The International Anti-Zionist Jew

American Jewish institutions often project a kind of bizarre exceptionalism onto Jewish anti-Zionists, as if they are either a modern deviation, totally detached from the collective consciousness of peoplehood, or part of an age-old problem of Jewish self-hate, termed "autoantishemiut" (literally “Self-Loathing Jew”)  in Hebrew. Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky, a "Refusenik" known for his work fighting for Soviet Jewry's right to emigrate to Israel, called anti-Zionists the "Un-Jews." Mainline Jewish magazines like Tablet accuse anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, of spreading antisemitic hate, while the Anti-Defamation League gives JVP its own page right alongside groups like the National Socialist Movement. The American Jewish Committee, one of the largest Jewish advocacy organizations in the country, says that focusing on anti-Zionist Jews is "tokenization" and that "Zionism is an essential part of Jewish identity," which reflexively indicts anti-Zionist Jews for supposedly lacking sufficient Jewishness.

The purpose of this framing is clear: to merge Zionist politics with Jewish identity so thoroughly so that the consensus pro-Israel stance of contemporary American Jewish organizations appears transhistorical when, in reality, it is a rather recent aberration.

But as scholar Benjamin Balthaser’s new book Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left points out, not only did radical internationalism inform modern Jewish identity, it has continued to do so with a sizable, and growing, number of American Jews. When we see thousands of Jews flooding into the streets to demand a ceasefire in Palestine, they aren’t breaking from what has been too quickly assumed to be a Jewish communal consensus, they are representing a long-established Jewish tradition of solidarity against oppression and that stilted nationalism holds no path towards liberation.

As Balthaser shows throughout the groundbreaking study, Jewish history has not been one that univocally envisioned peoplehood in the model of romantic European nationalism.Instead, a different revolutionary strain of Jewish self-conception ran directly from the haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, up till now. This strain understood Jewish identity through the kind of internationalism that diaspora community demands. Jewish organizations love their history in the labor, anti-war, and civil rights movement, such as the romanticization of their role in Yiddish newspapers like Fraye arbeṭer shṭime or their role in the legendary Ladies Garment Worker Union (an ancestor to today’s UNITE HERE),  until you remind them what their ancestors’ opinion typically was about Palestine.

While the left was well represented among a number of immigrant groups, few such groups were rivaled by the sheer quantity of Jewish presence. By some estimates Jews made up half of the Communist Party (as many as 5-10% of American Jews were party members), which had its own Jewish section and Yiddish language press. The radical wing of the labor movement was an overwhelmingly Jewish affair, as were historic antifascist movements, volunteers with the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, or allies of the Black freedom struggle. The Jewish history of oppression and the fact that their mobile history bred an inherent suspicion of states, capitalists, and politicians helped lead generations of Jews to define America’s left. It wasn’t until the end of World War II, the formation of the State of Israel, and the eventual ubiquity of Zionism after 1967’s Six Day War was it even possible to feign the assumption that American Jews had fully assimilated into liberalism.

Balthaser is a seasoned Americanist, but that is not the only vantage point from where he is looking at American Jewish history. He comes from generations of radical Jewish activists: his grandparents were Communist Party members, like many Jews, and he has spent his own adult life moving through socialist and anti-Zionist groups. While often framed as an unconventional sort of Jewish identity, it’s actually rather traditional, particularly if we look back to the Jewish left of the 1930s, where Balthaser’s study begins. The American Jewish left was not actually an import from Eastern Europe, but rather organic to the Jewish experience of hitting U.S. shores, sweatshops and tenements. Many had escaped increasingly violent persecution in the shtetl and joined the American project with both a sense of profound optimism and the willingness to leave behind the vestiges of the past. This led to a profound decrease in Judaism as the key marker of a Jewish identity, and instead many of these workers found that identity was more authentically expressed for them in cultural elements like the Yiddish language or in the kind of multi-racial, multi-cultural class politics of a left forced to deal with the diversity of the American working class.

