In this compact book, Marjorie Feld, a professor of history at Babson College, provides an overview of perspectives that are critical of Zionism. While billed as a history, Feld’s study covers only the first one hundred years of anti-Zionist critique, beginning in the 1880s (before the first official Zionist conference) and extending to the 1980s. A “coda” brings us to the post – October 7 crisis.
Feld has a twofold thesis. The first and primary strand of her narrative focuses on recovering what she argues is a major strain of Jewish thought: opposition to Zionism. In this narrative, she recalls in much (and occasionally repetitive) detail the anti-Zionist and non-Zionist arguments that began with the nineteenth-century Reform movement and culminated with the New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s.
For Jews in the early American Reform movement and many others since, Zionism posed a threat to Jewish flourishing in the diaspora, especially in the United States, the goldene medina. Although antisemitism was prevalent in the US, many Jews felt that assimilation would reduce the threat. Zionism, they maintained, would make it difficult to blend in. Another form of critique came from socialists and other progressives who argued that Zionism, a form of nationalism, was inimical to their socialist vision of the brotherhood of all people.
Some of the anti-Zionist leanings of the contemporary left can be found in early critiques as well — especially the argument that Zionism is colonialism, an argument that took on additional force in the 1950s and 1960s in the wake of worldwide anti-colonialist movements and the rise of the American Black Power Movement. There was also the anti-Zionist orientation of many Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who bridled at the presumption that the return to Zion could be accomplished without the Messiah. Feld does not give much attention to this particular angle.
Before World War II, the Zionist position may have been the true minority opinion. That changed with the rise of Hitler and Nazism. Then, the Zionist argument for a homeland became more powerful. There were still voices in opposition — Feld focuses on the work of Rabbi Morris Lazaron, the businessman Lessing Rosenwald, and journalists William Zukerman, Henry Hurwitz, and Morris Schappes — but they became increasingly marginalized. The Zionist position was in the ascendant.
The second part of Feld’s thesis concerns what she calls the “threshold of dissent”: how the “consensus” about Zionism was created and enforced. In her view, that threshold has been kept low, especially since the 1960s. That is, those who step outside the prevailing view promulgated by the major Jewish organizations (e.g., ADL, Conference of Presidents, and AIPAC) become the targets of intense rhetorical abuse. They are deemed antisemites or self-hating Jews, even when the same views are openly debated in Israel. Here, Feld is more an advocate for a position than a neutral historian, reiterating her view that the consensus is “manufactured” and “forced” (her language echoes Noam Chomsky’s). There is ample evidence that the major organizations exert a great deal of influence on opinion, but how exactly Zionism became a prevailing ideology is not explored in detail; the argument could be strengthened by a more thorough explanation of theories about how public opinion is formed.
Notwithstanding these deficiencies, the historical record Feld puts forth is relevant to the increasingly intense debate within the Jewish community about the future of the Jewish state.
