By rssfeeds-admin Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
Peter Beinart
Knopf, $26 (cloth)
The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism
Marjorie N. Feld
NYU Press, $30 (cloth)
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Naomi Klein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30 (cloth)
Unsettled: Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine
Oren Kroll-Zeldin
NYU Press, $30 (cloth)
Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948–1978
Yale University Press, $38 (cloth)
The year before his death in 1967, Marxist and Holocaust refugee Isaac Deutscher was asked what defines a Jew. “Religion? I am an atheist,” he replied, as the son of a Rabbi. “Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist,” he declared, as a famous critic of Zionism. He defined his Jewishness not by blood, soil, or god but by the intensity of his socialist commitments: the “force” of his “unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.”
Fifty years later, we are witnessing the first Jewish sovereign state since antiquity commit a genocide, backed by the full force of first the Biden administration and now Trump. Israel openly aligns with far-right, even fascist governments. Its leaders and organizations allied with the state work—with great effectiveness—to suppress dissent both within Israel and abroad, from Jews and non-Jews alike. And as all this unfolds, much of the institutional Jewish world, including organized religious groups, either applauds or stands mute. Except for notable exceptions in the United States, with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and IfNotNow (INN) leading dramatic sit-ins and building occupations, few if any legacy Jewish institutions have offered more than occasional handwringing at the scale of Palestinian suffering in Israel’s ongoing war and apartheid. Indeed, in the name of protecting “Jewish safety,” the well-resourced Anti-Defamation League—once a professed champion of civil rights—now backs armed raids of universities and makes excuses for Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes, while the sole concern of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) is that Washington may not be supporting Israel enough.
While Deutscher came to reluctantly accept by the 1950s what appeared to be the inexorable fact of Israel’s existence, he wrote in protest shortly after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that Jews “should not allow even invocations of Auschwitz to blackmail us into supporting the wrong cause,” noting that the real threat to Israel lay not in foreign armies but in the legitimate grievances of hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. How did Deutscher’s sentiments—once so prominent, even after 1948—become so sidelined in Jewish life? What made the force of Jewish identity so allied to reactionary and racialized state power?
Several recent books chronicling specifically American Jewish dissent from Zionism, past and present, demonstrate how this relatively recent Zionist “consensus” was manufactured. Geoffrey Levin and Marjorie N. Feld tell stories of once-mainstream dissidents and naysayers purged from the ranks of even straightforwardly liberal American Jewish institutions, demonstrating the force with which unconditional support for Israel had to be constructed from the top down in the immediate postwar era. Looking to the more recent past, Oren Kroll-Zeldin and Peter Beinart examine efforts—in Beinart’s case, his own—to break through that heavily policed consensus since the turn of the century.
In a recent conversation with Beinart and Rachel Shabi for the London Review of Books podcast, Adam Shatz asked: Why bother, at this particular moment, to write about Jews? As I read through these narratives, it occurred to me that I was reading as much about the decline of American liberalism as about the transformation of American Jewish thought and institutions. As the contrast with Naomi Klein’s recent memoir makes clear, none of these writers identifies as radical: on the contrary, their argument, more or less explicit, is that Jewish institutional life should live up to its long-held progressive values by applying to Israel the same liberal principles it applies to other areas of American politics. Can a group long associated with liberal causes—indeed, the group most identified with American liberalism, after African Americans—not only change its political valence, but dramatically reorient its exercise of political power?
Robert Loeb, executive of the 1970s American Jewish anti-occupation organization Breira, expressed the problem this way: Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians, he found, were in “direct contradiction to everything that I had been struggling for in the States in terms of civil rights.” The perversity at the center of American Jewish liberalism is the fact that American liberalism’s towering achievement, the end of Jim Crow, is precisely what Israel violates. Given the extent of Jewish identification with the American liberal tradition, engaging these histories can help us to ask whether there is anything in the liberal order that can be saved.
