Futurity is at the center of Israel’s natal myth. The binary opposition between diaspora (or, as it is often disparagingly called, “Galut”) as a marker of the forlorn Jewish past and Israel as a space for the Jewish future undergirds both the nation’s self-conception and its exceptionalist rhetoric. Popular heritage tourism experiences, such as the “March for the Living,” concretize this narrative, taking young (mostly American) Jews on a journey from the concentration camps of Poland to the happy telos of Israel—from obsolescence and social death in Eastern Europe to safety in Israel, the only place where a Jewish future is imaginable. Such narratives assure us that if we wish to evade the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” lamented by Salo Baron as early as 1928, we can do so only by jettisoning exile in favor of the sunny certainties of the nation-state. Over the past few years—since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent destruction of Gaza and the killing of more than sixty-seven thousand Palestinians in its aftermath—a number of literary critics and cultural historians have sought to rewrite the temporality of this narrative by reaching into the not-so-distant American Jewish past to construct a genealogy of anti-Zionist thought, writing, and activism. The story these scholars tell undercuts the sacrosanct belief in American Jews’ transhistorical embrace of Zionism and its apotheosis in the Jewish nation-state, while pointing, intentionally or not, to an American Jewish Studies that does not need to have a commitment to Zionism as one of its central precepts.Geoffrey Levin’s Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948–1978 (2023), Marjorie N. Feld’s The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism (2024), and Benjamin Balthaser’s Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left (2025) differ from one another in their methodological approaches and much of their content; nonetheless, these three monographs together function as a joint project of recovery, reaching into the American past to find antecedents to contemporary anti-Zionism. As Balthaser writes in his introduction to Citizens of the Whole World, “The sight of thousands of Jewish protesters descending on Grand Central Terminal to drop a banner reading ‘Never Again for Anyone’ during Israel’s 2023 invasion of Gaza for many seemed to have exploded out of nowhere” (1). To the mainstream media, such anti-Zionist activism was a radical departure from Jewish American life and opinion. Levin, Feld, and Balthaser make it clear that the generational and political divide between American Jews on the question of Israel did not begin in recent years, however, but instead has functioned as a powerful, if sometimes subterranean, undercurrent that has long been withheld from official accounts of American Jewish life.Geoffrey Levin relates that the use of “our” in Our Palestine Question is not accidental but instead chosen to invoke both the late scholar Amy Kaplan’s seminal look at the American relationship to the Jewish homeland in Our American Israel (2018) and the sense of ambivalence and complicity experienced by many American Jews about the “Palestine Question” before and after 1948. The history Levin relates in Our Palestine Question is both individual and institutional, moving deftly between analysis of the often-forgotten history of postwar American Jewish critics of Israel and an overview of the complex politics of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which remained officially non-Zionist until 1967. Levin’s first five chapters introduce the reader to figures from what he calls the “lost generation” of anti-Zionist intellectuals. Chapter 1 relates the fascinating biography of Don Peretz, one of the first scholars to conduct extensive research and write a dissertation on the Palestinian refugee issue. Levin notes that “Peretz’s attempt to study the refugee problem in a neutral manner in hopes of advancing a solution ran counter to ongoing Israeli attempts to advance a narrative designed to sweep the problem under the rug” (35). The scholar, whose family had ties to Palestine going back to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century, traveled to Israel with a Quaker relief organization in 1949 and, later, became the AJC’s first Middle East consultant. In that role, Peretz was tasked with developing a relief initiative for Palestinian refugees–a job that made him run afoul of Israeli officials, who desperately wanted to keep Palestinian refugees from returning in great numbers in order to maintain a Jewish majority. After this first, foundational chapter on Israel’s campaign against Peretz and the AJC’s refugee relief plan, Levin moves, in chapter 2, to The Jewish Newsletter, a postwar, English-language newspaper founded by William Zukerman, already a respected journalist for the American Yiddish press. Zukerman’s critiques of Israel and his sympathy for Palestinian refugees, like Peretz’s, worried Israeli officials and, eventually, led proponents of Zionism to undermine his career. Chapters 3 through 5 explore similar early anti- or non- Zionist figures, including James Marshall, a philanthropist affiliated with the AJC, Elmer Berger, a rabbi who worked with the American Council on Judaism, and Arab American writer and intellectual Fayez Sayegh. In the book’s final chapters, Levin looks to the period after 1967 and anti-Zionist groups, such as Breira, that have also largely fallen out of the conventional American Jewish narrative.Levin’s elegant monograph innovates by moving beyond an exploration of the complexity of American Jewish attitudes towards Israel and Palestine to look at