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 through the student and Yippie movements led by Jewish activists Mark Rudd and Abbie Hoffman.
There is 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.
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