Parade Entering Jaffa, Palestine (Tel Aviv, Israel) (ca. 1826-1900) | Frederic Edwin Church / Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum / Public Domain
Benjamin Moser has written three highly regarded books, Why This World, a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector; Sontag, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Susan Sontag, and a volume on Dutch art, An Upside Down World. His latest book, Anti-Zionism (Doubleday 2026), is a radical departure from his preceding works. Through the lives of Jewish figures from around the world who opposed Zionism, Moser provides more than a critique of the current state (and State) of Israel—his aim is far more radical. He attempts to demonstrate that, from its inception, Zionism has been a wrong-headed, even criminal enterprise, and that there have always been Jews who have opposed it. That opposition has been based on different grounds, from political, to ethical, to religious. Moser takes no prisoners along the way, and he lays out an uncomfortable reality: Israel’s crimes—its dispossession of the Palestinians, its massacres, its ethnic cleansing, the genocide in Gaza, its apartheid regime—are not accidental or incidental; they are an integral and inevitable feature of Zionism. But as Moser also shows, there have always been Jews who have fought against the ideology and its harms. Mitch Abidor spoke to the author about his understanding of Zionism, and the diverse array of anti-Zionists he features in his book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitch Abidor: How do you define Zionism?
Benjamin Moser: In the book, I give a very simple definition, which is that Zionism is the favoring of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Now, you could say it’s just favoring the continuation of that state’s existence. Of course, there are lots of other definitions as well, but I think that’s the simplest way to put it.
A lot of what gets confused about the definition is that when you go back to, say, 1896, you’re looking at a very different context from today. It was all theoretical then. They questioned everything. They asked themselves whether they should dance the hora; should they revive Hebrew? Most supported that, but not so many supported reviving state sovereignty. Those that did asked whether we should have a state that is essentially socialist, or essentially technocratic, or essentially all these other things. But what I try to say now is that when you say “pro-Israel,” you’re talking about the Israel that’s actually there. So, when you are supporting a state that is committing genocide, that is actively ethnically cleansing the West Bank, that has all sorts of discriminatory laws based on race and ethnicity, that, to me, is what Zionism actually is. I think a lot of Jewish people are theoretically inclined to go back and game play these alternative scenarios. But I try to keep it very, very concrete. What’s actually there? What’s actually happened?
Abidor: What’s your definition of anti-Zionism? Is it opposition to the idea of Israel, to the need for a Jewish state, or do you not think it should continue to exist?
Moser: Well, that’s where I come out, ultimately, and that’s where a lot of the people that I write about come out. Did the European Jews have the right to come to Palestine, which was 95 to 97 percent non-Jewish, where these people had never done anything to the Jews, and colonize that state, boycott the people, and ultimately ethnically cleanse and commit genocide against them? There’s a lot of ways to be an anti, right? That’s what I write about, that’s why it’s such a diverse, motley crew in the book. But ultimately, I don’t think any state really has a right to exist. I think people have a right to exist, and I think this hang-up is one of those things that they try to trap you into saying. So I say it right at the very beginning of the book, and I say it in italics.
Abidor: There’s a wonderful part of the book where you pick apart early Zionist leaders Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau and what you call their antisemitism, or their use of antisemitic language. A lot of the things they said about Jews was in order to have the Jews become something else. Herzl is saying these things to pull the Jews away from these negative things, to cleanse them of the filth that life in the Diaspora among non-Jews has covered them with.
Moser: When I was writing that part about Herzl, I really was puzzled by it, because, and I’m not using this word lightly, he sounds crazy. He sounds insane.
And in fact, there was a lot of mental illness in his family, there’s a lot of mental illness around him. He has this famous anecdote where his friend reads his book, The Judenstadt, and starts crying, because he says that Herzl has lost his mind. Trying to understand Herzl in a rational way becomes a real challenge. But I think that where he really is authentic, and where you really get a sense of a personality, is when he’s trying to change the Jewish people. He doesn’t have his son circumcised. He has negative comment after negative comment about the Jews. They’re weak, they’re effeminate, they’re pathetic, they’re dirty, they’re all this kind of stuff. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s basically what it is. And so, I think that there is this authentic core of his desire to change the Jews into something else. And whether that becomes a militaristic, nationalistic group, like all the nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it certainly is extremely radical in terms of anything in the Jewish ethical or religious tradition. And I think maybe that is what was so appealing about him.
