To read part 1 of this conversation, please visit this earlier post.
Francesca Freeman: All of the historical actors you engage in the book are Jewish, but Judaism plays different roles and manifests in varying ways at different historical moments. For example, you contrast current anti-Zionist Jewish public practices, such as holding a public Seder at the anti-Zionist, anti-genocide university encampments in Spring 2024 with the under-the-radar, private Jewish practices of Leftist activists in the 1970s, such as a Students for a Democratic Society campus leader cooking matzo ball soup for his comrades at home. Indeed, you assert that the public religiosity of the anti-Zionist left is “quite new” (2). What role does “religion” or Judaism as a religion play for the historical and cultural actors you engage in Citizens of the Whole World? Would those approaches resonate with American Jews today, or is there a substantive difference between historical and contemporary understandings of Judaism and the role Judaism plays in anti-Zionist activism?
Benjamin Balthaser: While reading the many and varied publications of the 1960s New Left, I came across a fascinating example of the complexity of “secularism” and “religion,” particularly in the Jewish context. In Norm Fruchter’s 1965 review-essay of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem for Studies on the Left (a kind of U.S. companion to the U.K.’s New Left Review), he refers to “secularism” twice in one paragraph to signify two completely contrary ideas. Secularism in his first meaning refers to an administered rationality, the Weberian modern world stripped of enchantment. This form of “secularism” Fruchter uses somewhat interchangeably with assimilation, as it includes suburban synagogues, Jewish non-profits, and the entire middle-class world of consumer capitalism and its rational, individualist instrumentalism. It is this secular world—one that includes liberal Jewish religion to be sure—that was aghast at Arendt’s essays and her less than pious sanctity of Israel’s public execution of the former Nazi.
Fruchter’s second use of the term “secular” refers to a longer history of Jewish humanism, one which he associates with the progressive tradition not only of the Left—from Einstein to Goldman to Marx—but a genealogy that begins with Spinoza and Maimonides, and which places human ethical action at the center of a philosophical conception of the world. In this latter sense, Jewish secularism and Jewish religion are not conceived as necessary opposites; they may be at times parallel to but are not identical to either the birth of Western states or Martin Luther’s separation of religious “faith” from the public welfare and its collective expression in the political. This vision of Jewish “secularism” is perhaps entirely outside of, or least not contained by the terms of, what is normally referred to as a the left debate around religion, Marxism, revolution and the state.
Jewish secularism and Jewish religion are not conceived as necessary opposites; they may be at times parallel to but are not identical to either the birth of Western states or Martin Luther’s separation of religious “faith” from the public welfare.
In that sense, my history of the American Jewish left doesn’t spend much time or devote intentional space to a rigid distinction between the religious and secular, except when they intersect with other political questions: Rabbi Meir Kahane’s anti-communism is of course connected, for him at least, to his religious orthodoxy; Chutzpah’s critique of Breira was, for Chutzpah at least, linked to their critique of institutional Jewish religious liberalism. That said, it is clear that the new Jewish left—from JVP to INN to Jewish Currents—is far more religiously observant, and publicly so, than its early 20th century counterparts in the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order or SDS.
In my final chapter, I recognize two overlapping and often polysemous strains of Jewish left practice. One flows from “secular” twentieth-century Jewish socialism and the other from Rabbi Waskow’s “freedom seder” and the left wing of the Jewish Renewal movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is a divergent sense of Jewish left-wing practice that separates these strains: the former, “secular” Jewish socialism, is often a politics of “memory,” while the religious strain is often a politics of ritual “reinscription,” the former organized around history and the latter around observance. While these are not absolute or binary categories (memory relies on observance and observance relies on memory) these different strains do have different conceptions frequently of Zionism, Jewish peoplehood, and the relationship of anti-Zionism to a wider conception of the political. If I can paint with very broad brush strokes, through my interviews, Jewish Marxists often tended to be leftists first and come to their anti-Zionism through a critique of racism and empire; more religious Jewish leftists tended to arrive at the left from a critique of Zionism.
