Marjorie N. Feld, Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism (New York University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Marjorie Feld (MF): I began this book eight years ago at the intersection of my observations within the American Jewish community and my own scholarly interests. I had long seen American Jewish community leaders and laypeople marginalize American Jews who dissented from unconditional support of Israel. In research for my book on American Jews and apartheid, I interviewed activists who noted their discomfort with this support dating back to the 1960s. When I returned to the archives to do research for this book, I found an unbroken continuum of criticism of American Zionism dating back to the late nineteenth century. In Threshold, I explain the worldviews and perspectives of critics of American Zionism and chart their courses in US Jewish communal life.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MF: Each chapter analyzes a distinct time and a group of historical actors, American Jews who cared deeply about American Jewish life and were also critics of American Zionism for distinct reasons. The book looks at how and why these individuals chose to dissent from American Zionism, and how the broader American Jewish community responded to their dissent. For example, some early twentieth-century American Jews, the subjects of Threshold’s first chapter, feared that Zionism would make all American Jews appear more loyal to a nation that was not the United States. Amidst the xenophobia and racism of Jim Crow America, they feared antisemitic accusations of dual loyalties and rejected Zionism in that spirit. American Jewish Zionist leaders of that era also deeply feared antisemitism, and worried that any divisions within the community would create vulnerability and threaten Jewish integration into the white mainstream.
The subjects of the second chapter, liberal and left anticommunist Jews at midcentury, saw Zionism as diminishing the vibrancy of Jewish life outside of Israel, and also diminishing the otherwise liberal values of American Jews. The immense losses of the Holocaust made these critics acutely aware of the need to find safe places for Jewish life; they disagreed that a Jewish state would ensure Jewish safety.
Within the liberation movements of the 1950s onwards, anti-colonialist Arab, Palestinian, and Black American leaders and their allies began criticizing Israel’s settler colonialism, and some American Jews were open to those lessons. These, along with the antiwar movement, are the subjects of the book’s final two chapters. Leaders criticized Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, and then its post-1967 occupation of Palestine; they feared for the directions of American Jewish life and the isolation that resulted from the community’s unqualified support of Israel. The so-called “consensus” on Zionism isolated Jews from progressive currents and movements in the twentieth century and into our own.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MF: My previous books looked at progressive movements—for public health, immigrant and labor and women’s rights, and against South African Apartheid. As a US social historian, I have always examined American Jews’ relationships to these movements. This book is the logical evolution of my scholarly interests, in many ways, because the American Jewish community’s fealty to Israel has prevented meaningful engagement with liberation movements like anti-apartheid.This book is as rigorously researched as my past books and is also similarly grounded in storytelling and historical analysis.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MF: Even before the global Zionist movement reached the United States, American Jews disagreed about what role Jewish nationalism should play in American Jewish life. Dissent over Zionism began within the American Jewish world. Before the Holocaust, mainstream Jewish leaders accused Jewish critics of Zionism of antisemitism and self-hatred because they equated Jewish safety exclusively with Israel.
Especially after the horrors of the Holocaust, American Jews felt that Jewish unity was of paramount importance. This was part of what motivated Jewish leaders to greet critics of American Zionism with hostility, removing their funding and marginalizing them. Zionism mobilized Jews, made them visible as many moved into suburban white America; it set them apart as a distinct community. The voices of the critics I study—many of whom argued that unqualified support for Israel made Jews and all of us less safe—were not heard or were actively silenced.
