He appears on the world stage as a whistleblower, an informer, divulging to ruling authorities the deep, dark political machinations and unsavory behaviors of the Jews.
The Jews, he charges, are a people who have abused the political power granted to them. When left to their own devices, they steal, cheat, and plunder the property of the poor goyim. This informer possesses secret information about Jewish politics that he claims testifies to these plots. Ruling elites, he declares, must dissolve Jews’ collective bodies and encourage their assimilation. The informer maintains that his undertaking is based on deep ethical commitments, but out of view, Gentile elites are paying him handsomely for his services.
Jews denounce the informer, calling him a moser, the most damning appellation a Jew can be tarred with. Derived from the Hebrew mesirah, to turn over to authorities, the epithet first appears in early rabbinic texts, and denotes someone whose character is lower than that of a serpent; the moser forfeits his or her share in the World to Come. Other texts go so far as to permit the killing of a moser, if it is certain that the moser will go to the authorities but has not done so yet. In multiple instances, Jewish leaders enforced this punishment to ensure communal safety.
In his new book Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (Doubleday, 2026), the astonishingly named Benjamin Moser, best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Susan Sontag, describes in detail the killing in cold blood of someone declared a moser, Jacob Israël de Haan, a Dutch journalist who arrived in Palestine in the early twentieth century. De Haan provoked the wrath of Zionists by informing British authorities about Zionist discrimination against local Arab populations. De Haan is one of 12 Jewish-born individuals from around the world whose lives and anti-Zionist legacies Moser spotlights. Nominative determinism aside—as the rabbis say, kishmo kein hu, “he is as his name”—Moser doubles down on the deed of Jewish truth telling. “Instead of being erased from history,” these 12 will be seen, through Moser, as “heroes … as the moral aristocracy of the Jewish people.” For Moser, the moser is an ideal Jew.
Moser curates these 12 “heroes” to be part of “a hidden tradition, like those of the kabbalists and Marranos—a tradition of people who, though long dismissed and despised, were ultimately proven right.” Indeed, this is a very hidden Jewish tradition, so much so that Moser is the first I know of who has identified it as such. Perhaps Moser was being modest, but what he is describing is in fact moserism, as this new tradition might be called. Moserism expresses the desire to break with Jewish communal solidarity and national identity to follow a more universal moral code. In Moser’s telling, this code may be Islam (as in the case of the Egyptian convert and communist Ahmad Sadiq Saad), religious ideals that reject national or collective ties (as with the American Reform rabbi Hyman Judah Schachtel), liberal imperialism (for example, the anti-Zionist British politician Edwin Montagu), human rights (the South African anti-apartheid leader Ronald Kasrils, the visual artist and activist Nan Goldin, the German Israeli lawyer Felicia Langer), or communism (the French scholar of colonialism Maxime Rodinson).
In Moser’s telling, what unites what otherwise might appear to be a dozen random individuals is not simply their opposition to Zionism, but an embrace of a cosmopolitan ideal that transcends one’s native background. They all are prepared to appeal to a body or source that stands outside of the Jewish collective. That is why, Moser asserts, that although his “book is necessarily about Jews—it exists only because of the Palestinians.”
Moserism expresses the desire to break with Jewish communal solidarity and national identity to follow a more universal moral code.
As the book progresses, Moser’s profiles inform the reader about many Israeli perfidies: Israeli leaders’ reluctance to make peace with Palestinians; Israelis’ lack of curiosity about, and fear of meeting, Palestinian neighbors; Israeli prison guards’ draconian punishments and Nazi-like behavior toward Palestinian inmates; Jewish settlers’ harassment and murder of Palestinians; and the squalid living conditions forced on Palestinian refugees.
Using his cast of 12 intellectuals and activists, Moser reveals what he believes to be the grave moral sins, ethical failures, and “fairytales” of Zionism. Together, they provide a range of different arguments against Zionism, highlighting what Moser says are the “racist,” “imperialist,” “colonialist,” “capitalist,” and antisemitic features of the movement. The Zionists are worse than everyone around them. “Whereas the rulers of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan had taken a pragmatic approach [toward peace],” Moser quotes historian Avi Shlaim asserting, “Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was intransigent … choosing permanent conflict.”
