Francesca Freeeman: Citizens of the Whole World provides a crucial intervention in the study of American Jewish relationships with Zionism and Israel, introducing for the first time the history of the anti-Zionist American Jewish left. In a broader scholarly context where nearly all histories either focus on positive relationships with Zionism or focus on liberal dissent, the assertion of the anti-Zionism of the Jewish left fundamentally challenges underlying assumptions and parameters of the field. Citizens of the Whole World generally avoids engaging with American Jewish Zionist historiography, focusing rather on discourses surrounding diasporism, decolonial analyses within Judaism, and histories of American Jews, liberalism, and the Left. At the same time, your analysis provides significant challenges to commonly held academic and popular assumptions about American Jews and their relationship to Zionism. How did you choose which historiographical and theoretical conversations to engage with? How do you think your research challenges American Jewish Zionist historiography?
Benjamin Balthasar: I decided to focus on discourses of diaspora and decoloniality as an epistemic choice as much as an overtly political one. I am interested in what E. P. Thompson referred to famously as “history from below,” that is history as told from the standpoint of social movements, oppositional organizations, and those often considered marginalized. As an American Studies scholar, I’ve long been interested in reading culture and politics from the viewpoint of left-wing social movements. Some of the books that shaped my own perspective have been Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe, a history of Black communists in Alabama in the 1930s, Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, the story of the New Deal era as told from left-wing cultural producers, and Cheryl Higashida’s Black Internationalist Feminism, which is also the story of feminism from the perspective of Black, mostly Marxist, activists and writers in the mid 20th Century. I think of my book as attempting to do something similar. I ask: What does the history of American Jewish anti-Zionism look like if one puts left-wing social movements at the center of that story? In some moments of course, they are the center, particularly in the heyday of the American Jewish left, the 1930s and 1940s, but even since their declension, such movements are a kind of “absent-presence” or what Louis Althusser calls “an absent-cause” in American life, a history that is determining, and present, even if it is not often addressed in official discourse. This theoretical perspective began with my own experiences as a student, many years before I started to formally write about this topic. As I attended Palestine solidarity meetings in the early 2000s, I noticed Jewish students were almost always overrepresented and often held within them a sometimes vague, sometimes quite pointed sense that Zionism violated some historical idea of what they felt as being “Jewish.” As a scholar writing about the Left, this led me to wonder whether there was a left-wing cultural history that could tell how and where such a sensibility arose in the U.S.
As far as how such history challenges the Zionist consensus, one simple answer—far more visible today than when I started the book some eight years ago—is that such consensus has been short-lived, and to a lesser and greater degree, manufactured from the top-down by ostensibly once-liberal organizations. If one reads the account of how American Jews adopted Zionism from the perspective of the American Jewish Committee, or even many, if not most Jewish Studies scholars, Zionism was an expression of two things in the U.S., a post-Holocaust need for Jewish safety, and a post-60s, post-Black power expression of rising Jewish identity claims. With Stokley Carmichael claiming Black is beautiful, suddenly, the argument went, it was OK to have Jewish noses, strange religious rituals, and overt, muscular Jewish nationalism. As Marc Dollinger articulates, Zionism was an affective reaction against, but also, and more importantly, an affective absorption of Black power celebrations of non-assimilationist identity movements.
What does the history of American Jewish anti-Zionism look like if one puts left-wing social movements at the center of that story?
My work intervenes in this debate in two crucial ways. First, I argue that anti-Zionism, like socialism within the American Jewish world, arose autochthonously out of the desire of mostly working- and middle-class Jews to create a world that was far more egalitarian and also less racist and less antisemitic. Zionism appeared to many, if not most, Jews in this movement as what one author called “White chauvinism,” or what we might call “whiteness” today. Zionism appeared less as a movement for national liberation by a subaltern group than as a form of colonialism backed first by the British, and then the American empires. When civil rights and then Black power organizations, such as SNCC and the Panthers, issued statements in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, many Jews in the New Left, including Suzanne Weiss, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd, Susan Eanet, Bernadine Dohrn, and others, felt that this aligned with their own ethical and political commitments as both American Jews and socialists much more than a heavily militarized Israeli state. I don’t investigate this history to make authenticity claims about “real” or “true” Jewish identity, but rather to think about lineages, stories, and cultural resources for resistance that, at certain times, have expressed themselves and made claims to hegemony. If we are in a moment of anti-Zionist upsurge in the U.S., particularly among younger American Jews, one has to ask why statements such as “Never Again for Anyone,” “Jews Against Genocide,” or even “Go Birds, fuck ICE, and Free Palestine,” should be legible as Jewish statements. On the latter, I would suggest that Hannah Einbinder’s linguistic triptych, “Go Birds, fuck ICE, and free Palestine,” not only combines a pair of domestic and international solidarities she later identified as Jewish, “go Birds”—a slogan of support for the Philadelphia Eagles NFL team—locates them particularly within an American commonsense and formation of belonging.
