Review: The academy ruins an important history of Jewish anti-zionism

Benjamin Balthaser, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the cultures of the American Jewish left. Verso, 2025.

I became aware of this book some time before publication. Having had a major interest in the Jewish radical tradition for many years, I felt inspired and immediately began to research the subject.

In earlier publications,^[1] Balthaser draws attention to the little known anti-Zionist political positions of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) in the 1930s and 1940s, significant also because of their substantial Jewish membership: Balthaser notes that an estimated half of the party membership in the 1930s was Jewish. Taking the turnover of members into account, some hundred thousand Jews may have at one time been communists, perhaps 5–10 percent of the entire Jewish population. This was particularly important in New York and other cities where Jews were concentrated, and where they were overwhelmingly working-class.

The CP centred its critique around Zionists’ alignment with British imperialism. Leader Earl Browder argued that despite the fig leaf of a mandate, “Britain owns Palestine and uses it to serve its own imperialist interests”. Nor could Palestine provide a refuge for Jews, as Zionists tried to argue: “Taking Jews out of the hell of Hitler’s Germany or pogroms in Poland and bringing them to Palestine…is not the way to solve the problems of the Jews”.^[2]

It was disappointing to find that, having drawn attention to the CPUSA’s impressive political stand, Balthaser’s articles provide virtually no insight into how it informed the practice of the party. This is a regrettable omission given that just a short search reveals some very interesting material about the actions the CPUSA carried out against the Zionists.^[3]

A few days after 1929 riots in Jerusalem between Palestinians and Zionists, 2,000 Jewish anti-Zionist members of the CP rallied in New York in support of the Palestinians. A major campaign in streets and party publications followed, during which right-wing Zionists, Jewish socialists, the American Legion, and police attacked party meetings, and offices in New York and other cities.

These conflicts were often quite violent. For instance after the communist defence guard repelled an attack on 3,000 people at a rally in Brooklyn, the attackers called in the police.

The police charged, brutally hitting left and right. More than a score of workers were severely beaten, one having his head cut open and another left lying unconscious… Six workers were arrested including Harold Williams, Negro District Organizer of the Communist Party.^[4]

Despite this major shortcoming, there are certainly strengths in the book.

It ambitiously covers four discrete political periods: the Depression to the Cold War (1930s, ’40s and ’50s), the New Left in the 1960s–70s, Jewish identity politics in the 1980s and the (re)emergence of Jewish anti-Zionism in the recent period. Balthaser uses source material from a range of organisations such as the CPUSA, the Socialist Workers Party (Fourth International), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its descendants such as the Weather Underground, and a number of Jewish activist groups particularly from the 1980s.

Balthaser’s aim is to show that the current conspicuous involvement of Jews in the pro-Palestinian movement is not new.

There has always been an antizionist Jewish left; indeed it is the emergence of a Zionist consensus, post 1967, that has been the historical oddity… (T)here has (re-)emerged a distinctively Jewish left that has held a remarkably consistent critique of Zionism… Jews on the left have both a particular opportunity and duty to ally with Palestinians and Israelis who wish to dismantle this state project. (p4)

Covering such a span of history is useful in establishing the continuity of this tradition. The high proportion of Jews in left-wing movements, as evidenced in the CPUSA in the 1930s and ’40s, continued into the post-WW2 period. Jews played an important role in the Black movements for civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s – in fact there was more Jewish support for civil rights than for Zionism in the late 1950s. Jews such as Jerry Rubin were prominent in Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and in other organisations of the New Left.

I was particularly intrigued by the activities of the Jewish radical collectives in the 1970s and ’80s. Two such were Chutzpah Collective in Chicago and Brooklyn Bridge Collective in New York, which consciously looked back to the heritage of Jewish socialism and activism for social justice internationally such as the Jewish Labor Bund.^[5] Balthaser considers they were important predecessors of today’s Jewish Voice for Peace.