Moser’s musings about Jews’ affecting the fate of world affairs follow in the footsteps of an earlier moser, the Russian Jewish convert to Christianity Jacob Branfman, best known for his work Book of the Corporation (1869), which became a blueprint for the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903). “Soviet support for partition [of Palestine],” Moser writes, “proved to be a calamity for the Arab world tout court. The weakness of the left created a void that the religious right and military nationalists rushed to fill, helping clear the way for the Salafists and colonels to come.” Describing the outsized influence and “effect” Israel’s supporters have on intellectuals, he claims that they are “installing a little Zionist censor inside a writer’s head.” Judaism is such a deformed religion, in his telling, that Moser cites, without skepticism, Donna Sadiq Saad’s “relief” at hearing of her husband’s conversion to Islam “because Islam treated women better.” One imagines that, just like Branfman’s Russian editors, Doubleday’s editors did not just let such lines slip into the text; they were approved to goad nasty partisan reviewers, cause a stir, turn Moser into a courageous truth-telling martyr, and ultimately sell books to a public thirsting for such claims to celebrate and prop up a brave dissident Jew.
Moser admits that he was given a “childish” Jewish education, but it seems there were other gaps in his intellectual development, as well. He assumes Zionism is unique in its ethical handicaps, but to this middle-aged historian it unfortunately looks very similar to other late national movements that remain at war with local populations, movements that Moser, if he knows about them, considers more benign. But yifei nefesh (precious types) should be cautioned against reading about the histories of political projects associated with Baathism, Hindutva, and Banderism. Trigger warnings were invented for such stuff.
Moser’s questioning of the Jewish state comes to us alongside a raft of academic and popular studies about Jewish anti-Zionism. Those who have read some of those tracts will be surprised that a book called Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History ignores the two largest and best known Jewish anti-Zionist groups: the Bund, a nineteenth-century Jewish labor movement, and Satmar, the world’s largest Hasidic movement.
Most notably, many will be wondering why Moser entirely overlooks the subject of Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (One World, 2026), Molly Crabapple’s best-selling work about the Bund, which was a force in early twentieth-century Jewish politics in Poland, Russia, Lithuania, and the United States. Crabapple, a political artist and activist, spent years studying Yiddish to reclaim the secular Jewish legacy bequeathed to her by her great-grandfather, a member of the Bund.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country mirrors Crabapple’s arresting, colorful political art, allegorizing and illuminating scenes from the nineteenth century. Her presentation of the Bund should be seen in the context of her May Day poster that first appeared plastered across downtown New York City streets during the Occupy Wall Street protests and is now in MoMA’s collection. The poster is an homage to the 1888 London matchgirl strikes, with a young woman serenely lighting a stick and watching wisps of Art Nouveau–inspired flames and smoke rise upward. The image is taken from the old black-and-white nineteenth-century past, but when reclaimed it appears as a hot, colorful, rich allegory for the present. Historical matter provides the means for her to illuminate the world around her.
Moving back and forth between the present and past, between the Bund’s critique of Zionism and Israel’s present-day mistreatment of Palestinians, between the half-Jewish Bund leader Vladimir Medem learning Yiddish and her own engagements as an activist and the daughter of a mixed marriage, Crabapple beautifully narrates the emergence of the Bund as the largest and best organized labor movement in Russia, its falling out with the Russian Revolutionary Party, and its legacy for today’s leftists.
Her book highlights the brutal realities and challenges that minority groups face in the context of left-wing political organizing. These issues come to a head when Crabapple addresses Vladimir Lenin’s demand that the Bund choose between relinquishing their independent character as a specifically Jewish labor movement in order to assimilate into a larger Communist project, and being deemed a counterrevolutionary element. True to their national character, the Bund refused. Its leaders ultimately fled, flipped, or were gunned down.
Crabapple correctly highlights the strong universalist elements in the Bund, but she glosses over the Bund’s refusal to kowtow to Lenin and brushes aside the equally strong nationalist colors that the Bund itself expressed. Their refusal was not, as Crabapple suggests, because they were turned off by Lenin’s “authoritarian” personality; it was a principled position about Jewish collective and national features. Its tragic end was not the result of right-wing fascism or Hitler’s wrath but rather Lenin’s and the left’s rejection of an autonomous Jewish collective. True to his own position, Lenin demanded that the Bund relinquish its distinct Jewish character and unify with RSDLP. Lenin was still prepared to recognize Jewish workers as a defined unit within the larger revolutionary movement, but he was not prepared to offer them any independent status.
