Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left

by Benjamin Balthaser

Since October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed a massive American Jewish uprising in support of Palestinian liberation. Through sit-ins in Congress or Grand Central Terminal, through petitions and marches, thousands of Jews have made it known the Israeli state is not acting in their name. This resistance did not come out of nowhere. Citizens of the Whole World returns us to its roots in the "red decade" of the 1930s and, from there, traces the history of American Jewish radicals and revolutionaries to the present day.

Benjamin Balthaser delves into radical Jewish novels and memoirs, as well as interviews with Jewish revolutionaries, to unearth a buried if nonetheless unbroken continuity between leftist Jewish Americans and the diasporic internation�alism of today.

Covering more than just the politics of anti-Zionism, Citizens of the Whole World explores the Jewish revolutionary traditions of Marxist internationalism, Jewish solidarity with Third World struggles, and relations between Jewish and Black radicals during the Civil Rights era.

Balthaser's book stages an intervention into current anti-Zionist politics, suggesting activists can learn from past struggles to help form a future politics in a world after Zionism.

Genres: History, Politics, Judaism, American History, Nonfiction, Jewish

320 pages, Hardcover

Published July 22, 2025

About the author

Benjamin Balthaser’s scholarship, teaching, and creative work investigates the relationships among social movements, racial identity, and cultural production. His book from University of Michigan Press' Class and Culture Series, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War explores the connections between cross-border, anti-imperialist movements and the making of modernist culture at mid-century . Balthaser’s critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and publications such as American Quarterly, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Reconstruction, Criticism, In These Times, Cultural Logic, Minnesota Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He also published a collection of poems about Jewish victims of the blacklist titled Dedication, that appeared from Partisan Press in the fall of 2011.

The courses Balthaser currently teaches range in topics from African-American literature, labor and literature, surveys of U.S. multi-ethnic literature, cultures of U.S. modernism and post-modernism, creative writing, the U.S. West in literature, and freshman composition. He currently enjoys living in South Bend, and participates when he can in the St. Joseph Valley Project and helps maintain a bi-weekly reading group on issues of labor, social movements and culture.

Education:
Ph.D. Literature and Cultural Studies, University of California, San Diego
M.F.A. English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
B.A., English, University of Washington, Seattle

Reviews

[Niamh · Rating 3 out of 5]

i am once again on my knees begging verso to hire proper editors

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books ever written about the American Jewish left and an immensely insightful look at the parallel tract of Jewish identity that had always run in contrast to that codified by the American Jewish Establishment. It also picks up on the Jewishness of the New Left in particularly unique ways, makes the case for the Red Scare as a core element of the rightward shift in American Jewish politics, and ties the current resurgence of the Jewish left to a history heading back well over a hundred years. Absolute must read, could not put it down!

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The standard narrative of U.S. Jewish history goes something like this: For several generations after fleeing the Pale and arriving on America's shores, Jews leaned left. But after the Six-Day War in 1967, Jews broke with the Left and turned toward Zionism.

Benjamin Balthaser's new book challenges this narrative: "There has always been an anti-Zionist Jewish left; indeed, it is the emergence of a Zionist consensus, post 1967, that has been the historical oddity." Leftism was always woven into Jewish American life. How else is it possible that Seinfeld, a thoroughly apolitical show filmed during the "end of history," casually featured a communist boyfriend, while the Coen Brothers' films mentioned Trotskyist sects and SDS?

This book points out just how Jewish the U.S. Left was throughout the 20th century: At its peak, more than half of Communist Party members were Jewish. The core of SDS was a "Jewish fraternity," in the words of one leader, and "three of four Kent State students gunned down by the National Guard were Jewish." The Trotskyist SWP also had a strong Jewish component. While these revolutionaries fought for a universalist program, they brought their own specific Jewish experiences into their work.

Balthaser also highlights little-known explicitly Jewish leftist groups like the Chutzpah Collective in Chicago or the Brooklyn Bridge Collective in New York — they can be seen as precursors to today's Jewish Voice for Peace.

Despite the claim that U.S. Jews turned toward Zionism after 1967, far more Jews in that era joined anti-Zionist leftist groups than pro-Zionist organizations such as the AJC or the ADL. And just like today, conservative Jewish leaders back then bemoaned losing their children to radical ideas.

According to Balthaser, the marginalization of the Jewish Left was not only the result of social ascension in the suburbs, assimilation into whiteness, or accommodation to Zionism — it was the Red Scare: "two-thirds of people questioned in the McCarthy hearings were Jewish." The AJC supported these right-wing, antisemitic campaigns against Jewish leftists, denouncing the Rosenbergs. (Stalinism's betrayal in supporting the foundation of Israel also helped destroy the Jewish Left.)

Balthaser offers essential context for our current moment. With masses of young Jews turning away from Zionism, we are not seeing a break from traditional American Judaism, but rather a return to traditional American Judaism properly understood.

I am hesitant to criticize the book because I wholeheartedly support its thesis, but for me, these ideas would have hit harder in a shorter text, as there was some repetition. The author is an English professor, while I am more into political history, so there were more deep dives on novels, plays, and poetry, than I would have liked.

[Brendan Campisi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and suggestive meditation on the terms of engagement between American Jews and the political left.

Balthaser challenges the received narrative of post-World War II Jewish assimilation and post-67 embrace of Israel/Zionism as reflecting the bourgeois class biases of mainstream Jewish history, arguing that greater attention to the working-class/lower-middle-class masses of American Jews would highlight the persistence of radicalism and anti-Zionism. Specifically within this tradition Balthaser is keen to highlight those, whether from the Popular Front or the New Left, who argued for affirming Jewish identity as part of a 'Rainbow coalition,' ethnic-pluralist working-class politics of solidarity, which he (implicitly) sees as a model for the contemporary Jewish left as against a conception of pure 'allyship' (with African Americans, Palestinians, etc).

The structure of the book as a series of interrelated essays leads to some unnecessary repetition and some sections being more compelling than others, and Balthaser's cultural studies background (which he warns the reader about, to be fair) means that he poses a lot of questions without answering them. But all in all, this is a very valuable book.

[Rebecca Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Going to engage this monograph heavily in my diss