Both Levin and Feld focus on American Jewish institutional history and its relationship to Zionism from the 1940s to the 1980s, between the Nakba and the Six-Day War. We can think of this period as a kind of interregnum when Zionism was not yet the consensus—indeed, when even major Jewish institutional figures offered stinging rebukes of Zionism and Israeli state policy in their official capacities as spokespeople for mainstream liberal Jewish organizations. As Feld and Levin tell it, the marginalization of such views can be narrated through three figures, metonyms perhaps for the Jewish whole: intellectuals and activists who represent broad and now only latent or exiled orientations, their fates demonstrating, as Matthew Berkman has framed it, how the “coercive consensus” came to be formed.
Levin’s central figure is Don Peretz, an unlikely outcast of Zion. Born into a progressive Zionist family in 1922, he became the first Middle East advisor for the AJC, the largest and most important liberal Jewish organization in the United States. Founded in 1906, the group had two goals: to combat discrimination against American Jews and find coalitions with other like-minded liberal organizations such as the NAACP. Founded at the turn of the century by mostly German-descended Jewish elites, it positioned itself as the guardian of Jewish respectability and assimilation, countering not only antisemites but also the working-class radicalism of newly immigrated Eastern and Southern European Jews.
As such, the AJC was initially ambivalent about Zionism. While welcoming the new Jewish state, the AJC also sought to remake Israel in its own image: a liberal democracy led by an educated, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. Its early insistence on non-Zionism reflected an ambivalence based on suspicions of Jewish “particularism”—the fear that intense nationalist feeling among Zionists would threaten American Jewish assimilation and lead to charges of “dual loyalty.” In addition, the AJC closely followed U.S. foreign policy: neither the Pentagon nor the newly emergent CIA were entirely sure yet about their new ally in the Middle East, nor how best to pursue its imperial interests in the region and with whom. A patriotic organization, the AJC squared its critical support for Zionism with its support for Truman and Eisenhower’s anticommunism crusade at home and abroad.
Peretz was hired by the AJC in 1956 to consult, among other things, on a subject now out of bounds in polite Jewish society: the plight of over 700,000 Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war. As the AJC’s magazine, Commentary, editorialized in 1951, “Jewish minds and consciences both in Israel and abroad have been troubled” by “an oppressed (and depressed) minority in the midst of a Jewish state.” The author of the piece this note introduced, Judd Teller, quotes Palestinians who offered to be “good citizens of Israel” if they could return to their homes. “As Jews,” AJC president Irving Engel later opined, “we know what lies behind the word ‘refugee.’”
Peretz was clearly the man for the job. In January 1949, he had traveled to refugee camps and Palestinian villages that had been liquidated, organizing aid as a volunteer with the Quaker-affiliated American Friends Service Committee. What he encountered over the next eight months “deeply disturbed him,” Levin relates. In a letter to the AJC’s foreign affairs director, Peretz wrote that many Israelis “have an attitude toward the Arabs which resembles that of American ‘racists,’” reminding his friend that fighting Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination is the very cause for which the AJC was ostensibly founded.
Peretz returned to the United States to start a doctorate at Columbia. After completing his dissertation in 1955—“the very first” on the Palestinian refugee crisis, Levin notes—the AJC promptly offered him a position, where he was soon at work producing a series of educational pamphlets. In these writings, Peretz cast doubt on Israel’s claims—then as now—that Palestinians fled at the orders of Arab states and that refugees in toto refused to be citizens of a new Israeli state, provided they were guaranteed security and equal rights. While Peretz’s work might strike readers today as even-handed, as he also criticizes Arab states for their antisemitic laws such as Jordan’s ban on religious Jewish travelers, his views were too much for Israeli leaders and diplomats. Foreign Minister Golda Meir directed that a response be written documenting Israel’s objections to one of Peretz’s pamphlets. “It seems we should do more than we have previously to take this fellow out of the committee,” an Israeli consul wrote, suggesting they try to tank his academic career. By 1958 he was out—the result of both direct intervention by Israel and actions by the executive board that did not reflect the wishes of AJC members.
The two other figures Feld and Levin chronicle may seem to be mirror opposites: the left-wing, Yiddish-speaking journalist William Zukerman and the Reform rabbi and head of the American Council for Judaism, Elmer Berger. Yet each illustrates how Zionism ran contrary to religious and secular common sense in the United States at midcentury.
