Critiques of Zionism by Jews

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As far as "oppressed and oppressor groups" are concerned, most leftists would say that Jews can be in either category depending on context. Most leftists would also say that it is wrong to pick on Jews merely for being Jewish, or for wearing Jewish religious symbols!

In the spring of 1936, a wave of anti-Jewish violence engulfed the Polish town of Przytyk. Jews comprised 90 percent of the town’s population and tended to dominate in craft and service occupations, while larger numbers of Poles lived and farmed in the surrounding rural areas.

Although the vast majority of Jews and Poles were equally impoverished, goaded by right-wing nationalists, some Poles blamed structural barriers to economic mobility on Jews. On March 9, the town’s weekly market day, this racism came to a head, resulting in one of interwar Poland’s most notorious antisemitic riots.

In response to the violence, beloved Yiddish songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig penned the song “Es Brent” (“It’s Burning”), which admonishes the Jewish community for watching on, arms folded, while flames engulfed their town. The song was a desperate call to action — and it did not fall on deaf ears. Following the pogrom, the Jewish population of Przytyk formed armed self-defense militias, while the Jewish and Polish socialist parties joined forces to call a one-day nationwide general strike.

The standard, lachrymose telling of Jewish history often omits resistance like this in favor of casting Jewish people as the passive victims of unending, unchallenged calamities. It’s a narrative that bolsters Zionism by downplaying the possibility of solidarity between Jews and non-Jews and by implying that antisemitism can only be countered by a Jewish ethno-state.

The Radical Jewish Tradition, a new book by Janey Stone and Donny Gluckstein, challenges this grim chronicle. Stone and Gluckstein present long-obscured histories of Jewish involvement in mass movements fighting for liberation from tsars, bosses, and fascists. And perhaps most importantly, The Radical Jewish Tradition demonstrates that there have always been Jewish alternatives to Zionism. Indeed, although it’s difficult to imagine today, prior to World War II, Zionism was a small minority current among Jewish people.

The Jewish Labor Bund
he Jewish Labor Bund is one of the most important examples of anti-Zionist Jewish political organizing from before World War II. Founded in Vilnius in Autumn 1897, the Bund was the most popular socialist party among Jews in the Russian Empire prior to the 1917 Revolution, and it led the largest Jewish unions.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Russian Empire was sprawling, economically backward and diverse, with the vast majority of its multiethnic, multilingual population living outside urban centers. Thanks to historical restrictions on where Jews could live and work, Russia’s Jewish community was one of the empire’s most urbanized. Moreover, Jewish workers were concentrated in crafts that were just beginning to industrialize, such as tanning, textiles, and shoemaking.

Turn of the century Russia also faced a series of increasingly severe political crises as the ossified Romanov monarchy struggled to keep pace with a modernizing economy, a militant labor movement, and emerging national liberation movements. These tensions made Russia a tinderbox for antisemitism as Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II attempted to displace popular frustration onto Jews. Tsarist propaganda drew on Christian anti-Jewish prejudice to portray Jews as either wealthy capitalists responsible for the world’s economic misery or, alternately, as socialists who threatened to tear apart civilization itself.

Combined with poverty and legal discrimination, the experience of often brutal day-to-day antisemitism pushed Russia’s Jewish population toward three broad alternatives. A minority founded organizations promising a better life in an exclusively Jewish homeland. Far more, however, emigrated to developed capitalist countries.

And to those who rejected the first two answers, the Bund offered a radical leftist political project that sought to end antisemitism by transforming society entirely.

Doikayt Contra Zionism
The Bund’s politics can be summed up by the term doikayt (hereness), derived from the Yiddish word do (here). Coined after World War II, doikayt highlighted the need to fight “here” — wherever Jews live — against economic exploitation and racism. And for Bundists, doikayt was opposed to strategies for ending antisemitism and exploitation that promised liberation “there,” namely, in Palestine, most Zionists proposed.

