Benjamin Moser grew up in an America where Zionism was ambient, unquestioned, like gravity. His new book is an attempt to recover the intellectual atmosphere in which that wasn't true — when fewer than 1% of American Jews belonged to the largest Zionist organisation, and serious thinkers within Jewish communal life debated whether a nationalist state project was compatible with what Judaism actually meant. The method is portraiture: twelve figures, across roughly a century, each of whom arrived at anti-Zionism by a different road. Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares saw in Judaism a vision that transcended the blood-and-soil nationalism that was already destroying Europe in 1914. Hannah Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah, helping refugee children reach Palestine after her own flight from Germany, before the Biltmore Conference of 1942 — six hundred delegates, a hardening consensus for statehood — convinced her that the logical endpoint was Arab expulsion or second-class citizenship. Felicia Langer spent decades in Israeli courtrooms representing Palestinian clients, including a family who discovered their son's imprisonment only when a father found his shirt soaked in blood. Each portrait turns on a specific biographical hinge, a moment of disillusionment that Moser renders with care and without melodrama. The book's strongest sections are also its most granular. Jacob Israël de Haan, the Dutch poet who wrote in 1912 about wanting 'our own Land, our own Language, our own Art,' then watched Zionism 'fall into the hands of hustlers' after relocating to Mandatory Palestine, is one of the sharper character studies here. His 1924 murder by a 21-year-old Haganah member, Avraham Tehomi, arrives with the quiet horror of a fact that has been successfully buried. Avi Shlaim's account of being 'radicalised in the archives' — not by ideology but by documents that 'completely, flatly contradicted the official line' of 1948 — is the kind of intellectual biography that earns its place in any serious account of the period. The book is honest about what it isn't. Moser makes no claim to comprehensive history and acknowledges that Palestinian lives shadow his protagonists but fall outside his chosen scope. The absence of the Satmar Hasidic movement — whose theological anti-Zionism, rooted in the belief that a Jewish state cannot precede the Messiah, represents a significant and distinctly conservative tradition — is a genuine gap. Anti-Zionism can be a religious conservative position as easily as a progressive one, and the book's portraits tilt toward a particular kind of secular disillusionment that shapes its conclusions more than it admits. The closing portrait of Nan Goldin — photographer, art-world figure, someone who paid a real professional price for speaking out as the assault on Gaza began in 2023 — brings the argument to the present without moralising. It's the right note to end on: not resolution, but continuity. What Moser has actually written is a book about the costs of dissent within a community that had, for understandable historical reasons, calcified around a consensus. His most pointed observation may be the quiet one about the promiscuous deployment of antisemitism as an accusation, 'so promiscuously that the word would eventually become meaningless.' That sentence will land differently depending on who reads it.