Of the two, Berger had the greater impact. The first American Jewish group created specifically to oppose Zionism, the Council was founded in 1942 and initially expressed little concern with Palestinian oppression; its focus was rather a theological and even conservative argument regarding Jewish identity. Steeped in American Reform Judaism’s late nineteenth-century “Pittsburgh Platform,” the Council’s Reform rabbis claimed that Jews constitute neither a secular people nor a nation but rather are defined by religious faith. Moreover, much like the AJC, the Council feared that Zionism would lead American Jews to be charged with “dual loyalty” and thwart assimilation. As with Reform Judaism’s origins itself, the Council was far more anxious about Jewish extremism—religious, nationalist, or socialist—than it was about settler colonialism.
Both Levin and Feld chart how Rabbi Berger began to shift from a Jewish-centered, even reactionary critique of Zionism to one politically informed by the struggle for Palestinian rights and sovereignty. Central to this story is Berger’s lifelong friendship with Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh, whom Berger met through their mutual work for American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Berger’s conversations and collaborations with Sayegh resulted in travels to the Middle East and connections with Palestinian nationalists abroad. Perhaps the highest-profile Palestinian to enter the American debate after the foundation of the state of Israel, Sayegh is most remembered today for his 1965 report Zionist Colonialism in Palestine and for helping to author the 1975 UN resolution declaring Zionism “a form of racism.” Always careful to distinguish Zionism from Jewish people, Sayegh and Berger “found common ground” and “learned from the other,” these books show. And much like Peretz, Berger saw “the squalor . . . the human degradation and above all, the eternal despair” of the Palestinian refugee camps firsthand, likening them to “camps in Germany where Jews lived.” These experiences prompted Berger’s political reorientation, away from Jewish self-interest and toward internationalist solidarity, through the late 1940s and into the 1950s.
The Council enjoyed a brief period of influence early in the Eisenhower administration, which led most materially to the U.S. State Department and even the CIA funding early fact-finding missions to Palestinian refugee camps. But it was targeted by the Israeli embassy as “a dangerous political foe” within the United States, Levin explains, and meanwhile its own internal divisions began to hamper its work with American Jews. At best indifferent or even hostile to the civil rights movement, and with an aging and bourgeois leadership, the Council was so moribund by the late 1960s that even the 1967 war and anti-imperial student protest could not revive its fortunes. While Berger went on to become, like Sayegh, an important spokesperson against Zionism, in some ways he moved far beyond the Council he had helped to found, creating his own anti-Zionist research organization and speaking once on stage with Stokely Carmichael in 1969 during a series of protests for Palestinian liberation at George Washington University.
Zukerman, for his part, is paradoxically the least well-known but culturally perhaps most recognizable of these three figures. He represented a once-dominant left wing Yiddishkeit sensibility, one that Levin associates with the Eastern European Jewish Workers Bund. Yet the Bund had very little presence in the United States—only a single office in New York City after the war, mostly catering to left-wing, Yiddish-speaking Holocaust refugees. Zukerman’s political and cultural orientations—socialist and secular, culturally nationalist and yet anti-Zionist—owe less to the Bund than to the Popular Front of the 1930s, whose Jewish socialists and Communists took many similar positions as the Bund in a distinctly American context, supporting Soviet experiments in Jewish autonomous communities, Yiddish language, Jewish humanism—and of course, anti-Zionism. Zukerman, Feld summarizes, “saw the global, universal Jewish mission as one with socialism.”
While Zukerman never joined the Communist Party—and avoided blacklisting and prison during the Red Scare—he nonetheless identified Zionism with the forces of McCarthyism and racial apartheid. Writing for the newspaper he founded, the Jewish Newsletter, he compared the anti-Palestinian 1952 Israeli Citizenship Law to Jim Crow, drew a parallel between the permanent exile of Palestinians and the anticommunist and anti-immigrant McCarran-Walter Act, and likened Zionists to “Dixie-crats and the Ku-Klux-Klan.” When Zukerman spoke of the “sacrifice of the principle of universal justice for reasons of nationalistic expediency,” the analogy to American racism and Indian removal would not have been far from his left-wing readers’ minds.
