Anti-Zionism

A revelatory Jewish history from the Pulitzer Prize winner

‘Astonishing … A work of moral courage’ BRIAN ENO

‘Affecting …beautifully written’ GUARDIAN

‘An important work’ AFUA HIRSCH

‘Remarkable’ YANIS VAROUFAKIS

‘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.

‘An urgent rebuke to the dangerous rewriting of history’ AFUA HIRSCH, author of Decolonising My Body

‘Brave and passionate … An important and revelatory contribution to the growing debate on the ethics of Zionism’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, author of The Golden Road

‘Finally we have a way to understand the best parts of Jewish history’ NAN GOLDIN

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

‘A necessary book that carries its passions with the urgent clarity and moral grace that its subject and the moment deserve’ HISHAM MATAR, author of The Return

‘Anti-Zionism restores our faith in what Iris...read more...