In our names.
A Pulitzer-winning Jewish biographer has written a history of Jews who opposed Zionism — and argues that conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not only false but dangerous, because it ties the safety of Jews everywhere to the conduct of one state acting in their name.
Benjamin Moser's argument is a Jewish argument, made by a Jewish writer, drawing on a century of Jewish thinkers. That is precisely why it belongs beside our work on the conflation: it is the living refutation of the claim that criticizing Israel is hatred of Jews. We grade the documented tradition, carry Moser's sharper claims as his, and fence the overreach — in both directions.
What this page is about
Benjamin Moser won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Susan Sontag. His new book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (4th Estate / Penguin Random House, 2026), assembles twelve portraits of Jews who opposed Zionism across the last century — from the early-20th-century Polish rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, through the philosopher Hannah Arendt and the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, to the photographer Nan Goldin. Moser's purpose, as he puts it, is to let contemporary Jewish critics of Israel “feel less alone” by showing that argument about Zionism was once ordinary inside Jewish life — not a betrayal, not a self-hatred, but a serious and recurring Jewish position.
From that history he draws a blunt present-day claim. In public remarks, reported by Drop Site News, Moser argued that Israel is “actively fomenting” antisemitism by claiming to act in the name of all Jews: “It's asking a lot of people to say that there's this Jewish army of this Jewish state with this Jewish star on their flag, and they are mercilessly slaughtering tens of thousands of children, but don't confuse them with Jews.” Much of the reported rise in antisemitism, he said, is really a rise in anti-Zionism — people reacting to a state's conduct, not to Jewishness. These are his words and his argument, and we carry them as such.
We grade this with the same dual standard we hold across The Oldest Lies: criticism of a state is not bigotry, and bigotry against Jews is a real and rising evil — both are true, and keeping them apart is the whole discipline. So the documented tradition is fact, and it dismantles the blanket equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Moser's sharper causal claim — that Israel manufactures antisemitism — we pose rather than assert. And his line that the rise is “simply” anti-Zionism we fence from both sides: much of what gets counted as antisemitism is indeed criticism of Israel, but not all of it, because real antisemitism exists and some of the increase is genuine hatred of Jews as Jews. It belongs in Israeli Influence, as the heavyweight corroboration of a point we have argued before.
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In Our Names.
A Pulitzer-winning Jewish biographer has written a history of Jews who opposed Zionism — and argues that conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not only false but dangerous, because it ties the safety of Jews everywhere to the conduct of one state acting in their name.
The book, the tradition, and the argument
Who is making this argument: a Pulitzer-winning biographer, in a serious book, honestly framed.
FACTThe messenger matters, because the usual way to dismiss this argument is to question the standing of whoever makes it. Benjamin Moser is an American-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer — he won the 2020 Pulitzer for 'Sontag: Her Life and Work.' His 2026 book 'Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History' (published by 4th Estate in the UK and Penguin Random House in the US) is built from twelve biographical portraits of Jewish opponents of Zionism spanning a century, reviewed in outlets from The Guardian to the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972. Moser is careful about its scope: he makes 'no claims to be writing a definitive history,' calling it portraiture and a personal 'cri de coeur' rather than a comprehensive account. This is a credentialed, mainstream-published, self-aware work — not a pamphlet, and not an outsider's attack.
The core fact that dismantles the conflation: Jewish anti-Zionism is a deep, once-mainstream tradition.
FACTThis is the documented point, and it does the heavy lifting. Opposition to Zionism was, for much of its history, an ordinary and even majority position inside Jewish life, not a fringe or a foreign import. As the book and its reviewers note, fewer than 1% of American Jews belonged to the largest American Zionist organization in 1914, whereas today roughly 90% of American Jews support Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state (though fewer identify as Zionists). The tradition's figures are serious and central: Hannah Arendt, who worked to resettle Jewish refugee children in Palestine and then warned in the 1940s that a Jewish state would leave the Arabs 'the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship'; Avi Shlaim, the Iraqi-born historian 'radicalised in the [Israeli state] archives' by documents that 'flatly contradicted the official line.' When towering Jewish thinkers have opposed Zionism for a century, the claim that anti-Zionism is simply antisemitism collapses as a general rule. We grade FACT the existence and seriousness of the tradition.
Moser's sharper claim — Israel 'foments antisemitism' by acting in all Jews' names — is his argument, posed not asserted.
SOME SMOKEHere Moser moves from history to causation, and we move with him carefully. In public remarks reported by Drop Site News, he argued that Israel is 'actively fomenting' antisemitism by presenting itself as the state of all Jews: 'there's this Jewish army of this Jewish state with this Jewish star on their flag, and they are mercilessly slaughtering tens of thousands of children, but don't confuse them with Jews.' The logic is that when a self-declared Jewish state commits acts the world recoils from, in the name of Jews everywhere, some of that recoil attaches to Jews who never consented to be represented — and that Israel, by insisting on speaking for all Jews, invites exactly that. It is a serious argument from a credentialed Jewish source, and it is plausible. But it is a causal interpretation, not a measured fact, and the harshest words ('mercilessly slaughtering,' 'evil, wicked') are his characterizations of Israel's conduct, which we attribute rather than adopt. We grade SOME SMOKE: a real and weighty argument, posed, not a conclusion we assert.
The overreach to fence — 'the rise is SIMPLY anti-Zionism' — cuts too far, and we fence it both ways.
SOME SMOKEMoser also argued that the reported rise in antisemitism is 'simply a rise in anti-Zionism,' people reacting to Israel rather than to Jews. Half of this is our own long-held position: much of what gets logged as antisemitism is in fact criticism of a state, and the word has been used, in Moser's phrase, 'so promiscuously that it would eventually become meaningless' — that is the conflation we document and reject. But the word 'simply' is where we part from him. Real antisemitism exists and some of the measured increase is unambiguous hatred of Jews as Jews — assaults on identifiably Jewish people, synagogue attacks, harassment that has nothing to do with Israeli policy. Folding all of it into 'anti-Zionism' is the mirror image of the error we criticize: if conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is wrong, so is dissolving antisemitism entirely into anti-Zionism. We grade SOME SMOKE and hold the honest line: much of the rise is misclassified criticism of Israel — but not all of it, and the part that is genuine Jew-hatred is real and must be named.
The honest balance: this is a minority tradition, and even its own figures evolve and disagree.
FACTPrecision keeps the book from being flattened into a slogan, and Moser himself supplies the nuance. The tradition he documents is a minority one: today roughly 90% of American Jews affirm Israel's right to exist, so 'Jewish anti-Zionism' is a real Jewish position, not the Jewish position, and honesty requires saying so. His subjects are not a monolith, either — the historian Avi Shlaim argued as recently as 2023 that 'for all its sins, Israel has not engaged in genocide,' then in 2025 published a book titled 'Genocide in Gaza,' a reversal Moser's own account registers. Reviewers note real gaps, too: the book largely omits the ultra-Orthodox Satmar strand, whose anti-Zionism is theological and conservative rather than progressive. We grade FACT that the tradition is a serious minority current, internally varied and evolving — which is exactly what an honest treatment, rather than a recruiting poster, looks like.
The dual-stance fence: criticism of a state is not bigotry, and bigotry against Jews is real — both at once.
FACTThis is the line that makes the whole page defensible, and it is the line Moser's book draws in a hundred lives. A Jewish writer, marshaling a century of Jewish thinkers, cannot coherently be accused of antisemitism for the argument — which is itself the proof that opposing a state's ideology is not the same as hating a people. That is why the conflation is false. But we refuse the opposite error with equal firmness: antisemitism is an ancient, murderous bigotry, it is genuinely rising in parts of the world, and nothing here excuses an attack on a Jew for being a Jew. The discipline is to hold both — to document the suppressed Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism without pretending Jew-hatred is a myth, and to name real antisemitism without letting it be used to immunize a government from criticism. Moser's contribution is to put the weight of a Pulitzer and a century of Jewish lives behind the first half; our job is to keep the second half in view at the same time.
When arguing about Zionism was ordinary
The reason Moser's book is a history and not a manifesto is that the position it recovers was, for a long time, unremarkable. Zionism was a late-nineteenth-century political movement, and like any such movement it had Jewish supporters and Jewish opponents who argued fiercely among themselves. Reform Judaism in its early American form was largely anti-Zionist, holding that Jews were a religious community rather than a nation needing a state. The socialist Jewish Labour Bund of Eastern Europe opposed Zionism in favor of Jewish life and rights where Jews already lived. And within the Zionist movement itself, before the 1942 Biltmore Conference hardened the goal into a Jewish state, serious figures imagined a shared homeland rooted in the long coexistence of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Palestine. The near-consensus support for Israel that now feels timeless is in fact young — a product of the Holocaust, the founding of the state, and the decades since. Moser's point is not that the anti-Zionists were right about everything, but that they existed, in numbers, and that their erasure from communal memory is what makes today's critics feel like aberrations.