the Israeli preoccupation with American Jewry. Exploring once-classified documents found in government archives, he elucidates the lengths to which Israeli officials went to maintain American Jewish support. He writes: “Rather than acting from a place of emotional connection and intracommunal kinship, Israeli officials acted in pragmatic ways toward the American Jewish community in the context of a wider public relations battle that raged between them and pro-Arab voices, which included Arab diplomats and some in the U.S. government” (5). As Levin makes clear through his cogent look at prominent American Jewish critics of Zionism from the nation-state’s inception to the late 1970s, Israeli officials were deeply fearful that American Jewish critics of Zionism would alienate public opinion and force them to re-examine the Palestinian refugee problem. Their silencing of critical voices has a profound effect on our ideas about the American Jewish relationship to Israel.Marjorie N. Feld’s The Threshold of Dissent offers a similarly powerful antidote to the accepted narrative of American Jewry as monolithically Zionist. Her book is perhaps the most meta-critical of the recent works on the history of American anti-Zionism. The introduction argues that even the lengthiest histories of American Jewish life, such as Jonathan Sarna’s celebrated 2004 tome, American Judaism: A History, avoid any mention of anti-Zionism as a current in Jewish American thought. Implicitly borrowing from both African American and Women’s and Gender Studies, Feld makes a case for the importance of the project of recovery of these lost narratives to both American and American Jewish history. The Threshold of Dissent makes it clear that the history of American anti-Zionism is not just a missing chapter in the narrative of American Jewish activism and thought; it is an entire world–with its own spectrum of belief and believers–that has been erased from the historical record due to what she calls “a forced consensus” on the centrality of Israel to Jewish survival (2).Each of Feld’s roughly chronological chapters explores a different thread of anti-Zionist activism or thought, and highlights “the lowering threshold of dissent on Zionism throughout twentieth-century US history” (12). Her account extends back further into the historical record than either Levin’s or Balthaser’s, opening with a look at late nineteenth and early twentieth century Reform rabbis who “feared that Jewish nationalism, which emerged in the next decade as the Zionist movement, threatened mainstream acceptance of Jews in the United States” (16). From this ambivalent Jewish encounter with nationalism and modernity, she moves to look at some of the same groups and publications as Levin, including the American Jewish Committee, the American Council on Judaism, and Zukerman’s newspaper. She diverges from Levin’s work in her later chapters, however, by moving into the more contemporary period of anti-Zionist thought–from the relationship between anti-Zionist and anti-colonial discourse on the American Jewish left to a look at how solidarity between Jews and other groups in the civil rights struggle influenced critics of Israel. Perhaps most strikingly, Feld ends The Threshold of Dissent by exploring the disastrous effects that suppressing dissent has had on the American Jewish community itself. She argues that, by ignoring or suppressing anti-Zionist thought, Jewish “leaders narrowed conversations about Jewish belonging” (13). Moreover, “their unwillingness to see these ideas as contested and subject to debate has been, in no small part, responsible for the growing generational divide among American Jews” (13).Literary and cultural critic Benjamin Balthaser’s Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left (2025) is similarly oriented to present-day divisions in the American Jewish collective. Balthaser opens Citizens of the Whole World with an epigraph from noted leftist intellectual Melanie Kay/Kantrowitz in which she writes: “What is there to SAY about Jews in progressive movements? That there were a lot of them? That now there are less? / I say this to Vivian in my fantasy, and in my fantasy she looks at me, eye to eye, and says, ‘Them, Fran? a lot of them?’” (1). Like the speaker in Kay/Kantrowitz’s story, Balthaser seeks to push the reader to question the identity of the “them” in the Jewish progressive movements and their identification–or lack thereof–with the American Jewish left. Like Levin and Feld, he persuasively argues that Jewish anti-Zionism has had a long and uninterrupted history in the United States that has largely been absent from narratives of American Jewish life. Even more than the other two books, however, Citizens of the Whole World feels tailor-made for our current moment. The American Jewish narrative of unwavering support for Israel seems out of step with the increasingly global reproach for the nation and its attacks on Palestinians since 2023. