These paragraphs in the context of a discussion not of Jewishness or Zionism, but as part of a defence of “grand narratives”, utopian thinking and radicalism:
But is it not rather the case that, in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud? The irony is that in the history of anti-Semitism Jews stand for both of these poles: sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in, sometimes they stand for a “homeless” and rootless universal cosmopolitanism indifferent to all particular ethnic forms. The first thing to recall is thus this struggle is (also) inherent to Jewish identity. And, perhaps, this Jewish struggle is our central struggle today: the struggle between fidelity to the Messianic impulse and the reactive (in the precise Nietzschean sense) “politics of fear” which focuses on preserving one’s particular identity.
The privileged role of Jews in the establishment of the sphere of the “public use of reason” hinges on their subtraction from every state power—this position of the “part of no-part” of every organic nation-state community, not the abstract-universal nature of their monotheism, makes them the immediate embodiment of universality. No wonder, then, that, with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel, refusing to accept the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who “subtracts” himself from this state, and who includes the State of Israel among the states towards which he insists on maintaining a distance, living in their interstices—and it is this uncanny Jew who is the object of what one cannot but designate as “Zionist anti-Semitism,” a foreign excess disturbing the nation-state community. These Jews, the “Jews of the Jews themselves,” worthy successors of Spinoza, are today the only Jews who continue to insist on the “public use of reason,” refusing to submit their reasoning to the “private” domain of the nation-state.
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) Verso.