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Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
Not yet published
Expected 22 Sep 26From author of Sontag Benjamin Moser comes a deeply researched history of the Jewish anti-Zionists from the nineteenth century to the present.
For over a century, Zionism has often been treated as inseparable from Jewish identity—a natural response to antisemitism, exile, and genocide. But in A Jewish History, Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser uncovers a largely erased tradition of Jewish dissent. Spanning nearly two hundred years, this powerful book traces the lives of rabbis, writers, and thinkers across the globe who viewed Zionism not as liberation, but as a dangerous form of nationalism—and a betrayal of Jewish ethical values.
Figures such as Edwin Montagu, who condemned the Balfour Declaration, and Jacob Israël de Haan, assassinated for his anti-Zionism, are among many who challenged the dominant narrative. Their resistance often came at great personal cost, yet their warnings and ideals remain strikingly relevant in today’s fractured political landscape.
Moser writes with urgency and compassion. He offers not a rejection of Jewish identity, but a reclamation of a different tradition—one rooted in human rights, moral clarity, and fearless dissent. At a moment of rising global tension and growing censorship, A Jewish History opens a long-suppressed conversation that continues to shape the present.
For over a century, Zionism has often been treated as inseparable from Jewish identity—a natural response to antisemitism, exile, and genocide. But in A Jewish History, Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser uncovers a largely erased tradition of Jewish dissent. Spanning nearly two hundred years, this powerful book traces the lives of rabbis, writers, and thinkers across the globe who viewed Zionism not as liberation, but as a dangerous form of nationalism—and a betrayal of Jewish ethical values.
Figures such as Edwin Montagu, who condemned the Balfour Declaration, and Jacob Israël de Haan, assassinated for his anti-Zionism, are among many who challenged the dominant narrative. Their resistance often came at great personal cost, yet their warnings and ideals remain strikingly relevant in today’s fractured political landscape.
Moser writes with urgency and compassion. He offers not a rejection of Jewish identity, but a reclamation of a different tradition—one rooted in human rights, moral clarity, and fearless dissent. At a moment of rising global tension and growing censorship, A Jewish History opens a long-suppressed conversation that continues to shape the present.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
400 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication September 22, 2026
About the author
Benjamin Moser
43 books268 followersBenjamin Moser is a writer, editor, critic, and translator who was born in Houston in 1976 and lives in the Netherlands. After attending high school in Texas and France, he graduated from Brown University with a degree in History. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht.
He worked at Foreign Affairs magazine and Alfred A. Knopf in New York before becoming an editor at the Harvill Press in London. He was the New Books columnist for Harper's Magazine before becoming a Contributing Editor on visual art and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Condé Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The American Scholar.
His first book, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, was published by Oxford University Press (USA), Haus Publishing (UK), Cosac Naify (Brazil), and Civilização (Portugal). Editions are forthcoming in France and Germany. He is the Series Editor of the new retranslations of Clarice Lispector to be published in the United States by New Directions and in the United Kingdom by Penguin Modern Classics.
He worked at Foreign Affairs magazine and Alfred A. Knopf in New York before becoming an editor at the Harvill Press in London. He was the New Books columnist for Harper's Magazine before becoming a Contributing Editor on visual art and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Condé Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The American Scholar.
His first book, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, was published by Oxford University Press (USA), Haus Publishing (UK), Cosac Naify (Brazil), and Civilização (Portugal). Editions are forthcoming in France and Germany. He is the Series Editor of the new retranslations of Clarice Lispector to be published in the United States by New Directions and in the United Kingdom by Penguin Modern Classics.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
(Doubleday did me an incredible solid sending me this book five months before publication. While I understand the implicit motivation for doing so, I’m also not beholden to what we industry types call ‘circle-jerkery.’ No big whoops. No whoop at all, in fact. Whoopless.)
