Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation

by Carolyn L. Karcher (Editor)

Personal narratives by thirty-nine jewish activists and scholars.

Today Jews face a choice. We can be loyal to the ethical imperatives at the heart of Judaism --love the stranger, pursue justice, and repair the world. Or we can give our unconditional support to the state of Israel. It is a choice between Judaism as a religion and the nationalist ideology of Zionism, which is usurping that religion.

In this powerful collection of personal narratives, forty Jews of diverse backgrounds tell a wide range of stories about the roads they have traveled from a Zionist world view to activism in solidarity with Palestinians and Israelis striving to build an inclusive society founded on justice, equality, and peaceful coexistence.

Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism will be controversial. Its contributors welcome the long overdue public debate. They want to demolish stereotypes of dissenting Jews as self-hating, traitorous, and anti-Semitic. They want to introduce readers to the large and growing community of Jewish activists who have created organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Open Hillel. They want to strengthen alliances with progressives of all faiths. Above all, they want to nurture models of Jewish identity that replace ethnic exclusiveness with solidarity, Zionism with a Judaism once again nourished by a transcendent ethical vision.

Contributors include: Joel Beinin; Sami Shalom Chetrit; Ilise Benshushan Cohen; Marjorie Cohn; Rabbi Michael Davis; Hasia R. Diner; Marjorie N. Feld; Chris Godshall; Ariel Gold; Noah Habeeb; Claris Harbon; Linda Hess; Rabbi Linda Holtzman; Yael Horowitz; Carolyn L. Karcher; Mira Klein; Sydney Levy; Ben Lorber; Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber; Carly Manes; Moriah Ella Mason; Seth Morrison; Eliza Rose Moss-Horwitz; Hilton Obenzinger; Henri Picciotto; Ned Rosch; Rabbi Brant Rosen; Alice Rothchild; Tali Ruskin; Cathy Lisa Schneider; Natalia Dubno Shevin; Ella Shohat; Emily Siegel; Rebecca Subar; Cecilie Surasky; Rebecca Vilkomerson; Jordan Wilson-Dalzell; Rachel Winsberg; Rabbi Alissa Wise; Charlie Wood

Genres: Jewish, Judaism, Religion, Nonfiction, Politics

320 pages, Paperback

Published May 8, 2019

About the author

Carolyn L. Karcher is the author of The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child and the editor of Tourgee's novel Bricks Without Straw.

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

The creation of the State of Israel from the ashes of Europe was paid for not with reparations from post-war Germany, or from the Soviet Union, or aid from the US. The invoice was sent to the Palestinians.” Jewish religious tradition states a Jewish homeland requires “the coming of the Messiah” which hasn’t happened, and “rabbis cautioned, we cannot and must not force God’s hand by establishing a sovereign Jewish state ourselves.” Political Zionism “unabashedly sought to overturn the Diasporic focus of Jewish life.” “Hebrew poet/author Joseph Chaim Brenner called Diasporic Jews ‘Gypsies and filthy dogs’ and the Labor Zionist icon A.D. Gordon wrote that Diaspora Jewish life was the ‘parasitism of a fundamentally useless people’.” Of the Diasporic Jews, Zionist leader Jabotinsky wrote “The Yid is despised by all and, therefore the Hebrew ought to charm all.” And he wrote “The Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum”. Jabotinsky calling “Yids” ugly is remarkably insulting, given that he himself at best looked like Rick Moranis dressed as a fascist. It is not doing Zionists any favors to continue to focus on “the world wants all Jews dead” eternal victim motif, instead of constructively building solidarity with all minorities targeted by racism, including Palestinians.

Rabbi Brant Rosen in this book said Moroccan Jewish music is “just as ‘Jewish’ as Klezmer”. And that there is a clear racism in defining Jewishness only through an Ashkenazic lens. Rabbi Linda Holtzman writes that “the wall separates farmers from their farms, people with medical needs from hospitals, college students from their classes, people from their friends and neighbors” and you will be changed if you simply experience checkpoints from the Palestinian perspective.
Rabbi Michael Davis wrote, “The kibbutz, with its ethos of the new muscular Jew, was intended to be the antithesis to the stereotype of the ‘weak’ Diaspora Jew.” He also wrote that ‘One of my rabbis in yeshiva explicitly rejected the Ethiopian Jewishness.” He also writes that the yarmulke (kippa) is a sign of being Orthodox, while going “bareheaded” is a sign of not being orthodox. He also writes that “The Torah rules that all are equal under the law, Jew and non-Jew (Numbers 15:16). The State of Israel is not faithful to this precept of the Torah.” In Jewish history, the attempted conflation of Judaism and Zionism is just a short chapter. You are talking two thousand years of history against little over one hundred years.