Zukerman spoke an idiom of an earlier socialist moment that embraced neither the Council’s assimilationism nor the racially exclusive, militaristic nationalism of Zionism. In a 1934 essay for The Nation, he saw in early Zionists the “menace of Jewish fascism,” noting with bitter irony that the “the newcomers [to Palestine] are not only the victims of fascism but spiritually also its supporters.” Though he acknowledged many of the Jewish residents of Mandatory Palestine were themselves refugees from Europe, the most militant and successful of them, he decried, wanted “a fascism of their own” that, like European fascisms, wished to “revive the glory of their passing world.” The idea of Zionism-as-fascism spoke not only to the racial violence inherent in the settler project but also to the ways that nation-building bound Jewish workers to the Jewish bourgeoisie. Referring to Zionism as “machine-gun Judaism,” Zukerman linked the Jewish state to both gangsterism and militarism in a single image.
For a decade, the Jewish Newsletter became a hub of non- and anti-Zionist thinking; its board members included prominent left-wing Jewish intellectuals such as Erich Fromm and Rabbi Morris Lazaron as well gentile socialists such as Norm Thomas and Louis Nelson. According to Levin, writers in its pages discussed the Palestinian refugee issue “more consistently” than any other Jewish newspaper; it considered the question of Palestinian refugees as the “moral question” of its time. It was popular enough to appear in both college Hillels and Reform synagogues associated with the Council.
Yet it was also, in the end, mostly a one-man show. Its Yiddishkeit socialism did not reproduce itself in great enough numbers to fight the twin onslaughts of Jewish assimilation and increasingly compulsory Zionism. The Newsletter died with Zukerman in 1961; the collapse of the Council, and the AJC’s formal adoption of support for Zionism as central to its mission in 1967, were further nails in its coffin. By the 1970s Jewish anti-Zionism would have no institutional home in America.
What explains Jewish anti-Zionism’s resurgence today in groups like JVP, which has grown from a small group in the Bay Area in the late 1990s to a nationwide movement with tens of thousands of dues-paying members and dozens of active chapters across the country? I have often heard it said that American Jewish youth are more critical of Israel simply because they are further from the Holocaust—an explanation recently invoked by Joshua Leifer in The Guardian, suggesting the “intensity of the reaction” to Zionism among American Jews owes to the “proximity in time” to the death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
No doubt, distance from overt racism and bigotry shapes American Jewish attitudes, on a range of subjects. But it is a theoretical and historical error to conceive of Zionism as a necessary response to the horrors of antisemitism and the Judeocide of Europe, as prevailing Zionist narratives like to insist. The work of Levin and Feld expands our understanding of just how forcefully this consensus had to be manufactured in mainstream Jewish organizations. Norm Podhoretz famously asserted that American Jews “converted to Zionism” after 1973, but it was as much a conversion as coercion; the conservative forces of nationalism and assimilation into whiteness, not the trauma of the Holocaust, turned Jewish institutions into Zionist institutions. The Jewish protesters dropping banners reading “Never Again for Anyone” from Grand Central Station today exhibit a very different form of historical memory.
Two other recent books confront this present: Kroll-Zeldin’s Unsettled, and Beinart’s own Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. They may seem to offer opposite, even irreconcilable, accounts—the one seeing a sort of vindication of American Jewish liberalism, and the other its enduring corruption.
Chronicling the rise of Jewish anti-Zionist movements over the last two decades, from JVP to INN and the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, Kroll-Zeldin sees an upswell of American Jewish liberalism against Israeli ethnonationalism and racial violence. Increasingly, he writes, Rabbis, students, and activists are “calling on the American Jewish community to consistently apply its liberal and progressive values to Israel.” In the face of an Israeli state that repeatedly refused to make peace with Palestinians, engaged in ever-escalating and routine massacres, and elected far-right politicians, American Jews, Kroll-Zeldin argues, are choosing their liberalism over their Zionism. Citing Pew studies from 2020, Unsettled notes that for three-quarters of American Jews, caring about “being Jewish” remains “very” or “somewhat” important, while only 35 percent of American Jews under the age of thirty view “caring about Israel as essential to being Jewish,” and a similar figure in that age range don’t see Israel as important at all.