That erasure is the same mechanism we track elsewhere: a live argument gets resolved not by winning it but by making one side unsayable. The tool for making Jewish anti-Zionism unsayable has been the conflation — the insistence that to oppose the state is to hate the people — which is why so many of Moser's subjects, as the reviews note, were accused of antisemitism “so promiscuously that the word would eventually become meaningless.” We document that conflation directly in The Conflation, and refuse it from the other direction in The Oldest Lies, where real antisemitic canards are named as the lies they are. Moser's book sits precisely on that seam: it is a Jewish rebuttal to the weaponized version of antisemitism, written in a moment when the genuine article is also real.
The sharpest edge of his argument is the one about consent. A state that calls itself the state of all Jews, flies the Star of David over its army, and claims to act on behalf of world Jewry has, in Moser's telling, drafted every Jew into its conduct without asking — so that the Jew in Paris or Buenos Aires is answerable, in the eyes of the angry, for a war they did not wage and may oppose. Whether that dynamic amounts to Israel “fomenting” antisemitism, as he says, or merely creating the conditions others exploit, is a genuine question we leave posed. But the underlying worry — that binding the safety of a people to the reputation of a government is a dangerous bargain for the people — is one that Jewish anti-Zionists have been voicing, as this book shows, for a very long time.
The conflation has two victims
Collapsing anti-Zionism and antisemitism into one thing does damage in two directions at once, and that is why it is worth getting right. In one direction, it shields a government from criticism: any objection to its policies can be reclassified as hatred and dismissed, so that the more a state does, the harder it becomes to say anything about it. In the other direction — and this is Moser's deepest fear — it endangers Jews, by making every Jew a hostage to a government's conduct and by cheapening the word “antisemitism” until it no longer rings the alarm it was meant to ring. If everything is antisemitism, nothing is; and the genuine article, when it comes, is met by a public that has learned to roll its eyes. A Jewish writer sounding that warning is not an enemy of Jews. He is arguing that the conflation is bad for the very people it claims to protect — and he has a century of Jewish witnesses to say he is not the first to think so.
- If a Pulitzer-winning Jewish biographer, drawing on Hannah Arendt and a century of Jewish thinkers, can be called an antisemite for opposing Zionism, then what is left of the word — and who is served by emptying it?
- A state that claims to act in the name of all Jews has conscripted people who never agreed to be represented. Is it antisemitic for those people to say “not in my name” — or is forcing the identification on them the thing that actually endangers them?
- Holding both truths at once is the hard part: anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and real antisemitism exists and is rising. Who benefits when either truth is collapsed into the other — and can a serious person refuse both errors at the same time?
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't anti-Zionism just antisemitism with better PR?
Sometimes it's a cover for it, and we don't pretend otherwise — antisemites do hide behind anti-Israel language, and that's real. But as a blanket rule the equation can't survive this book: a Pulitzer-winning Jewish biographer, writing about Hannah Arendt and a dozen other Jewish thinkers, is not an antisemite, and opposing a state's founding ideology is not the same as hating a people. The honest position is a dual one — anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitism, and some anti-Zionism is a vehicle for real antisemitism — and you judge the instance, not the category. What you can't do is use the category to rule the whole argument out of bounds, because the category includes Arendt.
Isn't Moser just a 'self-hating Jew'?
That phrase is the exact move his book exists to refute, which is why it's worth naming rather than ignoring. “Self-hating Jew” is a way of declaring that any Jew who reaches the wrong conclusion must be psychologically broken, so their argument never has to be answered — it pathologizes dissent instead of engaging it. Moser's response is historical: he shows that his position has been held, seriously and at great cost, by rabbis, poets, lawyers, and historians across a century, which makes “self-hating” an absurd diagnosis for a mainstream tradition. You can disagree with him on the merits — we fence parts of his argument ourselves — but the “self-hating” label isn't a counterargument. It's a refusal to have one.
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This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- The Guardian — review of Benjamin Moser, 'Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History' (the tradition, the figures, the ~90% / <1% figures, the Shlaim reversal)
- Penguin Random House — 'Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History' by Benjamin Moser (Pulitzer Prize winner; the twelve portraits)
- +972 Magazine — review of 'Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History'
- Drop Site News — Moser's remarks that Israel is 'actively fomenting' antisemitism by acting in the name of all Jews
- Black Book Audit — The Conflation
- Black Book Audit — The Oldest Lies
- Black Book Audit — Israeli Influence