it is easily disproven by consulting a dictionary. There, one finds a number of Hebrew terms approximating the more theologically pareve “diaspora,” such as the biblical cognate “golah,” the rabbinic Hebrew noun “pizur” (which first shows up in late antiquity, a millennium before when Kraemer dates the word’s emergence), and the now standard “tefutzot,” which is attested in medieval texts.

An exploration of the words for dispersion might have been a good way to begin a book about Jewish exile, as the graded terminology captures some of the ways Jews have spoken of their exilic realities. Instead, Embracing Exile’s opening shot is a quick and dirty recap of Jewish history, which strings together claims like “Palestinian Jews were not exiled [by the Romans] as a matter of policy and most remained in or near their former homes in Judea or greater Palestine” and:

Though the lives of these gentlemen [the tosafists] overlapped chronologically with the second crusade, neither they nor other Jews suffered as a result, for both Jews and Christians learned the lessons of the abuses of the first crusade and were thereafter able to prevent violence against Jews, which was not the goal of the crusades in the first place.

I suppose that some of these blithe half-truths can be defended.

It is true that unlike the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, the Romans didn’t enact an extensive population transfer of the people of Judea, but they did enslave tens of thousands and expropriate their lands. And yes, although some Christian clergy did try to prevent outright acts of violence against the Jews during the Second Crusades, many continued to preach antisemitism, with bloody results. While reading Kraemer’s downplaying of these horrors,I tried to imagine a twelfth-century Jew listening to his rosy reconstruction, someone like, say, Mina of Spier. Mina appears in the twelfth-century Hebrew chronicle Sefer Zekhirah. But Mina wouldn’t have been able to hear these claims, since, the chronicle reports, the Christians “seized her and cut off her ears and the thumbs of her hands.”

To be honest, I am a little jealous of Kraemer’s remarkable optimism, his relentless positive spin.He encourages readers not to interpret a “significant decline” of the yeshivas of Baghdad in the eleventh and twelfth centuries “as evidence of a decline in the quality of local Jewish life as such. Ironically, all these developments are more evidence of the comfortable embeddedness of the Jewish sages in Muslim-Iraqi society than anything else” (emphasis mine). He also argues that “anti-Jewish sentiments did not prevent Rashi from composing incomparable commentaries on the Torah and the Talmud, suggesting that he was free and secure enough to pursue the loftiest of Jewish goals” (emphasis mine). Perhaps it is unfair of me to italicize Kraemer’s shoddy historical reasoning, but there it is. Whether admiring a beautiful, illuminated manuscript produced in an Italian ghetto or an erudite work of learning composed while the goyim rioted outside, there is hardly a Jewish achievement that Embracing Exile doesn’t parade as evidence of satisfactory material conditions. Apparently, Kraemer doesn’t know that cultural gems (both Jewish and non-) often emerge from houses of pain. To take a well-known case, consider Shabbatai ben Meir HaKohen (the “Shakh”), who produced some of the most erudite specimens of early modern talmudism from the maelstrom of mid-seventeenth-century Eastern Europe.

Apart from responding to the ghostly echoes of Shavuot past, what led Kraemer to such cheerful historical revisionism? The great twentieth-century Jewish historian Salo Baron famously criticized the “lachrymose” narratives that misrepresented Jewish life as one long tearful passage through time. In Embracing Exile, one finds the opposite: a resolutely dry-eyed narrative, in which every negative nail is pried away with a happy hammer. Kraemer is apparently unaware of the decades-long reassessment, at academic conferences and in journals, of Baron’s alleged allergy to lachrymosity. Rather than denying the reality of Jewish tears, the Columbia historian was arguing against the invocation of Jewish suffering as a Theory of Everything. What Baron was calling for was a more attentive historiography grounded in careful readings of the sources and an openness to hearing the full clammer of voices from the past, even those that do not confirm one’s priors.

But Kraemer is constantly talking over his subjects:

Lamenting exile became a ritual for Jews, and speaking of “bitter exile” a formula—even a verbal tic—even when Jewish writers or speakers lived in relative comfort and celebrated their Jewish lives in a particular “exile.” In different settings, Jews may mean or feel something very different when they speak of exile, and we must judge meaning according to the evidence of the setting, not according to some pre-conceived notion of exile deriving from another time or context.

Of course, not every Jewish invocation of exile’s bitterness is equally gloomy. Tzuris and nachas live together, as in the climax of “Oyfn Pripetchik” and in Sefer Zekhirah’s shocking biblical quotation that concludes its account of Mina of Spier’s martyrdom: “Happy is the people whose lot is thus; happy is the people whose God is the Lord!” (Ps. 144:15).This is all to say that one must listen closely to the many, and sometimes contradictory, ways Jews speak of exile to appreciate the tangled meanings of exile in Judaism.

