Guest scholar James Loeffler looks at the different forms of anti-Zionism and its overlapping relationship with antisemitism, and considers how the past can remind us that it is possible to have a principled and logical critique against Zionism.
This episode is the fourth in a special four-part mini series of short episodes on antisemitism. This series has been produced in response to rising numbers of antisemitic incidents and attacks around the world.
Each episode draws on the expertise of AJS members, providing scholarly and informed insights into antisemitism from its origins and history to its complexities today around the war in Israel/Gaza.
Previous episodes include:
AVISHAY ARTSY: Welcome to Adventures in Jewish Studies, the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. In every episode, we take you on an entertaining and intellectual journey about Jewish life, history and culture, with the help of some of the world’s leading Jewish studies scholars. I’m your host for this episode, Avishay Artsy.
This episode is part of a special four-part mini series of short episodes on antisemitism that the AJS has produced in response to rising numbers of antisemitic incidents and attacks around the world. Drawing on the expertise of AJS members, each episode provides scholarly and informed insights into antisemitism from its origins and history to its complexities today around the war in Israel/Gaza. We’ll be releasing a new episode every week for the next four weeks and you can listen to the episodes in any order. In this episode we will discuss anti-Zionism. The term is often misunderstood or used to mean different things by different groups of people, ranging from a rejection of the current Israeli state, to a rejection of any Jewish-majority state. Our guest today is James Loeffler. He’s the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University. I started by asking him for the simplest definition of Zionism.
JAMES LOEFFLER: At its root, I would say Zionism is a form of Jewish nationalism. It originated as a movement, starting in Europe, based on the idea that Jews are a group, a national group, with ethnic and religious dimensions that deserve and require national self-determination.
AVISHAY ARTSY: So that’s Zionism. So then what is anti-Zionism? Is it just a denial of the Jewish right to self-determination or is there a better definition?
JAMES LOEFFLER: Yeah. So the way I like to think about it is not to focus on anti-Zionism as one essential thing but to talk about different forms of anti-Zionism. They all emerged in reaction to, in opposition to Zionism, and they took different forms. There were Orthodox Jews who on a religious basis believed that Zionism was preempting the Messiah. It was Jews going against God's will to wait in exile until the day of return. There were reformed Jewish leaders who also had religious opposition and said it was the wrong kind of nationalism, if you will. It was making Jews into a separate nationality when they should focus on becoming more and better Americans, French citizens, and so on and so forth. And then there were other versions of anti-Zionism too. There were political versions of the Bundists, Jewish Marxist socialists in Eastern Europe. They were a community who also had a national identity. They could be called a nationalist movement, but they strongly opposed Zionism as something they thought was utopian. They thought it was reactionary, not progressive, and they thought it was something associated too much with pulling Jews out of Europe in a utopian quest to return them to an ancient homeland. And then of course among the other versions of anti-Zionism, from the get-go, you had Palestinian and Arab opposition. Some of this took the simple form of an opposition on nationalist grounds. This was a national movement that would challenge a Palestinian Arab community their title to the land in Ottoman Palestine, their aspirations for some kind of independence and national freedom. Some of this also took place on anti-colonialist grounds and you had some of those leaders saying that this is a foreign import riding in on the backs of European empire and therefore it is displacing us illegitimately, and so on and so forth. So each of these was a reaction to a new political nationalist movement. Each of them had specific critiques of it, opposing it because of what it feared it would do to the state of society either for Jews or non-Jews. And each of these also had a complicated relationship to both a practical opposition and then a kind of ideational opposition, seeing it as a threat to the basic ordering of what should be the right way for society to progress into modernity.
There's one other thing to say about this, and I think it's often overlooked. From the get-go, from the late 19th century and the early 20th century onwards, um, anti-Zionist movements or ideas always had a complicated relationship, a dialectical relationship to antisemitism because from the outset, many anti-Zionists argued that they were intent on opposing Zionism because they said it would increase antisemitism. This was a point that was made by reformed Jewish leaders and Jewish liberals who opposed Zionism. It was a point that was made actually by Palestinian voices and Arab leaders who insisted that they were not antisemitic to oppose Zionism, but that the movement itself would only trigger more blowback and hatred. So this is a a common thing. This is not the same thing as people pretending not to be antisemitic but being antisemitic. That's a later development. But this is an argument about how the opposition to it is also in response to the problem of antisemitism. This is something I think we forget: from the get-go. This question was in the air about how to clarify the relationship between those two words.
