Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
by Benjamin Moser
The Jewish tradition they tried to bury.
For you if
you’ve been told that certain questions about Israel make you antisemitic.
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The equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is one of the most effective thought-terminating moves in contemporary political life — and it has a history. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Benjamin Moser recovers the suppressed Jewish intellectual tradition that opposed Zionism from the beginning: artists, rabbis, poets, and politicians across continents and centuries who saw in the Zionist project a betrayal of Jewish ethics and were censored, exiled, or erased for saying so. What emerges is not an attack on Jews but a portrait of a richer, more morally serious Jewish intellectual life than the official story allows — one where the question was always contested, always internal, always alive. This is the book that gives the Jewish reader permission to ask the questions they’ve been told are antisemitic.
Where This Book Lives
P&P carries this not because we take positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but because recovering suppressed intellectual traditions is what we do. Moser isn’t an activist — he’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and the figures he profiles (among them Hannah Arendt, Einstein, scores of rabbis and poets) have been systematically written out of the story of what Jews believe and have believed. The question this book answers — was there always a serious Jewish intellectual tradition opposing Zionism? — has been suppressed precisely because the answer is yes. That suppression is itself the story.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
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Five cameras destroyed. Every one kept filming.
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Why it’s here: Shot almost entirely by a Palestinian farmer with no filmmaking background, on cameras that kept getting destroyed and kept getting replaced — testimony in the most literal sense, edited (not directed) into shape by an Israeli co-director after the fact.
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Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
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Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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Knowledge was always the target.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