First, I am going to dispel any suspension: Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism is an incredible read, and there is also no way that Benjamin Moser is going to escape the raft of shit reactionaries hail down based on his title alone. To which, and I say this to the actual and royal Moser, fuck ‘em. Too many thin shelled exomorphs posing as humans nowadays anyway; a corpus populi primed to instantly launch into histrionic, performative simulacra of agony and ecstatic empathy that I, existential survivalist, carry the sacred cruciform of my middle finger readied to greet. Because let’s face facts—no one can truly care about EVERYTHING all the time. I understand the guilt complex inflicted upon the woebegone soul to feel terrible about themselves if they should fail to ascend the nearest telephone pole and start hammering palms to pine, but I also see the guilt industry preying upon these well-meaning empaths. Whether on the Yae or Nay or, like me, Too Uninformed on Hyperspecifics to Augur Future Findings, one cannot read Anti-Zionism as a non-political act by the racquetball logic that dictates reading Anti-Zionism IS a political act. Why? Because so much of the battlefronts now being assailed are psychic—parasitic morality ‘news,’ shaped remarkably like a chyron—that all informations intentionally ingested are, by default, psycho-militaristic; and that even includes us well-rounded and mature motherfuckers. It’s true.
Moser does what Moser is known for: he extricates a narrative history, one composed with wit and verve, from an impossibly complex history. At no point does he claim absolute authority, neither does he tend to linger too long in one epoch to the detriment of others. One COULD say that Anti-Zionism, as a title, is intentionally jarring, all the better to nab the eye and its attached consumer. In fact, I just said that. The term ‘confirmation bias’ will surely be batted around like a shuttlecock, too, so I readied my racquet for replying musical puns with a lineup of skronk’s finest (welcome Laura Logic).
From my familiarity with academic writing forms and best practices, I suspect that the LCD will bitch and moan of selectivity on Moser’s part; lack of footnoting; frankly wild fucking events relayed with no attributed source material; &c. This same familiarity impels me to encourage the reader balking at this to do some of their own heavy lifting. Moser is not posing as Gibbon or Vollmann, and he has written a narrative history of Judaism’s incompatibility with Zionism. For the source material, that is, and long has been, at the eager ends of your own fingertips. Database away; stare at scatterplots of Diasporic dilution; seek out what compels you. Otherwise, trust Moser; he’s earned it.
I recognize this sounds pedantic, but you have to go into this process as neutral as possible. Being (oh, I just love having to make this none-more-bullshit distinction) a ‘cradle Catholic’ (fuck you, neo-cons), whatever skin I have in this game is theoretical, viz. by the dumb luck of random chance and geography. I do know the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an, and I find each to be near perfect examples of fantastical fiction. And, yes, that is the luxuriated loucheness of a middle-aged cracker from the California coast. The point, and Moser’s larger thesis? Zionism is not congruent to Judaism, a fact as plain as the day as long. Ergot, Israel, as a nation-state of consolidated power, is not a cognate for a Jewish proposition born out of the traditional, sixteen-exiled-centuries of statelessness which holds that the ‘state’ of the Jew is, get this, ‘statelessness!’ This commonly held interpretation, which is to say the orthodox, traditional, non-revisionist take, is that God emancipated the Jews through their expulsion, forevermore freeing them from the yoke of being terrible kings and/or tyrant queens. This conceptualization defines ‘freedom’ as the perpetual suspension of responsibility from the playing at God which nationhood grants its elite few. From my seat, it’s a pretty healthy worldview, a sort of theological ‘Fuck Art, Let’s Dance’ spirit that’s always imbued the wonderful spirit of Judaism that I know first-hand. The ‘there’s no Hell/there ain’t shit/life is the gift’ scaffolding. This is reductive, but my Jewish friends have always held to a ‘there’s no afterlife, let’s get another keg and a schemozzle of psychedelics’ tonight.
To boil it down, clarify like the butter I see clarified on TV’s I walk past and wonder why anyone would watch someone do something they themselves could do a room or two away; here, without any bullshit armor or ‘apology stuffed animal arm’ extended; now, as far as I can substantiate given Moser and the stereo-optic lenses of my own eyes; is, as the kids all say, the facts.
