Anti-Zionism

From author of For over a century, Zionism has often been treated as inseparable from Jewish identity--a natural response to antisemitism, exile, and genocide. But in Figures such as Edwin Montagu, who condemned the Balfour Declaration; Jacob Israël de Haan, assassinated for his anti-Zionism; and Nadine Gordimer, who compared Israeli occupation to apartheid, are among many who challenged the dominant narrative. Their resistance often came at great personal cost, yet their warnings and ideals remain strikingly relevant in today’s fractured political landscape. Moser, himself a descendant of Holocaust survivors and a former Zionist, writes with urgency and compassion. He offers not a rejection of Jewish identity, but a reclamation of a different tradition--one rooted in human rights, moral clarity, and fearless dissent. At a moment of rising global tension and growing censorship, <Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History< opens a long-suppressed conversation that continues to shape the present.

Autorentext

BENJAMIN MOSER is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. Sontag: Her Life and Work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, and The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters appeared in 2023. He completed the present book at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Klappentext

A sweeping and revelatory history of the hidden tradition of Jewish thinkers who opposed Zionism, from Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser.

In Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, Benjamin Moser uncovers a suppressed tradition that has shaped Jewish thought for generations. Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists, and politicians—from Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America—Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism’s moral and political stakes—often at devastating personal cost, including censorship, exile, and death.

Their lives form a sweeping, global narrative that dismantles a powerful myth: that anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. Spanning continents and centuries, these voices—people from the right and the left, Reform and Orthodox, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, men and women, gay and straight—differ sharply in belief and background, yet converge on a shared warning about the consequences of a nationalist project built on exclusion. What emerges is not only a rediscovered tradition of Jewish moral thought, but a startling reappraisal of Zionism itself.

Moser’s work restores the full scale and depth of Jewish ethical imagination, affirming that Judaism is older and larger than any single political project. Lucid, unsparing, and deeply humane, Anti-Zionism cements Moser’s place as one of our foremost Jewish writers and presents a framework through which this history—and its meanings—will be understood for years to come.