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Benjamin Balthaser, "Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left" (Verso Books, 2025)
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'M honored to be speaking with Dr. Benjamin Balthazar about a recent book that he has published with VESO publisher. The book is called Citizens of the Whole Anti Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, which is a very topical issue. I think the book just came out a couple of months ago. Dr. Benjamin Bonfeiser is the author of Anti Imperialist Modernism, Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War and Dedication. His work has appeared on forthcoming has appeared on his forthcoming in journals such as American Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Boston Review, Jacobin and Schoeffer is currently the Associate professor of Multi Ethnic US Literature at Indiana University South Bend and also Associate Editor of American Quartet. Ben welcome to New Books Network.
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Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Thank you for having me. Delight to be here.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Before we start talking about the book, can I just very briefly introduce yourself? Tell us about your intellectual background, your field of expertise and more importantly, when did the idea of this book come to you? Because it's a very topical issue these days.
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Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah, so my background is actually not in Jewish studies, although I've done a lot of writing, kind of personal writing about my own family history. My grandparents were kind of Jewish left activists in the 1950s and faced repression during the Red Scare. And so I've kind of written dedication was kind of a family history of that. But my background is basically thinking about race, social movements, the American left and kind of a transnational an anti imperialist context. That was my last book and that's kind of my training in American studies. And this occurred to me actually as I was going this book topic occurred to me actually a long time ago. I was writing my dissertation which became my last book, Anti Imperialist Modernism and was going to Students for Justice in Palestine meetings. As a graduate student was also interested in Jewish Voice for Peace, which was then just kind of expanding out of the Bay Area in the early 2000s. And, and noticed as I was going to kind of the early days, you could say sort of the contemporary iteration of the Palestine solidarity movement as the BDS movement was really starting to form, that there were basically two groups of people that were at a lot of these meetings. It was second generation Palestinian immigrants to the United States, Arab Americans, the Muslim Student association and then left wing Jews. And that there were a lot always no matter where I went, if there was a Jewish population living in that area, there were always a lot of left wing Jews. And then of course my own family on my mom's side were left wing Jewish activists who were also anti Zionists. And so I thought you know, it would be, I think, worthwhile and interesting to take my training basically in thinking about cultural material histories of the left, particularly again, a kind of a transnational context, sort of thinking about America and the world and to think about, is there a story here that one can tell about the Jewish left in America, in particular in America and the large and growing presence of a Jewish anti Zionist movement in the United States? And I would say too, that as someone who is an editor of American Quarterly and someone who's very engaged in the field of American Studies, that's sort of a typical, you could say, American Studies project. What is the secret left history of whatever it happens to be? So secret Life's History of Baseball. What's the history of the Black Left? Robin D. Gees Kelly's work was incredibly influential for me as a graduate student. And so I thought it would be interesting to do a kind of Jewish version of that. Is there a left wing story that one can tell about the formation and subjective understanding of Jewish anti Zionism in the United States?
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Moteza Hajizadeh
This is a, I think you, you said it very beautifully, like I have always been this, this, this tradition of, you know, left, the Jewish left going back went to Marx and David Graeber. You named them, There were a lot of them. And these days, you know, the moment you start criticizing Zionism, you're immediately accused of being an anti Semite. And a lot of people might think that even anti Zionism. And I must confess that I was even until a couple of years ago. Yeah, before October 7th maybe, because I did broadly know about the history of area, but I didn't really know much about the history of Zionism. Even back then I thought anti Zionism is more or less a recent phenomenon, but that's not the case. And in your book you talk about anti Zionism as being a historical constant. It's been around for a long, long time and it's not really a rupture, it's not really a new phenomenon. But can you just briefly talk about this and tell us why do you think this anti Zionism as being an old historical phenomenon? Why has this been kind of forgotten?
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Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah. So I mean, first, just to say, I think one of the other things that hopefully my book can talk about is that people see, I think in real time organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or if not now, or sort of large Jewish presence in Democratic Socialists of America, particularly in New York City, and they wonder where that came from. Right. Is that New Right? Is it just a post 10-7- phenomenon as you can see again in kind of real time. Even Jewish liberals are starting to realize Israel has gone too far. The Israeli right, which is neo fascist, genocidal, running an apartheid state, does not exactly align with kind of historic Jewish American liberalism as the Jewish community has often understood itself, to say nothing of Jewish leftism. And so, yeah, anti Zionism is not new. In fact, actually in some ways the first, the title of my first chapter is When Anti Zionism was Jewish. Which is, you know, I mean, I'm being a little provocative, but Anti Zionism or Zionism rather was not popular on the American left in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s even, particularly in the American Jewish community. And this is of course an era that the historian anthropologist Karen Brodkin has referred to as hegemonic Jewish socialism. So one thing I think that's not very well understood is that the Jewish American community, particularly sort of post 1880s, 1890s immigration waves, was really kind of dominated by the left, sort of social democratic, anti capitalist, imaginary. And this actually was not exceptional. So most immigrants, and I think you can again can kind of see this today, that most immigrants come in as low wage workers and are swept up into the labor movement and sort of develop kind of autochthonously a critique of capital. And so who the immigrant workers in the 1880s. There's been a long Jewish presence in the United States going all the way back to the perhaps troubled and inglorious birth of this nation as a settler colony. But the real kind of massive waves of Jewish immigration from the Pale of Settlement in Russia, in Eastern Europe, with Russian empire, happened in the 1880s. Their response to pogroms, Jews basically didn't exactly have citizenship, were second class citizens in the Russian empire. And of course you have other waves of anti Semitism in Europe in the 19th century. The Dreyfus Fair is a kind of famous example of antisemitism becoming part of European left and right discourse. As you have waves, literally millions of Jews fleeing Europe and coming to the United States and they get swept up in the labor movement, which at that time was broadly anti capitalist. And the question on some level is why did Jewish Americans remain anti capitalists really up until the Cold War, even when other immigrant communities, German American immigrants, Italian American immigrants, were kind of broadly assimilated. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Part of it has to do with America as a predominantly Christian country. Some of it has to do with, with a kind of, you know, I would say Jewish communities in the United States who produce Their own left wing publications, those popular publication. Jewish publication in the first half of the 20th century was the Daily Forward, which at that time no longer is, but at that time was a social democratic or socialist publication. And so there was really kind of a. Developed, a kind of, you could say a broad Jewish American left that was, you know, anything from communist to social democratic, generally voted liberal, took part in, again, the broad labor movement. The Socialist party was hugely Jewish. The Communist Party was hugely Jewish. I mean, there's estimates that half the Communist Party in America, which peaked at about 100,000 members in the early 40s, was Jewish. And so the American left had an incredibly large Jewish presence, which even actually dwarfed in some ways the European Jewish left, which also, of course, was quite sizable up until the Holocaust. So, you know, the Jewish Labor Bund, of course, is one of the most important pre war political organizations, which was a socialist Jewish organization in Eastern Europe. And their perspective on Zionism, I think in some ways would resonate today in the sense that they understood Zionism to be imperialism aligned with the British Empire. They saw the Balfour statement as basically just a statement of American imperialism trying to conscript Jews. And of course they also understood that the British Empire, Balfour himself was famously anti Semitic. So a lot of the British Zionists, non Jewish Zionists, Balfour Churchill, were also anti Semites, right. And saw Zionism as a way basically to remove Jews from Europe and then also to, you could say Westernize Jews and make them into proper Western subjects by essentially making them create a nation state, right. And then sort of outpost the British Empire. The other way in which it was understood as, or the left understood themselves to be anti Zionist is they also understood Zionism basically to be a nationalist movement. And if you were a leftist in the 1930s, nationalism was fascism, right? And so a lot of the kind of. And this is, I think, the part that is a little lost today, we talk a lot less about nationalism as being inherently fascist. But in the 1930s, ultra nationalists were Franco, Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Peron's Argentina, right? Of course, Hitler. And of course there's even a critique of the Soviet Union that what was Stalin? Stalin was, you could say, a Soviet nationalist. And also Stalin was famously an anti Semite as well. And so even among you could say the far left, there was an understanding that ultra nationalism was racist, anti labor, and then also again, implicitly aligned with conquest, violence, militarism and imperialism. And so there are a lot of writers, Jewish writers of the 1930s, some of whom were communists. So there's an article that I talk about extensively by Robert Gessner, who was a kind of left wing film critic, fellow traveler of the Communist Party, kind of a popular Jewish American writer, wrote a lot about, did a kind of famous travel law, kind of Jew goes around the world. And you know, he famously basically says that even the sort of left wing Jewish Zionists are what he calls pink Nazis, right? He basically refers to Zionists as in line with fascist Germany. And there were actual Nazis who backed the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine as again a way to get rid of Jews out of Europe and to build up, as he put it, their own fatherland. There's social democratic writer, not a communist, but kind of a left liberal. Nathan Zuckerman, who won in the 50s to publish a kind of well known Jewish newspaper called the Jewish Newsletter, who referred to Zionism as machine gun Judaism and the idea that basically Zionists were essentially rampaging militias. And this is how Albert Einstein referred to the Zionist movement that eventually sort of won out the revisionists in the late 1940s. He referred to them as, as fascists. Hannah Arendt, who is famously not a leftist, a classic liberal, basically referred to the Zionist movement as something that is going to create a Sparta on the sea, something that is going to be a kind of a militaristic nation that is going to denude, as she put it, the kind of left wing values of the. She called it mass Jewish politics or Jewish left at the time. And I think the last part of it in the 1930s in particular was that the 1930s is an important moment in American left history. So what we think of today as the left really kind of gets born out of the New Deal era, this is the alignment of civil rights organizations with labor and civil liberties. And I think we take that coalition today so for granted that you can't even really imagine a left that wouldn't be anti racist and in favor of civil liberties. But if you look at the labor movement, really Even of the 19th century, there are many labor unions that didn't allow African Americans and they saw themselves as pro labor. And a lot of civil libertarians were anti communists or anti leftists. And so the New Deal is, you could say, a realignment of a number of different groups, organizations and political perspectives that aligned, you could say the sort of beginnings of the civil rights movement which really kind of gets going in the 1930s. It doesn't come into fruition until the 1950s with the labor movement, with civil liberties, with nation feminist movements, and also with anti imperialism Anti fascism, right. So if you're a leftist in the 1930s, particularly a Jewish leftist who's watching fascism march over Europe, right? To be a leftist meant not only to be pro labor, to be a social democrat or even a socialist, but also to be anti racist. And so you could say what really kind of linked pretty much the kind of common sense of the left was a sense that the left, if it's anything, is against Jim Crow, right? It's against apartheid. And so there's a lot a large discussion of the Yishuv, this is the pre state settlement right of Jews in what is now Israel as being what was referred to as a Jim Crow country because the Yishuv didn't allow Palestinians, right. Organize their own separate societies. And even among, you know, Zionists who were on the left, you know, they had a very hard time. So the official communist position in the late 40s, before the foundation of the state of Israel and the Soviet Union changes its tune in 1947, was that, you know, Arab Communists and Palestinian Communists and Jewish Communists should unite together, build a binational state and kick out the British. But they couldn't do this because the simple fact is that the issue were basically segregated communities. So you couldn't really build a binational state out of essentially these, these Jewish only essentially armed enclaves right in Palestine. And so the, the last plank, I would say of the understanding of Zionism as being a right wing project in the 1930s was the understanding that it was, as one writer put it, a Jim Crow society. And of course, if you were against anything in the United states in the 1930s and 40s and you're on the left, it would be Jim Crow. One other text that I spend a lot of time with is Mike Gold's Jews Without Money. Mike Gold was probably the best known Jewish left wing writer of the 1930s. He edited the most influential literary and arts journal of the 1930s and 40s, the new masses, was kind of a celebrity writer, music promoter, busybody, columnist, et cetera. And his one novel, Jews Without Money, is set 20 years earlier in kind of late 19th, early 20th century in New York City. And it's basically about working class and lower middle class Jews in the Lower east side of New York. And there's one little subplot about a Zionist businessman who's one of the villains of the novel and at a kind of, you could say, parody of Zionism, the Jewish businessman, Baruch Goldfarb, who is a no good nick, he runs vote rigging operations, labor spies he's anti union, he's just an all around oily character. And he's trying to move working and middle class Jews from Manhattan into white Jewish suburbs in Bensonhurst, which is sort of the outer rural of Brooklyn. And that's referred to as, you know, basically a kind of satire of the Zionist project. Basically taking Jews from a multi ethnic neighborhood that is integrated in part of the city and moves them out into basically a kind of real estate deal that's segregated and all white and that's associated in the novel with kind of right wing politics, anti labor politics in general. And so one of the arguments that I make is that you can look at the political statements of various organizations, but what I was really trying to piece together in the 1930s and 40s is what was kind of the gestalt of the Jewish left right, what was the sort of subjective alignment of how they associationally understood themselves as Jews in America trying to fight for a multi ethnic, anti racist, social democratic society and how they interpreted Zionism as being antithetical to that project. I also wanted to kind of stick it to. That's a little harsh. But I wanted to also contradict, I think, a fairly still understood, I think misapprehension is that Zionism was a left wing project or was understood to be a left wing project. And I can understand the reasons for that confusion. Of course, the party that basically won out in Israel. So there are numerous different kinds of Zionists. There were the binational Zionists that Albert Einstein and Martin Buber and even Hannah Arendt aligned themselves with and then became anti Zionist when they realized that they had lost, that Israel is going to become an ethnostate. So their vision of Zionism is that everybody would live together in a democratic state, which we understand today is anti Zionist. Right. You know, so when Mamdani says I want equal rights for everybody, of course the ADA understands