I hope that all who read my book recognize that we are living in just the latest chapter of Jewish dissent from American Zionism. The current protests have the potential to undo some of the isolation experienced within American Jewish life, as American Jewish critics of Israel’s devastation in Gaza (including activists who are Jews of Color and LGBTQ Jews) are joining with Palestinian, Black, and Arab Americans and others in fighting for Palestinian and Jewish freedom. As with many past critics of Zionism, they know that Jewish and Palestinian liberation have always been interconnected. I hope that this book sparks earnest conversations about the cost of the American Jewish “consensus” on Israel. I hope too that welcoming diverse perspectives on Israel and Palestine opens up broader currents of inclusion, in the American Jewish world and beyond.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MF: I have in mind a new project about sustainable American Jewish farming, its role in the American Jewish environmental movement, and how these activists are addressing climate change while also innovating Jewish ritual life. I remain interested in how American Jews join global movements—climate justice movements are particularly urgent right now—and offer alternatives: to traditional, mainstream Jewish life, and to the (unsustainable) industrial food system.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3, “Israel—Right or Wrong”—Anticolonialism, Freedom Movements, and American Jewish Life, pp. 102-106)
The story of global currents of anticolonialism and freedom movements are central to the history of American Zionism and the politics of American Jewish life regarding criticism of Zionism after 1967. Before 1967, many mainstream American Jewish leaders supported Black nationalist and Black Power movements. Even Jewish leaders who did not fully support these liberation movements compared them to Zionism as they sought to make sense of Black Americans’ struggles for autonomy and empowerment. In 1966, for example, Boston’s Jewish Advocate reported, “An [O]rthodox rabbinical leader warned that the slogan ‘[B]lack [P]ower’ and the reported deterioration in Negro-Jewish relations should not discourage rabbis from encouraging support of civil rights programs.” The article noted that Jewish community leaders expressed understanding of the need for Black Power, as they understood that “progress toward the goal of full equality must be accelerated dramatically.” Still, these leaders hoped that white people would be included in these coalitions for change. Yet Rabbi Emanuel Rackman of Yeshiva University went on record as saying that Jews and other whites should not “exaggerate” the fact that Black people wanted to “run their own movements.” “Such statements,” he believed, were made “in the same voice as Zionists in Israel, who have complained that American Zionists are interfering in their affairs.”
In these same years, as some American Jewish Zionists compared Black nationalism to Zionism to better understand it, the rise in Palestinian solidarity among Black nationalists and civil rights activists only widened the gap between American Jews and African Americans. This rise also contributed greatly to the distancing of American Jews from progressive coalitions, such as those fighting for civil rights.
Not all Black leaders took these positions. In the mid-1970s, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin led an organization called Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC), with the support of two dozen significant figures in its full-page advertisement in the New York Times. Historian Brenda Gayle Plummer also writes that a “Black-Jewish In- formational Center with headquarters in New York City . . . channeled favorable reports about Israel to the [B]lack press.” The Black-Jewish Information Center, which was managed by Richard Cohen Associates, a public relations firm that worked with major Jewish organizations, reprinted articles mostly from Jewish publications that celebrated moments of unity between Black and Jewish leaders. The agency focused mainly, and predictably, on Israel. It released a statement when the Histadrut, Israel’s General Federation of Jewish Labor, honored Black civil rights and labor leader Robert Powell, for example. It sought to smooth over tensions, downplaying Israel’s economic ties to South Africa. This was an uphill battle, however, as unqualified support for Israel diminished among Black activists amid Israel’s shifting position on the world stage.
Indeed, in taking public positions of support for Palestinians in the 1960s and 1970s, many Black leaders passed the threshold of acceptable public dissent on Zionism and Israel. Zionist Jewish leaders increasingly saw African American criticism of Zionism as a threat, especially when some Black Americans spoke of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as representative of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Often Jewish leaders attributed Black solidarity with Palestinians to “Arab propaganda” and felt doubly targeted as white people in thinking of Black national- ism as antiwhite. Alternately, Jewish leaders attributed Black solidarity with Palestinians to “Black antisemitism,” a phrase identified by scholars as a pernicious, racist concept intended to distance white Jews from Black liberation.
Scholars write about the National Conference for New Politics, held in Chicago in September 1967, as a turning point for Jewish left activists. The conference tried to bring together antiwar liberals, New Left radicals, and African American activists. At the conference, a group of Black radical organizations proposed thirteen resolutions, most of them focused on “white support for [B]lack self-determination and political power.” One resolution focused on condemnation of “the imperialistic Zionist war.” Many self-identified Jewish activists heard this strong language as a threat, perhaps even an ultimatum. Even were they critical of both Israel and Zionism, they now felt that they could not balance those ideas withcommitments to the New Left and anticolonialist activism. The vision of Israel with which they lived, that they had been taught, did not align with the language of imperialism, and many walked out of the conference to demonstrate their rejection of the resolution’s ideas.
