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The History Is More Complicated: On the Past, Present, and Future of Left Jewish Identity, by Josh Yunis – 13 June 2025

Benjamin Balthaser’s Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left will be published by Verso in July. Balthaser is associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University, South Bend, and a regular contributor to the website Jacobin. Balthaser was interviewed about the book for Jacobin, by author and journalist Shane Burley (guest editor of an important 2019 special issue of the Journal of Social Justice on contemporary antisemitism and author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It). The interview, looking at how Jews in the Old and New Lefts understood Jewishness and responded to Zionism, has been widely circulated.

This post is a response by Josh Yunis, which we republish with minor edits (and some additional hyperlinks) from a mailing list discussion.

I’d like to push back against this interview a little bit. I think it’s filled with some omissions and elisions that, overall, give a sense of an author working backward from a set of political commitments, and making the history fit the conclusions — or more precisely, omitting the history that doesn’t. 1

The author is set on hammering home two points: one on the historic anti-Zionist commitments of the Jewish American left, and a second on the ways in which Jewish ethnic politics were not at odds with left politics. The history on both counts, however, is more complicated than Balthaser lets on. 

Most glaring is the unwillingness to admit that a large portion of the Jewish labor movement was effectively pro-Zionist by the 1940s. After WWII, the Jewish Labor Committee rallied support for the creation of Israel, and supported the immigration of surviving European Jews to Israel (their efforts to lobby the US Congress to accept refugees failed). The JLC was also one of the earliest supporters of Soviet Jews and the refusenik movement. And as early as 1925, Abraham Cahan, the socialist editor of the Forward, expressed at least an openness to Zionism. These facts are curiously left out of the interview. The labor Zionism of the mid-20th century in fact appealed to many American Jews, leftists included; Pete Seeger’s leftist folk music group, The Weavers, famously performed songs in Hebrew about the nascent Jewish national home.

Second, is the author’s urge to downplay any kind of tension between Jewish identitarian commitments and their commitments on the American left. It is true that Communists were at the forefront of the radical advocacy for full racial and social equality, but as historian Gary Gerstle points out in his book American Crucible,

“not even the Communists fully escaped the racializing influences of the society in which they lived. Their entrapment is apparent, for example, in their visual representations of the ideal, universal worker, the sort whom they dreamed would lead their revolutionary struggle for socialism. In the 1930s, this worker was most often depicted as male, white, and with a powerful physiognomy that was Anglo-Saxon or Nordic. He rarely looked Jewish, Italian, Greek, or black.”

Gerstle goes on to add: Many American Communists

“seem to have become convinced that they would not succeed at their organizing work as long as they were marked for what they were — ethnic minorities drawn primarily from eastern Europe… If they were too easily identified as Jews, Finns, or Slavs, they would be rejected by ‘American’ workers, and rendered ineffective. So they desired to make themselves over into Americans. In undertaking this transformation, they sought to erase, at least in name, their eastern European identities.”   

Gerstle notes that one way in which this manifested itself among Communists was to change their names, which revealed “a hankering for assimilation to a Nordic ideal.” And so people like Itzchok Granich became Mike Gold, one of the figures cited approvingly in this interview. I mention all this, because these tensions — between Jewish identity and assimilation — belie Balthaser’s idea of the American left fostering some kind of beautiful multiethnic “mosaic” (in opposition to what he describes as the “melting pot” ideal of liberalism). 

Why are these omissions important? Well, I think the selective history serves to obscure a fundamental truth about Balthaser’s present-day politics: namely, that the contemporary American Jewish left’s militant anti-Zionism is available to them because their Jewish security and safety was built, at least in part, on immigration restriction and assimilation into America.

As I’ve written before, the success story of Jewish assimilation in America presents a problem within today’s social justice left, which tends to shun assimilation and champion self-definition. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace serve an important role inside this movement, because they wield the fact of their inclusion in American privilege as a weapon against those Jews who were excluded from it (the descendants of Holocaust survivors, Soviet emigres, and of course, Jews from MENA countries). JVP then reclaims their Judaism inside of this movement — but only in the manner prescribed by outsiders, who police the boundaries of acceptable Jewish expression. 

A bit more on Jewish solidarity and the present-day political implications: Balthaser complains that JVP is unfairly maligned as both “opportunistically” and “solipsistically” Jewish. It is both, though. JVP represents, in my view, a rather insidious weaponization of deference politics, or standpoint epistemology. (Jews are not the only group of people dealing with the misapplication of standpoint epistemology, though they may be the only group to weaponize it against one another; see, for instance, this essay on the phenomenon in the black community.) 

Given (1) the particularities of what makes someone a Jew and (2) the ways in which anti-Jewish hate is experienced in different ways by different kinds of Jews throughout the diaspora and in Israel — when someone makes the choice to speak “as a Jew,” questions about their Jewishness become fair game. Deference politics tell us that Jews whose grandparents or great-grandparents came to the United States 120 years ago and have long ago assimilated into American whiteness cannot tell us anything particularly insightful about the lived experience of say, an Iraqi Jew whose grandparents fled anti-Jewish violence for Israel, had a parent or grandparent who fought in an Arab-Israeli war, and maybe lost a family member during the Second Intifada or the 10/7 massacres. A Jew speaking “as a Jew” in order to speak over those voices — as earnest and well-meaning as they may be — forfeits the right to shut down questions about the opportunistic and solipsistic nature of their invocations of Jewishness. 

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with Jews who are interested in exploring what it means to be Jewish (that’s great!). There is also nothing wrong with being a Jewish person who is against a morally indefensible and criminal war of revenge (I happen to be one myself). What is unacceptable, in my view, is wielding one’s newly discovered Jewish identity as a cudgel, and only as a cudgel, against Jews with different material and social realities than one’s own.

If being a Jew is a category of identity that is meaningful to someone (and it doesn’t have to be!), then it is incumbent upon them to condemn, without qualification or preconditions, overt acts of harassment and violence aimed at Jews — yes, even the “Zionist” ones — that take place in the diaspora. That is what doikayt or “diasporism” demands of us in the year 2025. And looking abroad, when it comes to Israel/Palestine, it demands standing with the Israeli left, who have been abandoned by far too many on the international left. JVP does neither of those things. 

Notes:

  1. This wouldn’t be the first time Jacobin did this — for an even more egregious example, see the interview it did with Aisha Azoulay, which I think is fair to call propaganda. ↩︎

Josh Yunis is a writer-director based in Los Angeles. He has a Substack entitled “The Diaspora“.

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