What Do I Have in Common with Jews?

Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left by Benjamin Balthaser. Verso, 320 pages. 2025.

When I was eighteen, I was sent on a trip to Poland to visit the camps. I was reluctant to go because I knew what I would see, and I knew how I’d feel about it. What I did not expect, and what fundamentally changed me, were the monumental remnants of a millennium of rooted Jewish life in a place where I’d imagined mainly mud and death.

The most powerful of these was in Warsaw’s POLIN Museum, where I walked into a room and felt this history’s presence above me. I looked up and saw a gleaming vault, a dome of straight edges extending up into darkness, lacquered wood painted in living primary colors: red vines sprouting blossoms over the blue of heaven, around which turned the zodiac, its figures rendered beautifully but not gravely, almost with humor. Two griffins flanked the tablets of the Law, and at the corners of the wooden firmament were parchment-colored cartouches lined with Hebrew calligraphy. I had never seen anything like it. The Gwoździec Synagogue, of which this was a partial reconstruction, had been burned to the ground, along with nearly every other such wooden shul in Eastern Europe during the early 1940s. I had gone my entire life believing that Jews had no architecture of our own, no history of painting, that we abhorred the image. I was shocked, first, that we had built such colossal wonders for ourselves, and then that we had forgotten them, allowing not only the wood but the memory to be consumed by the flames.

Far from that place, in the Dallas synagogue where I spent nearly every shabbos of my childhood, I discovered one day while visiting home that the foyer had been decorated with a colossal, expensive-looking painting. It remains perhaps the single ugliest work of art I’ve ever seen: a collage of traditional Jewish symbols crammed together with new ones such as the El-Al logo, a bulging falafel pita, a cell phone, and—unforgivably—an Uzi, all rendered in asphyxiated blue and bloodless white. This monstrosity eloquently, unapologetically expressed an idea that dominates contemporary Jewish life but is often left implied: that the Jewish people as embodied in the State of Israel is itself holy and worthy of its own worship. The greatest tragedy of this mistake is the ongoing mass murder of Palestinians it makes morally invisible. We are ‘Am Segula, declares the Jewish State as it razes Gaza, ‘Am haNetzach: the Treasured Nation, the Eternal Nation. The first phrase has a longer history than the State of Israel. It was certainly uttered in the Gwożdziec Shul, though by Jews who meant by it the inevitable defeat of the tyranny they endured, their perpetual survival of Exile, and, perhaps, ideas more remote to us, such as their everlasting covenant with God to follow his commandments. The second—a twentieth-century invention—takes a traditional epithet of God and applies it to the Jewish people.

It is sad when those who oppose the perversion of Judaism and Jewish identity disagree with today’s autolaters not absolutely, but in the exact nature of their own greatness. It’s at first surprising to discover such ideas in a book about the radical Jewish left, especially when the book tries to assume secular stances antithetical to neo-traditionalist understandings of Judaism, and when the author seems to be unaware of their presence. Benjamin Balthaser’s Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left is an important attempt at a necessary book. It’s one of many in recent years—among them Daniel Boyarin’s No-State Solution, Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered, and Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza—to deal with the collapse of American Jewish collectivity under the combined weight of Zionism and America’s homogenizing form of secularism.

“Does Zionism require Jewish leftists to find a patronym before the foundation of Israel,” Balthaser asks, “or does Zionism require we reject a Jewish radicalism that has failed within the Zionist present to force a change? Is it anti- or ante-Zionism, memory or coming out that will point the way?” These are huge and neglected questions, and Balthaser’s greatest achievement in the book is asking them. He is right to ask what happened to the “absolute ordinariness” leftism had once enjoyed among American Jews, which survives vestigially in our now-rapidly shifting progressive voting habits. Unfortunately, his answers are rarely clear, and, when they are, often invite Jews to identify with the left (anti-Zionism itself is addressed usually in passing) on the basis of a putative cultural predisposition toward radicalism and progressivism.

Though he certainly didn’t intend it to be this way, Balthaser’s book functionally reduces the political horizons of the Jewish diaspora to a vacuous ethnic pride on the basis of prior generations’ leftism, calling on Jewish readers to identify with the left because of the team they happen to find themselves on. This book unwittingly represents the persistence of a dangerous racialism that will never beat Zionism at its own game, because unlike Zionism—right-wing Zionism, at least—it cannot see itself for what it is. American Jews may use “Zionism” to refer to a variety of things, including a vision for the secular, democratic, binational state Americans in general associate with “anti-Zionism.” But whatever we choose to call it, in the struggle to replace support for a Jewish ethnostate with an ideology that does not demand death, Balthaser’s watery identitarianism will lose.