JEW IS TO ZIONIST
AS
‘VOTER’ IS TO MAGA
That’s it, folks. Following Moser’s framing, it’s zealotry used as a smokescreen to reclaim power, enjoin the global order of hierarchical statehood; amassing enormous power using Judaism as a signal flare to hoodwink the fucking British (thanks again, chaps) into the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent 110 years of the repercussions. Modern Zionism, the very same you hear screamed about from the same phone you read the stupid shit I’ve written, is the creation of Theodore Herzl, a ‘utopianist’ quack author that used the vehicle of science fiction to extemporize and theorize what a hypothetical Jewish nation-state would require, and what its national essence must be. This is his story, as well as the guy that took his musings and ran with it; the next dude (always a dude) in Parliament with a complex and fuckdumb brain. It’s his story just as much as his peers, generally rabbis, that angrily shouted down ‘this cannot be done in our name;’ and the UN’s genocide committee becoming really fucking familiar with then-new Israel committing atrocities against the Palestinians within one year of being granted statehood. It’s all them bastards, right up to this one, me, talking to you; me telling you that, like it or not, to test these waters one must drink the ocean/there are no half-measures here. To remind you that to offer your two cents on Israel is to enter a complicity far more fucked and interwoven than any rational, single person could possibly hold equal and true simultaneously, and the necessity for just that. And my imploring that Zionism is not tantamount to but a euphemism for nationalism. And I say, “fuck that noise.” I defer to the military’s most respected NCO, the stalwart Capt. D.V.V. Beefheart, and carve on our common wall, “None of my women have tears in their eyes.”
And to whatever Hell Dante on premium LSD could have mustered, I banish:
MAGA
&
National Zionism
(and, to forestall idiot boys, Islamic State/Hezbollah/etcetera-ite radicalized mountebanks)—
Any and all actors killing and dying for a God disgusted by your telemetry, industries of death, and screamings across the sky.
You can’t have me. Nor you, reader (if you’ve read this far), unless you surrender to their infernal, blackhole/cathode transmissions, and forget that you are alive
now
only
and
it’s
haymaking & hi-fives.
X Solidarity
First, I am going to dispel any suspension: Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism is an incredible read, and there is also no way that Benjamin Moser is going to escape the raft of shit reactionaries hail down based on his title alone. To which, and I say this to the actual and royal Moser, fuck ‘em. Too many thin shelled exomorphs posing as humans nowadays anyway; a corpus populi primed to instantly launch into histrionic, performative simulacra of agony and ecstatic empathy that I, existential survivalist, carry the sacred cruciform of my middle finger readied to greet. Because let’s face facts—no one can truly care about EVERYTHING all the time. I understand the guilt complex inflicted upon the woebegone soul to feel terrible about themselves if they should fail to ascend the nearest telephone pole and start hammering palms to pine, but I also see the guilt industry preying upon these well-meaning empaths. Whether on the Yae or Nay or, like me, Too Uninformed on Hyperspecifics to Augur Future Findings, one cannot read Anti-Zionism as a non-political act by the racquetball logic that dictates reading Anti-Zionism IS a political act. Why? Because so much of the battlefronts now being assailed are psychic—parasitic morality ‘news,’ shaped remarkably like a chyron—that all informations intentionally ingested are, by default, psycho-militaristic; and that even includes us well-rounded and mature motherfuckers. It’s true.
Moser does what Moser is known for: he extricates a narrative history, one composed with wit and verve, from an impossibly complex history. At no point does he claim absolute authority, neither does he tend to linger too long in one epoch to the detriment of others. One COULD say that Anti-Zionism, as a title, is intentionally jarring, all the better to nab the eye and its attached consumer. In fact, I just said that. The term ‘confirmation bias’ will surely be batted around like a shuttlecock, too, so I readied my racquet for replying musical puns with a lineup of skronk’s finest (welcome Laura Logic).
From my familiarity with academic writing forms and best practices, I suspect that the LCD will bitch and moan of selectivity on Moser’s part; lack of footnoting; frankly wild fucking events relayed with no attributed source material; &c. This same familiarity impels me to encourage the reader balking at this to do some of their own heavy lifting. Moser is not posing as Gibbon or Vollmann, and he has written a narrative history of Judaism’s incompatibility with Zionism. For the source material, that is, and long has been, at the eager ends of your own fingertips. Database away; stare at scatterplots of Diasporic dilution; seek out what compels you. Otherwise, trust Moser; he’s earned it.
