In the years 1897-98, three political movements were formed which fashioned the destiny of the Jews during the 20th century.
The socialist General Jewish Labour Bund was founded in Vilnius in October 1897 and advocated cultural autonomy in the areas of the great empires in which Jews were concentrated. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was founded in Minsk at the beginning of 1898, later splitting into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and finally evolving into the Communist Party under Lenin. And, in August 1897, the Zionist movement held its first congress in Basel. Theodor Herzl opened the proceedings with a lacklustre speech, followed by the social critic Max Nordau who paid tribute to ‘the great men of 1792’ – the sansculottes of the French Revolution who had overthrown the monarchy. Despite their eventual differences, both communists and Zionists looked to the French Revolution as ‘the dawn of humanity’ when racism would vanish and justice prevail.
In 1917 the October Revolution and the Balfour Declaration took place within days of each other. One spoke about repairing the world, the other of a Jewish home in Palestine. The former appealed to the universalism within Judaism while the latter spoke to its particularism. Both communism and Zionism coloured the paths of multitudes of Jews. Jewish communists looked to Marx and Lenin, who had condemned all forms of nationalism. Jewish Zionists looked instead to Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the advocates of constructivism and anarcho-communism who advocated the importance of identity within a nation.
David Ben-Gurion, born in 1886 and regarded as the founding father of Israel, admired Lenin for his pragmatism and ability to create a revolution with few resources. In January 1924 he gave a eulogy in Hebrew on Lenin’s passing. Many of the early Zionist pioneers in Palestine in the 1920s admiringly looked to Moscow for inspiration in building socialism in Palestine. Some remarkably remained loyal to the Kremlin even during the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s.
Benjamin Moser, the author of biographies of the Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispector and the American critic Susan Sontag, for which he won a Pulitzer prize, has now turned to the subject of anti-Zionism, a position he strongly embraces. His book follows a biographical approach, consisting of a series of 12 profiles of prominent anti-Zionist Jewish figures, from Aaron Samuel Tamares, rabbi of Milejczyce in 19th-century Poland, to the American photographer Nan Goldin.
There is virtually no mention of the origins of anti-Zionism and the ideological opposition of the early Jewish Bolsheviks such as Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Karl Radek. Trotsky is also missing. He was offended by those who described him as a Jew rather than as an internationalist. Even so, Trotsky became interested in the socialist experiment of the Jews in Palestine in the late 1930s. There is also no mention of the originator of socialist Zionism, Moses Hess, who was a colleague of Marx in the 1840s and was influenced by The Republic of Equals by the French revolutionary Gracchus Baboef.
Moser’s book is therefore not really an objective Jewish history of the ideological streams that first cemented Jewish anti- Zionism, but more a retort to the Netanyahu coalition’s assault on Gaza.
Several of those featured in this book were overt Stalinists. Felicia Langer (1930-2018), a courageous defender of Palestinian detainees and Israeli conscientious objectors in Israeli courts, was a member of Rakah, the pro-Kremlin faction of the previously united Israeli Communist Party. She had grown up in the Soviet Union after fleeing from the Nazi invasion of Poland.
The French orientalist Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004) expressed his fidelity to Stalin by supporting the Kremlin’s charges against the Jewish doctors accused of poisoning the leaders of the Soviet Union in the so-called Doctors’ plot of January 1953. Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, Rodinson and his colleagues in France were informed by the Kremlin that the Doctors’ plot had been a big mistake. Moser omits all of this.
Elsewhere Moser considers Ronnie Kasrils (b.1938) who, like Moser, moved from Zionism to Marxism, and joined the Communist Party of South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Kasrils, who became a defence minister under Mandela, has castigated the timidity of Jewish organisations in speaking out against apartheid. Yet the heavily Jewish suburb of Houghton in Johannesburg repeatedly returned Helen Suzman as the only anti-apartheid member of the South African parliament between 1953 and 1989. She was regularly at the sharp end of antisemitic jibes by Afrikaner nationalists and often told to ‘go back to Israel’. In the early 1960s Golda Meir as foreign minister of Israel repeatedly condemned apartheid and instructed her representatives to vote in support of anti- apartheid motions at the UN. Such episodes aremissing from Benjamin Moser’s ‘Jewish history’.
Half of Moser’s introduction is about Theodor Herzl but there is nothing about other figures who represented a wide spectrum of views within Zionism, stretching from Abba Ahimeir’s sympathy for Mussolini to Meir Ya’ari’s belief in Stalin. Moser raises the question of whether Herzl suffered from mental illness, and by extrapolation the supposition that Zionism was a delusion writ large which sucked in many Jews.
The terrible Gaza war was no doubt an impetus for Moser’s book. Even so, few Israelis today subscribe to Netanyahu’s version of Zionism. Two years ago, New York University Press published Marjorie N. Feld’s The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism. It strove to be comprehensive and non-partisan, and is to be recommended. In contrast, Moser constructs a one-dimensional appraisal of Zionism, an emotional reaction to a romanticised past rather than an informed analysis of the disastrous present.
History Today November 2026