that's anti Zionism. Right. Even though that sounds like a fairly ordinary idea. So there were the binationalists and then there were the revisionists, which were the ethnostate Zionists who won the kind of internal internecine fight over Zionism in the 30s and 40s. But they were run by the Labour Party in Israel and that had nominally social democratic rhetoric. And so a lot of people think of Zionism as being a labor project or a left wing project. But if you read the sort of Jewish left press in the 1930s and 40s, it's very clear that they see organizations like Habonim and Hashem er Hatzer, which were the kind of left wing Zionist organizations as really outside of the Jewish left. They do not recognize them as inside the mainstream of the Jewish left. And just in a political sense. Habonim and Hasheber Hadzer organize entirely separately. There's a brief moment during World War II in which the sort of united front policy that Hashemir hat zer gets sort of included into the left wing fold. But that kind of ends as soon as the war is over. The other thing I think that happens that I think people mistakenly think of Zionism as a left wing project. Of course, the Soviet Union comes out in 1947 and embraces Zionism and this really changes the left press in the United States. I mean, up until the Khrushchev revelations, the Soviet Union was still kind of understood generally to be a left wing project. And so the Soviet Union comes out in favor of Zionism for strictly geopolitical reasons. They had no particular interest in Jewish autonomy for its own sake. And this, for a brief moment you could say, welds the left to Zionism. But the Soviet Union changes its tune fairly quickly. And, and then of course, you know, the, the, the politics around Zionism becoming adopted as general American policy and among a broad section of Jews has much more to do with questions of whiteness and empire, which we can get into later. So the world moves fast your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot There was a.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Lot there to unpack. I'm sure we won't be able to go through everything to unpack it, but I have a few questions there as well. But I was really excited when you were talking about all these things. It just goes to show how wonderful the book is. And I really ran a lot myself that I'm using this opportunity to reemphasize or reiterate it to our listeners. One thing I'm really interested in that is that that idea of, let's say, anti Zionism as being a radical movement, especially in 1930s, 1930s-40s. And they also those Jewish radicals, they, they, they resisted being assimilated into this, into this white America. Let's say they were not really white. They were not considered White, the same as Italians, I guess, back then. And they formed alliance. They formed alliance with African Americans. They formed the alliance against Racism, Jim Crow. Basically the same thing we see these days in. On the street, like Jewish Voice for Peace, you know, forming alliance with Anti Zionism, with Black Lives Matter. Can you talk about that idea of racial politics and solidarity movements during that time and their commitment to internationalism and anti imperialism at that time?
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Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah. So two things I think that are important for us to mention. So you mentioned Jewish Voice for Peace in the present. And one of the things I think that also inspired writing this book was watching Jewish Voice for Peace and other Jewish progressive organizations on the left that are critical of Israel or anti Zionist make, you could say, natural alignments with the black left. Right. So Black Lives Matter, the movement for Black Lives. And that was really kind of, I think, a pivotal moment in the American, contemporary American left, when in 2016, the Movement for Black Lives came out with a very critical statement about Israel. And Jewish Voice for Peace immediately defended it. Right. And you see those alignments, I think, in New York City right now with the Mamdani campaign, you see progressive Jewish organizations, some of whom are anti Zionists, like Jewish Voice for Peace, some of whom are not. They're non Zionist or maybe even liberal Zionists, but for whom Zionism is not the main thing that they are working on. They're working on housing issues or whatever, like Ben the Arc, for instance. The alignments that are constructed in New York City right now are very reminiscent of the alignments of the 1930s and 40s that I was talking about. So you have a democratic socialist who is now mayor of New York City and his coalition of support are Jewish leftists, the black left, new immigrants. Right. And that's a coalition that looks very, again, much like the New Deal coalition, the sort of social democratic New Deal coalition of the 30s and 40s. And I think it's no accident and that anti Zionism and a critique of Zionism is a central part of Mamdani's campaign. And so in some ways you say we're turning back full circle to the 1930s and 1940s. The other part I want to mention too, I think one of the misnomers that I'm trying to correct in the book, a lot of people, I think, think that the main opposition to Zionism in the 1930s, even really up until the Six Day War in the 1960s, was basically about Jewish assimilation. And so certainly there were assimilationist Jews represented by the American Council on Judaism, which was a Liberal Reform Reform Judaism, sort of a branch of Jewish religious observational, observant practice generally kind of associated with American liberalism. That the American Council on Judaism was an anti Zionist organization that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly when they saw the rise of Zionism, they thought, okay, we have reformed Jews, thought we have to create a political organization to oppose Zionism in America. And their grounds for doing so were very different than the Communist party and Socialist parties. Their grounds for opposing Zionism was that Zionism was going to lead Jews to be accused of dual loyalty. Right. The Jews are not patriotic Americans who belong to America first and foremost. It's going to lead to the accusation that Jews really belong to Israel. And also, of course, there's a long debate in the Jewish community about what does it mean to be Jewish. Right. That is not a settled issue now, and it's never been a settled issue. There's a Holocaust definition if you're Jewish, if you're born of a Jewish mother or convert. But there's always been a question in that, are Jews a cultural group? Are Jews a racial or ethnic group? Are Jews a religious group? Are Jews some combination of all of those things? And for the reformed Jews of that time, they believe that Jews are only a religious group so therefore have no claim to being a nation. Right? And so that was their opposition to Zionism. And the Jewish left of the 1930s and 1940s for the most part was secular and even anti religious. And so for them, they felt that their, you could say ethnic racialization at the time or cultural belonging, as you said, led them to a lie with, you could say the civil rights movement, particularly in a moment in which not only was antisemitism still in some ways the law. I mean, so this is 15, 20 years after the Johnson Reid act, which was an incredibly antisemitic, anti immigration bill that basically is the reason why Jews couldn't escape the Holocaust in the United States. Right? Because there was this anti immigration bill that had quotas. And it was, if you look at the debate in the 1920s, it was very clearly intentionally anti Semitic to stop the flow of Jewish immigrants that were coming from Eastern Europe. And then I think also too, there's a kind of sense that assimilation was still the cultural doctrine of America. And assimilation into what? It wasn't just assimilation into, you know, voting rights. It was assimilation, particularly into a kind of an Anglo Saxon white notion of what it meant to be an American citizen. I mean, just as a small anecdote, but my grandmother, who was an immigrant was literally beaten in school for speaking Yiddish. Right. You know, so the idea that speaking a non English language, particularly an Eastern European non English language, was seen as being anathema to being American. Right. So part of the kind of left of the 1930s in of front 40s was this kind of celebration of pluralism, multiculturalism and along with that, civil rights. Right. And so for them, Zionism, again the attempt to create a kind of ethnostate that was for one race only, was again aligned with the British Empire and then aligned with the American empire, very briefly aligned with the Soviet empire, was just anathema to the idea of a kind of multi ethnic pluralistic society based on social democracy, civil rights, justice, labor rights, et cetera.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
And I guess, and that's the reason that they viewed radical, I mean, Jewish activists kind of viewed us as being similar to US imperialism. I mean, sorry, they saw Israel, what Israel is doing is being similar to US imperialism or the apartheid in South Africa. Sorry, go ahead.