“The common wisdom among my fellow Jewish radicals is that the Jewish community today is beyond hope. Overwhelmingly, they say, those who were raised with Zionism will never set that identity aside in favor of equal rights for all people.” “I came to feel that Israel was not a very Jewish place.” Gone are the “social ethics of the prophets which fearlessly criticized kings, the commitment to free inquiry” and “the commitment of Jews like Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman to the civil rights movement.” Where among Zionists is the esteemed Jewish precept of repairing the world (tikkun olam)? Note how the foundation of Zionist racial nationalism demands “exclusivity for some and marginalization for others.” Zionism is less about Judaism and more about “capitalism and European notions of supremacy, imperialism, and racism.”

Zionists don’t See all Jews as Equal: God forbid you are Jewish in Israel but are ALSO “Jews of color, Mizrahi Jews, Sephardic Jews, homeless Jews, transgender Jews, [or] gender non-conforming Jews” More than one Zionist has said, “the thought that there could be Arab Jews just never occurred to me.” “The army tended to place Mizrahim (Arab Jews) in lower-ranking positions, as cooks, guards, and drivers, while the Ashkenazism were placed in loftier positions, as higher-ranking officers, specialists in computers or intelligence.” “Mizrahim and especially Yemenites, by definition were classified as less capable than their Ashkenazi peers.” “For years, Mizrahim were perceived to be lazy, criminal, stupid, and incapable of achieving, learning, or making progress. Sociologists such as Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt [1949] and Karl Frankenstein [1972] published academic studies supporting this claim.” So, Zionists are racist against fellow humans (Palestinians) and racist against fellow Jews (who are Mizrahim). I wonder if blind Zionists have ever happily liked Palestinians and Mizrahim in conversation until a sighted Zionist told them who they were talking with. That would be rather telling. At a “Stand with Israel Right or Wrong” type rally in Boston, one of the book’s Jewish writers who was protesting it said an elderly woman came up to him, shaking her fist, yelling “you should have died in the camps.” Clearly not all Jews are considered equal (unless you are a progressive). Merely mention the occupation (which it is) and watch the sparks fly from offended Zionists. One author writes that mentioning international law or genocide, ethnic cleansing publicly will get you accused of “hate speech”. With that logic, would saying you hate international law, and love genocide and ethnic cleansing get you praised for “love speech”? In Iraq, a “Jewish underground cell, commanded by secret agents sent from Israel, planted bombs in Jewish centers so as to create hysteria among Iraqi Jews and thus catalyze a mass exodus to Israel (info from Ella Shohat).”

“If Israel claims to represent all Jews, then as Jewish people we have the obligation to call out the fact that it does not represent us and what we believe a just society should be.” Funny how Israel wants peace, but clearly peace without justice. What happened to loving your neighbor as yourself”? “How can you claim that you are all about love if you don’t acknowledge that the land you are walking on is disputed?” “I remember hearing, quite regularly, variations on the theme that the Palestinians, like Hitler before them, were ‘Amalek’, the eternally reborn, biblical enemy of the Jewish people.” “Many of the settlers have permits to carry a wide array of weapons and are heavily armed.” “According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), 24,115 Palestinian homes were demolished between 1967 and 2009.” 24,000 tragic stories, not one of which will be covered by the complicit Western media. 48,488 Palestinian structures including apartment buildings, mosques, and community centers have been bulldozed between 1967 and 2015. Caterpillar Tractors – We Bring Good Things to Death.