I recognize this sounds pedantic, but you have to go into this process as neutral as possible. Being (oh, I just love having to make this none-more-bullshit distinction) a ‘cradle Catholic’ (fuck you, neo-cons), whatever skin I have in this game is theoretical, viz. by the dumb luck of random chance and geography. I do know the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an, and I find each to be near perfect examples of fantastical fiction. And, yes, that is the luxuriated loucheness of a middle-aged cracker from the California coast. The point, and Moser’s larger thesis? Zionism is not congruent to Judaism, a fact as plain as the day as long. Ergot, Israel, as a nation-state of consolidated power, is not a cognate for a Jewish proposition born out of the traditional, sixteen-exiled-centuries of statelessness which holds that the ‘state’ of the Jew is, get this, ‘statelessness!’ This commonly held interpretation, which is to say the orthodox, traditional, non-revisionist take, is that God emancipated the Jews through their expulsion, forevermore freeing them from the yoke of being terrible kings and/or tyrant queens. This conceptualization defines ‘freedom’ as the perpetual suspension of responsibility from the playing at God which nationhood grants its elite few. From my seat, it’s a pretty healthy worldview, a sort of theological ‘Fuck Art, Let’s Dance’ spirit that’s always imbued the wonderful spirit of Judaism that I know first-hand. The ‘there’s no Hell/there ain’t shit/life is the gift’ scaffolding. This is reductive, but my Jewish friends have always held to a ‘there’s no afterlife, let’s get another keg and a schemozzle of psychedelics’ tonight.
To boil it down, clarify like the butter I see clarified on TV’s I walk past and wonder why anyone would watch someone do something they themselves could do a room or two away; here, without any bullshit armor or ‘apology stuffed animal arm’ extended; now, as far as I can substantiate given Moser and the stereo-optic lenses of my own eyes; is, as the kids all say, the facts.
JEW IS TO ZIONIST
AS
‘VOTER’ IS TO MAGA
That’s it, folks. Following Moser’s framing, it’s zealotry used as a smokescreen to reclaim power, enjoin the global order of hierarchical statehood; amassing enormous power using Judaism as a signal flare to hoodwink the fucking British (thanks again, chaps) into the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent 110 years of the repercussions. Modern Zionism, the very same you hear screamed about from the same phone you read the stupid shit I’ve written, is the creation of Theodore Herzl, a ‘utopianist’ quack author that used the vehicle of science fiction to extemporize and theorize what a hypothetical Jewish nation-state would require, and what its national essence must be. This is his story, as well as the guy that took his musings and ran with it; the next dude (always a dude) in Parliament with a complex and fuckdumb brain. It’s his story just as much as his peers, generally rabbis, that angrily shouted down ‘this cannot be done in our name;’ and the UN’s genocide committee becoming really fucking familiar with then-new Israel committing atrocities against the Palestinians within one year of being granted statehood. It’s all them bastards, right up to this one, me, talking to you; me telling you that, like it or not, to test these waters one must drink the ocean/there are no half-measures here. To remind you that to offer your two cents on Israel is to enter a complicity far more fucked and interwoven than any rational, single person could possibly hold equal and true simultaneously, and the necessity for just that. And my imploring that Zionism is not tantamount to but a euphemism for nationalism. And I say, “fuck that noise.” I defer to the military’s most respected NCO, the stalwart Capt. D.V.V. Beefheart, and carve on our common wall, “None of my women have tears in their eyes.”
And to whatever Hell Dante on premium LSD could have mustered, I banish:
MAGA
&
National Zionism
(and, to forestall idiot boys, Islamic State/Hezbollah/etcetera-ite radicalized mountebanks)—
Any and all actors killing and dying for a God disgusted by your telemetry, industries of death, and screamings across the sky.
You can’t have me. Nor you, reader (if you’ve read this far), unless you surrender to their infernal, blackhole/cathode transmissions, and forget that you are alive
now
only
and
it’s
haymaking & hi-fives.
X Solidarity
Review of advance copy received from Author
This is a complex and emotional read- I highly recommend it even though I have questions about it. 90% of what is in here has been unavailable in one place as far as I know. And much of this information was unknown to me previously, or lived in some unexamined place in my awareness.
