Anti-Zionism

‘An important and revelatory contribution’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

‘A book of extraordinary moral clarity’ NATHAN THRALL

A sweeping and revelatory history of the hidden tradition of Jewish thinkers who opposed Zionism from Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser.

In Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, Benjamin Moser uncovers a suppressed tradition that has shaped Jewish thought for generations. Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists and politicians – across Europe, North American, Africa, Asia and Latin America – Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism’s moral and political stakes – often at devastating personal cost, including censorship, exile and death.

Their lives form a sweeping, global narrative that dismantles a powerful myth: that anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. Spanning continents and centuries, these voices – people from the right and the left, Reform and Orthodox, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, men and women, gay and straight – differ sharply in belief and background, yet converge on a shared warning about the consequences of a nationalist project built on exclusion. What emerges is not only a rediscovered tradition of Jewish moral thought, but a startling reappraisal of Zionism itself.

Moser’s work restores the full scale and depth of Jewish ethical imagination, affirming that Judaism is older and larger than any single political project. Lucid, rigorous and deeply humane, Anti-Zionism cements Moser’s place as one of our foremost Jewish thinkers and presents a framework through which this history – and its meanings – will be understood for years to come.

‘A lovingly-written historical primer for the free-thinkers of the West today’ ISABELLA HAMMAD, author of Enter Ghost

‘What I learned in these pages has profoundly changed my understanding of history – the world's, my people's, my family's, and my own’ AYELET WALDMAN, author of A Perfect Hand

‘An urgently necessary refutation … I hope it will be widely read’ PETER SINGER, author of The Life You Can Save