Anti-Zionism

A sweeping and revelatory history of the hidden tradition of Jewish thinkers who opposed Zionism from Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser.

In Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, Benjamin Moser uncovers a suppressed tradition that has shaped Jewish thought for generations. Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists and politicians – from Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America – Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism’s moral and political stakes – often at devastating personal cost, including censorship, exile and death.

Their lives form a sweeping, global narrative that dismantles a powerful myth: that anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. Spanning continents and centuries, these voices – people from the right and the left, Reform and Orthodox, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, men and women, gay and straight – differ sharply in belief and background, yet converge on a shared warning about the consequences of a nationalist project built on exclusion. What emerges is not only a rediscovered tradition of Jewish moral thought, but a startling reappraisal of Zionism itself.

Moser’s work restores the full scale and depth of Jewish ethical imagination, affirming that Judaism is older and larger than any single political project. Lucid, unsparing and deeply humane, Anti-Zionism cements Moser’s place as one of our foremost Jewish writers and presents a framework through which this history – and its meanings – will be understood for years to come.

Reviews

Praise for Anti-Zionism:

‘With meticulous research, wit, and a searching moral candour, Benjamin Moser takes on decades of propaganda in these portraits of Jewish intellectuals and public figures in the shadow of Zionism’s grand narratives … A lovingly-written historical primer for the free-thinkers of the West today, to whom this book says: You are in good company’ Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost

‘Moser has written such an expansive, moving text. Sensitive, rigorous, and deeply personal’ Raven Leilani, author of Luster

‘A rare book that induces a simultaneous expansion of the mind and soul’ Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza

‘A book of extraordinary moral clarity. With razor-sharp prose … Moser reveals the true face of the Zionist movement to colonize Palestine. Taking us from Jerusalem to Rio de Janeiro, Baghdad to Berlin, this master biographer's vivid, insightful, and affectionately drawn portraits illuminate the integrity of the defiant souls who stood in opposition’ Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

‘At a time when some Zionists seek to restrict freedom of speech by defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and some anti-zionists target Jews as if they were all Zionists, Moser's book provides an urgently necessary refutation of such conflations. I hope it will be widely read’ Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save

‘Benjamin Moser has created a work that is not only necessary, but riveting. I started reading with a pen in my hand, but by the third page found I had underlined almost every sentence. What I learned in these pages has profoundly changed my understanding of history – the world's, my people's, my family's, and my own’ Ayelet Waldman, author of A Perfect Hand