As Kroll-Zeldin makes clear, however, Jewish anti-Zionism did not merely emerge from within the American Jewish community. The end of the Second Intifada led many Palestinian intellectuals and activists to focus on nonviolent civil disobedience, including the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign (BDS), which in turn provided space for American Jewish activists both to join in delegations to the West Bank to protect Palestinians from settler attacks and to help organize BDS movements in the United States in dialogue with Palestinian partners abroad. From occupying AIPAC offices to sitting in at Congress, holding die-ins in front of American businesses that trade with Israel to forming a critical and outsized constituency in the student-led encampments this past spring, anti-Zionist Jewish activism has taken an increasingly visible and pivotal role. Today, JVP—the most radical and one of the largest Jewish anti-Zionist organizations—grounds a parting of the ways over the meaning of Jewish identity in institutional, cultural, and political praxis.
Beinart sees things quite differently—not as a breaking apart of Israeli and American Jewish communities, old and young, right and left, as much as the corruption of a unified Jewish community, who all share in the blame and condemnation. Ironically, perhaps, Beinart is himself a sign of the rapidly changing American Jewish consensus on Israel. Once a liberal Zionist who supported the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Beinart broke with his Zionism, if not his liberalism, to advocate for an end to a Jewish-supremacist state in 2020, leaving The Forward to join the editorial team at anti-Zionist Jewish Currents.
Addressing his book to a former friend who still identifies as a Zionist, Beinart embraces the idea that Jews “are all each other’s relatives.” “I still believe in the metaphor of Jews as a family,” he writes. After positing this still-coherent peoplehood, he makes his real target clear: the morality tales even liberal American Jews tell about Jewish history—that Jews are the world’s eternal victims, and world history is the history of Jews surviving successive attempts to kill them. Where Kroll-Zeldin sees American liberalism as the fulcrum wrenching American Jews apart from Zionism, Beinart argues that this liberalism has a reactionary function: it is a balm in Gilead, a healing salve to reassure Jews that we are still the world’s victims and can do no wrong. From narratives of antisemitism in which Jewish victimhood is deployed to silence critics of Israel to the Book of Esther and Deuteronomy, we mistake our new massacres for acts of self-defense. “Jews can be pharaohs too,” Beinart warns.
But his prescription is not religious disenchantment. On the contrary, Beinart interprets the drive to Jewish nationhood in the Levant not as a consequence of European imperialism or a devil’s bargain with Western antisemitism but as a result of the increased “secularization” of Jewish life. Rather than “describe ourselves as a people chosen by God to follow laws engraved at Sinai,” he argues, we “describe ourselves as a people fated by history to perpetually face annihilation” only to “miraculously” survive. In evoking a cosmopolitan practice of religious commandment against the story of a people tied to land in a transhistorical quest for security, Beinart echoes scholar Shaul Magid’s concept of an “exilic Judaism,” which arose in full flower only after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans.
In this vision, reading Torah not only challenges the necessity of a state; it calls into question whether a state itself violates Jewish theology. As Magid frames the question, one can be in exile even in Jerusalem as long as one is not in accordance with the letter and spirit of Jewish law, which among other things holds the protection of human life as above all other values. While one might question Beinart’s claim of Torah-as-refuge as itself a product of secularization—in the ancient world religion was very much an affair of the state, not a privatized escape from it—he is trying to answer a question very much on the minds of anti-Zionist Jews. After rejecting Zionism, to paraphrase a famous revolutionary song, how do we create a new world out of the ashes of the old?
Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger is unique among these recent books in approaching the state of Jewish politics from the outside in: rather than ask how Jewish institutions became internally corrupted by Zionism, she traces the consolidation of Zionism into the mainstream through the rise of the global far right. Doppelganger suggests that fascism’s rising appeal stems from cathexis with its other, the language and affect of the left. For Klein, Zionism is another “doppelganger” effect: just as anti-vaxxers position themselves as victims of state tyranny, the Jewish state appropriates the rhetoric of resistance to trauma and oppression, refashioning dreams of liberation into paranoid hyper-nationalism.