Yet most Jewish leftists I interviewed mixed the two strains in complex ways that were impossible to disentangle. Most Jewish left-wing organizations, such as JVP, which is the largest and probably most representative, include forms of Jewish observance at many of their gatherings and protests. There is a JVP rabbinical council and JVP lists over a dozen synagogues as aligned with its values and which participate in JVP holiday observances. JVP members span a continuum from strictly observant to militantly anti-religious and everything in between. Most JVP members accept this diverse range of Jewish identity and practice. And because much of Jewish observant life is organized in the home—from shabbos dinners to seders to reading groups—many of these practices are bound up inexorably and in idiosyncratic ways with a broad Jewish communal and family life.
There are many ways to conceive of this “post-secular” turn in the Jewish left.
For the moment, however, Jewish leftism still tends to be more secular in both senses of the term: if one looks for instance, at the vote tallies for Mamdani, non-Orthodox Jews were more likely to vote for Zohran Mamdani than the orthodox and ultra-orthodox; this pattern also tends to reflect politics around Zionism. Still, as was widely noted, Mamdani made important inroads with Satmar rabbinate. And with the growth of organizations such as the Halachic Left, religious forms of anti-Zionism are being more widely disseminated. Either way, it is very clear to me that the old oppositions between “secular” and “religious” Jewish life are breaking apart, at least on the left, and perhaps, were never really what we imagined them to be to begin with.
Francesca: You conclude the book by arguing the potential that histories of the American Jewish Left have for current anti-Zionist Jewish organizing. What role do you think the “memory of the American Jewish Left” can or should play in contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist movements? Do you see contemporary movements looking to or embracing these histories?
Benjamin: One critique my book has received (from ostensible progressives) is that attention to earlier moments of the American Jewish left risks a kind of nostalgia. The claim is that the past is presumably beyond any recovery by a contemporary Left project: We are all middle-class Zionists now, aren’t we? In one sense, it is an odd charge—as Rachel Gross argues, nostalgia is perhaps the primary modality of nearly all diasporic Jewish cultural practice, from museums to foodways to holiday observance, serving as a means to locate oneself in community, in a diverse and multiethnic nation, and to bind extended family often over far geographic and even global distances. And yet nostalgia can often risk substituting, as Frederic Jameson famously argued, the replacement of style for history, pastiche for narrative, aesthetics for politics. There is something conservative about nostalgia, at least in the generic sense, as it reckons a past immediately available, affectively available, to the present. As Gross recounts, Jewish tourists visiting preserved temples in Europe feel “immediately connected” to past generations, “as if we were there.” In one sense, nostalgia’s conservatism may be benign, simply conserving a past and sense of identity in a fast-changing world. Jews are certainly not alone in the consumption of nostalgic tourism, and yet, in a political context in which Jewish innocence and Jewish victimhood are narrative anchors for American Zionism—from referring to October 7th as a “pogrom” or calling Hamas “Nazis”—the reactionary potential for such narrative devices are all too real.
Perhaps the most egregious recent example is Franklin Foer’s 2024 lament in The Atlantic that the “golden age of American Jewish life is over,” with Donald Trump on one side, and Keffiyeh-clad protesters on the other. Harkening back to a better past when, presumably, American Jews were met with broad acceptance, the article is adorned with a faux-Yiddish playbill of Jewish heroes, from Philip Roth to Barbara Streisand to Lenny Bruce. From this cultural height, Jews now cower again in buildings while mobs rampage outside; they consider leaving the country while their schools are overrun by antisemites. What Foer is really lamenting in the piece is the collapse of the liberal-and-Zionist consensus, in which liberalism and Zionism were once not only seen as synonymous but also ascendant.
Ignoring Israel’s genocide—and liberal support for it—Foer suggests Jews have not changed, rather America has. American Jews have always been liberals and always been Zionists, such “Jewish dreams,” he argues, “were American dreams.” What this nostalgic display denies are Jews who were neither liberal, nor Zionist, such as Lenny Bruce who wrote “goddamn Israel and its bond drives…what influence did they exert to save the lives of the Rosenbergs?” and Jerry Rubin who quipped, “If Moses were alive today, he’d be an Arab guerilla.” Even more troubling, Foer conflates the rise of neo-Nazis, White nationalists, and Christian supremacists to national office with anti-Zionists on college campuses. He does this despite the fact that many of the latter are Jewish and, more importantly, most are not antisemitic. Indeed, one could argue that it is precisely the keffiyeh-clad protester who may be the direct cultural descendants of Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, and Grace Paley, all of whom are stars on Foer’s playbill of nostalgia.