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Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
I can elaborate on that point if you want. Yeah, sure. But if you have another question, do you want to.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
No, no, go ahead.
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Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah, so the analysis. So one of the main changes I would say about anti Zionism also has to do with the changing American relationship to Israel and zionism throughout the 20th century. So the period from the 40s up until 1967, the United States was generally pro Israel and supported partition, although after the Soviet Union, but was not, I would say, strictly Zionist. So the Eisenhower administration was a little wary of the state of Israel and also wanted to curry favor and try to win over newly independent or becoming independent Arab states, of course, many of which were very critical of Israel. And so Eisenhower is kind of trying to have it both ways. Right. And so this is actually a moment in the 1950s where certain kind of progressive Jewish organizations like the ACJ that were anti Zionists actually had a brief moment of influence in the Eisenhower administration and were able to basically get the CIA of all organizations to publish a report on the Arab refugee crisis in the 1950s. And so what really changes is the Six Day War in 1967 in which Israel basically wallops in a very short amount of time the Soviet backed states, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. And of course the America is now fully in the Cold War and fighting and losing war in Vietnam. And so see Israel in a very short matter of time just wipe out its enemies. And this really changes the American political and military establishment. They did become Zionists overnight. And of course the media establishment goes along with this. You start seeing all These front page of Life magazine, Time magazine, just celebrating Israel and its lightning victory in the Middle East. This also, of course, is the heyday of the New left in the 1960s, in which the New Left is really opposing the American empire. And so one starts seeing the left for the first time, really thinking about Palestinians as not just kind of faceless victims of Zionism, but start seeing Palestinians as actors in the kind of Third World struggle against American empire. And you start seeing not only anti Zionism being critique of an ethnostate or critique of the kind of legacy of the British Empire, but a critique of Zionism is a kind of proxy for a critique of the American empire. And so you start seeing the left, the new Left, the black left, start really shifting its analysis of Israel and Zionism. And then of course, also this is the beginnings really of the anti apartheid movement in South Africa, which is seen as part of the Third World struggle. And so this is when you start getting this kind of language that changes from the 1930s left. You can say the principles are the same, but you start seeing a shift towards opposing the American empire, a language of Third World struggle. The Palestinian, him or herself, as being a kind of fighter against empire, the kind of heroic figure of the Fedayeen fighter. The emergence of the PLFP and then ultimately the PLO as becoming kind of central actors in a kind of third world socialism that starts in the 1960s. So one of the, you could say the failures of the 1930s and 40s left, and this is sort of the pun on the title of my first chapter, which was that the Palestinian doesn't really exist much in the discourse. Right. They're sort of vague and abstract. You know, there's like communist rhetoric about or socialist rhetoric about. Yes, the Arab masses just throw out the British, but they're just sort of faceless masses. And it's really about the British Empire, a kind of internal discussion about what it means to be Jewish. And it's the 1960s that really brings the Palestinian subject kind of, you could say, into the discourse.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Another part of the book that I was really interested in was the idea of Holocaust, because again, in public mind, Holocaust is usually used. I mean, that's how we tend to think of it. That within Jewish community, they use it to kind of silence even any criticism of Israel, as we've seen, especially in the past two years. But something that again, I guess is kind of forgotten in the mainstream media, also in the public, is that the memory of Holocaust was also a moral framework for radical, for Jewish left or radical Jews. They use that as a moral framework to oppose in Vietnam, also Israel, militarism in Palestine. Can you talk about how the Jewish left. And I think the best example is Finkelstein. Well, one of the best examples of this, how they use Holocaust as that moral framework to fight against nationalism and also Zionism.
