Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
It doesn’t break new ground, nor does it intend to, and it is not a 'history' per se. Rather, it is a kind of literary resurrection, a personal search through lost Jewish choices, following paths long overgrown and figures that history thought best forgotten ... Yet the very diversity of these thumbnail biographies points to a major weakness at the heart of Moser’s book ... The chapters in Anti-Zionism are selective, as they must be, and one can question why Moser includes this but not that person. But in some way, this misses the point. He doesn’t set out to be comprehensive, and his argument is not that the lives and ideas of these figures subvert the Zionist vision of history. Rather, they demonstrate how recent a phenomenon the Zionist consensus is ... The stories featured in Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History tell of struggle, of deep conviction, of the desire for justice. To give voice to these stories is an act of fidelity to those who suffered at the hands of an emerging national project in a time of trauma.
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Reminds Jewish Americans that another tradition is available, one that opposes Israel’s existence rather than merely seeks to curb its worst impulses ... But Moser does not detail what a future resolution might entail ... Has an unfortunate tendency to misrepresent the authorities he enlists ... No patience for complexity ... Moser’s biggest failure, though, may be his inability to escape the very solipsism that he denounced in his Equator essay.
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Moser writes as someone whose heart has been broken by his illusions about Jews, and who now wants to make amends by praising Palestinians. He has an evil perpetrator and a virtuous victim ... Despite his declared aversion to Zionist claims to the Promised Land, Moser still manages to wrap himself in sentimental attachment to land-based nationalism ... The musical key of Anti-Zionism is not the mythic anti-rationalism of turn-of-the-century Vienna, but the siren sound of reductionist academic theory.
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