Zionists, by contrast, claimed that antisemitism would never be defeated, and argued that to live freely and in safety, Jews needed an exclusive homeland. Bundists rejected this as pessimistic and separatist and argued that it was necessary to fight racism and capitalism at the same time, by uniting working-class and oppressed peoples across national, religious, and ethnic lines. Contrary to Zionists, Bundists understood that the fate of Jewish people in Russia and Poland was bound up with that of the entire regional working class and all the ethnic minorities therein.

Reflecting legal, economic, and linguistic realities, the Bund was a Jewish organization. However, thanks to its commitment to solidarity and working-class unity, it played an outsize role in the wider Russian labor movement. Indeed, before the 1905 Revolution, the Bund was by far the largest socialist organization in the Russian Empire, claiming more members than all the small circles then-comprising the socialist movement combined.

This is why, in March 1898 — just a few months after its founding — the Bund hosted the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), which went on to split into the better-known Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

Bund members played an outsize role in the RSDLP’s original leadership and were also responsible for significant theoretical breakthroughs. Ob Agitatsii (On Agitation), published in 1893, is a good example. Written by Arkady Kremer, a Bundist, and Julius Martov, who would later come to lead the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP, Ob Agitatsii theorized the interplay between propaganda and agitation. As Kremer and Martov argued, propaganda disseminates broadly socialist perspectives to a smaller audience while agitation attempts to gain a mass audience by focusing on concrete and immediate problems.

Importantly for its time, Ob Agitatsii argued that it was necessary for socialists in the Russian Empire to move away from building small circles of clandestine intellectuals and toward a mass movement of workers — and this meant a shift toward agitation.

National Liberation and Class Solidarity
Debates among Bundists also informed Marxist conceptions of anti-racist solidarity and national liberation.

From the outset, the Bund faced a built-in contradiction between its leadership and its audience. At the time, 97 percent of Jews in the Russian Empire were native Yiddish speakers while only 25 percent knew Russian. Russian was, however, the intellectual and political lingua franca for leftists across Russia, and the Bund’s leadership was primarily drawn from assimilated Russian-speaking Jewish intellectuals.

Instead of insisting on speaking to their audience in a language they did not know, early Bundists established a Yiddish-language revolutionary press. And indeed, this initiative was emblematic of the Bund’s overall approach to cross-cultural organizing.

For example, in the tanning industry, bosses deliberately split Jews and non-Jews into different parts of the production process to undermine solidarity and encourage different cultural groups to scab on one another. In response, the Bund published multilingual manifestos that helped to unite workers of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds while still honoring their cultural differences.

Similarly, as part of the push to simultaneously agitate among Jewish workers and build solidarity between Jews and non-Jews, the Bund developed their own form of non-Zionist Jewish identity, which they called “national cultural autonomy.” Bundists saw this cultural program — which included Yiddish-language arts, sports, education, and recreation — as a proletarian counterweight to both religious traditionalism and emerging secular Zionist cultural movements.

This broad approach raised much debate — both among Jews and between Bundists and their non-Jewish comrades — over the dividing line between Zionist nationalism, which they rejected, and the Bund’s conception of a progressive Jewish national cultural autonomy. Some of these issues came to a head at the famous 1903 congress of the RSDLP.

Drawing inspiration from a perspective known as “Austro-Marxism,” developed by Austrian social democrat Otto Bauer, the Bund envisaged a socialist movement with federal structure, granting autonomy to socialist parties among Russia’s various linguistic and national minorities. As part of this vision, Bundist delegates argued that the Bund should be the sole representative of Russian Jewish workers.

Other sections of the RSDLP argued for a single, united party encompassing multiple nationalities and languages. Many supported Yiddish-language education, agitation, organizing, and cultural activities. But at the same time, they did insist on a party organized across national lines. The Bund lost the vote, after which it quit the RSDLP. Three years later, however, it rejoined.

Most Bund-sympathetic accounts criticize the vote as antisemitic or read it as a harbinger of Joseph Stalin’s repression of Jews. This is misguided. Rather, the debate was over the best way to organize a socialist party in a large multinational empire. The outcome did not entail a rejection of the Bund’s call for Jewish self-determination.