In contrast to such nostalgia, Walter Benjamin argues that the radical historian should produce a memory of the past to cut “against the grain” of dominant historiography. Rather than invoke figures from the American Jewish past to shore up the project of liberal Zionism, one can think of radical Jewish history as a disruptive force, entering political discourse in a moment of crisis to suggest the re-emergence of lost futures. Jewish activists and scholars are now unearthing histories of Jewish anarchists, socialists, communists, and anti-Zionists. They do so not to preserve a Jewish status quo, but rather to chart new paths through a fragmented present. Indeed, every generation of Jewish radicals invents its own past to break with what Benjamin refers to as the “social conformism of progress,” what Foer would describe as the seamless march to the future of (Jewish) America. In Molly Crabapple’s histories of Bundist anti-Zionism socialism, the Chutzpah Collective’s evocation of radical partisans and garment workers, Amelia Glazer’s recovery of radical Yiddish poetry, Alan Wald’s literary biographies of Jewish communists such as Abraham Polonsky and Mike Gold, Judith Butler and Daniel Boyarin’s reclamation of “diaspora,” Devin Naar’s history of the Ladino left, such histories become specters, to use Marx’s phrasing. In becoming such, they haunt the present by way of the past and point to a different path forward.
Rather than invoke figures from the American Jewish past to shore up the project of liberal Zionism, one can think of radical Jewish history as a disruptive force, entering political discourse in a moment of crisis to suggest the re-emergence of lost futures
Of course, memory is a complex topic in Jewish diasporic life. As Yosef Yerushalmi famously noted in Zakhor, every generation of Jews has the duty to “remember” the cycles of Jewish life and the myths of Jewish narratology. Yerushalmi contrasts his profession as an historian with that of the folk-traditions of Jewish memory; indeed, he says the task of the historian is precisely to interrogate the Jewish mythology of family genealogy and story. In this sense, one could say Benjamin views the project of memory as quite different from the professional “objectivity” of the historian as well: what is left in the archive, whose perspective may be available, what is even recorded as “fact” is in large part determined by, as Benjamin wrote, “the victors,” from whom even “the dead are not safe.” Objective history, as opposed to the “radical history” available to memory, accepts the limits of the archive and empirical truth—whether it knows it or not, it is on the side of bourgeois progress. For Benjamin, history neither progresses forward nor does it return—history is the story of multidirectional class conflict, the outcome of which is unknowable, a dialectic without teleological end: the “strait gates” through the messiah may come at any time. In this sense, the role of the historian is not to “reproduce the past” but to keep traditions of the past struggles alive for a moment in which their voices may be heard again.
That said, I do think work such as mine, as well as work by Crabapple, Glazer, Wald, et al. is not merely myth or memory. To put it bluntly, we’ve been lied to, duped. The American Jewish left wing has largely been either suppressed or contained. The fact that Zohran Mamdani could win nearly half the New York City Jewish vote in 2025 during a campaign that attempted to paint him as an enemy of the Jewish people did not just worry our enemies, but I would argue, has not been fully comprehended or digested even by our friends. Perhaps a folk memory of a Jewish left still has some bearing on the present? Perhaps certain folk memories may have in their way outdone history: the myths of every Jew walking with Heschel and King are just that, myths, but perhaps such mythic “commonsense” may be available in a “moment of danger” as the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Federations, and American Jewish Committee violate the basic precepts of democracy and liberalism in support of Israel. In other words, the death of Jewish progressive thought may have been too hastily named. I would not, of course, argue the opposite: that therefore the history of the American Jewish left will return. Brodkin’s phrase, “hegemonic Jewish socialism,” is indeed over. Yet one can still hope that new movements, new moments, will take such past moments and make them their own.