The Bund’s goal was to unite Jews with other workers to improve all peoples’ material wellbeing. While the Bundists strongly differed from the Zionists, and saw them as opponents, their immediate enemies were tsarist authorities and antisemitic forces; their ultimate foe turned out to be the Russian Communist Party. It’s a shame that Crabapple did not grapple with the Bund’s nationalist features, its refusal to relinquish Jewish political autonomy, and its deep historical ties with Labor Zionism. The questions the Bund asked and the conceptual challenges it faced remain pressing today on the left, even if Jews’ class profile is now radically different.
In Crabapple’s defense, it is not only unfair to expect an artist to conform to the canons of trained historians, but is also an act of cultural self-impoverishment. Crabapple’s decision to focus on one aspect of the movement is an understandable artistic choice, one that pays off. If Judaism is a civilization and not a politics, it must be able to recognize the virtues of creative and radical political expression, even at the expense of history. Crabapple has written a deeply moving artistic work culled from in-depth research. A healthy Jewish civilization needs more artists willing to challenge national narratives built on Israeli p.r.
The player-haters, and the fanboys, who hold Here Where We Live Is Our Country to the standards of an academic book are acting in bad faith. True, its arguments are not weighed judiciously. It plays fast and loose with historical events, and had it been peer-reviewed, scholarly reviewers would have raised many interpretive concerns. Its proximity to the past but distance from scholarly objectivity is both the book’s strength—it gives readers access to something that otherwise would be buried in archives—and also its weakness. While it’s tempting to read it as a comprehensive academic account, that temptation would lead one astray.
Still, scholars and teachers most certainly will gain from using it to help students think broadly about what a nineteenth-century labor movement might signify to them and to ask what role class should play in constituting the identity of a collective. Crabapple’s book should also be an inspiration for other artists and activists to see the past as a powerful resource for shining light on contemporary political engagements. Crabapple’s portrait of the role Jewish labor played in the formation of the Russian revolutionary movement shows the drama, the personal struggles, and the hardships of this Jewish movement more successfully than any scholarly work I know of.
Crabapple beautifully narrates the emergence of the Bund as the largest and best organized labor movement in Russia, its falling out with the Russian Revolutionary Party, and its legacy for today’s leftists.
Even more conspicuous than the Bund’s absence from Moser’s “Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism” is that of the largest present-day Jewish anti-Zionist tradition, the Satmar Hasidim. Originally established in Hungary, today the movement counts roughly 150,000 followers, residing mainly in the United States, making it the largest Hasidic court in the world.
The two largest present-day Satmar communities, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and in Orange County, N.Y., have been featured in excellent books by the scholars Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper and Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers. Recently, the intellectual features of the movement have been the subject of Shaul Magid’s Jewish Anti-Zionism as Political Theology: The Major Writings of Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (University of California Press, 2026). Magid’s work is part one of a promised two-part study on the anti-Zionist writings of the Satmar Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979). It provides a partial translation of Teitelbaum’s major works, And Moses Consented and In Matters of Redemption and Exchange. Magid’s rich footnotes provide lay readers and students a key to unlock Teitelbaum’s oeuvre. Magid’s analysis and recuperation of Satmar broadens the canons of Jewish political thought. And in contrast with Moser’s claims about a “hidden tradition,” Satmar anti-Zionism remains very much at the center of public life in the United States.
According to Magid, Teitelbaum’s problem with Zionism was not its treatment of Arabs as much as its being “a heretical abrogation of the covenant whereby God decreed that the Jews remain in exile until the coming of the Messiah.” Yet the irony of Teitelbaum’s life was that it was the Zionists who saved him from the Nazi extermination camps. The Hungarian Zionist journalist Rudolph Kastner, well aware of Teitelbaum’s disdain for Zionism, negotiated the rabbi’s release from the clutches of Adolf Eichmann. The paradox of Teitelbaum’s survival highlights a question that any serious anti-Zionist must confront: like it or not, the State of Israel exists, and why would any collective want to give up the political capacities a state provides? It’s one thing to argue against Zionism as an ideology; it’s something very different to claim that Jews would be much better off in the world if a Jewish state did not exist.