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Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah, there's a. I'm trying to find the quip. This just sort of came up in debate. I'm trying to choose a speechwriter for Obama, Sarah Hurwitz. Yeah, so there's a recent Twitter or I guess now X controversy over some comments that Sarah Hurwitz was a former Democratic speechwriter, Democratic Party speechwriter. And she was lamenting that contemporary American Jews are taking, particularly Jewish youth are taking the wrong lesson from the Holocaust because they see the Holocaust memory as including Palestinians and people who are not Jews into its moral framework. And, you know, it's interesting and I think remarkable to me that, you know, 40 years, 50 years into the Holocaust being weaponized and deployed, particularly by Zionist Jewish institutions, to mean you have to support the state of Israel. The Holocaust only is something that affected Jews should be understood basically as giving Jews complete impunity to run Israel however they see fit, that on some level, international law is only a weapon that can be deployed by them and not actually hold them to account. So even after 50 years of the Holocaust being weaponized in this way, and this is, as you mentioned, Norman Finkelstein. Norman Finkelstein has articulated that quite passionately. You know, his parents were Holocaust survivors. And it pains him quite greatly to see, you know, the memory of his parents and the sufferings they went through weaponized to basically victimize someone else. But even after 50 years of, you know, everything from the American Jewish community, the adl, the Jewish Federations, numerous Holocaust museums, et cetera, the ending of Schindler's List, you know, going on and on and on, that still somehow this other memory of the Holocaust seems to still be latently and perhaps even dominantly present. And so one of the things that I found very interesting so part of this book, Obviously in the 1930s, I couldn't rely on interviews because the people I would want to interview have passed on. But a lot of the 1960s activists, members of the Jewish New Left, were, are of course, still alive. And so a lot of the second and third chapters, which are about. And and fourth chapter, which are about the New Left and kind of post New Left formations of the 60s and 70s, relied on interviews. And one of the things that kept coming up in these Interviews over and over and over again was how the memory of the Holocaust inspired them to become leftists and also to engage in international solidarity and then finally to become anti Zionists. And so, you know, the phrase we didn't want to be good Germans or we couldn't let it happen again, it being the Holocaust was repeated to me over and over and over again by veterans of the Students for Democratic Society, Socialist Workers Party, basically, you know, organizers and activists of the 1960s and 70s New Left. And so the Holocaust for them is a metaphor basically for the machinery of, you know, genocidal capitalism, right? The ethnostate engaging in expulsions, rendering people stateless. And this you see actually all over the place in 1960s and 1970s student propaganda leaflets, et cetera. So I have a whole kind of stack of Pamphlets from the 60s and 70s of Jewish leftists referring to My Lai, you know, the mass. The famous massacre committed by the United States of an entire village in South Vietnam as basically being like Auschwitz, right? You have the mass incarceration in the 1960s and 70s being in the war against the Black Panther Party being described as like the Gestapo, right? And then you have as well people, Jewish activists describing Israel as engaging in a genocidal campaign against Palestinians. And so I think, you know, and then, of course, you know, very recently there was a big banner drop in the Grand Central Station by Jewish Voice for Peace. And the slogan read Never again for anyone. And so there's been a debate, debate about what Holocaust memory is supposed to mean. And I think for a lot of people, you know, the Holocaust, if it means anything, it means basically, this is the result of fascist violence. This is what happens when ethnostates, militarism runs amok, right? You start engaging, you know, nation state, starts engaging in ethnic cleansing, mass killing, rendering of people stateless. And there's been an attempt by, I think, both the American empire and the state of Israel to use that memory as a way not to prevent crimes to happen, but actually to commit them again. Right. And so, you know, there's a wonderful book by Pankaj Mishra, you know, where he talks about how, you know, the Holocaust is not only has not been erased, but rather has been redeployed as a modality of American imperialism. Right? So international law is used to punish American enemies and used to buttress America and its empire as basically killing a village to save it. So using international law and the protection of minorities as a way to further again, basically the US war machine. And so Israel is, I think, the Most obvious contradiction of that, right? So here you have a state that supposedly is born out of the catastrophe of the Holocaust and yet who is committing one on their own and using Holocaust memory in order to just justify it. I should also say one really important small detail that I found very interesting. So I, I did not grow up in a particularly Zionist family, but I think I even embraced or had internalized the idea that Israel was, was the natural outcome of the Holocaust. And it certainly is true to say we wouldn't have the state of Israel without the Holocaust for the very simple reason that, you know, there are, were a million displaced Jews who had nowhere to go after the Holocaust and they were barred from going to America. And European states basically refused to resettle them. And so they went to Israel and became shock troops of the 1948 war. But there was a debate even up to 1948 about how those refugee should be integrated into a new state formation, the birth of the state of Palestine after the retreat of the British, how they should be integrated into that state, what their presence there should mean. And on the Jewish left I found it very interesting. Hannah ran pages of Jewish Life, which was a socialist Jewish newspaper magazine in the 1940s, and other Jewish left publications were like, yeah, okay, we can accept that if Jews are refugees and America is not accepting them. And there was a big campaign to get the United States to accept Jewish refugees after the Holocaust in the US Blatantly refused for explicitly anti Semitic reasons. So basically he said there was a back and forth between the U.S. state Department and the British, what would now be referred to as the Home Secretary Bevins. And the State Department was basically trying to get the British to accept Jews into England. And he's saying, wasn't that ironic that because you won't accept Jews into New York City because you think they're all a bunch of communists, essentially was what the back and forth was about. And so there was an open, I think kind of secret or open dialogue that nobody really wanted to accept Jewish migrants. And they were seen basically as if they come to the United States, we're gonna have 100,000 more communists. And so Jewish refugees were seen as basically kind of, you could say an ethnic communist threat. And so leftists were saying, okay, fine, if Jews can't be resettled in Europe and America is not going to take them in large numbers, they have to go somewhere, but they don't have the right to create an ethnostate. They should enter the new state of Palestine as equal citizens with everyone else. And so the idea of the Holocaust meant that inevitably there's going to be a Jewish only ethnostate in Palestine was not even understood after the Holocaust. That is something that emerged after the 1948 war and the revisionist Zionists took over. So the idea of the Holocaust should not only justify the state of Israel, but justify the particular concrete state of Israel as it exists now as an ethnostate Jewish supremacist state wasn't even understood by Holocaust survivors themselves or the left press after the Holocaust as it happened. So this is very much, you'd say an invented memory, right? And is weaponized, you know, with great, I mean, you have now the international Holocaust remembrance, which is a law basically saying, you know, in the name of the Holocaust, if you criticize Israel in a way we don't like, we're going to call you an anti Semite. That's like literally the law of many states in the United States and many countries in Europe. I mean, it is literally what it means to be Jewish and what it means to remember the Holocaust is enshrined into law. And obviously this is bad for Palestinians, but it's also, one could say, a violence to Jewish memory. This is not in a way in which again, many Jews want the Holocaust to remember themselves or remember it themselves or memorialize it themselves.
- [46:38]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Now it's interesting if some of the arguments that America or even some European countries use against taking Jewish refugees and the victims of Holocaust, they use the same arguments against Palestinians that nobody wants to take them, not even the neighbors.
- [46:54]
Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
This is the terrible irony is that the Palestinians are literally being rendered stateless in the exact same way Jews were before and during and after World War II. I mean, and I mean if you read Hannah Arendt, one of the, I think best books, I mean, it's a flawed book in many ways, but one of the best books on statelessness is Hannah Arendt's words as a totalitarianism. And she goes through this process and also Eichmann in Jerusalem, she goes through this process in great detail of how before the sort of machinery of the Holocaust emerged in earnest and before Jews were sent to the camps, there's always this legal process of rendering them stateless, right? And rendering them as non citizens. And this is exactly what is happening to Palestinians, right? Nobody wants them, Israel is running to them, stateless people without a nation. Nobody wants them as migrants. And of course you have Palestinian American activists like Mahmoud Khalil being arrested and threatened deportation. This is also exactly what happened to Jews, right? They were Deported to nowhere. Right. And so, I mean, irony this in Bezen. I don't know, you need a better word than irony. Right. I mean, it's just.