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City turned from a local triumph into a national news story when almost 1,000 American Jewish rabbis signed a petition arguing that he posed a danger to Jews because of his criticism of Israel. Balthaser argues that socialism and anti-Zionism have long gone hand in hand because both arise from a similar vein of anti-imperialism–and that American Jews have a uniquely important role in the relationship between the two ideologies.Following in the footsteps of Tony Michels and other intellectual historians of the American Jewish left, Balthaser argues that Jewish socialism was not imported from Eastern Europe, as many accounts would have it, but instead was a product of the unique constellation of characteristics of Jewish life in America. According to Balthaser, just as Jewish identity in the U.S. was informed by leftist commitments in a manner unlike any other white ethnic group, the American left has itself been defined by its Jewishness. Central to the American Jewish left was a sense of solidarity with other racial and ethnic groups, as well as a suspicion of nationalism. Balthaser writes: “While there are many other reasons for Jewish socialism to have thrived in the US, including a greater atmosphere of freedom than in tsarist Russia (albeit often circumscribed), I would suggest it was rather that the American left lent itself to an expression of ethnic politics as a politics of socialist liberation. In the US, unlike Europe, racial solidarity was an expression of radicalism” (7–8). Balthaser recasts the classic antisemitic trope of Jewish internationalism decried by Henry Ford and other proponents of nativism as a positive attribute of American Jews on the left who see anti-Zionism as part and parcel of a wider anti-colonial and anti-nationalist posture, as well as a politics of empathy that asks for solidarity across racial lines.While Balthaser, like Levin and Feld, effectively makes the case for the long durée of anti-Zionism in the American Jewish imagination, he acknowledges that the form that anti-Zionism takes and its relative importance to Jewish leftists have shifted significantly. He writes:This insight into the more explicit and religiously-identified Jewishness of the contemporary anti-Zionist left distinguishes Citizens of the Whole World from the other two texts.Each chapter of Citizens of the Whole World employs a mixed methodology that moves between theoretical speculation, historical analysis, close reading of literary texts, and ethnographic interviews. Balthaser’s integration of interviews with Jewish leftist activists and intellectuals enriches his monograph, providing key evidence for the continuing existence of an anti-Zionist left in the U.S. at the same time that it sometimes feels like it overburdens his chapters with information. The first chapter of Citizens of the Whole World explores anti-Zionism from the 1930s to the Cold War with a particular focus on novelist Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which he sees as two pivotal anti-Zionist texts of the period. Balthaser’s next chapter looks at the complex uses of Holocaust memory on the left. Citing Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, Balthaser argues that the Holocaust had multiple rhetorical functions for Jews. Just as the Holocaust was and is often used as an argument for Israel’s need to exist as an ethno-national Jewish state, it has also been used as a means of making connections between the historical oppression of Jews, Black and Native American subjects in the U.S., and Palestinians. His last three chapters combine to make a powerful argument about American Jews’ ambivalent relationship to whiteness, the place of Zionism and anti-Zionism in identity politics, and the re-emergence of a powerful Jewish anti-Zionist left in recent years. Literary and cultural studies scholar Balthaser makes his disciplinary debt to Black and Diasporic Studies explicit, citing critics, such as Stuart Hall, who have theorized the aesthetics and politics of the African diaspora. Although both Levin and Feld mention the ways in which Zionist and anti-Zionist discourses have intersected with the vicissitudes of Jewish racialization in the U.S., Balthaser’s book does the most to explore the connections between ideas about Jewish whiteness and leftist solidarity with oppressed racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. and elsewhere, particularly in the concept of “diasporism.” As Balthaser asserts, “If Israel has remade Jewish life, it has also remade the meaning of the diaspora, from a fact of Jewish life to a source of opposition” (20).Perhaps it is in this revaluation of diaspora–as both metaphor and lived experience–that anti-Zionism has made its greatest contribution. If proponents of Zionism once argued that diaspora was a dead-end, making Jews eternally vulnerable to the violence of antisemitism, contemporary anti-Zionism suggests that a diasporist posture is the most apt for describing and living in a pluralistic Jewish present. After all, in order to become synecdochic with the future, Zionism had to make an argument about the past, and, particularly, the essential role of antisemitism in the Jewish past. Shaul Magid argues that an ahistorical concept of anti-Semitism as constitutive of the Jewish experience is central to Zionist rhetoric. With this in mind, he coins the term “Judeopessimism” in a direct nod to the concept of “Afropessimism” in critical race theory. Magid argues that Judeopessimism, like Afropessimism, is defined by an idea of ontological race hatred that is impossible to evade or get beyond. Jewish Studies, he argues, would do well to borrow from Afropessimism in making its ontological claims clear and open to questions. If we believe that antisemitism is constitutive of Western modernity, as anti-Blackness is in Afropessimism, how do we place it in the realm of critique, where we can both acknowledge and interrogate it? How do we avoid making antisemitism an excuse for violence or a floating signifier that can be instrumentalized by fascists intent on undermining intellectual freedom? Levin, Feld, and Balthaser offer answers to these thorny questions in their insistence on complicating the story of American Jewish life and the role of anti-Zionism in the future of it.
Jennifer Glaser (Fri,) studied this question.
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