Citizens of the Whole World: Delving into Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left

With the topic of “anti-Zionism” becoming part of the conversation around Israel-Palestine, and the first anti-Zionist forum held recently in Vienna, “Citizens of the Whole World: Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left” is well-timed for its deep dive into Jewish-American political activism and social justice movements, particularly in laying out the precedents for today’s “left-wing” Jewish organizations. As author Benjamin Balthaser outlines in his acknowledgments, part of his premise was to discover what the “formations of a new Jewish left might mean not only for global human rights and democracy, but also for Jewish identity, history, and our own sense of ourselves in community.”

For many readers, the text will be a primer on unfamiliar names and coalitions, and the first “criticisms” of Zionism from the Jewish left in the 1930s and 1940s. For many readers, the text will be a primer on unfamiliar names and coalitions, and the first “criticisms” of Zionism from the Jewish left in the 1930s and 1940s. The book’s cover art, “The Demonstration,” a painting by the Lithuanian-born artist Ben Shahn, sets the tone. 

Establishing that “there has always been an anti-Zionist Jewish left,” Balthaser states that the “emergence of a Zionist consensus, post-1967, was the historical oddity.” The Zionist structure that garners a consistent critique from what Balthaser terms a “distinctively Jewish-left” is defined by apartheid and state formation through “ethnic cleansing.”

Balthaser places the antecedents of movements like Jews for Religious and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in Jewish labor and socialist movements, which emanated from Eastern European roots. He continues into the 1930s “Red Decade,” the McCarthy Era Red Scare (when six of the Hollywood Ten were Jews), the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and the student and Yippie actions led by Jewish activists Mark Rudd and Abbie Hoffman.

Follow an alphabet soup of groups from the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Memberships shift and realign as internal disagreements on policy and direction create splinter coalitions. In addition to interviews with Jewish radicals from the 1960s and 1970s, there are references to the thinking of Jewish writers (Howard Fast, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Tony Kushner, and Joshua Cohen), Jewish intellectuals (Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Boyarin, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, and Naomi Klein). Even Jewish cultural icons like Larry David and Seth Rogen make an appearance.

There is an abundance of material to digest, including excursions into Marxist philosophy, colonialism, and the affinity of Jews with oppressed groups. In the book’s forty-nine-page introduction, “The American Jewish Left in the Shadow of Zion,” the reader receives grounding from the Communist theorist Alexander Bittelman, the founder of the CPUSA, who Balthaser quotes at length. Bittelman rejects “assimilationism” and “reactionary nationalism” [Zionism] for “progressive Jewish values”—which in the decades of the 1930s/1940s for the Jewish left sector equaled a “secular culture of social democracy, anti-racism, and cultural diversity—expressed through Jewish tradition.” Bittelman viewed Zionism as a form of imperialism, and Balthaser points out that both Bittelman and Arendt foresaw the forced displacement of Palestinians. They viewed the state of Israel as becoming part of a British and American triangle, with the third angle serving the “bourgeois interests of the Jewish ruling class.”

The word “diasporism” is paired and presented as a counter to Zionism and the latter’s takeover of Jewish American identity. Establishment organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Congress (AJC) jockey to be the significant voice of Jews in America, while they actively criticize other groups grounded in a different ethos. Sometimes, it’s to the point of vilification.

Balthaser posits that “Zionism is incompatible with the multiethnic democratic culture of the U.S. Left, and that Zionism is a violation of the Jewish ethics of diasporic mobility and an ethic of cohabitation.” In picking up the threads of previous decades of Jewish-American political action, Balthaser underscores that “the explosion of left-Jewish activism over Israel’s genocide [in Gaza] is just the latest chapter in this story.”

Digging into Jewish assimilation post-World War II and the embrace of whiteness (as opposed to Jewish solidarity with persecuted people of color in America and abroad), Balthaser goes back to the European scenario where Jews were the other, oppressed and despised. The roles are reversed in Palestine, as Jews became part of an imperial project. He presents the question, “Was Zionism a right-wing nationalism and a relinquishing of the European Class struggle?”

How did the horrors of the Holocaust morph Jewish opinion toward the premise of a state for Jews, convincing them that it was the only option for Jewish survival? American immigration laws subjected Eastern European Jews to quotas both immediately before and after World War II. Prior to the war, Jews were categorized as “Hebrew’ on census forms (1899-1943). When race profiling transforms from “biology to ethnicity,” Jews are allowed a certain amount of white privilege. This “racial reassignment,” accompanied by a population move of Jews from cities to the suburbs (along with admissions to top colleges where restrictions have been removed) led to an embrace of “whiteness” that changed Jewish self-perception in America.

I found Balthaser’s second chapter on the 1960s and 1970s, “Not Your Good Germans,” particularly dynamic, possibly because elements of it coincided with part of my lived experience.

Before getting into particulars, Balthaser again outlines how the 1967 Six-Day War was a watershed in the consciousness of American Jews and mainstream Jewish institutions. He cites the work of Matt Berkman, who followed the money, communications, and politics of these organizations as they turned from their work with war refugees and Shoah survivors to the prioritization of support for Israel. The result is Zionism and Israel becoming the centerpiece of American Judaism.

The 1974 treatise released by the ADL, written by Benjamin Epstein and Arnold Foster, entitled The New Anti-Semitism, was a precedent for the current Jewish establishment goals “to refocus the politics of antisemitism around Israel.” 