Abidor: Bernard Lazare, a Jewish anarchist who was the first person to defend Dreyfus, and was the first Zionist in France, famously wrote a history of antisemitism in which he blamed the Jews for antisemitism, saying that they really were all the terrible things they were accused of being.
Moser: Bernard Lazare is the great inspiration for Hannah Arendt, who’s also in the book, and also, funnily enough, was an inspiration for Herzl, because Herzl doesn’t even realize that the Dreyfus affair is about Jews until Lazare points it out to him. But Hannah Arendt describes the Jews in a way that you would not get into Liberties or into The New York Times today. She’s harsh about the role of Jews in exploiting the populations that they taxed, and in the German principalities, all these things that we tend to forget about. What you see in all this pro-Israel stuff is that the Jews are always victims. But in fact, if you know anything about Jewish history, you know that this comes and goes. And sometimes there are periods of terrible persecution, and sometimes there are periods where the Jews are doing pretty well, just like now.
Someone like Hannah Arendt could very easily be considered antisemitic if you looked at her under current standards. I think her whole body of work remains very challenging and very interesting. I was really interested to read about her. Her thoughts on the roles of Jewish finance in the consolidation of the German Empire, for example—you would get canceled for writing that now, I think.
Abidor: What you said about different periods of Jewish history, that antisemitism comes and goes was, I thought, the genius of Mark Mazower’s book on antisemitism. He points out that what gets elided from any discussion of Jewish history is the good times. We’re very attached to our misery.
Moser: I was told, and I’m sure you were too, that if there’s no Israel, it’s Auschwitz. Right? And so, the narrative is that Israel is bad in a lot of ways, that we hope it will reform, and we hope that we’re going to be on the side of making it better. But if we don’t have Israel, it’s next stop: Treblinka. I come from a family of German refugees, as you know from the book. That was a very present story to me, even though we lived in the full opulence of modern America, with all its freedoms and wealth. That awareness, or that fear, was very present.
Abidor: In your chapter on Hannah Arendt, the description of what went on around Eichmann in Jerusalem very much resembles what went on a couple of years ago, during the Gaza solidarity campus encampments, when all of a sudden everyone was considered an antisemite, and even minor criticism of Israel was treated as a threat to Jewish existence.
Moser: I came across this incredible story of what actually happened with Eichmann in Jerusalem, because I always heard, “Oh, it’s about the banality of evil, and it wasn’t really banal, and she says Eichmann didn’t really hate the Jews, but he really did hate the Jews, and blah blah blah.” And I always thought, well, actually, when you read this, it doesn’t matter. The whole point of the banality of evil is that it doesn’t matter what Eichmann actually thinks about the Jews, or whether he’s banal or not banal. What matters is what she’s describing, which is this modern mechanized slaughter factory; that you could take him out and put somebody else in. As the Holocaust shows, or as Gaza shows, there are plenty of people who are willing to commit all sorts of atrocities if they’re put in the right bureaucratic scenario. So I couldn’t figure out why Arendt was attacked so brutally, and for so long. This is what people forget, that that “controversy” went on for years. And she dies, as Ron Feldman says, a pariah.
Abidor: We now have this anti-Zohran frenzy led by certain Jewish factions; it’s like a religion. Anybody who says anything bad about Israel is a Nazi, and now if you say anything good about Zohran you’re clearly an anti-Semite. Just to give you an example, I campaigned for Zohran, knocking on doors. And I wore a t-shirt—I still have it, because it’s a great t-shirt—that says “New York Jews for Zohran.” And the reactions I get are just really horrifying.
Moser: I think people are really addicted to this wound that isn’t their own wound. I mean, I was brought up as a descendant, as I said, of people who escaped Germany. I was always told “It’s not your story. You live in Houston, Texas. You are lucky. You don’t have to go to 1937 Poland. You can go down the street here in Houston and see people who have horrible, horrible lives, and those are the people that you’re supposed to feel solidarity with.” I was lucky with my parents, in this sense. But I’ve been quite shocked by these very wealthy, comfortable people who are absolutely hell-bent on being victims. And right now, they’re focused on Mamdani, but you know, Netanyahu got his start inciting against Yitzak Rabin, the former Israeli Prime Minister. This is a pattern. I think what you see in my book, if you go back to the nineteenth century, it’s the same playbook. It’s the same vocabulary. “You’re a Jewish anti-Semite, you’re a self-hating Jew, you’re a whatever,” just repeats, constantly. It’s like a playback loop.