Pop Quiz: How does the Holocaust justify how Palestinians are treated today? Why can’t “Never Again” mean “Never Again for Anyone”? Why demand racist exceptionalism over inclusivity and community? Because Hitler, Goring and Goebbels did? Why is support for Israel dependent upon maintaining ignorance about Palestine? Why the endless media talk about whether Jews “feel safe” on campus, while never fairly also considering whether Muslim or Arab students “feel safe”?

Zionists like to call members of Jewish Voice for Peace “kapos” (sold-out Jewish guards at concentration camps). All Palestinians must live in concentration camps, while all Jews are chosen by God and must rule triumphant. Isn’t binary totalitarian thinking fun? It sure worked for Hitler (to a point – until Nazism imploded because of that same binary totalitarian thinking – which is Israel’s future). Palestinians all bad, Zionists all good (as long as you are not Mizrahim or even vaguely critical of unchecked settler-colonialism). Zionism as armor – without it you are only a self-hating Jew. And those with intact morals thought Judaism was about collective accountability for ALL crimes, and NOT collective immunity for ALL crimes. “Israeli society is moving to the right [to keep Modi and Kim Jong Un company?] and increasingly racist and militarized.” Funny how if you publicly say you still believe in the United States that “all men are created equal” that according to Zionist PR, you must be either a self-hating Jew or a Jew hater. The Zionist binary tango. Cool quote: “Zionism has hijacked Judaism.” Because Zionists in Israel live to drink the PR Kool-Aid, “Diaspora Jews [instead] are reclaiming our legitimacy and our voice as Jews.”

Palestinian Incarceration: Palestinians children can be infinitely detained without cause; just have a Zionist judge renew the baseless charge every six months, et voila. Did you know that “the Israeli government requires the children’s parents to foot the bill for incarceration and extends the prison term when they cannot?” “At the moment there are approximately 7,000-10,000 Palestinian prisoners and approximately 750,000 Palestinians have been arrested since 1967.” Wanna keep a Palestinian from going to school, or become a lawyer? Throw his/her ass in prison – Nice N’ Easy. One Jewish activist was told by a judge, “What would your mother think of you, a good Jewish boy, playing out there with Palestinian monkeys?” “How could Judaism, defined by social justice and community, have been corrupted into this cruel nationalism?”

Breaking the Silence is a group “dedicated to informing the public about the violence that maintaining the occupation requires.” The Torah doesn’t just say “welcome the stranger” it says, “welcome the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” You must respond to the stranger with compassion; compassion Judaism demands but Zionism openly denies. “At my core, I believe that American Jewish communal and institutional support of the occupation, systemic racism, and militaristic violence deeply contradict our Jewish values and teachings.” “How could I study Torah and not practice the values of tikkun olam?” “Jewish tradition instructs us to question and challenge the status quo.” “Zionism built a state based on Othering another people and I’d always believed my community would stand against that.” Did you know the bulldozer operator who intentionally ran over Rachel Corrie in Rafah, ran her over TWICE? That will teach her to think tikkun olam means ALL people and everything! Rachel wasn’t chosen by God, but she was chosen to die by the chosen, so close enough.

One writer writes of his “growing understanding that Israel was, in fact, an aggressor illegally occupying and colonizing Palestinian land.” And how “history of the conflict solidified my understanding that Zionism is, at its core, a colonialist project designed to further maintain Jewish privilege at the expense of the Palestinian people.” He tellingly writes, “We started in East Jerusalem – an underdeveloped collection of two-story buildings and dirt roads – and ended in West Jerusalem at an outdoor mall complete with a Versace outlet.” Zionist binary justice – Johnny Come lately gets his Versace, while residents living there for over 100 years get the world’s largest open-air prison and no clean water. If you complain, you are a terrorist. Liberal Zionists oppose the occupation but want to keep all that exceptionalist Jewish privilege – like a child opposed to the work of eating the real meal yet still defiantly demands the desert. “The privileging of Jews over Palestinians in Israel-Palestine is not a mistake of Zionism – it is its goal. I can participate in this no more than I can in any other ideology that renders one group superior to another.” “From at least the 1930’s on, Zionism’s primary objective was taking as much land as possible in Palestine for the benefit of the Jewish people, while removing as many Palestinians as possible.”