- [48:03]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, you're right.
- [48:04]
Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah. So, yeah, it's a grotesque. Yeah.
- [48:07]
Moteza Hajizadeh
So, yeah, let's talk about liberal Zionism. It would be good if you give. Give us a definition or what is liberal Zionism? Who are the key figures in liberal Zionism? And in your book, you also go to say that Jewish liberalism is kind of has some contradictions in terms of, you know, contradictions in terms of the trajectory of that American Jewish politics. And I'm keen, I know that this question has many parts. So who are the liberal Zionists? How did they interact or compete with Jewish left or even New Left radicals these days to shape that Jewish identity? Now, what are the contradictions there?
- [48:51]
Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
I'll start actually with the last part first with a contradiction. So the last chapter. I write a lot about Tony Kushner, Angels in America, which is an important play. Tony Kushner is probably the best known and most recognized American Jewish liberal to left playwright. And the play is really about the AIDS pandemic, but it focuses on this kind of liberal Jewish, very contradictory hero, Louis Ironson. And the last conversation in the play is about Zionism. And the play kind of, I think, marks this moment in which you can see Jewish liberal Zionism falling apart in its own contradictions. That is, you can have a liberal state at home in America and support an ethnostate abroad. Right. That's always been the contradiction of liberal Zionism. And you can see Jewish Ironson, Louis Aronson, begin to change throughout the play. And of course, his last statement basically is a very sort of tepid and cautious support for Palestine as the last stateless people after he comes to learn the importance of the AIDS crisis and recognize his former romantic partner who he abandons. And so I think one of the things we're seeing in real time is a lot of former liberal Jewish Zionists becoming liberal anti Zionists because they realize that Zionism is not compatible, not even with leftism, but American Jewish liberalism. So Peter Beinart is probably the sort of key figure in that formation, Right. Somebody who was a liberal Zionist Democratic Party stalwart, wrote columns for liberal newspapers and very well known, sort of inside the Beltway figure and who comes out as an anti Zionist about six or seven years ago, maybe a little less. But he's been on this path for a long time, and he's somebody even in my own lifetime. So I'm A member of the American Studies association and American Quarterly. The Journal and Editors is the American Studies Association's journal and American Studies association was one of the early academic associations that backed bds, the academic boycott of Israel. And Beinar, he said he cleared us of anti Semitism because a lot of people were saying that the American Studies association was anti Semitic. He said, no, ASA is not anti Semitic, but said that we don't understand Zionism where nostalgic Third Worldists we have binary politics and Israel is really the proper homeland of the Jews and Zionism is a democratic project, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I am old enough to remember when Peter Beinart was actually somebody who was calling us out and somebody who I was reading his columns to see how positions that I was instrumental in taking were going to be criticized. And now he is somebody who, like I said, who very much supports, articulates himself as an anti Zionist. So that transition is happening. But I think the moment of the heyday of liberal Zionism was really the 1960s and this is the moment that liberal Zionism really sort of started to flex its muscles. So there's a conference that I write a bit about and it was at the arden. It was 1970, it was the Arden House in New York. And it was basically a panic of Jewish liberals about New left anti Zionism. And so it was all sort of the well known Jewish liberals of the day. So Seymour Lipset, Nathan Glazier, Irving Howe, I'm blanking on Leonard, I'm blanking on his last name. But it's basically kind of a who's who of kind of Jewish liberal writers and intellectuals of the time. And it's a series basically of speeches and lectures though seem very familiar today. It's basically Jewish liberals who are panicking that, you know, everyone from Abbie Hoffman to Mark Rudd to Bernadine Dorn to Jerry Rubin, the National Guardian, Irwin Silver, Noam Chomsky, et cetera, are all coming out against Zionism, sort of, you know, the sort of Jewish New Left. And for them, you know, again, they see themselves as co defenders of American liberal culture. They are supporters of civil rights. They are supporters of the liberal left of the Democratic Party. They are supporters of liberal institutions like universities and labor unions. And for them, Zionism is part of the Civil Rights project, right? Everybody gets a homeland. African Americans. We can support the decolonization of African states in the name of civil rights. We can support the independence of people who feel oppressed by the Soviet empire. And then of Course, you know, part of that story is Jews get a homeland in Palestine as part of this kind of liberal framework of global autonomy of oppressed peoples. And of course the paradox of that is that the Jewish homeland was created out of the British Empire and as a colonial settler, colonial project of displacement, right? And so this contradiction keeps trying to get smoothed over. And the more they try to smooth it over, the more nasty and right wing they become. So in the 1970s, when it's very clear the Jewish left is not going to shut up about, or the left in general is not going to shut up about Palestine, of course you get the UN declaring Zionism as racism. In 1975, you start getting this formulation of the new anti Semitism thesis which really emerges initially out of Jewish liberal Zionists. The new anti Semitism thesis, which is as we've been discussing, the old anti Semites were Nazis and hated Jews because they were not seen as proper national subjects. But now Jews are assimilated into liberal democracies like America or Great Britain. And the new anti Semites are the left who oppose Zionism because they hate Jews and the new form of Jewish autonomous self expression. And of course the enemy of the new anti Semitism thesis in the 1974 book are organizations like the Black Panther Party, Socialist Workers Party, famous Jewish leftists like Isaac Deutscher. And this has come full form from the kind of nominally liberal ADL of the 1970s to really becoming part of, you would say, a Jewish MAGA alliance of the far right. So you have basically the new anti Semitism task force of the Trump administration, Project Esther, et cetera, who are actually targeting not only the pro Palestine left writ large, but also very particularly Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace. And so you can see that in the attempt to try to square this impossible contradiction between American Jewish liberalism and the state of Israel, basically nominally liberal organizations like the ADL have dropped their liberalism and are now just full ethno fascists, right? And of course this has its own contradictions because a lot of the far right are anti Semites and don't really want to be in a coalition with the ADL or Jewish conservatives. And there's a whole freak out about Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, et cetera. So all these have their own contradictions that are implicit in their projects. But yeah, I think we're seeing right now Jewish liberalism kind of run in, it's kind of run the end of its road, right? And so what you see now basically is kind of a, you could say a return back to the conversation in the 1930s, you have the Jewish right which backs the ethnostate, and you have the Jewish left which backs basically global solidarity. Right. And we kind of return full circle, but back to 1938. Funny how history works. I mean, I would say one last comment though. I mean, there's a reason why I think the idea of Zionism as a left wing project was plausible. Not only has it been the historical association of Jews with liberalism, really even since the French Revolution, you know, you know, but also the European left, the American left, the Bolshevik revolution, et cetera, but also the idea of a Jewish homeland has been a long standing idea and it wasn't only a Zionist idea. So the Bund were nationalists, they were cultural nationalists and they believed in a Jewish nation where Jews lived in Eastern Europe. And of course there are Soviet projects, some of which were actually progressive in the 1920s when Soviet Union is basically a Leninist project and then regressive in the 1930s when Stalin takes over. But there have been projects in the Soviet Union to create Jewish autonomous zones where Yiddish would be the dominant language and Jews would have some autonomy over their lives as a response to historic European anti Semitism. So the idea that Jews should have some cultural autonomy was once a left wing idea. And so Zionism I think for a long time traded on that as a way to gain legitimacy. That's over. You know, the, the left is done in Israel. There is no really Israeli. I mean there, there are social movements in Israel that are on the left, but there's really no functional left party in Israel any longer. The state is wholly taken over by various forms of far right religious and secular organizations. But so the idea, so the idea I think that liberal Zionism traded on was this kind of old sort of left wing idea of Jewish autonomy. So not only is that run into its contradictions in America, but it's also Israel even pretending that's part of its project is long gone.