Moser’s omission of the Bund and Satmar in Anti-Zionism highlights the novel features of his argument that moserism should be considered not simply a practice engaged in by certain Jews but a hidden Jewish tradition. Moser surely realized that, given these groups’ popularity and emphasis on Jews and Jewish collectivity, it would be impossible to include them as part of the “hidden tradition” of moserism. The Bund and Satmar are the leading Jewish traditions of anti-Zionism, they are hardly hidden, and they would never condone conversion to Islam or Moser’s colonialist project of calling for the unlearning of a Jewish “native language.” Indeed, there have always been quite public religious and secular forms of Jewish anti-Zionism, easily found by those with a library card and a knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish (languages Moser does not appear to know). Nobody has been hiding anything from anybody.
The omission of the best known Jewish traditions of anti-Zionism leaves one to wonder if this book in fact is, as Moser’s subtitle posits, “a Jewish history”? What exactly does it mean to be a Jewish anti-Zionist, without practicing Judaism, speaking Yiddish or Hebrew, or identifying with any major Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism? “Jewish anti-Zionist” is certainly not a nationalist definition. Neither can one say it is a “religious” definition (Moser includes a Muslim and at least one atheist among his 12 heros). According to Moser, what makes someone part of the hidden tradition of moserism is not observance of Jewish rituals, nor identification with a collective or political body of the Jewish people. Rather, all one needs is Jewish blood.
In other words, moserism turns out to be based on the exact same racial and nativist definition of a Jew advanced by Zionists and Nazis alike. Take away race and bloodlines, and the book is a compilation of 12 mosers who led colorful lives. Moser is oblivious to the fact that the only thing, besides being mosers, that his 12 heroes have in common is their biological and racial identity.
Moserism turns out to be based on the exact same racial and nativist definition of a Jew advanced by Zionists and Nazis alike.
Moser certainly is an anti-Zionist, but I was left unpersuaded regarding his claim that moserism is “a hidden Jewish tradition, like those of the kabbalists and Marranos.” Likewise, Moser’s presentation of Zionism is “deliberately and necessarily incomplete” (to use his words) to the point of undermining his claims about the colonialist essence of the movement. He decides not to tell readers about Leon Pinsker, author of Auto-Emancipation (1882), who made the case for a Jewish homeland years before Theodor Herzl did, as a direct response to the brutal murder, raping, pillaging, and destruction of Jewish communities across the Pale of Settlement, the refusal of the left-wing parties to come to their defense, and the impotency of the Russian state to provide basic protection and rights.
Moser leaves out the fact that the movement Hibbat Zion (“Lover of Zion,” which he seems to confuse with Abraham Mapu’s 1853 novel Ahavat Zion) came on the heels of those pogroms and inaugurated mass Eastern European Jewish immigration to Palestine long before Herzl proposed such a thing. Twenty-five thousand Jews from Russian lands had already immigrated to Palestine when Herzl appeared on the scene. Herzl himself admitted that there was very little in The Jewish State (1896) that had not already been said by Pinsker. In fact, Herzl, in his diary, claims that had he known about Pinsker he never would have written his work. “A pity that I did not read this work before my own pamphlet was printed,” he noted. “On the other hand, it is a good thing that I didn’t.” Likewise it might be said that it’s a pity Moser did not mention Pinsker—but Herzl’s “colonialist” and “imperialist” arguments are far more convenient for his purposes than Pinsker’s cry for national self-determination in the face of death and destruction.
Finally, one wonders if Moser was acting “deliberately and necessarily” when he chose not to produce sources to justify why he thinks there are Jews who are “indigenous” to Egypt, that “Zionism was not even a Jewish idea to begin with,” that “prior to the nineteenth century … the Jews never evinced any desire to immigrate to Palestine,” and that the prayers that observant Jews recite three times a day “expressing hope of a return to Palestine referred to a mystic vision.” I, for one, have no idea what he is talking about.
The omission of the best known Jewish traditions of anti-Zionism leaves one to wonder if this book in fact is, as Moser’s subtitle, posits, “a Jewish history”?
Moser’s unreliability as a secondary historical source is precisely what allows his work to feel intellectually novel and compelling for many younger American Jews. As such, it is an important document, even an important book. The fact that Moser and his generation of American Jews have become alienated from the State of Israel to the point of making their opposition to it the central feature of their Jewish identity suggests that his thesis is at the very least partially correct. This branch of anti-Zionist “Judaism” emerges at a time when Israel has failed to live up to the promise made in its Declaration of Independence to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Israel’s political and economic institutions continue to reproduce social and class inequalities that contradict that promise. These contradictions extend well beyond a small coterie of Israeli settler terrorists, and they have become embedded in a broader political economy of occupation and territorial dispossession. For decades, Israeli governments have incentivized Jewish lower classes to purchase land at discounted prices in areas designated as Palestinian territories.