In 1978 Chutzpah pulled together a coalition to oppose Nazi organising in Chicago’s suburbs, with violent attacks on Martin Luther King and other Black activists and local residents. When the city government tried to counter their activities, they changed focus and announced a provocative march through a Jewish neighbourhood. Ultimately the march was cancelled, but not before the coalition held a

militant gathering…(with) the presence of “Holocaust survivors” with “iron pipes under their sweaters” as well as Jewish and non-Jewish anti-fascist groups carrying “canes” and “baseball bats” – while most of the mainstream Jewish groups stayed away”. (p181)

Subsequently an even more important march led by a diverse coalition brought together Jews, Blacks and a wide range of socialists and activists (including the International Socialists). Balthaser quotes a member of Chutzpah who “was privileged to experience the first taste of a fighting unity” among “thousands of Jews, Blacks and leftists…ready to brave…flying bricks and bottles in common physical defense”.^[6]

This march, which passed through a primarily Black neighbourhood, was violently threatened by white racists and resulted in numerous arrests. This was one of the largest marches against fascism in Chicago’s history and the Chutzpah writer felt he was witnessing the “Black-Jewish working class communist united front” he had always dreamed of.

In sum, over the decades that he covers, Balthaser writes that “there was perhaps far more continuity with the three generations of Jewish socialists than there was rupture” (p.221) – a sentiment I can agree with.

But unfortunately, this is not the book for those who want to know more about this tradition.

There are three main problems. Firstly the book is heavily academic. Secondly, although while it purports to engage with socialist and Marxist organisations and activists of all stripes, the analysis is grounded not in socialist or Marxist analyses but in whiteness theory. And thirdly, although Balthaser is a committed anti-Zionist and supporter of Palestine, and his avowed purpose of rediscovering a radical Jewish anti-Zionist past is to be applauded, there is unfortunately very little actual history in this book.

Firstly, why do academics need to use words such as metonymic, liminal, Gestalt and autochthonous? If the goal of this book is to engage activists with a topic that is extremely relevant to our times, this kind of academic obscurantism is a barrier. It also reflects Balthaser’s own barriers to understanding. For instance, in discussing a poem by a Jewish socialist woman about being a temporary white-collar worker in the new gig economy in the 1970s, he concludes: “The poem’s Jewishness is perhaps its contingent relationality”. I would think the poet had more need of a trade union than academic incomprehensibility.

The academic pretentiousness is however less important than the core philosophical and analytical approach – whiteness theory. Identity politics is so widespread today that it’s not surprising to find an academic anti-Zionist who embraces it and attempts to use the concepts to analyse Jewish radical history.

Sarah Garnham defines identity politics this way:

Identity politics is a set of ideas and practices that aim to build recognition of and expand representation for particular identity groups. It reflects the social, political and career aspirations of a particular layer within these groups, who seek to hegemonise their political approach to oppression among all those concerned with challenging it. The starting point is the elevation of select identity groups to moral and political pre-eminence, while implicitly or explicitly subordinating others. Different advocates of identity politics see the world through different identity lenses, usually the ones that they are personally connected to.^[7]

Garnham notes some general theoretical and political assumptions that underpin identity politics, of which the ones most relevant to Jewish identity are an essentialist view of identity and the assumption that the subjective experience of marginalisation is the defining feature of oppression. The concept of privilege is also important to Balthaser’s analysis, rooted as it is in the originally New Left concept of “white skin privilege”.

But Balthaser has a major problem in analysing Jewish oppression and antisemitism in terms of whiteness theory – most people would consider US Jews (most of them originating in Eastern Europe) as white, and therefore they would appear to be the bearers of privilege according to the logic of identity politics. What then do we make of the fact that Jews in the US have been the victims of anti-Jewish hatred and exclusion, not to say anything of the centuries of oppression they suffered in Europe?

The reality is that the position and status of the Jewish community has changed considerably over the past century.

In the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, Jews in the US were overwhelmingly working-class. As refugees from pogroms and persecution in Eastern Europe they brought with them their language (Yiddish) and their culture, including the tradition of struggle. In the pre-WW2 period and more so after WW2, sections of the Jewish community moved into the middle class. Although the tradition of socialism, activism and social justice remained strong, more right-wing tendencies also grew, most notably Zionism.

Marxists can discuss and understand how these changes in class position led to shifts in the relationship between oppression and exploitation within capitalism. But while Balthaser does mention class, his main analytical method is to try to explain social changes in terms of whiteness theory: sometimes Jews are “white”, sometimes non-“white” and sometimes somewhere in between.

For example in analysing the politics of Jewish activist groups in the 1980s, he comments that their notion of identity is:

relational, dialectic, and based on contingent relationships with both the left and other marginalised groups. The diaspora, then for (the groups) is a place between and among all these contradictions, neither resolving them nor allowing them to overwhelm the particularity of either group. Diasporism is neither exclusively identitarian nor a flattened, universal subject. (p 185)

How does this “sometimes it’s one thing, sometimes it’s the opposite” help us understand anything? The Chicago anti-fascist marches are successful and inspiring examples of how to organise, not a tortured academic subject.

