Citizens of the Whole World

Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left

Benjamin Balthaser

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781804291382
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Social Sciences

Since October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed a massive American Jewish uprising in support of Palestinian liberation. Through sit-ins in Congress or Grand Central Terminal, through petitions and marches, thousands of Jews have made it known the Israeli state is not acting in their name. This resistance did not come out of nowhere. Citizens of the Whole World returns us to its roots in the "red decade" of the 1930s and, from there, traces the history of American Jewish radicals and revolutionaries to the present day.

Benjamin Balthaser delves into radical Jewish novels and memoirs, as well as interviews with Jewish revolutionaries, to unearth a buried if nonetheless unbroken continuity between leftist Jewish Americans and the diasporic internation?alism of today.

Covering more than just the politics of anti-Zionism, Citizens of the Whole World explores the Jewish revolutionary traditions of Marxist internationalism, Jewish solidarity with Third World struggles, and relations between Jewish and Black radicals during the Civil Rights era.

Balthaser's book stages an intervention into current anti-Zionist politics, suggesting activists can learn from past struggles to help form a future politics in a world after Zionism.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The American Jewish Left in the Shadow of Zion
• 1. When Anti-Zionism Was Jewish: Jewish Racial Subjectivity and the Anti-imperialist Literary Left from the Great Depression to the Cold War
• 2. Not Your Good Germans: Holocaust Memory, Red Scare Anti-fascism, and the Anti-Zionism of the Jewish New Left
• 3. Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Class, Whiteness, and the Racial Politics of the Anti-Zionist Jewish New Left
• 4. A Kesher with the Left: Jewish Identity Politics and the Remaking of a Diasporic Left, 1970-1980
• 5. The Antinomies of Jewish Liberalism: Socialist Memory and the (Re)Emergence of Jewish Anti-Zionism
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index