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THE LONG ANTI-ZIONIST HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN JEWISH LEFT  
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Benjamin Balthaser
July 21, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In the last year and a half, thousands of left-wing American Jews
have protested Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. They are taking
part in a long tradition of anti-Zionist Jewish radicalism in the
United States. _

A general view of the Communist National Convention at its first
session on June 24, 1936, at the Manhattan Opera House in New York
City., ACME / AFP via Getty Images

 

This is an excerpt from _Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and
the Cultures of the American Jewish Left _by Benjamin Balthaser, out
this week with Verso Books.

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As historian Karen Brodkin tells it, socialism was “hegemonic” in
American Jewish life before the Cold War. Not in the sense that every
American Jew was a socialist, but rather that a “working class”
and “anti-capitalist outlook” was a familiar, even dominant
political position of American Jews between the first waves of mass
Jewish immigration in the 1880s and the Red Scare of the late 1940s.

The shape such political commitments took were in broad-based
community organizations, labor unions, socialist publications, and
leftist parties built in Jewish communities or in non-Jewish
organizations with large-scale Jewish participation. The International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) not only formed with an
overwhelming majority of Jewish workers, but formed through militant
strikes and built a culture far beyond the workplace in dance halls,
housing cooperatives, and left-wing Yiddish publications. The
Socialist Party had almost unparalleled support among Jewish workers,
with Eugene Debs receiving nearly 40 percent of the Jewish vote in
1920, compared to less than 4 percent of the vote from the general
population. Victor Berger, Debs’s running mate and one of the most
popular socialist politicians in the United States, was Jewish, as was
Meyer London, an outspoken Socialist congressperson.

One of the great misconceptions about the sizable Jewish left of the
early to mid-twentieth century (an error repeated by Brodkin among
others) is that American Jewish socialism was an import from Eastern
Europe. Brodkin’s quite reasonable claim, and indeed what I think is
common sense among American Jews and historians of the Left, is that
Jewish socialism was born out of the crucible of tsarist antisemitism
and a late-arriving Haskalah, fueled by an overeducated if
underemployed working class. While this may be true for the arrival of
the Bund in the early twentieth century, for the emergence of the
late-nineteenth-century American Jewish left, according to historian
Tony Michels, there was little Jewish socialism to import. As Michels
argues, the Jewish labor and socialist movement precedes the Eastern
European labor and socialist movements by two decades; “the Jew had
not always been a radical; the Jew had become a radical in New York
and in other American cities.” In part, Michels suggests, this has
to do with Jewish contact with radical German American workers, who
brought with them texts from the_ Oyfklerung_ of German socialism,
including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Wilhelm
Liebknecht.

Michels’s historical observation functions as a critique of a far
more pervasive assumption, that Jewish socialism is a
single-generational affair and that, upon assimilation, socialist Jews
quieted down into electoral liberals. Little could be further from the
truth — indeed, the movement of Jewish socialism from the 1880s to
the 1940s suggests an increasing radicalization the more assimilated
Jews became in the United States and the more comfortable in their
environs.

Indeed, the communist movement of the 1930s and ’40s was, as Michael
Denning observed, a movement of largely second- and third-generation
“ethnic American” immigrants rather than more recent arrivals. The
communist movement was also the high point in many ways of the Jewish
left in the United States, with the Communist Party (CPUSA) averaging
nearly one hundred thousand members at this time, over half of whom
were Jewish — and given the party’s high turnover, it would mean
hundreds of thousands of American Jews passed in and out of the ranks
of the organization.

Yet the range and scope of the CPUSA went far beyond its membership
rolls, to the many affiliated unions, civil rights organizations,
anti-imperialist and antiwar organizations, and cultural organizations
in the party’s orbit. The left wing of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), the National Negro Congress, American League
Against War and Fascism, Civil Rights Congress, Jewish People’s
Fraternal Order, and others meant that millions of Americans were
fellow travelers with the CPUSA or active members in CPUSA-aligned
organizations. This both followed and helped produce the greatest
realignment of American mass politics in history — a coalition of
white liberals, labor, civil rights organizations, people of color,
and American Jews.

The alliance is such a bedrock of modern American life, it causes
confusion if it begins to unravel. The high point of the American
Jewish left, in other words, also coincided with and helped produce
the common sense of left-wing American politics.