Opponents of the Bund’s proposal argued that it would limit Jews — and other nationalities, Russians included — to single, nationally defined parties. Far from uniting workers, this would, they suggested, encourage separatism and undermine cross-cultural solidarity. Instead of separating Jewish and non-Jewish socialists, the Bund’s 1903 opponents argued that there needed to be a Jewish presence in every part of the RSDLP, as part of an ongoing fight against antisemitism.

This position also reflected reality. Although the Bund represented the vast majority of Jewish socialists, the RSDLP also had Jewish members in most of its regional divisions. Under the Bund’s proposal, these RSDLP members would be faced with a choice: either leave their organizations within the RSDLP and join the Bund, or effectively renounce their Judaism in order to remain in their chosen political or regional groupings.

The RSDLP members who voted against the Bund’s proposal were far from dismissing Bund members’ concerns, and less still were they motivated by racism. The “no” voters staunchly opposed antisemitism, both legal and popular, and saw it as a tsarist strategy to divide and poison to the wider movement. Ultimately, they believed a united party had a better chance at combating antisemitism than a federated one.

Labor Zionism
In addition to Bundism, The Radical Jewish Tradition looks at another Jewish political current, labor Zionism. Labor Zionism, as the name suggests, was broadly congruent with socialist Zionism or left Zionism, and tried to combine socialist and working-class politics with the project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.

The original labor Zionist organization, Hashomer Hatzair, was formed in 1913 in Austria-Hungary. On the eve of World War II, it claimed 26,000 members across 300 branches, while its international sections enjoyed some support. However, with an overwhelmingly middle-class membership and few inroads in the Jewish working class, labor Zionism paled in comparison with the Bund.

On its face, labor Zionism was a left-wing current. Many labor Zionists escaped racism and poverty in Europe, in order to establish kibbutzim — agricultural collectives — in Palestine. Labor Zionists also created the Histadrut, the Jewish union in British Mandate Palestine, which was, at the time, one of the strongest labor federations in the world. Among the labor Zionists who remained in Europe, many joined ghetto movements and partisan units to fight against the Nazis, often taking leading roles.

In the lead up to World War II, however, labor Zionists set their sights exclusively on Palestine, dedicating organizational resources to camping trips and learning how to farm, in preparation for their occupation of Palestinian land. This strategy was often in direct counterposition to active resistance. For example, when Nazis famously rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1939, Hashomer Hatzair declined to counterprotest, stating that “Our Zionist policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine.”

Today the labor Zionist tradition holds continuing appeal for progressive Jews who oppose the occupation and the far-right Zionism that dominates contemporary Israeli politics. As Zionists, they believe a nation-state is the only model for Jewish self-determination. As progressives, they hope for a more liberal-democratic or even social democratic Israel.

As Stone and Gluckstein argue, the historical record proves that these aspirations are mutually incompatible. To understand why, we need to understand how Israel has evolved over time. When we think of Israeli settlements today, we think of the fanatical, Jewish fundamentalist settlers in the West Bank. Although the labor Zionists were never a majority, the kibbutzim they founded were the first settlements to be established on Palestinian land. Although far more secular and socially progressive than Jewish settlers today, labor Zionists led the way by expropriating tracts of Palestinian land.

Labor Zionists laid the foundation for the military occupation of Palestine.

Labor Zionists also laid the foundation for the military occupation of Palestine. They established the Haganah — a paramilitary organization that eventually became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — to protect the kibbutzim. In 1948, the Haganah led the expulsions of Palestinians before going on to dominate Israeli politics for its first three decades. Since then, labor Zionism has played an outsize role in Israel’s military establishment. Of the last ten chiefs of staff of the IDF, eight have a background in labor Zionist parties or the kibbutzim.

Similarly, when labor Zionists founded the Histadrut, their intention was to segregate Jews and Palestinians by excluding Arab labor. Members paid two types of dues; the first funded pickets against businesses that employed Arab workers, and the other funded boycotts of Arab produce.