Klein is an outlier among these authors in another way, too: she neither writes from within the academic discipline of Jewish Studies, nor is she, like Beinart, a halachically observant Jew. The child of Jewish New Left war resisters who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, she has made a name for herself as one of the primary chroniclers and spokespeople for a new post–Cold War left. Beginning with an analysis of the global justice movement, her books and wider writing have explained and defended movements against the Iraq War and neoliberalism and for climate justice. From this vantage, it makes sense that her account of her own anti-Zionism would emerge as less a dialectic within the Jewish world than of a piece with political movements for liberation. Her Jewishness—while something she has never been shy about—now seems called upon, if not by other Jews, then by history itself.
On this score, Doppelganger’s narrative runs not through American Jewish liberalism but global Jewish Marxism: Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, Leon Trotsky, and Abram Leon. As her own background suggests, American Jewish anti-Zionism has far more often expressed itself outside of Jewish institutions than in, as evidenced by the outsized presence of American Jews in the radical left—from the Communist and socialist parties to Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Throughout the twentieth century, Marxists opposed Zionism not on the grounds that it was a perversion of Jewish teachings and traditions but mainly on the basis that it was a right-wing nationalist tendency, in line with other forms of latent fascism.
Citing Leon and Benjamin, Klein notes that fascism emerged as a countermovement to multi-ethnic working-class revolutions from Russia to Ireland, as well as to the stirrings of anticolonial revolt from Asia to the Middle East. The racialized trope of the “international Jew” was the scapegoat of the new socialist threat; the goal of fascism was always to eliminate Jewish alterity within Europe, by assimilation, expulsion, and finally genocide as a means to eliminate the left. With Israel, the fascists finally achieved their aim: to create a state and people in their own image, one that advances a global reactionary movement. Ascribing a mythic, timeless identity to Jewishness as the logic of a new “militarized ghetto” state is the apotheosis of fascism, not a resistance to it.
In this sense, Klein is able to synthesize the two theses of Beinart and Kroll-Zeldin: that Jews are simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary fascism, and also, in the United States, behind some of the organizations most active in resisting it. One voice says Never Again for Jews; the other says Never Again for anyone. To put it in terms that Benjamin or Trotsky would approve of, Zionism is the form of today’s class war against people’s rebellions, and anti-Zionism its multi-ethnic, working-class antithesis. The Jew for Klein is thus the ultimate doppelganger, victim become victimizer, a figure that signifies histories of both Israeli state fascism and anti-fascism, colonizer and the internally colonized. Shylock, as Klein’s reading of Philip Roth suggests, is the double here of Israel, the victim become victimizer, and the antisemitic image of the Jew forever bound by their wounding to wound. It is this slipperiness that gives the “anti-antisemitism” industry so much of its charge: it can persecute leftists in the very name of what was once a left-wing cause.
In this sense, the framework of “Jewish dissent” developed in the other books discussed here is far different from Klein’s analysis—perhaps because of her relative distance from American Jewish institutional life, perhaps because of her different entry point of radical social movements, as opposed to ethnic or religious community. For Klein, while the figure of the dissenter is of course valuable, it is also rather fatalistic: a statement of individual principle, rather than the expression of global struggles to produce multi-ethnic, multiracial working-class majorities. At stake, she thinks, are not Jewish ethics or Jewish communal institutions so much as the ways that Jewish history, and popular Jewish movements in the past, can point to a collective future and provide historical footing for those who do wish to resist. Seen from this vantage, JVP is less a dissenting voice within an increasingly reactionary Jewish institutional world than a part of a new global majority rejecting colonialism, racial apartheid, and militarism.
While Klein is closest of these authors to my own personal genesis as an activist and writer—we both came of political age during the late 1990s “Battle of Seattle” and the rise of the first hemispheric, anticapitalist movement since the 1960s—I see all these books as an ensemble, part of a social formation still struggling to be born. They are all asking, more or less explicitly, whether the victories of twentieth-century social democracy we have come to take for granted—that all people deserve to have rights, that we all should have basic liberties to speak, protest, and receive care—can remain meaningfully universalist, both for those who benefitted from such reforms and those who did not.
And American Jews did indeed benefit. Once a marginalized, poor, and discriminated-against minority, they shot, in Grace Paley’s words, “like a surface-to-air missile right into the middle class” after World War II. A result of mass unionization, the lifting of antisemitic quotas at universities and restrictive covenants in suburban housing, and state investment in public education and civil service, Jewish assimilation has long been held up as a sort of civic religion—proof that the United States is a liberal, welcoming, and increasingly inclusive society.