And while the Communist movement of the 1930s promoted its Popular
Front slogan, “Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism,” it has
been noted by wide swaths of both historians of communism and Jewish
history that the movement of the 1930s and ’40s was anything but
assimilationist. As Brodkin writes, “Jewish workers did not accept
the notion that a Jewish identity was peripheral to their working
class interests” as late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish
socialists. Describing the same phenomenon a decade after the period
Brodkin describes, Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik argue that
“Jewish Communism” in the United States “was a combination of
socialism and secular Jewish nationalism.”

Indeed, reading through the left press of the 1930s,
“assimilation” was understood to be anathema to socialism; not
only something a socialist Jew would not want to do, but very much a
project conceived to counter socialism and undermine it. As one of the
major Communist Party editors and theorists of the late 1930s and
1940s, Alexander Bittelman, writes:

Everybody knows that the non-democratic forces in American Jewish life
are either assimilationist . . . or reactionary-nationalistic. The
assimilationists are altogether opposed to the building of a Jewish
life in America or they seek to reduce the American Jewish community
to a religious group, which is tantamount to a denial of Jewish life.
And on this point, the reactionary nationalists, who deny the
possibility of building a Jewish life in the diaspora (the Goluth),
take the same position as the assimilationists. Namely: they either
oppose altogether the building of a Jewish life in America or —
which is virtually the same thing — they want to confine it to a
religious community.

For Bittelman, the alternative to “assimilationism” and
“reactionary nationalism” (that is, Zionism) is “progressive
Jewish values.” Much like “tikkun olam” a generation later,
“progressive Jewish values” in the lexicon of the 1930s and ’40s
Jewish left refers to a secular culture of social democracy,
anti-racism, and cultural diversity, expressed through Jewish
tradition. As the scholar Yuri Slezkine articulated it, of the three
Jewish answers to antisemitism in the twentieth century —
immigration to the Americas, emigration to Israel, and the Bolshevik
Revolution (that is, assimilation, nationalism, or socialism) —
socialism remained by far the most popular solution to the “Jewish
question” in the early to mid-twentieth century. As a solution then,
communism was not a form of assimilation, but rather an alternative to
it.

Of course, this raises the question, what was it about the United
States that allowed for the flowering of Jewish socialism? While that
may be an overdetermined question, it is clear that Jewish socialists
expressed their political commitments through a language of ethnic
identification and racial solidarity; indeed, these tended to be
inseparable.

As Amelia Glaser writes in her comprehensive history of left-wing
Yiddishkeit poetry in the United States, part of Jewish leftists’
acculturation to the United States was through the language of racial
solidarity and racial identification. American poets writing in
Yiddish would often transpose language of pogroms onto stories of
lynchings and would compare the sufferings of African Americans with
the sufferings of Jews in the Pale of Settlement. Yiddish-speaking
poets would even translate black idiom and black poetic styles into
their writing. While such forms of borrowing and identification could
be seen as a kind of left-wing minstrelsy, it expressed a critique of
the Al Jolson modality of shedding Jewish tears through blackface.
Rather than expressing Jewish grief through transposition, such poems
were a way of communicating the oppression of African Americans to
other Jews in an idiom they could understand.

In an analogous move, the mid-century novelist and editor Mike
Gold’s 1930 _Jews Without Money_ features a dark-skinned,
curly-haired Jew — nicknamed the N-word by the community — as his
hero. Rather than see this as appropriation, I would argue Gold
features this character to reject a “teleology of assimilation”
and embrace solidarity with other marginalized Americans. While there
are many other reasons for Jewish socialism to have thrived in the
United States, including a greater atmosphere of freedom than in
Tsarist Russia (albeit often circumscribed), I would suggest it was
rather that the American left lent itself to an expression of ethnic
politics as a politics of socialist liberation. In the United States,
unlike Europe, racial solidarity was an expression of radicalism.