As Israel and Palestinian rights emerged as prominent issues among Black and Arab American activists, these issues complicated progressive coalitions between African Americans and American Jews. This was certainly true after the National Black Political Convention in March 1972, where a group of delegates described Israel as “expansionist,” condemned its work with imperialist powers, and called on the United States to end its support for Israel. Tensions rose still more in 1979 after President Carter appointed Andrew Young as America’s first Black ambassador to the United Nations. After his meeting with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Young faced calls to resign from many mainstream Jewish leaders. That same year, when two hundred Black leaders of a diverse array of Black organizations, including the National Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, met to talk about calls for Andrew Young’s resignation, they drew attention to Israel’s close relationship with apartheid South Africa and voiced full support for efforts by Black leaders to support peace by talking to the PLO. Black leaders called this their “declaration of independence on the Middle East issue,” and they aligned that sentiment with strong criticism of the positions of Jewish leaders that were increasingly “contrary to the best interests of the [B]lack community.”
A draft of the document, one ultimately not released, named the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee as three Jewish organizations that had “opposed the interests of the [B]lack community” in court cases over affirmative action. Black leaders also labeled Jewish contributions to civil rights “patronizing” because the contributions were made “pending clarification of how the beneficiaries, who solicit them, feel about them.” After Black leaders announced that the Jewish Defense League had used “threats of physical violence” against them, Nathan Perlmutter, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, denounced the threats as “wrong” and meriting “condemnation.” Perlmutter cited Jews’ “open record in [sic] behalf of civil rights and the betterment of the human condition.” He wrote,
“We apologize to no one.” The headline on the front page of the Michigan Chronicle, a Black newspaper, was “Jewish Leader Tells Blacks: No Apologies.”
In sum, anti-Zionism in the American left grew out of a new global mindedness and global solidarity among Black, Palestinian, and Arab activists: opposition to state-sanctioned racism and oppression at home and Cold War allegiances abroad, including America’s involvement in Southeast Asia and in Israel and Israel’s involvement in Algeria and South Africa. These new Cold War alliances served as an opportunity for mainstream acceptance and even power for Jews, and strong support for Israel proved central to their gradual withdrawal from some aspects of the domestic civil rights agenda.
As political scientist Adolph L. Reed Jr. noted, the focus on “Black antisemitism” seemed distracting to those who felt strongly that the xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism from the Right (for example, from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists) posed an actual and far more formidable threat to minority groups such as African Americans, immigrants, and Jews. Certainly there were examples of antisemitism within civil rights, Black Power, Arab American, and other movements. By focusing so powerfully on “Black antisemitism,” though, American Jews gave themselves permission to withdraw support from positions that challenged the racist status quo and thus their own emerging, per- haps vulnerable positions as powerful figures in American life. Linking much of the criticism of Israel to antisemitism and to Black and Arab American anticolonialist critiques under the disingenuous categories of “Black antisemitism” and “Arab propaganda,” American Jewish leaders also reinforced their whiteness and thus their political influence.
Unwittingly or not, then, some Jewish leaders in this way contributed to the backlash against liberation movements. At a 1979 meeting, Black leaders took note of American Jews’ new role, leaving behind their work for Black equality and joining others as “apologists for the racial status quo.” Jewish leaders’ policing criticism of Zionism and Israel was one component of this new role. Historically, debates over Jewish non- and anti-Zionism took place across the political spectrum, as Zionist critiques had been leveled by elite Reform Jews through the 1940s and secular Jews on the left through the 1960s. After 1967, as American Jewish leaders gained power and stature, they conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism and also the diverse historical, political, and intellectual strands of the Left as a singular threat and so some joined the broader attacks on the left in the culture wars. This stance allowed them to demonize the movements that were providing activists around the world with a critical view of Israel and other colonial powers.
Note: Also see Connections Episode 94: American Jewish Critics of Zionism with Marjorie N. Feld (28 May)