As much as I learned - more about the history of Zionism than the history of AntiZionism- the main revelation was how much I STILL, after 17 years of being out front for Palestine, hold on to some Zionist myths (like that Herzl was influenced by the Dreyfus trial to write The Jewish State- something I actually repeated in one of my books- turns out he made this up retrospectively)-
either because I've heard these lies so many times, or I didn't realize that they were locked in my psyche.
I am not going to sum this book up, or summarize its achievements. (The campaign against Hannah Arendt's objection to the Eichmann trial being used to justify Zionism was orchestrated. Of course it was, as someone who has been on the receiving end o Hasbarah, why didn't I realize that?!)
I just want to say, that because it raised more questions for me than it answered, its impact on me was gigantic. Highly recommended if you might still have any fuzzy areas left.
Very interested to see how it is received. I obviously needed this book and I am grateful for it.
As much as I learned - more about the history of Zionism than the history of AntiZionism- the main revelation was how much I STILL, after 17 years of being out front for Palestine, hold on to some Zionist myths (like that Herzl was influenced by the Dreyfus trial to write The Jewish State- something I actually repeated in one of my books- turns out he made this up retrospectively)-
either because I've heard these lies so many times, or I didn't realize that they were locked in my psyche.
I am not going to sum this book up, or summarize its achievements. (The campaign against Hannah Arendt's objection to the Eichmann trial being used to justify Zionism was orchestrated. Of course it was, as someone who has been on the receiving end o Hasbarah, why didn't I realize that?!)
I just want to say, that because it raised more questions for me than it answered, its impact on me was gigantic. Highly recommended if you might still have any fuzzy areas left.
Very interested to see how it is received. I obviously needed this book and I am grateful for it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Benjamin Moser is very brave to write this book, and, unfortunately, I predict a concerted campaign to destroy his career will begin any day now. His book chronicles the reaction to (mostly) Jewish writers and artists over the last 150 years who have spoken out in opposition to Zionist violence and the apartheid state of Israel. It’s almost inevitable that the same vitriol will explode in reaction to this book (and maybe even my review of it).
Despite what many try to argue, and what has been so successfully ingrained in the psyche of American, German, and many other societies: no, it is not antisemitic to criticize Israel for its state sanctioned violence, apartheid, and genocide, just as it is also not anti-Chinese to criticize the policies of the CCP, nor anti-American to criticize Trump.
I’m sure some will argue this book could have done more to explain why Zionism arose in the 19th century, especially the brutality of Tsar’s pogroms. Perhaps a few pages could have been spent on that at the start to ward off that criticism. But the point of the book is to educate readers about the long history of anti-Zionist leaders (almost all Jews), through chapter-length biographies of those who have had the courage to publicly criticize Israel and work on behalf of Palestinians. The most remarkable of all was probably Felicia Langer. I had never heard of her before this book.
As a Jew myself, I’ve been told that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. I’ve finally come to reject that premise, but it’s taken me a long time to understand that anti-Zionism does not mean wishing ill on Israelis. It means opposing Israeli’s apartheid system and state sanctioned genocide of Palestinians.
Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the eARC.
Despite what many try to argue, and what has been so successfully ingrained in the psyche of American, German, and many other societies: no, it is not antisemitic to criticize Israel for its state sanctioned violence, apartheid, and genocide, just as it is also not anti-Chinese to criticize the policies of the CCP, nor anti-American to criticize Trump.
I’m sure some will argue this book could have done more to explain why Zionism arose in the 19th century, especially the brutality of Tsar’s pogroms. Perhaps a few pages could have been spent on that at the start to ward off that criticism. But the point of the book is to educate readers about the long history of anti-Zionist leaders (almost all Jews), through chapter-length biographies of those who have had the courage to publicly criticize Israel and work on behalf of Palestinians. The most remarkable of all was probably Felicia Langer. I had never heard of her before this book.
As a Jew myself, I’ve been told that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. I’ve finally come to reject that premise, but it’s taken me a long time to understand that anti-Zionism does not mean wishing ill on Israelis. It means opposing Israeli’s apartheid system and state sanctioned genocide of Palestinians.
Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the eARC.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews