"As Jewish protesters began flooding capitol building rotundas, blockading roads in cities across the country, and staging an unprecedented protest in New York City’s Grand Central Station, journalists attempted to pin down this “new” phenomenon. Some in Jewish establishment organizations decried these Jewish dissenters, either claiming them as patsies for terrorism, betrayers of their community, or not Jews at all. Others saw this as a brand new reclamation of Jewish identity, the building of an authentically emergent way of being Jewish that broke with the mainstream Jewish consensus. While this was a resurgence in alternative Jewish organizations and religious and cultural life away from the overwhelming Zionism of American Jewry’s dominant institutions, in truth, nothing about this was new.
As scholar Benjamin Balthaser tracks in his new book, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, the vision of Jewish identity on display in Jewish-led Palestine solidarity demonstrations organized by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and the Jewish Anti-Zionism Network are the latest stage in a long history that sees Jewish identity as in relationship with all communities facing oppression and on a diasporic model of internationalism.
Shane Burley spoke with Balthaser about how Jews in both the Old Left and the New Left convened their sense of Jewish identity, how they understood and responded as Zionism emerged and then later dominated American Jewish life, and how this model of Jewishness has found its continuity in the radical Jewish activism attempting to halt the genocide in Gaza."
https://jacobin.com/2025/06/history-left-jewish-identity-politics