“The left itself is a Jewish modality of articulating a point and politics between identity and solidarity,” Balthaser writes. There are certainly well-trodden paths from Jewish communities to the left, and Balthaser does occasionally address contemporary ones—all of them unfortunately marginal, such as the DSA’s Jewish Solidarity Caucus. But the problem of Zionism today is the emergence of a form of fascism from Jewish ideas. To defeat this, it’s not enough to demonstrate that Jews have a natural affinity for leftism; clearly, plenty have an affinity for the opposite. Just as it would be bigoted to similarly impute an inherent tendency toward murderous ethnocracy, there is simply no reason to take seriously the idea that being Jewish will make people behave ethically. The circumstances of life in the Pale made Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the United States—and their children—likelier to feel solidarity with the oppressed. But those are not the circumstances here in America now.

The radical generations who Balthaser idolizes arose from vastly different material and cultural conditions than the ones American Jews find themselves in today. First of all, they came from less—their parents were workers, sometimes modestly middle class, often poor. While Balthaser is right to point out throughout the book that the continued existence of working-class Jews is often ignored, it’s also true that Jews are likelier to be wealthy and less likely to be poor than other groups in America. The Jews who founded New Left organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (or their parents, at least), whom much of the book is devoted to beatifying, were formed ideologically when being Jewish by and large meant being working class. Majoritarian Jewish politics back then were necessarily working class politics in a way that they just aren’t now.

The vision of the idealized cosmopolitan diasporic Jew that era produced—secular, progressive, multilingual, fluent both in their own culture and the culture of the dominant society, which they were able to look on with irony—is the result of Jewish marginalization. This grace comes from being forced to humor a majority convinced of its own natural superiority. In America many associate this irony with a particularly Jewish sensibility. That’s merely because Jews occupied that position in Europe and, for a time, in the United States. But Israeli society offers a very easy refutation of this strange chauvinism: there, it’s the Jewish majority that worships itself, while the Palestinian underclass writes, for example, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (which I recommend). Meanwhile, in America, this vision reflects a kind of person who now barely exists. Unless the Christian nationalists get their way, Jews are no longer foreigners here. What ethical distinctiveness we will retain—or, likelier, revive—cannot rely on nostalgic invocations of a leftist pedigree. The fact that Balthaser at points claims to oppose this kind of nostalgia while unwittingly relying on it shows how inescapable and blinding it can be.

At the risk of sounding reactionary, Judaism brings inherited obligation, not hereditary talent. Jews are not inherently more moral than other people, not subtler, not more sophisticated, certainly not gentler, not better. If we are to have a special “kesher [connection] with the left,” as Balthaser entitles an entire chapter, it must come not from intuitions about its naturalness, but because of a deliberate, collective commitment to values—secular or otherwise—that demand something of us. At times, Balthaser seems to believe this as well. In discussing Edward Said’s reading of Exodus, he writes: “Moses’s Jewishness is entirely relational: it emerges not out of introspection or genealogical data, but rather his choice to defend a Jewish man from a beating and his later adoption by Jews as their leader. Moses in turn comes to make Jews not only a fleeing mass, but a coherent people.” That coherence—about which Balthaser seems to be ambivalent—urgently requires serious ideological conflict among Jews.

Though it’s addressed to fellow leftists, a good start is “Against Zionist Realism,” a piece published in Jewish Currents earlier this year. In it, Jon Danforth-Appell calls for American Jews to collectively oppose Israel not as Jews but as Americans in a much broader coalition. As taxpayers, it is this latter identity which materially implicates them in the genocide committed by a U.S. client state. As voters, it allows them to exert leverage over elected officials. By publicly denouncing Israel as Jews first, he says, we reify Israel’s claim of authority over all Jews worldwide.