Balthaser traces how Jews in the 1930s and 40s, primarily within the Communist and Socialist Parties, thought about their Jewishness. In doing so we can see Balthaser breaking with other historians. Tony Michaels remains one of the most respected scholars of the early Jewish left, and he suggests that radical Jews, at least shortly after the turn of the century, were ambivalent about their Jewish identity and looked forward to assimilating into the international proletariat. He says it was actually the Jewish Socialist Labour Bund, a Jewish particularist socialist organization that took shape in the Pale of Settlement, Eastern Europe, and Russia, that began to shift things, injecting a kind of progressive Jewish nationalism into the left’s class politics and moving these Jews back towards preserving the vestiges of at least a secular Jewish life. Balthaser suggests this assumed Bundist influence might not be accurate since the Bund never had a large foothold in the UShe Communist Party and surrounding unions, like the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) were, however, “Bundist” in orientation rather than direct affiliation, since they had deep Jewish attachments. “Despite differences with the Bund, Jewish Communists and socialists in the US constructed an ethnic particularism that echoed some of the Bund’s own cultural politics,” writes Balthaser (54). He turns directly to the sources for this, such as Alexander Bittlemen, a well published Communist Party member and writer who spoke clearly that Jewish nationalism was a necessary corrective to assimilation. 

But this kind of national consciousness was in direct opposition to Zionism, which these workers saw as directly connected to fascism because of its roots in ethnic nationalism. For the Jewish left, Zionists were schemers, charlatans and class collaborators, colluding with Western empire and capitalists for safety rather than to the power the working class could generate if it took its own interests seriously. For example, Bittelmen agreed with the Palestine Communist Party of the time, which supported organizing the Jewish workers of the Yishuv in direct opposition to the "programmatic demand to turn Palestine into a Jewish state.” As Balthaser summarizes, Bittlemen, and others, believed that “if Jews have any role to play in Palestine, it would be to free Palestinians from colonialist rule.” This was not an aberration for these Jews, it was common sense.

Balthaser also bucks conventional wisdom regarding how, or even if, Jews transitioned away from the left. As he points out throughout the text, there are a number of books that discuss Jewish assimilation into whiteness and flight to the suburbs, but few point to the Red Scare of the 1950s as a major cause. Jews were disproportionately targeted by antisemitic allegations during McCarthyism, and many Jewish organizations, like the ADL, participated in purging alleged communists. Many Jewish leftist organizations like the Jewish People's Fraternal Order (JPFO) were literally outlawed, and the Jewish heavy radical unions from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) were likewise shuttered. It was dangerous to be a Jew on the left, and mainline Jewish organizations, which had their own history of appealing to centrist, affluent, often Jewish-German immigrants, took advantage of this by setting a new standard for what the proper expression of Jewishness became. With the Six Day War this process was completed and the craving for Jewish identity that many found on the Jewish left was replaced with a more acceptable form of Jewish consciousness: Zionism. 

But this strain of the Jewish left still continued and was expressed in two interesting ways in the New Left. The first, as Balthaser tracks in his chapter “Not Good Germans,” is the influence Jewish memory had in mobilizing some of the most outspoken activists from groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Yippies. Balthaser discusses Mark Rudd, one of the leading members of SDS out of Columbia who eventually went underground with the Weathermen, who points to his family’s experience with the Holocaust as a reason why he could not remain silent and complicit during the Vietnam war. None of them wanted to be “good Germans,” who sat politely back why murders were taking place. The same logic played into Jerry Rubin’s bombastic public performance, which often highlighted his own stereotypically Jewish features and appealed to the subaltern nature of Jewish outsiderness. 

This version of the Jewish left probably would never have claimed its Jewishness as a frontline identity, particularly since the anti-imperialist left of the time was focusing on white allyship as a pathway to engagement. But another version of the Jewish left, broadly referred to as neo-Bundism, wanted to return to that multicultural vision of a Jewish left that saw Jewishness itself as a way of bucking assimilation and taking part in the rainbow of resistance cultures that could be mobilized in solidarity against the Western capitalist project. This led to largely non-Zionist groups like the Brooklyn Bridge Collective and Chutzpah, which, while never becoming officially anti-Zionist, helped to really start the Jewish-led Palestine solidarity organizing in the U.S. This began by building deep relationships with the Israeli left, which at the time had (a perhaps naive) belief that an ultimately equitable solution was to be found in Israel-Palestine that would end the Occupation and lead to a sovereign Palestinian state. 

