ANTI-ZIONISM

The biographer of Jewish cultural icons Clarice Lispector and Susan Sontag turns his attention to the ideology that founded Israel.

To be Jewish is to belong to a religious community, writes Moser in a searching and eloquent introduction recounting his gradual disillusionment with Zionism. Growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s, he was raised in a liberal household with parents who were Zionists—“because everyone in America—at least as far as I knew—was a Zionist.” On reading Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism—and whose Zionist Writings was “a talisman of a grandfather I never knew”—Moser encountered a different argument: that Jewishness was a matter of race, “one people” who merited an ethnic-based nation of their own. Herzl made inquiries about whether Argentina might cede territory for such a nation, then asserted that “Palestine is our unforgettable historic home” when it appeared that the Argentine government wasn’t keen on the idea. Of course, it was the historic home of the Palestinians as well, “a population that, unlike the Europeans, had never harmed the Jews,” Moser writes. Across 12 chapters, he enlists a dozen learned Jewish critics from a “suppressed tradition” (including Aaron Samuel Tamares, Edwin Montagu, and Hannah Arendt), presenting their lives and thought in order to challenge the dominant narrative that, as French scholar Maxime Rodinson put it, “Zionism is the natural outcome of the whole of Jewish history, something which belongs to the very essence of Judaism and to which all the world’s Jews owe allegiance.”

A principled case against a powerfully entrenched doctrine.