Unfortunately, it is precisely when engaging—or failing to engage—its sources that Embracing Exile falls flat. Take Kraemer’s curt reference to a “critique directed by one Jew at his compatriots, when he declared ‘How can you enjoy yourselves, O exiles, and find pleasure in taverns and good food?!’” One wouldn’t know from that sentence, nor from the cryptic endnote anchoring it, that the identity of this “one Jew” is the remarkable tenth-century Karaite Sahl ben Masliah, who led a controversial group of Jerusalem-based ascetics known as the Mourners of Zion. One also wouldn’t know that Sahl was engaged in a vigorous debate about how to respond to the Temple’s destruction and how to think about the Jewish exile. Instead, all we get is Kraemer’s facile one-liner about the targets of Sahl’s criticism: “They may have been ‘exiles,’ but they were not suffering.”

Speaking of embracing exile, perhaps the group of Jews that came closest to literally doing so were the sixteenth-century mystics who arrived in the town of Safed after the Spanish Expulsion. As Kraemer correctly notes, these kabbalists understood exile as a metaphysical state, not a geographical location. Indeed, they left us a considerable trove of exilic writings composed from the very heart of the Galilee, including remarkable descriptions of “(self-)exiling,” a peculiar practice in which one wanders across the countryside in imitation of the Shekhina—the feminine aspect of God who was, like the people of Israel, exiled from the Temple.

The kabbalists’ curious exilic behaviors, which have been recently treated at some length in Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s Hebrew study of Jewish exilism, go unmentioned in Embracing Exile. And although Kraemer considers the exilic preoccupations of the Zohar, which inspired the Safed kabbalists, he does so haphazardly, without the textual precision and linguistic sensitivity to be expected of a distinguished scholar, even one ranging widely. Take Kraemer’s discussion of the following passage:

Since we are in exile, oppressed among our enemies, and the Matron has been separated from the King and distanced from Him, He causes the Shekhinah to dwell among us and He will redeem us.

Although Kraemer claims that this text comes from the Zohar, it is, in fact, missing from virtually all zoharic manuscripts and is not discussed by the classical commentators. Both traditional and academic scholars assume that the text stems from a later interpolation imitating the Zohar’s style and symbolic system, in which the “Matron” corresponds to the feminine Shekhina and the “King” corresponds to the masculine fulcrum of the sefirotic system, Tiferet. And yet, Kraemer opens the discussion with an elementary error, claiming that “‘King’ is a reference to the top sefirah—Keter = crown.” As anyone who has studied Zohar knows, the work’s erotic—and exilic—dynamics derive from the push and pull between Shekhina and Tiferet rather than Keter, which was seen as abstract and transcendent. Regardless, the ensuing treatment is just as insensitive to the Zohar’s mixed metaphors and erotic energy, leading to a misapprehension of one of Judaism’s most intriguing exilic ideas.

Other omissions and oversights are equally mystifying. For instance, one searches in vain for any mention of the Bundist notion of doykeit—“hereness”—or for that matter, any mention of the Bund. Additionally, Kraemer’s treatment of major diasporist thinkers, like Simon Dubnow, is paltry and passing, and there is no reference to contemporary Israeli responses to Zionism’s “negation of the diaspora,” such as that of Raz-Krakotzkin. At the same time, some of Kraemer’s choices of text are simply odd, such as his discussion of S.Y. Agnon’s story cycle A City in Its Fullness when the novel Until Yesterday would have been more apt. His discussion of Ruby Namdar’s novel The Ruined House is similarly misbegotten.

Ambitious, sweeping historical projects like Embracing Exile push scholars outside of their academic comfort zones, a fact for which they should be commended, not condemned. These difficulties can normally be surmounted by consulting scholarly works and one’s colleagues; in short, it takes a faculty. Yet judging from the acknowledgments section, which credits just three JTS colleagues for suggesting some sources, Kraemer didn’t even consult a minyan. What is more, he hardly seems to have considered published scholarship beyond his own field of ancient Judaism. This is a shame, as it would have saved Kraemer from many blunders, which are not restricted to his treatment of the Zohar. The book’s confused and confusing chapter on the Maharal of Prague is as unfortunate as its discussion of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, which hardly consults a single piece of Roth scholarship or criticism. As a result, Kraemer falls right into the cunning trap Roth set in his postmodernist masterpiece, which tells a dizzying tale about the real upstanding novelist Philip Roth and a radical doppelganger diasporist named Philip Roth.

In the end, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Embracing Exile is the product of a particularly pleasant time and place—call it what you wish: America’s Golden Age or, as Kraemer describes the Upper West Side home of the protagonist of The Ruined House,“a privileged location in a privileged neighborhood.” It’s a fine perch, but the nice neighborhood may obstruct the historical view. The result is a book that is less of an embrace of exile than a suffocating bear hug. A frictionless—and occasionally fictional—account of a key Jewish experience, Embracing Exile massages history and misreads sources as it tries to transform one of Judaism’s deepest ideas into a slapdash celebration.