There’s No Place Like Home by Joseph Finlay

Surely we’re all multiculturists now. We accept the necessity of the pluralist democratic state, with multiple groups sharing a contested yet neutral public space. We know, as children of modernity, that we can never be fully ‘at home’, that communities are virtual, free flowing and in flux, and that identities are multiple. We know, from the tradition of post-colonial thought that homelands are always ‘imagined’. We know these things as a society, at least in part, because Jews have taught them to us. As the pioneers of the modern project, Jewish ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were instrumental in creating a world where the borders of nation states were transcended and internationalism became a defining value.

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