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

Literature scholar Balthaser (Anti-Imperialist Modernism) charts the complex relationship between Jewish leftist thought and the Zionist movement in this insightful intellectual history. Surveying the 20th-century organizations, intellectuals, and activists who opted for a more diasporic vision of Jewish life than their Zionist counterparts, Balthaser homes in on the 1960s and ’70s emergence of the New Left and the ways in which anti-Zionist thinking overlapped with the New Left’s broader anticolonialist ideology. Along the way, he explores such fascinating tangents as how the era’s thinking was influenced by the 1950s Red Scare and the role that Jewish “red diaper babies” played in the prominent 1960s organization Students for a Democratic Society. Balthaser highlights divisive moments in the history of the American left brought about by conflicting opinions about Zionism, particularly intense debate in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. Some of the book’s most fascinating segments deal with anti-Zionist “radical Jewish collectives” in New York that clashed with the Zionist, far-right Jewish Defense League over the Vietnam War, among other political flash points. Late in the book, Balthaser shifts into a more literary analysis, weaving in revealing discussions of how Zionism and anti-Zionism play out in books by the likes of Philip Roth, Jess Row, and Joshua Cohen. The result is a powerful showcasing of a long-standing and robust strain of anti-Zionist sentiment in American politics. (July)