Abidor: You write, “Nothing is more guaranteed to unleash Zionist viciousness than comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. This is not because the memory of the six million is sacred to Zionists, but because since the day of Israeli independence, [Israel’s] behavior has invited the comparison.” You had to know when you wrote that sentence that people were going to be crawling all over you when this book comes out.
Moser: Well, when I wrote the title, I knew they were going to be crawling all over me. I don’t think that’s something that I can avoid with this subject. And I don’t want to avoid it. I think that if people want to defend the massacre by the Irgun at Deir Yassin, and they want to defend the massacre in 1953 at Qibya, and they want to defend [Israel’s actions in] Gaza, and they want to defend not just Gaza now, but Gaza in ‘68, Gaza in ‘73, Gaza in 2014, Gaza in 2021 …That is not a winning move for them, because I think that what they’re depending on is the prohibition being so powerful, and that threats to people’s careers, to people’s livelihoods will ensure that people will just not do that.
In acting like this they compromise what I always thought was the lesson of the Holocaust, which was “never again for anyone.” That was what I was taught, that you’re supposed to be against violence and against discrimination and apartheid and genocide everywhere, for everybody. So if they want to talk about how the massacre at Deir Yassin isn’t as bad as something else, when they killed all the pregnant women and dumped the orphans in front of the gates of Jerusalem, and then paraded the men through the streets of Jerusalem, where they spit on them and then executed them … That’s a conversation I’m willing to have. But of course, they won’t talk about that.
Abidor: You know, for me, the best book on the impact of the Holocaust is Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life, and there’s a great line in it, where Novick says that “never again means, never again will the Jews in Europe be slaughtered between 1939 and 1945.”
Moser: I think that Tony Judt also said that the Israeli state is today the most responsible party for devaluing the Holocaust and trivializing Auschwitz.
Abidor: I noted the prominence of communists in the book.
Moser: I think I came to really like communists a lot as I was doing this book. So many of these people were so courageous. Like Felicia Langer, the communist lawyer who defended imprisoned Palestinians, this tiny little woman with pink lipstick, who’s getting tear gassed and spat on her whole career. And Ronnie Kasrilsin from South Africa. I just was really inspired by a lot of the communists, but I didn’t want it to be all communists.
Abidor: I’m interested in the selection criteria, because when I met you a few months ago I asked you if the anti-Zionist organizations Matzpen and the Bund were in the book. And they’re not, and I’m, curious why neither one of them made the cut, and what were the criteria? You include a broad swath of Jewish life. You have religious Jews, gay Jews, straight Jews, Ashkenazi, Sephardim, the whole thing. But the Bund was really it, it wasn’t only the major Jewish anti-Zionist force in Europe before the war, it was the major Jewish force. And Matzpen, the revolutionary socialist organization, managed to find a way, with its 35 members, to be both anti-Zionist and Israeli, and started fighting the Occupation a couple of months after the 1967 war.
Moser: The first thing about the Bund is I already had a lot of leftists. I feel like I represent socialist and communist opinion pretty widely. And I was more interested, in some ways, in what conservative people think about all this. Like Edwin Montague, a representative of the upper class of English-Jewish tycoons, and the Reformed Jews in America, who were the establishment. They were not radical at all. It was a very small-c conservative organization in Houston.
The other reason was that Molly Crabapple’s book on the Bund was coming out, and she’s a friend of mine. I thought she’s totally focused on this, she’s going to do a proper, big dive into this. The point about this, I think, is that I hope the book will be just a start in the conversation. In this archaeology of all these figures, the more you go into it, the more you realize it’s diverse, the more you realize it was complicated, and it was a huge story. I would say your average Jewish American does not know any of this stuff. It’s not a complete work, but I’m trying to just sketch the outlines of the subject and then hope people will pick it up and run with it.
