Benjamin Balthaser in the Boston Review:
Several recent books chronicling specifically American Jewish dissent from Zionism, past and present, demonstrate how this relatively recent Zionist “consensus” was manufactured. Geoffrey Levin and Marjorie N. Feld tell stories of once-mainstream dissidents and naysayers purged from the ranks of even straightforwardly liberal American Jewish institutions, demonstrating the force with which unconditional support for Israel had to be constructed from the top down in the immediate postwar era. Looking to the more recent past, Oren Kroll-Zeldin and Peter Beinart examine efforts—in Beinart’s case, his own—to break through that heavily policed consensus since the turn of the century.
In a recent conversation with Beinart and Rachel Shabi for the London Review of Books podcast, Adam Shatz asked: Why bother, at this particular moment, to write about Jews? As I read through these narratives, it occurred to me that I was reading as much about the decline of American liberalism as about the transformation of American Jewish thought and institutions.
More here.
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