- [59:00]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And unfortunately that seems to be the destiny of the left in most countries. But with Mamdani, there's a ray of hope.
- [59:08]
Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah, yeah. I mean, hope springs eternal. Yeah, I mean in one sense the left is a, a conscious political project of wielding and blending, infusing new identities and new constituencies. And in that sense one could imagine a world without the left at all. But also too, we used to live in a capitalist society and people need things so they need to meet their rent and they need to get fair wages and live in a clean environment, et cetera. And so I think to the extent that the right is never interested, nor neoliberals ever interested in solving those problems. There's always going to be space. Space. I think in a re emergence of the left, the question is, do we have time, do Palestinians have time, does the climate have time, et cetera. And I think that's actually right now one of the things that has been, I think, a real source of anxiety right now. There's a sense that the global left, even though I think really sort of heroically stepped up. I mean, you had general strikes in Italy, huge protests, student encampments in the United States, giant protests in Spain, even Great Britain, which is not one place right now where the left is in good shape with massive demonstrations. And I think the reason why Palestinians were not, I think if Israel got its way, I think Palestinians would be pushed out of Palestine, wiped off the face of the earth. And the reason that hasn't fully happened yet is because there is just simply too much pressure. I mean, even Trump acknowledged that this is becoming politically untenable for the slaughter to go on. So even though, like I said, I think the left really did come out in full force, I think there's still a sense that the left failed in the last last couple of years to really prevent a genocide, prevent the destruction of Gaza, to uphold international law. And so there has been, I think, a growth, small but nonetheless real of fascist anti Zionist voices that I think have legitimacy precisely because the left is kind of in crisis right now, you know, and so Nick Fuentes was that guy, David Miller in Great Britain, Candace Owens in the United States, who are anti Semitic, racist, right wing Christo fascists, you know, who also don't like Israel for their own reasons, you know, and I think are gaining legitimacy precisely because of the sense that the left is in crisis and in retreat. Right. So, you know, we have a work for us. Yeah, I just have a couple of.
- [62:01]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Questions, couple more questions. But one area that again that has become more dominant is how the minorities have come to join this anti Zionist movement and support Palestinians, especially feminists or queer communities. And again, in your book you talk about how feminists and queer perspectives reshape Jewish anti Zionism, active Jewish anti Zionism on activism in 1970s, and also again, the role they played in revitalizing that anti Zionist discourse. Can you talk about the role of feminists and anto also queer communities in this?
- [62:46]
Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah, yeah. I mean, one thing I just would say, just very anecdotally, but it's also been written about by. There's a new book that came out on Jewish Voice repeats by its founder, Zulu Weiss and Rebecca Vcomersson, two of its founders. And they talk about Jewish Voice for Peace is a feminist organization that has a vast queer membership. And it is readily obvious if you go to a Jewish Voice for Peace meeting, it is going to be predominantly run by women. And it is a very queer friendly place. Also the temple that I belong to, so I belong to an anti Zionist shul in Chicago that is also very clearly a feminist and queer friendly temple. And so part of that has to do just in general with the Jewish left of the 1970s really embracing, along with the rest of the American left, feminism and queer politics as a corrective to the earlier 20th century, rather masculinist left. So I mean, yes, the Communist Party paid lip service to the equality of women. The New Left paid lip service to the quality of women. But if you look at a lot of New Left meetings, New Left leadership, it was men running everything and women making the coffee, right? So there was, I think, just a general acknowledgment. And of course there's the famous feminist kind of breakup with SDS, I believe it was in 1969, where Shulemeth Firestone and one of the founders, you could say, of Jewish feminism in the 1970s, you know, breaking with FCS's kind of masculine culture. But I think there's been another acknowledgement too that beyond just kind of the practical questions of the American left and feminist politics, there's been a sense too that Zionism itself was a masculinist project of basically reordering Jewish gender. So Daniel Boyarin writes quite, and Judith Butler both write quite, I think, movingly and articulately about this, that one of the ways in which Jews were racialized in the 19th and early 20th centuries was to be seen as not proper sexual subjects. So Jewish men were seen as effeminate and womanly, and Jewish women were seen as too masculine and over dominant. And, and Zionists really internalized this discourse. And so people like Max Nordau Herzl and other early Zionists saw Zionism as the remasculinization of Jewish men. And you see this in Israel today, that Israeli culture is very militaristic. Service in the IDF is, is perhaps the one thing that really glues the country together as like a singular national institution that has near universal support. And of course as a military, it is, you know, masculinist. And even though of course, they pay lip service to being gender egalitarian army. And so I think one of the critiques of Zionism itself is a gender critique of Zionism. That Zionism is an attempt to create, as one critic put it, that's a straight state. Right. The state formation itself is a heteronormative activity. And so part of the kind of Jewish resistance to Zionism has been the formulation of a kind of queer diasporic culture that is anti nationalist essentially and I think then also anti gender normative.