Francesca: Often, histories of American Jews are critiqued for treating Ashkenazi, White Jews as normative and thus erasing Mizrahi, Sephardic, Black, Indigenous, and Jews of Color (BIJOC). How do you approach these dynamics of racialization? And what opportunities do you think there are to expand American Jewish history and cultural studies to account for Mizrahi, Sephardic, and BIJOC?
Benjamin: As I mentioned above, Jewish whiteness—which overlaps with but is not identical to “Ashkenormativity”—is deeply entwined with the question of Zionism. In an American context, Zionism and whiteness are inseparable, that is, one cannot separate the incorporation of first-and-second generation Jewish immigrants into normative political, economic, and social forms of U.S. life from Zionism: the acceptance if not promotion of a social formation that combines White supremacy, a legacy of settler colonialism, capitalist wage-relations, anti-communism, and cultural forms of individualism and heteronormativity. This generative intersection between “American exceptionalism” and “Zionism” was perhaps expressed most succinctly by Bari Weiss in a speech she gave at the 2020 “No Hate, No Fear” march in NYC, protesting what she claimed was a wave of antisemitism engulfing the city. “I am a Jew because the Founders of this country saw themselves as the new Israelites,” she stated, adding, from her 2019 book, that the founders of Israel are like the founders of the U.S., both a “small band of iconoclasts fleeing tyranny…to worship God freely in a promising land” (20). Here Weiss links Jewish identity with the founding of the United States. This statement ties Weiss to the settler-colonial founding myth of America: that we are an exceptional nation founded on the principles of Manifest Destiny, the ethnic cleansing of the land, and global ambitions.
I don’t investigate this history to make authenticity claims about ‘real’ or ‘true’ Jewish identity, but rather to think about lineages, stories, and cultural resources for resistance
Weiss’s equation of Zionism and the U.S. project of global whiteness distills a thematic that was not lost on many of the writers and activists I read and interviewed. Even by the 1930s, it was clear to many American Jewish socialists that Zionism was linked materially and politically with the forces of White supremacy and great power imperialism. In maybe the most sardonic assertion of this analysis, novelist and New Masses editor Mike Gold compared Zionism to shady real-estate deals in the New York suburbs. In Mike Gold’s Jews without Money, Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, Robert Gessner’s famous 1935 take-down of Zionism in “Brown Shirts of Zion,” real-estate, whiteness, and settler-colonialism are all fused in dramatized and also quite material ways. In addition, many Jewish socialist speeches and pamphlets in the 1930s and 1940s denounced Jewish settlement in Palestine as aligned with British imperialism and “white chauvinism”; as one left-wing writer in the mid-40s labeled the Yishuv in a socialist pamphlet, it was “Jim Crow country”—a label that would immediately resonate with an American left audience.
This critique of Zionism and whiteness was picked up by New Left activists and writers who were some of the early architects of what we now refer to as “whiteness theory.” Many of the key theorists of “whiteness” were themselves Jewish anti-Zionists: Noel Ignatiev, David Gilbert, Stanley Aronowitz, and others. While much ink has been spilled on the simultaneous break of Jewish liberal institutions with Black power movements, it was not lost on many of the New Left Jewish activists that this rupture was simultaneous with the swiftly intensifying Jewish institutional support for Israel. Aware of the incorporation of European descended Jews into the material and cultural formations of whiteness— and after the 1967 Six-Day War even into the Pentagon—these activists sought to shed their “white skin privilege” and also, declare their fundamental alignment with the de-colonizing world.
Following the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later the Black Panthers, many of the New Left activists I interviewed and whose work I read connected their anti-Zionism to a rejection of whiteness: “Israel is part of the white world,” as one SNCC pamphlet framed it, connecting the defeat of Nasser’s forces in 1967 with the lynching of Black men in the United States. David Gilbert framed his commitment as an SDS activist by explaining that “SNCC, the most militant of the civil rights organizations, and some other Black organizations came out, quite justly, in opposition to Israel’s war of conquest at that time.” Therefore he felt it was incumbent on the “white left” to protect SNCC from “the furor and backlash [which] was overwhelmingly against the Black movement.” As salient as the Palestinian freedom struggle was in the late 1960s for the New Left, how the politics of anti-Zionism refracted back onto and through American Jewish race-making in the mid-20th century was of equal if not greater importance.