One writer in this book was told by her mother that if she married a non-Jew, then “Hitler’s dream would come true.” Funny how the mother strongly supporting a Nazi-style racial nationalism in Israel would somehow not ALSO make Hitler’s dream come true. “Twenty percent of all US foreign aid goes to Israel.” One ten-year old child in Gaza pleaded with her mother, “Don’t leave me alone. I want to die together.” Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians.” One guy’s Israeli tour guide told his bus, “It’s called the green line because from here to there the Jews live. They care for the land and make the desert bloom. From here on, the Arabs live, and they do not care for the land, so their land is not green.” “On one trip, I managed to have a settler in civilian clothes stick his Uzi at me and bark I was on his land when I walked with the Palestinian farmer whose land it actually was.” Zionist trolls will say, “why don’t you give back your land to Native Americans?” even though that’s not what Native Americans are demanding, AND Native Americans clearly have equal rights in the US unlike Palestinians. The chosen people myth intentionally cuts “us off from other people” and mars “our capacity to feel equality with everyone.” “My personal and historical knowledge led to the understanding that Israel was becoming a mirror image of its fascist oppressors.” One of this book’s writers call some progressives PEP – progressive on everything except Palestine. I would refer to such “fair weather progressives” as liberals. One Palestinian comedian said on stage, “They want me to recognize Israel. No problem! I went there, and recognized my parent’s house, my uncle’s house…”

Cool quotes: We are human before we are Jews, or any other ethnicity.” “It’s called having a conscience, and it’s the most Jewish thing I know how to do.” “We should never forget that everything that Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’.”

Neturei Karta argues that Jewish law forbids believers to “dominate, harm, kill or demean other people.” I think of all those videos popular now in 2024 of Zionists openly making fun of Palestinians dying in Gaza. Zionists won’t remind you of the highest Jewish values of “love thy neighbor”, “love the stranger”, and “justice, justice shalt thou pursue.” American youth are getting more progressive while Israel’s education system for over two decades has been only going further to the right. This is why change must come from pressure from OUTSIDE Israel. Sharp eyes can see that continuing the occupation and genocide is NOT making Israel safer, nor does continuing to hide an ethnocracy behind a democracy. Many of the book’s authors have also shown how “the blatant discrimination that Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews have confronted has exposed the falsity of Zionism’s promises.”

I’m so glad to have read this book, which, like Rabbi Brant Rosen’s “Wrestling in the Daylight”, abundantly make clear how Zionism and Israel’s blatantly illegal 75-year occupation do NOT reflect Jewish values. And nowhere in the Torah, does it say, “And maketh thee settler-colonial upon thy neighbor’s asses, covet their property, aim at their sons’ kneecaps and thou shalt be called righteous.” What a great important book which I am so happy to have read. Bravo.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The central event in this collection of essays about the grip which Zionism has exerted -- and continues to exert -- on modern Judaism is the Holocaust, which acted not as its progenitor so much as its catalyst. While the Holocaust is not always explicitly cited by the 40 authors represented here, its historical impetus on subsequent events is always felt. One is reminded of the old adage that "hurt people hurt people," and the picture which emerges from the non- and anti-Zionists whose voices are heard in this volume is one of collective generational trauma. This type of trauma can either be perpetuated by subsequent generations, which is most often the case when left to its own devices, or else disrupted through intensive self-reflection and conscious effort. In the case of present-day Zionism, the former dynamic has held sway, and this book is part of the effort to align with the latter dynamic.

The creation of the State of Israel has carried with it paradoxes which have been impossible to reconcile. The often-quoted idea that Israel represented "a land without a people for a people without a land," despite being exposed as blatant propaganda (i.e., a lie), is still to be heard to this day. The assertion that Israel can be, simultaneously, a robust democracy as well as a bastion of Jewish ethnic nationalism is absurd, yet is not only rigorously maintained, but officially validated by Israel's allies, the U.S. certainly not excepted. The Ashkenazy-centric bent of Israeli society places Sephardic, Mizrahi, and all other non-white-presenting, non-European Jews within a caste system which has parallels to the Jim Crow south. And, most clearly, the oppression, bruatlization, attempted genocide, dehumanization, and stripping of identity of the Palestinian people has a direct parallel to the treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. Not to mention Israel's maintenance of an apartheid state with regard to Palestinians, which clearly parallels the more recent history of South Africa.