To their credit, a few labor Zionists opposed these racist policies and argued for unity across national lines. Nevertheless, from the beginning, the movement as a whole was crucial to seizing land and establishing apartheid. There is, unfortunately, more continuity between today’s Zionist far right and their labor Zionist forbears.

Young Jewish Americans are playing an outsized role in the movement for Palestine—but not without facing consequences. In a recent article for In These Times, Shane Burley investigates the ways anti-Zionist Jews are facing persecution from community institutions they once called home. Burley joins The Marc Steiner Show for a discussion on the growing divide over Zionism in Jewish communities, and the role of youth in this process.

Anti-Zionist Jews face persecution from Jewish institutions w/Shane Burley | The Marc Steiner Show, Oct 24, 2024:



From the description on YouTube:


The above-mentioned In These Times article is here: U.S. Jewish Institutions Are Purging Their Staffs of Anti-Zionists by Shane Burley, October 1, 2024: "A months-long investigation found even the smallest hints of dissent are often met with unemployment."

Looks like not just anti-Zionists, but also liberal Zionist critics of the Israeli government are getting pushed out of many Jewish organizations these days.

Hopefully the anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists will succeed in building their own separate Jewish institutions.

“Reprehensible and dangerous.” “Terrorist sympathizers.” “It’s not 1938 Berlin. It’s 2024, Columbia University, NYC.”

The White House, Congressional Republicans, and cable news talking heads would have you believe that the Columbia University campus has devolved into a hotbed of antisemitic violence – but the reality on the ground is very different. As a Jewish student at Columbia, it depresses me that I have to correct the record and explain what the real risk to our safety looks like. I still can't quite believe how the events on campus over the past few days have been so cynically and hysterically misrepresented by the media and by our elected representatives.

Last week, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition, representing more than 100 student organizations, including Jewish groups, organized the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, a peaceful campus protest in solidarity with Palestine. CUAD was reactivated after the university suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in the fall. On Wednesday morning, hundreds of students camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn. They vowed to stay put until the university divests from companies that profit from their ties to Israel. Protesters prayed, chanted, ate pizza, and condemned the university’s complicity in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Though counter-protesters waved Israeli flags near the encampment, the campus remained largely calm from my vantage point.

Columbia responded by imposing a miniature police state. Just over a day after the encampment was formed, university President Minouche Shafik asked and authorized the New York Police Department to clear the lawn and load 108 students – including a number of Jewish students – onto Department of Corrections buses to be held at NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. One Jewish student told me that she and her fellow protesters were restrained in zip-tie handcuffs for eight hours and held in cells where they shared a toilet without privacy. The NYPD chief of patrol John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

Since then, dozens of undergraduates have been locked out of their dorms without notice. Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia, notably gave students just 15 minutes to retrieve their belongings after returning from lockup and finding themselves evicted. Suspended students cannot return to campus and are struggling to access food or medical care. Students who keep Shabbat, and do not use electronics on the Sabbath, were forced to rely on technology in order to secure food and emergency housing. This crackdown was the most violence inflicted on our student body in decades. I implore you, as our Jewish Voice for Peace chapter does, to consider whether arresting Jewish students keeps us and Columbia safe.

Smears from the press and pro-Israel influencers, who have levied charges of antisemitism and violence against Jewish students, are a dangerous distraction from real threats to our safety. I saw politicians compare student organizers to neo-Nazis and call for a National Guard deployment, apparently ignorant of the lives lost at Kent State and in Charlottesville, and with very little pushback from national media. This is a repulsive form of self-aggrandizement that I can only assume is intended to preserve relationships with influential donors. Calls to more heavily police our campus actively endanger Jewish students, and threaten the regular operations of the university far more gravely than peaceful protests.

It’s true, the fact that CUAD organizers fundamentally reject bigotry and hate has not stopped unrelated actors from exploiting opportunities to shamefully harass Jewish students with grotesque or antisemitic statements. I condemn antisemitism – which should seem obvious since I have experienced it many times myself. (This likely won’t keep controversial Columbia Business School professor Shai Davidai from calling me a kapo.) But the often off-campus actions of a few unaffiliated individuals simply do not characterize this disciplined student campaign. The efforts to connect these offensive but relatively isolated incidents to the broader pro-Palestinian protest movement mirror a wider strategy to delegitimize all criticism of Israel.

As this national discourse over “campus antisemitism” reached a boiling point over the weekend, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment saw CUAD organizers lead joint Muslim and Jewish prayer sessions and honor each other’s dead. This is wholesome, human stuff – it doesn’t make for sensationalist headlines about Jew-hating Ivy Leaguers.

On Monday, I joined hundreds of my fellow student workers for a walk-out in solidarity with the encampment; we listened respectfully as a similarly sizable group of Columbia faculty held a rally on the library steps. Frankly, it didn’t feel much different from the environment during my union’s most recent strike on campus – I felt inspired again by my colleagues’ commitment to making Columbia a safer and better place to work and study.

Later that night, a Passover Seder service was held at the encampment. Would an antisemitic student movement welcome Jews in this way? I think not.

Here’s what you’re not being told: The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities.

I am wary of a hysterical campus discourse – gleefully amplified by many of the same charlatans who have turned “DEI” into a slur – that draws attention away from the ongoing slaughter in the Gaza Strip and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. We should be focusing on the material reality of war: the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which kill Palestinians by the thousands, and the Americans participating in the violence. Forget the fringe folks and outside agitators: the CUAD organizers behind the campus protests have rightfully insisted on divestment as their most important demand of the Columbia administration, and on sustained attention to the situation in Palestine.

And we are not alone. College campuses across the United States have followed Columbia’s lead.

And so, it is my hope that we can all learn from their examples to remain clear-eyed about the stakes of this crisis and focus on the actual violence being perpetrated in all of our names.

I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Don’t Believe What You’re Being Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’ by Jonathan Ben-Menachem, Zeteo, Apr 23, 2024: "Smears from the press and pro-Israel influencers are a dangerous distraction from real threats to our safety."

Jewish students at Columbia University have been driven out of their dorm rooms, chased off campus, compelled to hide their Jewish identity, ostracized by their peers and denigrated by faculty, according to a report released Friday by the university’s Task Force on Antisemitism.

The report, the second one released by the investigatory body made up of faculty, illustrated the breadth of anti-Jewish discrimination at the Ivy League campus. It also said that pervasive antisemitism on campus has “affected the entire university community.”

“The larger social compact is broken,” the report said. “University policy and individual practice must change.”

The task force also created its own definition of antisemitism, short-circuiting a combative debate over differing definitions created by varying coalitions and undercutting criticism that it had previously faced. The definition calls antisemitism “prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis” but does not mention Zionism, a wedge in the broader debate, explicitly.

To compile the report, released just hours before the start of the Labor Day long weekend, the task force held listening sessions with close to 500 students last school year. The students testified about their experience around the campus, including in dorms, on social media, at student organizations and in class. They reported a pattern of discrimination that affected their social lives, studies and mental health.

After October 7, numerous students reported that they no longer felt safe,” the report reads. “One student who had moved into her dorm room in September, told us she placed a mezuzah on her doorway as required by ritual law, as traditional Jews have done for centuries. In October, people began banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to move out of the dorm.”

The report also details dozens of other antisemitic anecdotes and incidents on campus, including students wearing kippahs who were spit on and berated, a Jewish woman and her brother who were chased off campus at night, and classmates wearing keffiyehs who shoved Jewish students and shouted, “We don’t want no Zionists here.”

Other incidents mentioned in the report include jokes about Adolf Hitler that were scrawled onto communal whiteboards in the dorms and a professor who called Jewish donor “white capitalists” guilty of dealing in “blood money” and referred to “so-called Israel” in a classroom exercise. Israeli students were “singled out for particularly terrible treatment,” according to the report.
“We heard about crushing encounters that have crippled students’ academic achievement. We heard about students being avoided and avoiding others, about exclusion from clubs and activities, isolation and even intimidation,” the task force said in the report.