Balthaser clearly had access to a wide range of resources. But the book almost exclusively discusses writings by individual members of selected organisations supplemented by interviews. There is almost no discussion of the politics of the organisations as a whole, nor are these politics really set against the period in which they exist. And most importantly, the politics are not discussed in terms of how successful they were – the analyses are abstract and philosophical. Balthaser gives equal weight to all the organisations he discusses, he maintains a distance (meant to make him “objective”, no doubt), and makes no attempt to take a position.

The most blatant example of this is the failure in his discussion of the CPUSA in the 1930s and ’40s to situate the organisation’s politics on Jews within the changes in strategy that occurred in that period. The abrupt change in 1934 from what was known as “Third Period Stalinism” to the popular front strategy is completely absent – the word Stalinism does not appear in the book at all. This is a very clear example of the problems with the myopia of academic research: it often results in omitting core elements and context.

In the Third Period the Comintern, and the CPUSA with it, called the socialist parties and members of the Second International “social fascists”. Thus the Zionists that they came in conflict with, many of whom were socialist Zionists like Hashomer Hatsair, were called “social fascist Zionists”. This was in fact a major source of the violent conflicts. CP language changed dramatically with the introduction of the popular front, when the party oriented to building alliances with non-working-class forces and organisations. But there is no mention of this in the book.

In discussing the post-World War Two periods, Balthaser smoothly glides between discussions of the CP, SDS and the New Left, the Weather Underground and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (USA) without apparently noticing the fundamental differences between them politically. This is because the book is in the main a collection of material about thoughts and ideas in the heads of a number of selected individuals.

Perhaps the most famous quote from Karl Marx is from the Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.

Balthaser doesn’t take us past the first point; the ideas in this book mostly remain in the heads of the people thinking them. But in order to change the world, ideas need to come out of people’s heads and contend with each other – to be tested in the world. The value of history is to see how ideas are expressed through actions and group experience, to learn from the past. For that we need to look elsewhere.

Janey Stone is a long-term socialist who has written extensively on women’s liberation, Zionism and antisemitism. She is the co-author (with Donny Gluckstein) of The Radical Jewish Tradition. Revolutionaries, resistance fighters & firebrands.

References

Abramson, Rachel n.d., “Confronting the Nazis”, Chutzpah, 15, p.8, quoted in Balthaser 2025.

Balthaser, Benjamin 2020, “When Anti-Zionism Was Jewish: Jewish Racial Subjectivity and the Anti-Imperialist Literary Left from the Great Depression to the Cold War”, American Quarterly, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 72, Number 2, June 2020, pp.449–70, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/758945

Browder, Earl 1936, Zionism: Address at the Hippodrome Meeting June 8, 1936, Yidburo Publishers.

Garnham, Sarah 2021, “The failure of identity politics: A Marxist analysis”, Marxist Left Review, 22, Winter. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-failure-of-identity-politics-a-marxist-analysis/

Gluckstein, Donny and Janey Stone 2024, The Radical Jewish Tradition. Revolutionaries, resistance fighters & firebrands, Interventions.

Lazare, Sarah 2020, “The Forgotten History of the Jewish, Anti-Zionist Left: A conversation with scholar Benjamin Balthaser about Jewish, working-class anti-Zionism in the 1930s and ’40s”, In These Times, 13 July. https://inthesetimes.com/article/jewish-anti-zionism-israel-palestine-colonialism-annexation-apartheid.

“Zionism, Palestine, and the Left: Articles from 1903 to 1939”, Revolution’s Newsstand, , https://revolutionsnewsstand.com/2025/02/25/zionism-palestine-and-the-left-articles-from-1903-to-1939/

“Zionist Drive Against the Communist Party’ from The Daily Worker. September, 1929”, Revolution’s Newsstand, https://revolutionsnewsstand.com/2023/10/24/zionist-drive-against-the-communist-party-from-the-daily-worker-september-1929/

1. Lazare 2020, Balthaser 2020.
2. Browder 1936.
3. See “Zionism, Palestine, and the Left: Articles from 1903 to 1939”, Revolution’s Newsstand.
4. “Zionist Drive Against the Communist Party”, The Daily Worker, September 1929.
5. For more on this heritage I recommend Gluckstein and Stone 2024.
6. Abramson n.d., “Confronting the Nazis”, quoted in Balthaser 2025.
7. Garnham 2021, p.83.