- [66:41]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Right.
- [66:41]
Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
And so embrace basically of a different modality of being Jewish, a different modality of care, a different modality of self organization that refuses the sort of militaristic, masculinist and dominant forms of all state formations, but particularly a settler colonial formation like Israel.
- [67:03]
Moteza Hajizadeh
You know, previously when I asked you when we were talking about contradiction of liberal Zionism, I think you ended on a very important note that there might be hope for the left to reorganize, but it's a matter of time. Do Palestinians have time? Do we have time against challenges such as climate, climate crisis. As a final question, where I'm trying to bring all this together. We live in an area in a time that there's a backsliding of democratic institutions, there's the rise of authoritarianism and ripening politics, there's this ongoing genocide in Gaza. What lessons can the contemporary movements and I, and it's general, the left, you know, anti Zionist, Jewish, whatever. In general, what, what lessons can we draw from, from, from Jewish activism in terms of, you know, coalition building strategies to challenge to, to, to, to resist, you know, this rise of authority and also the ongoing tyrannies of neoliberalism which is, I guess, the root cause of many of these plights.
- [68:12]
Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a reason why the genocide against Palestine has captured, I think, the popular global imagination beyond just the fact that it's a grotesque horror. I think a lot of people, as many people have said, if this is allowed to continue, God knows who's next. That we're living in an era of fascist states, revanchist nationalism, hyper masculinity, hyper militarism. And so the notion that a genocide can be carried out on live TV is terrifying for its own sake. But I think also a lot of people recognize themselves on some level in the face of Palestine. Yeah. And so I don't make predictions. I mean, as Walter Benjamin famously said, it's against Jewish law to make predictions into the future, or at least the rabbis refused to do so. But I think one of the things that I got sort of interested in was the ways in which Kind of a century of Jewish left, you could say, people making or homemaking articulated itself and how it can think of that as perhaps a guide to reformulating the left itself. And so one of the things that One of the 1970s left wing activist Myron Perlman, who's someone actually I knew personally in Chicago, said is he said, we have a kesher with the left. Kesher is Yiddish bond. We have a bond with the left. The left itself is a kind of homeland, but it's a homeland without a stable place or even a stable referent. It's a relational homeland. It's a homeland of bonds to the other, it's bonds to a community. It's made and remade in every conjuncture. And so I think it's one of the lessons that one can take from it is that yes, capitalism continues to exploit people. It continues to be ever quickening death machine. And the left itself has no stable history, is a process without a referent, as Al Fazer famously said. And I think Jews who have been racialized, re. Racialized, deracialized, re and degendered because there are minorities basically wherever they go prior to Israel, they've always had to sort of remake themselves in new countries, getting kicked out of one place, going to another. And so there's a long history. It doesn't mean the Jews are only people who do this, but there's just a long history of Jewish leftists kind of rethinking about identity not as an isomorphic presence that is, not as something that is stable, unchanging, trans historical, but as something that's relational and in process. And so I think, you know, I'm always attracted to lefts that can kind of remake themselves newly in every conjuncture. Right. So the Mamdani campaign as we keep referring to, who knows what he'll be able to do. But what's to me exciting about the campaign is you could see in real time these new coalitions forming as a new New York City is articulated under neoliberalism. Right. And so I think it's not that Jews are only who again, who can do this, but there's a long history of Jewish left wing writing that has always been suspicious of kind of nationalism, ethnic nationalism, trans historical senses of identity, the positing that somehow the answer to left formations is to create a singular revolutionary subject that's going to be transcendent throughout time. These are all ways for the left to basically fall into crisis. And so we're at a moment of I think, fragmentation. We've been in a moment of fragmentation really since the 70s. But I think we're an increasing moment of fragmentation and danger now. And so it's not the Jewish left has an answer like this is what ought to be done. But it has a way of thinking through this in relationality. And so an example that I give is these little Jewish socialist collectives in Chicago and New York city in the 70s. As the new left was falling apart, SDS imploded, the black Panther Party was being gunned down by the FBI. This is the age of stagflation, the beginning of deindustrialization. So, so all the kind of stable reference of the left were in crisis. And a lot of these little Jewish socialist collectives kind of wrote about, well, what does it mean to create new collectives that are at the micro community level in Chicago in the 1970s, particularly around anti Klan collectives, racially progressive collectives. In what moments does it make sense for the Jewish left in the city to lead the struggle? And at what moment does it make sense for us to just be one part of a larger collect the black left might lead. And I think you can even see this in New York City around like figures like Brad Lander, you know, who basically was like, well, in this moment, you know, the best thing I can do as a Jewish leftist is to support somebody else, right? You know, support Mamdani and try to deflect all these, you know, ridiculous claims of anti Semitism that are leveled against him. But at other moments, you know, Brad Landhurst very much, and other parts of the Jewish left are very much, much taking center stage in politics that they think are important to them, particularly actually fighting. One thing I think that Jews have a lot of experience fighting is fascism. So there's always been a kind of anti fascist Jewish presence on the left. And that was actually true in Chicago. So the group that really led the sort of fight against the Klan in Chicago in the 70s, we forget that the far right in the 70s. Catherine Belew's book is really terrific on this. The far right in the 70s was really a big and militant presence. And one of the reasons why the Jewish left kind of reformed in the 1970s was basically to fight the Klan, you know, and, and so, you know, there's a lot of experience doing that. And so, you know, again, it's not that the one should read my book or any other book about the history of the left and say, okay, we're going to remake the Communist Party just like it existed in 1942, but to say, okay, what are some of the principles and practices of rationality, reformation thinking through the conjuncture in real time that we can flexibly use to rebuild the left today? And I think there is a real lesson. And so what I try to show in the book is, yes, there are some constants, you know, anti imperialism, anti racism, but the notion of what the left is, is always in process. And Jewish Voice for Peace is a very different organization than the Communist Party. You know, it has, you know, it's more religious, it's more queer, it's not located in very particular factories or neighborhoods. You know, it has a much more kind of flexible identitarian practice. It's religious. You know, these are all things that are very different from an earlier generation. And it's, it's rolling with it, you know, so, you know. Right.
- [75:16]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Benjamin, thank you very, very much for taking time to speak with us. This is such a wonderful book. Citizen of the World, Anti Zionism and the Cultures of American Jewish Life. I strongly recommend it to our listeners and viewers. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
- [75:31]
Dr. Benjamin Balthazar
Thank you. Absolutely right. Thank you. It was wonderful.