Jewish students' reports get brushed aside
Students who reported antisemitic hostility to faculty were sometimes brushed aside, according to the report. Some Jewish students who reported discrimination to administrators were referred to counseling “which they correctly understood” meant that they needed to accept antisemitism, the report said.

The task force is recommending the use of its antisemitism definition, which says the prejudice can manifest in ethnic slurs or caricatures; stereotypes or antisemitic tropes; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; discrimination based on Jewish identity or ties to Israel; and double standards applied to Israel.

Although the task force’s definition does not directly mention Zionism, the report notes that “Zionists” were often targeted and reported a “slippage that sometimes felt intentional” between the terms Zionist and Jew. New York University last week issued new hate speech guidelines that said students or faculty who target “Zionists” could be violating campus policy.

“Anti-Zionism, as it has been expressed in campus demonstrations during the past academic year, hews far more closely to antisemitism than to a simple critique of Israel,” the Columbia report said, adding that some anti-Zionist rhetoric, such as stickers that accused “Zionist donors” of controlling the university, echoed traditional antisemitic tropes.

I remember reading it was the Jewish Voice for Peace that was doing the “loyalty oaths”.

What are you referring to here?

Eilon Presman was about 100 feet from the UCLA Palestinian solidarity encampment when he heard the screams: “Zionist! Zionist!”

The 20-year-old junior, who is Israeli, realized the activists were pointing at him.

“Human chain!” they cried.

A line of protesters linked arms and marched toward him, Presman said, blocking him from accessing the heart of UCLA’s campus. Other activists, he said, unfurled kaffiyeh scarves to block his view of the camp.

“Every step back that I took, they took a step forward,” Presman said. “I was just forced to walk away.”

Some of the Jewish students who took part in the encampment played a role in excluding Zionists.

Members of Jewish Voice for Peace at UCLA, a small but rapidly growing group on campus, argue they had a moral responsibility to pressure university officials to divest from Israel.

The camp and its checkpoints, they said, were not hostile to Jews. Restricting fellow students from entering was just a pragmatic move to protect protesters inside from physical, verbal or emotional abuse.

“We are committed to keeping each other safe,” said Agnes Lin, 22, a fourth-year art and art history student and member of Jewish Voice for Peace. Anyone who agreed to the UC Divest Coalition’s demands and community guidelines, she said, was welcome.

In practise, students who supported the existence of Israel were kept out — even if they opposed Israel’s right-wing government and its bombardment of Gaza.

Senior Adam Thaw, 21, said activists blocked him and others from accessing a public walkway to Powell Library.

After telling him they were not letting anyone through, a male activist eyed his Star of David necklace: “If you’re here to espouse that this is antisemitism, then you can leave.”

As complaints from Jewish students mounted, UCLA declared the encampment “unlawful.” In an April 30 statement, Chancellor Gene Block said most activists had been peaceful, but the tactics of some were “shocking and shameful.”

“Students on their way to class,” he said, “have been physically blocked from accessing parts of the campus.”

The campus was dark and hushed when Sabrina Ellis joined dozens of activists at 4 a.m. to set up the encampment on the lawn of Dickson Court.

After pitching tents and erecting barricades of wooden pallets and sheets of plywood, Ellis, a 21-year-old international student from Brazil, took shifts guarding the entrance.

Ellis didn’t call it a checkpoint. The goal was to exclude and physically block “agitators” — anyone who might be violent, record students or disagree with the cause.

“Our top priority isn’t people’s freedom of movement,” Ellis said. “It is keeping people in our encampments physically and emotionally safe.”

The longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace — who wore a large Star of David over her T-shirt and a kaffiyeh wrapped around her shoulders — said the camp “was not profiling based on religion.”

But as activists blocked Zionist students from public campus space, they faced charges that they engaged in viewpoint discrimination.