Anti-Zionism: An Anti-Jewish History

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

A common story told to Jewish schoolchildren is about a town that commissions a cover for its Torah scroll. When it finally arrives, the cover is stunning, but it’s clearly too short to cover the whole scroll. The townsfolk come up with a fix: They’ll just trim the Torah.

 

This story is told to children because the absurdity of the “solution” is obvious even to the young. Yet I fear that Benjamin Moser took the wrong lesson from it.

 

Moser’s new book Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History is the presentation of a worldview so narrow that Judaism has to be pared down considerably in order to fit inside it. Moser begins by declaring that the Jews are not a people, a nation, a civilization, or a society. They are adherents of a religion, strictly in the modern sense. They are Protestants with bagels and lox.

 

This ahistorical and narrow presentation of Judaism is the core problem faced by anti-Zionists. The Jews are an ancient people who have survived into the present. Modern terminology doesn’t have a category for them. That can be confusing, even threatening, to those who need everyone to fit into a modern framework. Therefore, “religion” is the least threatening box to put them in: If Judaism is “just” a religion, the Jews are just like everyone else.

 

Complicating this picture greatly is the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the historic Jewish homeland with the establishment of the state of Israel. The movement that brought this to fruition was Zionism, which can most accurately be defined as the Jewish right of self-determination. Today, Jewish anti-Zionists are a fringe group fighting a long-finished conflict, like Hiroo Onoda hiding out on some remote island in the Philippines.

 

Fringe, but dangerous: Post-1948, anti-Zionism seeks the dismantling of the state of Israel. To establish this undoing as a legitimate goal, anti-Zionists must argue that Jewish sovereignty is itself illegitimate, because there’s no such thing as “the Jewish people.”

 

Thus we have Moser stating the following about Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism’s political program, and his famous book The Jewish State: “Der Judenstaat is short. It defines the Jews as a ‘people—one people,’ ein Volk. In the nineteenth century, this word’s associations were political and above all racial, and therefore clashed with the traditional definition of the Jews as a community of religious believers.”

 

Moser clings to this idea like a life raft. After an introduction in which Moser calls Herzl “thoughtless,” “childish,” and likely mentally ill, and in which the author expresses resentment toward his parents for not telling him that this Herzl guy was a madman, Moser introduces us to the first of his 12 subjects: Aaron Samuel Tamares. A small-town rabbi in modern-day Poland but a prominent figure in the Jewish intellectual world as the 19^th century turned into the 20^th, Tamares was known for his pacifism. This put him in conflict with some of his fellow Zionists and estranged him from the wider movement.

 

Tamares is a compelling figure, but Moser uses him as a tool to shame the Zionists for being impious. The desire for a national home was “undignified and irreligious, Tamares insisted: Judaism was ‘independent of land, kings, and lords,’” Moser writes.

 

Moser returns to this theme in his chapter on Dutch poet Jacob Israël de Haan, who, like Moser and Tamares, began as a Zionist but became deeply disillusioned and joined the anti-Zionists. “Without the laws that had kept the Jews together through the centuries, Zionism would become just another vulgar chauvinism,” Moser writes of de Haan’s views.

 

Yet it turns out that Moser considers the Orthodox to be dispensable too. Moser celebrates the anti-Zionist rabbi Hyman Judah Schachtel, who became the spiritual leader of an infamously anti-Zionist synagogue in Houston in the 1940s. Schachtel “rejected the Zionist idea ‘that we are Jews by race and nationality.’” But he also enforced a bizarre synagogue policy: Zionists and observant Jews could only be nonvoting members. Moser says that Schachtel and his congregants understood how “Superstitious abracadabra, the thousands of petty directives governing diet and dress … was getting in the way of a universal message.” They therefore put strict limits on their congregation’s tolerance of traditional Judaism.

 

By the end of Anti-Zionism, the People of the Book aren’t a people and have no book.