While many on the Jewish left resisted conscription into whiteness, a critique of whiteness does not, of course, magically change one’s racial conscription. Given the history of the American Jewish left, arising from the mass immigration wave from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, my project largely, though not entirely, tells the story of Ashkenazi Jewish radicals. French New Left and Trotskyist activist and intellectual Daniel Bensaid commented that the French Jewish left of the 1960s was likewise largely Ashkenazi and Yiddish-speaking. Yet, I found his exploration of his own Algerian Sephardic roots productive and provocative, using the term “Marranism” over Deutscher’s formation of “non-Jewish Jew,” stressing that there is a longer Sephardic history of coerced adaptation to New World colonialism, dating back to the late 15th century Reconquista. Framing Marranism as a project of Jewish memory and refusal, Bensaid defined the Marrano as a Jew identified as such by what they were not: a Christian or a European citizen. Alberto Moreau (born Alberto Moise) was another Sephardic Jewish member of the Marxist left in the U.S. He wrote perhaps more than any other Communist in the 1950s about the discrimination against the Mizrahim and Sephardim in Israel, while of course always keeping their marginalization in view of the utter dispossession of Palestinians. More recently, with the formation of the Jews of Color/Sephardic/Mizrahi Caucus of Jewish Voice for Peace, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice’s Jews of Color and Sephardi and Mizrahi Caucuses, much-needed dialogues about the Ashkenazi history of the American Jewish left have finally begun. Works by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, the Jews of Color Initiative, Devin Naar’s recovery of the Ladino left, and others have done much to address these gaps in the historical narrative about the presence of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the United States. While there is much to mourn in the passing of earlier generations of Jewish leftists, the relative diversity of Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, If Not Now, and other Jewish left spaces and their attention to the Ashkenazi nature of the earlier Jewish left formations is a marked broadening of our possibilities as a movement.
Following the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later the Black Panthers, many of the New Left activists I interviewed and whose work I read connected their anti-Zionism to a rejection of whiteness
Yet one cannot perfectly conflate the phrase “Jews of color” with “Sephardi/Mizrahi”—many Jews of color are of Ashkenazi descent or Jews by choice, and many Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are White or White-identified in the United States. What may be rigid racial faultlines in Israel between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, in the U.S. are far more diffuse and multidirectional, given the axial dividing line is more often than not between whiteness and blackness, citizen and non-citizen, heteronormative and queer, owner and worker, Christian and non-Christian. Yet the “race of Jews” and/or Jewish racialization concern crucial historical and political questions—there is not a singular Jewish perspective or single Jewish story one can tell in the U.S., nor should one, even though it is often assumed that all American Jews have experienced the same long ascendence from Ellis Island to the tony Chicago suburbs of Highland Park—what Grace Paley sardonically called the “surface to air missile into the middle class.”
Thus, I found it important to conclude my book with two Puerto Rican Jewish poets, Martín Espada and Aurora Levins Morales. Espada in particular articulates a lived memory of working-class Jewish socialists he knew personally in Brooklyn as a child and through his father’s radical connections as a community organizer in the 1960s and 1970s. Referring to himself as “politically Jewish,” Espada eschews neat and often determinist identifications of heritage or authenticity. Rather, he weaves together narratives of Jewish radicals such as Abraham Lincoln Brigade and Freedom Ride veteran Abe Osheroff with the stories of non-Jewish Black New Yorkers who grew up fighting the same landlords and ultimately, with the international brigades in Spain, against the same enemy. Espada also links together the story of Palestinian colonialization with the annexation of Puerto Rico itself, which is itself in turn linked to narratives of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. As Levins Morales, like Espada, describes herself as a Jewish Puerto Rican anti-colonial writer, she also fuses the working-class radicalism of both Jewish labor organizers and Puerto Rican anti-colonial activists into a diasporic reimagining of Jewish life. Evoking herself as the granddaughter of garment workers in New York City, she compares her own hands, now working to create a decolonized future for Puerto Rico, her “homeland,” with the work-hardened hands of her union-activist grandparents. While my book is the story not of Jewish demographics, but of politics, one hope I do have is that the immediate future will see a fusion of many different Jewish narratives into a new diasporic Jewish life.