I write this as a non-practicing Jew who grew up as a member of a Reform synagogue. Pledging allegiance to Israel was a simple matter, because the only information we ever received was boilerplate propaganda. The Israelis had taken control of an unoccupied land which no one else had any interest in and heroically transformed barren desert into a lush land of milk and honey. However, as in every fairy tale, there was a villain: "the Arabs." It is important to note that the dichotomy, when I was growing up in the 1970s, was always framed in terms of the Arabs vs. the Jews. The words "Palestine" and "Palestinian" were rarely ever heard within the mainstream until the lead up to the Israeli-Lebanese conflict of the early 80s and the intifadas which followed, and then it was always within the context of the PLO, a group universally characterized as a terrorist organization. At the time of the invasion of Lebanon I was 16 years old and ill-equipped to see through the smokescreen of propaganda. Now, as an adult, it is easy to see that condemning the ensuing intifadas is not unlike labeling the participants of the Warsaw uprising as terrorists: these events did not happen in a vacuum, were not inexorably incited by pre-existing dogmas, and were certainly not snap decisions. Instead they occurred within significant historical and cultural contexts, evolved out of the frustration of being oppressed for years (or, in the case of the Palestinians, decades), and were the end result of every peaceful means of protest and resistance failing in the face of unrelenting, inhuman brutality.

There have been encouraging shifts in recent years, and the editor of this book, Carolyn L. Karcher, summarizes some of these in her incisive Afterword. These include the rise of the Internet, which makes it easier than ever to winnow facts from propaganda; the ever-increasingly right-wing extremist politics which have gripped the State of Israel; the support of Israel -- which it largely welcomes -- from far-right and nationalist organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere; and the increasing insistence, on the part of Israel and Zionists everywhere, that they should, and in fact do, act as the voice of Jews worldwide. This last point may be the one which undermines their efforts the most: no one wants someone else speaking for them without their consent. Zionism, in its present form, was born from the belief that, in the wake of the Holocaust, Jews required, deserved, and had a self-evident right to occupy a homeland. It presupposed that Diasporic Jews could never be safe unless they had a Jewish homeland to retreat to and that, furthermore, any Jewish person who did not do so was undermining the safety of all Jews. More than 70 years have now proved this to be untrue. The fact is that no ethnic group, Jews included, will ever be "safe" from racism and bigotry, but Diasporic Jews are neither better nor worse off than those living in Israel. If anything, we enjoy the advantages of: not having to live with indefensible policies the goal of which is precisely the kind of genocide which Zionists cite the Holocaust as representing; not necessarily living in conflict, to one degree or another, with every one of our bordering neighbors; and choosing our creeds and spokespeople for ourselves. Zionists, in short, have become the very thing they hate the most.

As also pointed out in the Afterword, there are a number of groups which are gaining momentum in order to try to put an end to this madness. Most notable among these are Jewish Voice for Peace, but it should be pointed out that there are many local and grass-roots efforts which are emerging as well, often coalescing around the BDS agenda, such as Tzedek Chicago, a synagogue for those U.S. Jews who feel dispossessed by the seemingly-ubiquitous Zionist agenda. Zionism is unique within Judaism in that it is the one hard-line right-wing agenda which many liberal, and even progressive, Jews have historically chosen to defend. Diasporic Jews have been very effectively gaslit by Zionism. This is now changing, and the voices which collectively speak for the dispossessed in this volume are representative of that fact. Any Jewish person, any non-Jew who supports a Zionist agenda, or anyone who pledges blind allegiance to the State of Israel, should fear nothing from reading this book. If they're certain that their beliefs are bulletproof, nothing here will alter them. But if they're truly open to other perspectives, they may find this collection transformative.

[Pamela Nice · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you transcend cultural trauma, so that you don’t, as a culture, strike out in revenge or develop an invincibility that convinces you, “We will not be hurt anymore”? What is the role of the Jewish cultural narrative of victimization and vindication in the practice of Zionism today? In this essay collection, Karcher presents us with 39 Jewish individuals who have wrestled with these questions and come to the realization that the Zionist narrative with which they were raised has been turned on its head: the victims are now the victimizers of another people; the oppressed are now the oppressors. Cultural narratives are tenacious. The courageous individuals who contributed to this collection have engaged the battle and dared to present their uncomfortable truths in spite of the estrangement of family and friends, the label of being self-hating Jews.