Bittelman, as a Communist Party theorist, attempted to schematize
Ashkenazi Jewish identity and its relationship with non-Jewish people
of color throughout the world within a Marxian and intersectional
framework after World War II. Bittelman first conceives of Ashkenazi
Jewish life in the United States as existing within a “bourgeois
nationalist” framework that seeks to incorporate the “Jewish
bourgeoisie” into aims of US-dominated global capitalism and offer a
form of subordinate “assimilation” to the Jewish masses. Bittelman
then goes on to say that race in the United States is not simply an
epiphenomenon of class; rather, there “exists in the United States a
peculiar system of oppression of peoples, usually spoken of as
minorities, which is a system of persecution of peoples and
discrimination against them.” In other words, the United States is
not only a capitalist country existing through the exploitation of
labor but the inheritor of the British Empire externally and the
product of settlement and slavery internally.

While eschewing a strict hierarchy of oppression, Bittelman
nonetheless describes the oppression of African Americans as akin to
colonization, framing it as a “national oppression” analogous to
the colonization of the Philippines and Puerto Rico within the
“Black Belt of the South,” and a regime of oppression and
discrimination throughout the rest of the United States. Bittelman
describes a system of racial oppression that ultimately serves the
interests of capitalism while placing “Anglo-Saxons” as the
dominant group and subjecting white ethnics such as “Poles,
Russians, Italians, Jews and others” to various forms of exclusion.
Bittelman goes on to suggest that Jews stand apart from this general
framework insofar as “anti-Semitism itself ” is a form of
“national oppression and discrimination” that is less systemic
than the oppression faced by black people, yet both sharper and more
important to the forces of “imperialist reaction” than the general
forms of social exclusion faced by non-“Anglo-Saxons.” In this
framework, it is in the interests of American Jews to ally with the
“Negro people” who are fighting for their “national
liberation” within the Black Belt and are a “vanguard force
against the whole imperialist system of national discrimination and
oppression in the United States.”

It makes sense, then, that in his analysis of the role of Jewish
socialists in the United States, a critique of Zionism emerges out the
Jewish left’s general worldview. Thus for Bittelman, American Jewish
identity is linked primarily to its conditions in the United States
and its lived solidarities with other “oppressed nationalities,”
especially African Americans and people in the colonized world.
Bittelman’s theorizing an American Jewish relationship to Zionism
follows from his general theorization of race and capitalism as
transnational formations, linked through circuits of military and
economic form.

If Zionism is a form of imperialism, it is not only directly
antagonistic for the Palestinians — it is also against the direct
self-interest of working-class Jews. Bittelman grants that Jews form
a“national group” in the Yishuv, the prestate Jewish settlement in
Mandate Palestine. But their national character, language, territory,
and national culture does not then grant Jews in Palestine the right
to form a Jewish-only state. As Bittelman writes:

The Zionist solution of the Palestine question, being anti-democratic
and reactionary and oriented on collaboration with imperialism against
the Arab people, endangers the security of the Yishuv and tends to
turn the Jewish people into accomplices and partners in imperialist
oppression and exploitation.

Bittelman was hardly alone in seeing Zionism as a form of imperialism
in the 1930s and ’40s; indeed, that was the commonsense
understanding on the Left. Not only would Zionism, as Hannah Arendt
accurately predicted, displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
and set a minority of Jews against an entire subcontinent of Arab
neighbors; it would be aligned with British and US imperialism and the
bourgeois interests of the Jewish ruling class. Bittelman spoke for
most American Jewish leftists including luminaries such as Mike Gold,
Albert Einstein, Leon Trotsky, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others, when
he wrote that Zionism was anathema to “progressive Jewish values.”
Anti-Zionism seemed to swim well within the mainstream of American
Jewish life. As Robert Gessner succinctly put it, in the United States
“about one percent of Jews are Zionist.”

To quote Stuart Hall on Antonio Gramsci, ideas are “never only
concerned with the philosophical core” of their existence; for their
“organic” presence in movements and communities, “they must
touch practical, everyday commonsense.” It’s important to point
out that American Jewish anti-Zionism emerged organically, in the
Gramscian sense, from the already-existing socialist commitments of
Jews in the United States. While the US Jewish left was briefly
“converted” to Zionism, it was not by Israeli military prowess,
but rather the Soviet Union’s support for Partition in the United
Nations. Yet this was short-lived for both the Soviet Union and the
American Jewish left.