Jews themselves bought into this narrative en masse. They still vote Democratic as a group second only to African Americans—estimates show that around 70 percent voted for Kamala Harris in November—and they continue to support liberal issues such as abortion rights, gun control, and investments in public education at rates far higher than other American ethnic groups. It is as if American Jews are a kind of embodied memory of the successes of the New Deal and Great Society. Unlike Italian or Irish Americans, they still revere both the Civil Rights Act and Wagner Acts as crowning achievements of American liberal democracy. As my uncle was fond of saying, the New Deal made us Americans. It was not for nothing that reactionaries referred to the era of social and economic reform as the “Jew Deal.”
But as Paley’s image suggests, there is much this triumphant narrative conceals. American liberalism’s greatest achievements, both before and after World War II, were as much a response to the threat of communism as they were a genuine commitment to fulfill the promises of social democracy; behind Kennedy and Johnson’s visions stood Vietnam, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously invoked. In the decades since, American liberalism, in the form of the Democratic Party, has been complicit in mass incarceration, the expansion of the military-industrial complex, and the gutting of public goods and social services. Yet throughout all this, even as some Jews defected from civil rights to neoconservatism, the expectation prevailed that to be Jewish was, in some deep way, essentially to be liberal.
This may help to explain why Israel’s genocide registers so sharply for so many Americans, even or especially American Jews: it is the final betrayal of American liberalism, in the most grotesque form imaginable. As historian Michelle Mart puts it, Israelis “became surrogate Americans.” Both Israel and the United States are settler nations that consider themselves paradigms of the open society. From Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958) to the lightning victories of the 1967 war, Israel was increasingly seen by Americans in the aftermath of the civil rights era as reviving the righteous idea of their own country after its defeat by Vietnamese guerrillas abroad and hippies and Black power at home. “There were no draft dodgers in Israel,” historian Michael Fischbach writes of the late 1960s pro-Israel consensus—no Vietnam War, no burning ghettos, no drug addicts, no crime. Israel was Americans’ Disneyland abroad, a fantasy of an ideal past long gone, which in reality never existed.
Legally and morally speaking, Jewish history formed the architecture for the liberal postwar order: from the Nuremburg trials to the UN’s Geneva and Genocide Conventions, the new instruments of international law were all designed to prevent another Holocaust. As Pankaj Mishra has traced, Israel’s genocide against Palestine functions as something more bitter than irony: the state to have emerged from the Shoah, indeed with that genocide as its raison d’être, commits the very crime such laws were intended to stop. And this is perhaps Israel’s real horror: far from proving the “anachronism” that Deutscher described, it embodies the ethnonationalism of the future, beyond legal and moral restraints—a “portent,” as Mishra writes, “of a bankrupt and exhausted world.”
Can the United States, which framed its liberalism on a postwar order of human rights, live up to these values? It is not clear whether Jewish liberalism, to say nothing of a Jewish left, will arise triumphant from the ash heaps and killing fields of Zionism. Then again, it is not clear that the world will emerge from the rise of the far right and the entwined crises of wealth accumulation at one pole and immiseration at another, climate chaos, AI’s new military-industrial complexes, and the expanding carceral state. To be sure, these are not the same question: Jews are a tiny minority worldwide, numerically roughly the population of Illinois.
Yet like the Jewish Question, Jews are bound up with the liberal story the West tells about itself. Whether American Jews manage to shed their Zionism may or may not decide whether the United States continues to support Israel, and thus whether Israel will be empowered to continue on its rampage of ethnic cleansing and war without end. Yet as these authors suggest, each in their own way, American Jews have a material stake in the outcome of a just future for Palestine and Palestinians that is tied as much to Israelis as it is whether or not the United States remains in any form the liberal democracy it promised to be post-1965. To this extent, parting ways with Zionism should also be seen as the condition of the rescue of American liberalism itself.
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
The post The Outcasts of Zion appeared first on Boston Review.
Discover more from RSS Feeds Cloud
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.