These groups had a range of opinions, and when you read through their publications today some of them read as though they could have been written by the contemporary Jewish right. The reasons for this are complicated: the way antisemitism is referenced today is so often opportunistic and disingenuous that it’s easy to read that same attitude into these sources from the past. But they show a process of evolution, and increasingly they hold space for profound political differences. These are the groups, along with others like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) in New York City and, later, New Jewish Agenda, that created the lineage of organizations that lead up to JVP today.

Balthaser slowly brings us up to the present with a number of literary detours where he shows his background as a scholar of comparative literature. But these are fascinating opportunities to be reminded that there are other models of Jewishness that have sat alongside the mainline Israel-inflected political model that seems so ubiquitous today. Whether it is the hysterical neurosis of Philip Roth or Larry David, or the international syncretism of poets Martin Espada and Aurora Levins Morales, there are other distinctly Jewish perspectives that have their own authentic history and tradition. Balthaser seems especially enchanted by Jewish novelist Mike Gold’s 1930 comedic novel Jews Without Money, which itself shares much of the impulses that defined the Jewish left of the time. Balthaser’s alternative Jewishness, the kind portrayed in Citizens of the Whole World, is not just an alternative political or social vision, it is one that is distinctly working class in a world where the prescribed character of normative Jewish identity is being decided by the wealthy presidents of major Jewish organizations. 

When we look at the American Jewish politics around Israel-Palestine there is a direct class connection between how wealthy someone is and how enthusiastic their Zionism is. Balthaser’s discovery here is not just the realm of ideas, but the material realities that make those ideas proliferate. It’s not that Jews became wealthy and then assimilated into the American project of middle class political hegemony, but the Jewish voices allowed to speak are defined by this tendency and dedicated to reproducing their ideological hegemony with everything from birthright trips to the marginalization of their opponents.

Balthaser ends the book in a distinctly personal way by looking at organizations he has had his own role in building. He is a member of the Chicago chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and helped to form the Jewish Solidarity Caucus (JSC) in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a distinctly anti-Zionist Jewish formation that came together in support of DSA’s BDS resolution in 2017, and then took part in organizing antifascist resistance to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This model of a Jewish organization is tied to the same conditions that made the Communist Party and its Jewish section its own kind of normative space for Jewish identity: as young people become downwardly mobile in an increasingly volatile economy they are more likely to slip into the radical socialist organizations familiar to their great grandparents and away from the stilted, suburban synagogues and Federation sponsored projects that no longer speak to their lived reality. Their anti-Zionism emerges from this reality as much as it does from the moral outrage that their identity is being mobilized to justify a genocide in Gaza. 

But as Balthaser points out across several generations, their anti-Zionism is a constituent of something larger, a sense of Jewishness that has always been tied to the outsider experience of Jewish history and the need to build strong, cosmopolitan and democratic societies where Jews and all minorities can flourish. That lesson simply cannot be learned if your model of correct Jewishness is built around the maintenance of a Jewish majority state in historic Palestine since the Zionism appropriate to its very existence is predicated on the notion that every ideological remnant of our Jewish past was fundamentally incorrect. These two models of Jewishness, the historically rooted and evolving one, and the historically naive, Zionist one cannot co-exist.

Citizens of the Whole World is brilliant, captivating, and persuasively argued, and will stand out as perhaps one of the best books ever written about the American Jewish left. Part of what makes it so is that on top of his expert scholarship, Balthaser knows this material in a way that archival research and plucky interviews will never teach you: this model of Jewishness only exists if we choose to build it. As the situation continues to devolve in Palestine/Israel and young Jews shift away from the earlier infrastructure of Jewishness, there are going to be more people who feel as though that choice has already been made for them as they consider what it means to be Jewish and who our allies are in that fight. We are already citizens of the whole world. We remember what our ancestors taught us.