Israeli governmental officials provide numerous justifications for these policies, but the bottom line remains: young Americans have watched successive Israeli governments pursue settlement expansion to the point of fragmenting the territorial contiguity of a possible Palestinian state, while Palestinians residing in the West Bank are forced to travel on different roads, wait at checkpoints, and be screened to perform the most simple tasks. If Israeli governments were trying to convince American Jews that they were serious about making peace with Palestinians, they sure fooled me.
The rise of moserism and the strong reception Anti-Zionism will attract is not in spite of Israel’s and Zionists’ protestations or because of poor p.r. campaigns. It is by and large a result of Israel’s own decisions and political strategy. Israelis made a conscious bet that they could afford to sacrifice the long-term support of a few million Jewish liberals and progressives. They would double down on the narrow support of tens of millions of evangelicals and the Republican Party. This trade provided Israeli Jews with the capacity for greater freedom of action in the region and reduced incentives for accommodating Palestinian national claims. “People need to understand,” Ron Dermer, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, explained in 2021, that American Jews are “disproportionately among our critics” and that “the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians. It’s true because of numbers and also because of their passionate and unequivocal support for Israel.” Moser and his generation of American Jews certainly got the message.
What Dermer and Israeli leaders did not plan for, however, was that evangelicals’ support for Israel would also collapse, especially among the youth, and that the movement itself would be overtaken by more powerful forces on the American right. In this great age of polarization, it turns out that if there is one thing that those on the left and those on the right can agree on, it’s that the United States should be cutting back its support for the Jewish state. This is the issue that motivates Tucker Carlson, and this is the issue that can take out centrist Democrats in party primaries.
And only someone whose political life depended on lying could claim that Israel can afford to lose the support of liberals and progressives around the world and continue to flourish and be secure. It is European and American academic institutions that turn the STEM lights on in Israel. The main valve in Israel’s R&D pipeline runs through academic and scientific institutions in Europe and the United States. Israel has but ten universities. Nearly one of every two Israeli postdocs is trained in the United States.
While Moser’s work is ostensibly about “Jewish anti-Zionism,” the question that haunts him, “the question from which every other flowed,” as he puts it, is “did Israel have the right to exist.” This fixation with a “right to exist”—a nonsensical formulation; how would any country establish a “right to exist”?; does Canada have such a right, or China, or South Africa?—leads him to conflate the past with the future, questions with answers, and Zionism with the material reality of seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians living on lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
I understand why his question might lead to other questions, but the question that all answers flow from is the one before our eyes: how two fiercely nationalist peoples, equally unwilling to “unlearn” their native tongues, overcome enmity. Moser’s suggestion that Jews “unlearn” what is or has become their “native” language smacks of the very kind of imperialism that he reflexively criticizes. Moser is unprepared to confront the practical implications of moserism. Moser never tells the “settler-colonialist” Israeli Jews where they should be going and what happens to them.
Unlike Zionism, an abstract idea that has largely achieved itself, the nation of Israel is a daily plebiscite; it remains an unfinished project constantly remaking and reconstituting itself. It’s absurd to claim that the forces that propelled Yitzhak Rabin to come to Oslo are so different than those that propelled Itamar Ben-Gvir to celebrate the killing of Palestinians. Indeed, Moser is right that Jewish history is replete with mosers who believed that Judaism and Jews were so unique and unredeemable that their political collective needed to be dismantled entirely. For good reason, history has not been kind to such individuals, and for good reason no one has ever imagined a Jewish “tradition” of moserism.
There is nothing genetically or intellectually different about Jews or Israelis that should make it impossible for them to learn the lessons countless other nations and collectives have learned before them: that violence begets violence, and occupation corrupts the occupier as much as it destroys its victims. Just because they might not learn this lesson in our lifetime does not mean it will not happen.
Moser, who throughout his work approvingly quotes the Apostle Paul’s dictum “when I became a man I put away childish things,” would probably consider the prospect of Israelis eventually learning the hard lessons of occupation to be a “childish” Jewish “fairytale.” But being an adult should not require any Jew, or any Palestinian, to become a moser, a convert, or relinquish his or her identity or natal ties in the service of some imperialist project.