The establishment of sovereignty in Israel changed Jewish history and it changed the Jewish people.

Of course, it changed the material and civic and for many, even spiritual lives of the women and men who live there. And it nourished the hopes of untold millions,

who longed to depart from their exiles and return to the land of their fathers.

While Israel would also function as a safe haven for Jewish refugees,

exiled from the states they had been living in, sometimes for years, sometimes for centuries.

For Jews the world over, whose vector pointed towards Zion, and for the residents who lived there,

sovereignty allowed them to take collective national responsibility, to act in history, to exercise

moral judgment on a national scale.

In the politics, Aristotle says that a person who has no need of a city is Etherion

a Theos, either a beast or a god.

And from the perspective of Israel's Zionist architects, the Jews of the exile were less than fully realized human beings,

lacking the ability to exercise that special capacity

for politics that is unique to mankind. Israel changed all of that. But what about the Jews who

intended then and the Jews who still now intend to remain in the diaspora? How does Israel change

the condition of diaspora jury? How do Israel's dilemmas and vulnerabilities and triumphs affect the Jews of Paris or Melbourne or Buenos Aires or Chicago?

Well, today's guest argues that Israel is now the single most important reference point in the Jewish consciousness anywhere in the world. We've entered, he argues,

the Israeli century. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest today is

Yossi Shane, who I first met many years ago as a professor at Georgetown University, where he

spent roughly half the year each year before then returning to teach at Tel Aviv University.

He's one of the authoritative scholars on diaspora politics.

Several years ago, he went emeritus at Georgetown, relocated to Israel full time,

and he was recently elected as a member of the 24th Knesset.

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