When Israel again emerged in the spotlight in 1967, the New Left
response was remarkably consistent with the response of Jewish
leftists a generation earlier. While the Trotskyist Socialist Workers
Party (SWP) remained consistent on Palestine throughout the nadir of
the 1950s, for many in the leadership of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), there was a process of relearning. When the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came out in support of the
nascent Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968, leaders in
SDS felt that they should be supported. Susan Eanet-Klonsky, who was
in SDS leadership and worked out of the national office in Chicago,
said she received a stack of pamphlets and books “on the Palestine
question” from older comrades and took up a study of the issue for
the first time. Writing several articles for SDS’s newspaper, _New
Left Notes_, Eanet-Klonsky framed Israel-Palestine much like
communists of the 1930s had, as an imperialist conquest “analogous
to the flight of early colonists in America . . . to a land already
occupied by Indian people.”

When, fifty years later, Jewish Voice for Peace unveiled the “Deadly
Exchange” campaign to highlight the racism of both the US police
state and the Israeli apartheid state, they were articulating a
hundred-year tradition of linking Zionism to racial violence and
imperialism. While in each case the conditions and context may have
been new, the left-wing transnational conception of race has remained
a constant. Such a conceptualization of race is not a new phenomenon,
but rather emerges from solidarities and articulations of a much
longer tradition of an American Jewish left.

On the question of Zionism and solidarity with other oppressed ethnic
groups and religious minorities, there is a straight line from the
Communist Party to SDS, to the Chutzpah Collective, to New Jewish
Agenda (NJA), to Jewish Voice for Peace. Indeed, one can even trace
such lineages through singular individuals and families. Jewish Voice
for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), and
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are intergenerational
organizations, and many of the founders and activists hail from
multigenerational left-wing families themselves, including Melanie
Kaye/Kantrowitz, whose career spans from NJA to JFREJ; to David
Duhalde, a Jewish socialist in DSA whose parents are exiles from
Chile; and Molly Crabapple, who is the great-granddaughter of a
well-known Bundist. In this sense I would suggest that the Jewish
left(s) are not peripheral to Jewish identity, but rather integral to
understanding the ongoing cleavages and oppositions within the Jewish
community, as well as the continued presence of self-identified Jews
and Jewish organizations on the streets in protest over Israel’s
latest war.

These questions are far from academic. As now right-wing Jewish
institutions, from the American Jewish Committee to the
Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International, attempt to quash
debate among the American public on Zionism and the continuing
displacement of Palestinians from their land, not only is a living
memory of the Jewish left a resource for American Jews, it can point
to ways forward for those who wish to challenge such institutions on
their own cultural grounds. As opposed to theories of the Jewish
left’s “vanishing” or interest in the American Jewish left as a
form of “nostalgia,” it should be remembered that Jewish leftists
were not merely brave individuals but representatives of rooted
communities and class perspectives, part of a longer story of class
struggle, anti-imperialism, and assimilation into dominant modes of
whiteness and power. As much as this is a cultural history of “the
Jewish left,” Jewish lefts are inseparable from the longer history
of the American radical left, of which Jewish lefts have been an
active and influential part.

Of course, this is not to say that the (Jewish) American left has been
infallible (indeed, blind adherence to the foreign policy of the
Soviet Union was a disaster for Palestine and for the credibility of
American communism): its defeats are primarily the result of the
uneven terrain of class struggle, not internal contradictions. The two
Red Scares, COINTELPRO, and the alignment of liberal Jewish
institutions with the inquisitions of the Right have played outsize
roles in establishing the dominance of Zionism over Jewish and
American politics. But it should be remembered that past struggles
emerged and were fought out over terrain not wholly different from
what we face now: an imperialist superpower against the interests of
the global majority.

My intervention is not the idea that Jewish leftists were exceptional,
farsighted, or cosmically visionary — rather that such lefts emerged
out of the quotidian interests and struggles of ordinary people in a
grotesquely unjust world. As such, earlier Jewish leftists built a
Jewish left — and a critique of Zionism — out of the terrain that
was autochthonous to the United States: one in which racial
oppression, a rapacious bourgeoisie, a bloated military budget, and
precarious living standards even for the educated are the norm rather
than the exception. American Jews, like all other members of the 99
percent, have grounds to fight such formations in their own language,
in a common language, in one’s own language in common with others.

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Benjamin Balthaser is an associate professor of multiethnic US
literature at Indiana University, South Bend. He is the author most
recently of Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures
of the American Jewish Left from Verso Books.

* Jewish history; Jewish Bund; Communist Party USA; American Labor
Movement
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