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Nathan: ‘My parents still call me, even today, asking “so, what about a boyfriend?” I tell them, “listen, I have a boyfriend every day! Every day I have a new boyfriend”. And then the question is of course, “do you want to be alone?” And this is another reason why it is better to live in this country [Germany], where being alone is not the Mark of Cain.’ Sexual orientation and left-wing political affiliation often play significant roles in decisions to leave Israel. Queer Israelis question nationalist and heteronormative expectations regarding army service, monogamy, and procreation. A general despair over the current political situation and the collapse of democracy further motivate their departures and leave many feeling that they don’t belong to the Israeli national collective, while Berlin is frequently celebrated as a cosmopolitan and unassuming city where LGTB people can live in peace. Hila Amit argues that queer Israeli emigrants, in their decision to depart, undermine Zionist ideology as well as change the obvious paths of resistance to Zionism. In stepping out of the territory of Israel, they avoid the Zionist demand to perform as strong, masculine courageous citizens. But the left-wing resistance to the regime is just as committed to a heroic ideal – the willingness to take part in often violent demonstrations and risk imprisonment or injury. Amit recognizes the vulnerability of the emigrants, who can no longer bear the hardship of the life offered to them in Israel. To be explored, then, is the political potential of passivity and unheroic conduct. As Adi, one of the participants of the study, puts it: ‘I’ve been an activist for 10 years. I can’t live there anymore. People come to Berlin to heal, that’s why some people call it the Berlin Sanatorium.’ The discussion builds on the contributions to A Queer Way Out: The Politics of Israeli Emigration (2018), an award-winning study by Hila Amit. The evening presents an opportunity to hear both from, Queer Israelis in Berlin: Belonging, Resistance, and the Politics of Emigration, discussion, ICI Berlin, 27 September 2018

Employing Anzaldúa’s hom(e)ophobia and Avery Gordon’s modality of haunting, my proposed reading of the Book of Ruth aims to understand contemporary forms of dispossession and their impact, especially when they are supposedly over and done with, and when their oppressive nature is denied. Such denials are reflected in the Zionist discourse of the establishment of the state of Israel., Ruth Preser, ‘Things I Learned from the Book of Ruth: Diasporic Reading of Queer Conversions’, in De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Manuele Gragnolati, Cultural Inquiry, 11 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2017), pp. 47–65

Ruth Preser's essay 'Things I Learned from the "Book of Ruth": Diasporic Reading of Queer Conversions' performs a queer appropriation of history. The "Book of Ruth" is a biblical narrative that opens with two women, Naomi the Israelite, a bereaved woman who wishes to return from Moab to Judea, and her no-longer-daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabite, who pledges to follow Naomi, turning away from her gods and people. This laconic tale of nomadic intimacies and speech-acts of pledges and conversions has become an iconic narrative and a seminal text in Judaism, and it has also been appropriated by contemporary feminist and lesbian readings. Indeed, since it is not fully narrated but rather full of gaps, voids, and 'ghostly matters', the "Book of Ruth" provides apt ground and a malleable vessel for contemporary appropriation by stories seeking incarnation beyond linear or teleological constraints. In Preser's 'palimpsest reading', the biblical tale continues to communicate a story of successful assimilation of the poor and the foreign, and of a 'home-coming', but it is troubled by displacement, unresolved diasporic longing, and an acute and continuous sense of vulnerability. Thinking with Avery Gordon's modality of haunting, Preser's reading aims to understand contemporary forms of dispossession and their impact, especially when their oppressive nature is denied. It reflects on what kind of theory might emerge by remobilizing the category of 'home' through its de-constitution, through movement rather than destination, through disintegration rather than determination. Troubled by questions of race, nomadism, gender, and sexuality, in an era when (some) bodies may traverse national, sexual, and class borders, Preser's investigation asks what happens to bodies that continuously signify precarity and loss.

The question of diaspora is bound to movement and its narration, but in an aberrant way. A narration of movement is generally marked by departure, passage, and arrival. Diaspora, while certainly shaped by these marks, tends to disrupt their relations. Its dynamics of non-belonging, multiple-belonging, and the in-between serve to express movements that could be narrated as both never arriving and never beginning. Indeed, the question of diaspora is inseparable from the question of how to move, how to make one’s way, in contexts in which one must negotiate the impossibilities of belonging. Diaspora designates those who are ‘loose in the world’ (James Clifford) and encapsulates variegated historical, post-colonial, political, and cultural contexts. Contemporary uses of the term extend well beyond the classical Jewish-oriented one and are more accommodating of a multiplicity of experiences. Accordingly, it has emerged as a means of expressing the negotiations of non-Jewish groups with the impossibilities of belonging. In this sense, the question of diaspora, today, is inflected by the relationship between its Jewish and non-Jewish iterations: In what sense does the former provide a paradigm for the term’s general meaning? And in what sense might non-Jewish diasporas press us to rethink such a paradigm? Furthermore, the ontological, rhetorical, and embodied aspects of diaspora – which are marked by displacement, exile, and the transnationalization of identity politics, and which are informed by histories of persecution and violence – raise questions about the relationships between queer subjects and notions of belonging, whether to a collective, a family, a nation, or a ‘home’. What are the ways in which queerness emerges and exists? How does it enable and enact migration, identity trans/formation, and political affiliation along racial and affective trajectories? And while diaspora cannot (and should not) be reduced to geopolitical entities, Diaspora and its Others: Narratives, Nomads, and Impossibilities, conference, ICI Berlin, 26–27 March 2015

Leftover: the residual, the adjunct, the tenacious, dismissed from the ‘Whole’, a demarcation, a rejection, an excess, a stain, a trace, to be re-decorated, re-moved, re-cycled, re-turned to a primordial condition. Only it won’t. Unwanted as they might be, leftovers linger, escape, insist, and demand our attention; they are a constant distraction, intensity, and transgression. As objects, environments, actions, and intentions, leftovers incite affects. Although not essentially antagonistic or the product of agential action and intention, leftovers are helpful in mapping the political, not only by drawing the coordinates of the respectable, responsible, reasonable, essential, and the aesthetic, but concurrently as the rejected yet lingering remnant of knowledge production. Using ‘Leftover’ as an invitation for theorization across disciplines and research paradigms, this event reflected on what we might mean when we use affective vocabularies in order to position ourselves in theoretical and methodological terms, and what is being left-over in theory, action, and passion. Eirini Avramopoulou is a fellow at the ICI Berlin. Currently, she is working on her first monograph on affect, performativity, and queer/gender activism in Istanbul, Turkey. Heather Love is the R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (‘Rethinking Sex’), and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History (‘Is There Life after Identity Politics?’). Nahal Naficy is a fellow at the ICI Berlin. Her most recent work, Our Tale Was True, Our Tale Was A Lie, co-authored with Alice Gavin, is forthcoming with Punctum Books. Ruth Preser is a fellow at the ICI Berlin. Currently she is working on a monograph on queer Israeli Diaspora in Berlin. Yael Navaro-Yashin is Reader in Social An, Leftover: Affect in/as Methodology, workshop, ICI Berlin, 20 May 2014

Ruth Preser, ‘Berlin My Love: Haunting and the City’, talk presented at the workshop De-Constituting Wholes: Haunting, Eclipse, Plasticity, ICI Berlin, 9–10 July 2014, video recording, mp4, 19:30