Danforth-Appell argues that we must break the State of Israel’s stranglehold over the diaspora not because it reigns as a usurper over this collective but because this collective (“The Jews,” as Daniel Boyarin likes to singularize it) doesn’t exist as a coherent political group. But while they are not homogenous, even barring any commitments to diasporic peoplehood, Jews are materially linked whether they like it or not. In addition to normalizing the mass murder of human beings in Palestine, Zionist institutions connect and endanger American and Israeli Jews. Besides the billions of dollars that flow through Jewish philanthropy from here to there, there is intense ideological exchange between these two places. The judicial reforms that ruptured Israeli society up until October 7 were advanced by an American group trying to spread U.S.-style libertarian conservatism. People I grew up with in Dallas, meanwhile, have moved to Israel to fight in the IDF.

But Danforth-Appell understands that in transforming—or undoing—this connection, there will need to be something beyond a faith in Jewish goodness: “The intentional absence of Zionism,” he writes, “rather than its presence, even as an object of perpetual critique, may represent the most vital mode by which to decenter Israel. It is only once we’ve achieved this distance that we can begin to articulate a new imaginary, a new basis for the creation of our own institutions, communities, and political organizations—spiritual and secular—fully detached from national identity.” But, he adds, “‘Judaism beyond Zionism’ is only a slogan, and the Jewish left as a whole has yet to articulate a project that is not just the negation of Zionism.”

That negation, by itself, will get us nowhere. “In an atomized society,” Arielle Angel wrote after the 2021 Gaza War, “the ability to ‘opt out’ is the greatest barrier to restorative justice.” Balthaser, meanwhile, seems to want Jews to opt in because of their atomization. “What do I have in common with Jews?” Kafka wrote. “I barely have anything in common with myself.” Balthaser tells us, uncontroversially, that this is “not a rejection of Jewishness, but an articulation of it.” But it is absurd and irresponsible to claim that this kind of existential condition could ever form the basis of any politics, let alone one that must defeat an ethnonationalist movement which offers its supporters an intense feeling of belonging.

What binds Jews to the left as Jews—and to the humanist ethical principles which underlie it—cannot be the permanent self-alienation that Balthaser tells us Judaism is. The idea that Jews in diaspora are less themselves than other people is the foundational assertion of Zionism. To cede this claim is to cede the rightness of Jewish life in the diaspora. It is to say that it’s impossible to be Jewish except under Jewish rule, and to offer in the place of Zionism’s promised rootedness an eternal emptiness that will never and should not be accepted by average Jews.

In one of many moments of fleeting clarity in the book, Balthaser seems to understand this. It’s worth quoting that passage at length:

One has to ask, is “diasporic Jewishness” just a nicer way of saying “anti-Zionism”? And if it is, then why bother demarcating its Jewishness per se? Or perhaps “diasporism” is merely a way of announcing one’s Americanness, that is, the extent to which the US—at least New York and Los Angeles—has become perhaps an alternative Zionism, a liberal cosmopolitanism? If so, then how is it really a diaspora at all, except in the way that all Americans, save the indigenous, are living out diasporic lives? Surely one wouldn’t say we are in diaspora from Israel, for to say that would be to posit Israel as “home”; and one could not with any real conviction say that we are still “in diaspora” from the ancient Judean kingdoms destroyed by the Romans. Perhaps one way diasporism could mean something would be to say Jews have no home—not even the United States—in the sense that internationalists believe workers have no country, and also, insofar as Jews see themselves as Jewish first, not belonging to a state, even or especially a Jewish colonial state.

But the Jews are “still in diaspora” from the kingdoms destroyed by Rome. This forms the ethical core of rabbinic Judaism. It is the foundation of the once-widespread Jewish hatred of state power and suspicion of kings which led to the folk-leftism Balthaser idolizes. It is the most essential expression of the Jewish conception of justice, which overcomes the will of the strong, even if it reigns for millennia. It is, as Peter Beinart has written, what should make it completely obvious that the Palestinians, in whom we ought to recognize ourselves, must return to their homes. Or so I think. Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion would beg to differ. So would their Jewish American funders. Unlike them, I’m not convinced of the inevitability of my side’s victory. This means we can, with work, see clearly enough to win.

Sixties radicalism was no more inherently Jewish than the Uzi or the Separation Wall. The Jewish left today is as contingent as Kahanism or any other ideological system. What is not contingent is Jewish responsibility, which we abdicate at our peril, and the peril of the world, when we identify anything inherent or unchanging in Jewish identity but a ceaseless obligation to act justly.