 

Believe it or not, this isn’t the only problem with Moser’s work. There’s a reason Anti-Zionism has received harshly negative reviews from the New York Times and The New Yorker, outlets that regularly defend the concept of anti-Zionism, and that reason is Moser’s fundamental dishonesty. The New Yorker, in particular, picks apart Moser’s chapter on Hannah Arendt, which Moser uses to portray Zionism and Nazism as enthusiastic and like-minded allies. The New Yorker’s review uncovers a slew of falsehoods and factual errors in this chapter.

 

The Arendt chapter focuses on her controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, and it may be where Moser is at his sloppiest. He quotes the following passage from a contemporary review by then-Commentary editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz: “In the place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in the place of the Jew as a virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in the place of the confrontation of guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim.”

 

Moser cites this as an example of how, to Zionists, “the only permissible lesson of the Holocaust was Jewish moral spotlessness.” But Podhoretz was making a passing stylistic contrast between Arendt’s and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s approaches to writing about victimhood, not arguing for moral spotlessness. The point of Podhoretz’s review was to debunk Arendt’s claim that, without Jewish collaboration, “there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” Arendt’s own past scholarship on totalitarianism, Podhoretz pointed out, shows that it is society-wide collaboration, not piecemeal administrative grunt work by a small group of prisoners, that makes such mass murder possible. Moser pretends such substantive engagement with Arendt by her critics didn’t exist at all.

 

This cheap deceit is a perfect distillation of Moser’s writing throughout Anti-Zionism. And it explains why publications that are so critical of Israel and Zionism, like the New York Times and The New Yorker, were so clearly disappointed: Moser’s book does more to discredit anti-Zionism than to revive it.

 

Another form of Moser’s dishonesty is his refusal to give agency to anyone except his story’s villains. In the chapter on Ahmad Sadiq Saad, an Egyptian Jewish communist who opposed Zionism, Moser writes the following about the conflict that followed Israel’s declaration of statehood: “Egypt found itself at war with the new State of Israel.” By “found itself at war with,” he means “invaded.”

 

Moser makes a habit of skipping over how a conflict or an incident began so he can avoid uncomfortable truths. Regarding the 1921 Arab Jaffa riots, for example, Moser is beyond parody: “The degree of mutual enmity, the bizarre conspiracy theories doing the rounds, made it hard to ascertain the reasons for the outbreak. The Arabs whispered that twelve hundred Arabs had been killed by airplanes. The Jews whispered that the Arabs had poisoned all the milk.”

 

But the 1921 riots are no mystery: They began when there was a street fight between two Jewish groups, during which the Arabs of the area took advantage of the commotion to go on a murder spree. Moser eventually throws up his hands: “Whatever the origins of the unrest …”

 

There is surely an interesting history to be written about Jewish anti-Zionism. But the operative word there is “history.” In the bloody chaos of the first half of the 20^th century, a debate raged over whether fighting for statehood in the Holy Land was the best way to secure the Jewish future. That debate ended the day the state of Israel was born.

 

Schachtel, leader of the most famous anti-Zionist synagogue of its day, had a change of heart after 1948. It was “futile to argue with history,” he said. In a letter that Moser quotes, the rabbi wrote: “Anti-Semitism is being defeated by the courage of Israel. The name Jew is now associated with courage, stamina, heroism, fighting power—the anti-Semites have been confounded.” Schachtel would from then on be among Israel’s loudest cheerleaders.

 

As for Tamares, he died in 1931 at the age of 62, leaving behind his wife and six children. Four of those children immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. His wife and the other two children stayed behind. They died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942.

 

Then there’s Saad. After his fellow communists barred Jews from the movement, Saad and his wife converted to Islam.

 

All those stories are in Moser’s book too. And that is the final irony of his feeble attempt to claim vindication for an idea that belongs squarely in the dustbin of history: Moser intended to praise anti-Zionism, but instead he buried it.