AVISHAY ARTSY: And what is the time frame that you're discussing now? Is this like the late 1800s, early 1900s, like pre-Holocaust?
JAMES LOEFFLER: So I'm describing these first few decades. If we take 1897 as a really important moment when Zionism becomes more of an official political movement and we think about the couple decades after that when the dramatic events are happening with World War I, with the British takeover of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine and with the Balfur declaration, the League of Nations, all of these political events are turning the question about Zionism and anti-Zionism into an international one. And this will continue to be an argument between anti-Zionists and Zionists in this period in the 1910s into the 1920s and 1930s. And things are beginning to change as we get to the late 30s because the situation in Europe is fundamentally unstable and there are new real hard questions about what will be the fate of Jews there. What will be the fate of the Jewish community in now British mandatory Palestine. And of course what will also happen for Palestinians and Palestinian Arabs who are in the midst of their own conflict not only with Zionist groups in Palestine but with the British forces too in that same period, 1930s.
AVISHAY ARTSY: Okay. So now take us to the Holocaust and how that changed the discussion of Zionism and anti-Zionism.
JAMES LOEFFLER: Sure. The first thing to understand is that the Holocaust, beyond simply a calamitous event and a, you know, a moral catastrophe and a terrible moment of destruction. It also basically from the get-go changed the way Zionist leaders thought about their future and thought about the diaspora. Before the late 1930s, they had an idea of building a Jewish population up in this historic homeland and making claims to it. Once it began to be clear that so much of Jewish Europe was destroyed and that there was no future there, the focus on Zion, the focus on what they called the Yeshuv or Israel, the land of Israel, it only became more intense and there was a refugee crisis. Where will Jews fleeing persecution go? And there was a sense that they won't remain in Europe. There were a lot of political calculations around this but on the ground and in the minds of Zionist leaders it meant that to oppose what they were doing was to risk Jewish safety and security. The other thing I would say is that the Holocaust also changed many Jewish and non-Jewish people's views about the Zionist movement because it began to be seen as something that was essential as a refugee rescue movement. There was a rise in what we call non-Zionist support for Zionism, of people simply saying I don't identify with nationalism or the idea of a reborn Jewish state, but I do think there has to be a place for those people to go. And that was a category that we don't hear much about today. We hear a lot of debates about anti-Zionists and Zionists’ visions of justice for Israel and Palestine. Back in the 30s and then into the 40s and early 50s, there was a lot of non-Zionist support of again Jews and non-Jews simply saying whatever I think about Zionism, I don't oppose it. I'm not so much for it as I accept it and want it to succeed in giving homeless Jews a home.
AVISHAY ARTSY: Okay. So after the Holocaust, support for Zionism goes up, anti-Zionism goes down. Who then is left as the anti-Zionists for like the decades after the Holocaust? Where does anti-Zionism flourish, if anywhere?
JAMES LOEFFLER: I would say that anti-Zionism doesn't go down as much as it changes. And the way I put it is, as you just said, support for Zionism, de facto support, even from people who say, "I'm not planning to move to Israel. I may not be Jewish. I don't actually have so many thoughts about Hebrew or Jewish culture and national identity." But support for the de facto creation in the state of Israel goes up. And yet at the same time, we begin to see strong currents of anti-Zionism that are changing. The first thing that should be said is that for many Palestinians who are displaced and suffer enormously during the 1948 war, during the events of the Nakba, that displacement leads them to pretty logically oppose Zionism and see it as a force which has excluded them and also forced them out of their homes. Even those who recognize the complexity of the situation of a wartime environment and the complexity of their fate and hope to return home after 48 from Jordan and from Egypt and elsewhere. Even those leaders and average people in that community pretty naturally oppose Zionism and see it as the enemy, right? The enemy nationalism. The second two things that happen are the following. One is related to that. There is pan-Arab sentiment. There is pan-Arab nationalist, I would call it even imperialist, sentiment in the Middle East, which says that Zionism is a threat to the integrity of the Arab and in some cases Muslim Middle East. Zionism is an alien import. We associate it with the colonialist world. We associate with those European empires that we want to remove from the Middle East. And so when we talk about being anti-Zionist, we talk about not justice for the Palestinians, but we talk about a worldview of seeing this as an alien ideology that comes from Europe that is threatening to us, that is not completely new to Arab nationalist politics, but it intensifies after World War II. And the third part of this is the rise of the Soviet Union's communist anti-Zionism. This is again a complex pattern of thought and ideology. Soviet representatives and ideologues and diplomats say that Zionism is completely synonymous with Western imperialism because, they say, look who sponsored it, like, look who brought it to the Middle East and the Soviet Union, is positioning itself as an anti-imperial empire, championing the rights of different parts of the world and communities who've been suffering under European colonialism. But the Soviet Union is also beginning to use it as a code language for pretty explicit antisemitism and it's beginning in this period to use Zionist as a code term to refer to Jews and a way to launch a campaign of persecution within Soviet Russia in the 1940s, late 40s and in the 50s, targeting Jewish elites, targeting people who have no connection to Israel, no connection to Zionism, who may themselves else be ambivalent about it or opposed to it. But it becomes a code language and that tends to spread across those decades, those post-war decades. You see it entering Arab political rhetoric too of denouncing people in terms that blur the line between an anti-Zionist critique and an antisemitic demonization.
