Nathan Friedman, ““The Jew in You”: Diasporism and Utopia in the Songs of Geoff Berner and Daniel Kahn”

In 2019–20, Yiddish singers Geoff Berner and Daniel Kahn both released albums addressing the global resurgence of antisemitism and the far right: Berner’s Grand Hotel Cosmopolis, and Kahn’s The Fourth Unternational, in collaboration with Psoy Korolenko. These artists embrace Diasporism, an Ashkenazi Jewish identity and practice embracing diaspora as “a place we might join with others who value this history of dispersion [and] who stand in opposition to nationalism and the nation state” (Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007). Inspired by the Bundist movement from late-19th century Eastern Europe, Diasporism has more recently become popular among young left-wing diasporic Jews struggling to articulate a secular Jewish identity unaffiliated with Israel (Bergen 2021). Diasporists have been at the forefront of intersectional activism against far-right threats of violence in recent years, and Berner and Kahn’s albums actively engage in this spirit.

In this paper, I examine Berner and Kahn’s repertoires, with special focus on two songs: Berner’s “Grand Hotel Cosmopolis” (2019) and Kahn’s “The Jew in You” (2020). Within albums that focus on resistance, these songs sketch broadly utopian views of the future and imagine societies modeled on diasporism as an alternative to nationalism, attained voluntarily with a party-like atmosphere (Berner), or necessitated by catastrophe (Kahn). Berner and Kahn’s songs embrace concepts of diasporic resistance to the domination of the territorial nation-state—concepts that emerged with the advent of Diaspora Studies in the 1990s as a response to globalization (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993, 2002; Clifford 1994). Through lyrical analysis, I argue that these songs now deploy these theoretical concepts in order to inspire praxis that may challenge chauvinistic nationalism as it has become more entrenched in the post-2016 era. In a stance not without scholarly precedent (Marienstras 1975; Safran 1991), these songs make diasporic Jewishness the indexical case of difference within the nation-state. I argue that these songs can be heard as manifestos for a strategically essentialist model of Jewishness as diasporic Other, one that repurposes the hybridity of diaspora in order to foster intersectional alliances against the far right.