In these testimonies, the realization that Zionism is a racist doctrine that valorizes a chosen group over all others comes to each person differently, often over a long period of time, and often after witnessing the reality in Israel and Palestine. Karcher’s introduction and afterword are masterful pieces of writing, collating much historical material and highlighting the themes of the contributors. Her own story powerfully connects the facts of Occupation to her felt experience as a traveler in Palestine. All of the contributors come to the realization that to live the meaning of the Jewish social justice tradition, one must become one with the oppressed, whether Jewish or not.

Some of the most moving essays recount how the narrative of Zionism—especially the supposed miracle of making the desert bloom amidst a host of enemies—was embraced because it offered a symbolic home for the alienated—a philosophy that uplifted those who had been victimized or ostracized in their personal lives.

One remark stands out, referring to the Torah’s admonition to “Welcome the stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Contributor Moriah Ella Mason urges us to respond with compassion to our own cultural trauma, rather than to oppress in turn. “In welcoming the stranger, I heal the stranger in my own heart.”

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a non-Jew with a passionate interest in the fight for justice in Palestine, I was interested in hearing how my Jewish brothers and sisters came to join this fight. I had previously heard the story of Ned Rosch, whose story is on of more than 30 told here, and was inspired to hear more. I was not disappointed. The writers range in age from college students to senior citizens, and their backgrounds cover the gamut of Judiasm, from devoutly Conservative to non-practicing "cultural" Jews. I was interested to read that, for many, Zionism and the State of Israel were entwined with religion from a very young age - leading to the difficulties many experienced in rejecting unconditional support of Israel while maintaining their Jewish beliefs. The stories are inspiring - and I hope they are widely shared both inside and outside of the Jewish community.

[Kyra Robinov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book compiled by an esteemed author. Easy to read and so important! I highly recommend it.

[Gerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

We may all be at different stages on our path to understanding this complex issue, and may sometimes despair of ever understanding. If you have ever felt that way, this book is for you. If you have gotten to the point where you can no longer bear to look the other way and pretend not to see, if you can no longer allow yourself the excuse that “it’s just too complicated,” this is the book for you. Every reader should be able to find an opening to educate themselves from among this diverse collection of voices, from students to rabbis to academics to veterans of the civil rights movement. Every story is characterized by love and compassion, especially for those who would accuse them of self-hatred and anti-Semitism. Scrupulously researched historical background is also provided. I found it nothing short of miraculous that these individuals who have suffered so much cruelty and loss could somehow find a way to transcend the horror of the Holocaust and transform fear and hatred into a love of justice. Their witness gives me hope for humanity.

[Jimmacc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gave me a lot of …perspective?….
Many of the essayists connect their anti-Zionism with their direct observations of inequities inside Israel. Specifically on how non Ashkenazi-Jews share are treated/viewed/supported. Most emphasize their standard Jewish upbringing in the US, with the majority have at least nominally pro Zionist views at first. Whether through experience with non Ashkenazi Israelis or with Palestinian/Gazan residents, all found their experience with Zionism to run counter to their expectation of Jewish values.

The more wrenching essay was the one describing the essayist relationship with their Zionist grandmother, and the strain it caused on two people who were described as having a very close relationship.

[Deborah Goldsmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very moving autobiographical stories by Jewish people who grew up as Zionists and were confronted by circumstances and information that changed this belief. It's important for anyone wanting to understand how some people who identify as Jews can separate their spiritual beliefs and ethnic ties from a political stance supporting the current state of Israel.

[Marcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific anthology of personal narratives - intermixed with a fair amount of academic context - exploring the various paths out of Zionism that Jewish people have taken and are taking. There's a good mix of different generations and Sephardic narratives as well. It can and should be an important tool to help people bring more Jews out of Zionism.

[Lauren Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essays by the rabbis are particularly good, but it’s all thought-provoking and worthwhile. Recommended.