AVISHAY ARTSY: What you're telling me about the history of anti-Zionism does sort of complicate this debate over whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic because on the one hand, if you see anti-Zionism as a critique of Israel's actions, that's not antisemitism. But some still see anti-Zionism as a denial of the Jewish right to self-determination and they think that is antisemitism. So, what can the history of anti-Zionism tell us about how to see it in light of antisemitism?
JAMES LOEFFLER: That is the most difficult question for scholars and I think for anybody who's invested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and wants justice, especially in light of incredible suffering happening now today, with incredible violence happening, especially towards Gaza. What I would say is looking back at the past can remind us that it is possible to have a principled and logical critique against Zionism. It simply is. And to say self-determination because of its consequences for other populations is unjust or I oppose it or I oppose nationalism. That was true then and we can be reminded of that. It was not all along simply a pretext for hating on Jews or on Israel when it emerges. At the same time, it can remind us that there is a kind of tie between this notion of opposing Zionism and this notion of demonizing Jews or Jewish interests or the state of Israel. It doesn't mean that every ideology and every attack is that. It just means that sometimes rhetoric that can be intended even to be logical and persuasive and unbiased can nonetheless traffic in stereotypes that are classical anti-Jewish stereotypes and it can traffic in this coded language. I think this is what is so hard for many Jewish people to understand and many anti-Zionists, Jewish or not Jewish, to understand that the words can carry a kind of sense of invective and demonization or they can not. And the dividing line will depend on context and it also will depend on how much it traffics in stereotypes that go back to classical antisemitism.
AVISHAY ARTSY: I wonder, given how fraught these terms are, Zionism and anti-Zionism, Zionist and anti-Zionist, are there better terms we could be using, maybe more precise terms to indicate what we mean when we're critiquing the state of Israel or the project of Israel as a Jewish nation state?
JAMES LOEFFLER: Yeah, that is a really interesting question. I think for better or worse, there are really no better terms out there. Pro-Israel and anti-Israel, which is a pair of terms we hear a lot. Pro-Israel, pro Palestinian, those are descriptors which also have problems with them. It's not always clear what they mean. And they can also remove us from this question of really debating not just a country but debating nationalism and nationalist movement. I do think that using the term “Jewish nationalism” sometimes can be helpful because it can force those who identify with Zionism to own their own views about being a nationalist, and saying that it does involve emancipating your people but potentially excluding other people. And that's an ethical challenge for all nationalist movements.
AVISHAY ARTSY: Adventures in Jewish Studies is made possible with generous support from The Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation. The executive producer of the podcast is Warren Hoffman. I’m the lead producer for this episode.
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James Loeffler
James Loeffler is Felix Posen Professor of Jewish History at the Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Stulman Jewish Studies Program. He is the author of Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2018), winner of the 2018 American Historical Association Rosenberg Prize and the 2018 Association for Jewish Studies Schnitzer Prize, and Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America (Metropolitan Books, 2026). His other writings include the essay “Anti-Zionism,” in Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (Palgrave, 2020).
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Avishay Artsy
Avishay Artsy is an audio and print journalist based in Los Angeles and a senior producer of Vox's daily news explainer podcast Today, Explained. He also hosted and produced the podcast Works In Progress at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, and produced Design and Architecture at KCRW. His writing has appeared in the Jewish Journal, The Forward, Tablet, JTA, and other publications and news outlets. His audio stories have appeared on NPR's Marketplace, KQED's The California Report, WHYY's The Pulse, PRI's The World, Studio 360 and other outlets. He is also an adjunct professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Executive Producer: Warren Hoffman, PhD
Producers: Avishay Artsy and Erin Phillips