Balthaser shares the story of Peter Buch of the Socialist Workers Party, who grew up in the Hashomer Hatzair movement as a labor Zionist, and went on to refute his previous writings that had qualified Israel as a socialist and democratic project, later redefining it as a “capitalist and colonizing society.” Buch pointed to the fact that Arab workers were always willfully excluded by Israelis. Addressing the oft-touted phrase, “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,” Buch perceives Israeli society as built on a nation-building process that negated the formation of a progressive society, for one building the elements of “military expenditure, the creation of a homogenous national culture, and the colonial racism undergirding such exclusions.” I was interested in Buch’s concept that the “primary division in Israel’s politics was not between left and right, but between the Zionist and the anti-Zionist philosophies. Buch points to the Israeli group, Matzpen, as a potential “nucleus” for the “de-Zionization of Israel.”

Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League (JDL) are also a part of this decade’s story. Balthaser examines Kahane’s concepts and underscores that Kahane’s understanding of Zionism “was directly opposed to left-wing projects of decolonization.” The current Israeli ideologies of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich reflect Kahane’s supremacist philosophies.

Many of the Jewish leftists of the 1960s echoed the common thread that “the Jewish tradition” was to side with the “underdog and the oppressed.” The contrasts between “radical Jewish culture” and “Jewish nationalism” are illustrated; the former are American Jews and the latter are Israeli Jews. Repeatedly, these American Jews find their comfort zone in “international solidarity, not ethno-nationalism.”

Through a retelling of the Yippie movement and the trial of the Chicago 7 (featuring the back and forth between Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, with plenty of Yiddish to give it flavor), Balthaser picks up the thread of a specific commonality among the activists that he interviewed about the lesson of the Holocaust. It boils down to Jews should “never join the oppression of other people” and that “social solidarity, not Jewish particularism or nationalism, was what Holocaust memory should mean.” Balthaser adds several quotes to drive home this sentiment. Issac Deutscher wrote: “I am a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.” Suzanne Weiss, in response to the question, “Are you a Zionist?” replied, “No, I’m Jewish.” Balthaser assesses these responses as the “governing logic of the 1960s Jewish left.”

Each of the five chapters has extensive notes (one has up to 150 entries), with additional material to keep any reader in the weeds. As Balthaser moves through different iterations of the American Jewish left, he creates a road map for Jews who are presently trying to locate their Jewish realities. Not in what they have been taught, but in the response of their kishkes. Balthaser offers a wealth of information for those looking for a tradition to investigate or align with.

I snagged an interview with Balthaser to clarify several points I wanted to understand more fully. Generous with his time, he underscored, “Israel is crashing into U.S. politics.” He went over the backstory of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and their writings examining race and the post-World War II acquisition by Jews of white privilege. Many liberal American Jews, who had been part of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, began to feel threatened by the Black Power movement. Simultaneously, other fellow Jews saw solidarity in the context of a larger anti-war (Vietnam) movement, which would go on to embrace anti-imperialism.

It was the work of Issac Deutscher, who Balthaser said was quoted most frequently by the radicals he had interviewed. Deutscher was a Jewish Marxist born in Poland (1907), and originated the term “Non-Jewish Jew” to reference Jewish thinkers who, while not being active in Jewish religious or cultural affairs, had a definitive intellectual and emotional thread to their Jewish heritage (Think Spinoza, Trotsky, and Freud.). It was a way of identifying one’s Jewishness in the world. Kicked out of his Orthodox Polish community for adopting Communism, Deutscher was then purged by his Communist comrades in 1932, for discussing the dangers of fascism—which were on the horizon. The sole survivor of a family completely wiped out in the Holocaust, Deutscher’s political views were filtered “through Jewish eyes.”

Balthaser circled back to The New Anti-Semitism, “which would issue the opening salvo in what would become a decades-long attempt by the Jewish establishment to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” Balthaser qualified this as a move in the ADL from its focus on antisemitism to an emphasis on anti-Zionism, thereby giving a “Zionist framework” to the organization.

Even in Jewish progressive spaces, the fissures have become increasingly pronounced—from feminists and LGBTQ advocates, right up to the New York City Mayoral campaign. Zionism is becoming the litmus test of being Jewish, from those on the left and the right. Strident disagreement among American Jews has led to exclusionary politics becoming the norm.

Describing his book as “a story of transformation,” Balthaser mentioned his grandparents as the catalysts for his early exposure to “the Jewish left.” Balthaser’s undertaking of the book was to help readers understand how this “cleavage” among American Jews evolved. With the loss of a Martin Buber-esque concept of how the state of Israel could emerge, we discussed what kind of new iteration of Zionism might come to the fore, or if a de-Zionization of Israel was the best course?

“Everyone is walking these fine lines,” Balthaser emphasized. “There are real contradictions that can’t be papered over.”

In a world of “binaries,” as Balthaser defined tightly held views, “Citizens of the Whole World” offers a look at the history of ideas and activism that probe “a way to articulate one’s Jewishness.” While searching for a way to change one’s relationship to others, Balthaser opined that the journey to “changing the relationship to one’s self becomes evident.”

As I write this, the Gaza population is starving, and the death toll is over 61,000. The need to call out Israeli governmental action and to examine the topic of “Jewish complicity” is hard to ignore. While documenting the evolution in American Jewry’s political thinking, Balthaser has opened the door to insights that could inform entrenched beliefs.

People have the choice to walk through.