A restored history of Jewish anti-Zionism — and the loss it cannot repair
Yahia Lababidi writes in +972 on 22 September 2026:
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, by Benjamin Moser, Doubleday, 2026
Few words in contemporary public life have undergone so rapid and punitive a narrowing as “anti-Zionism.” Once a contested political position, argued across Jewish religious and ethical traditions, it now arrives pre-condemned, treated less as a historical idea than as evidence of moral contamination. The word no longer describes only a position regarding nationalism or statehood; it has become an instrument of foreclosure, capable of collapsing distinctions and histories into accusation.
That collapse happened fast. In December 2023, less than two months after the October 7 attacks, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 311 to 14 to resolve that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are equivalent. This resolution was not only an attempt to delegitimize the growing wave of protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Alongside subsequent legislative efforts, it has served a deeper purpose: to erase a long and serious Jewish tradition of opposing Zionism on religious and political grounds.
Benjamin Moser’s “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History” sets out to recover that tradition. A Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Moser has spent his career restoring figures who lived at the edges of what institutions were willing to acknowledge — among them the American critic Susan Sontag in her contradictions and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector in her strangeness. He brings that same instinct here, to a chamber of Jewish intellectual history that others had long declared sealed.