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For author Ben Moser, writing about anti-Zionism is an act of sanity
Benjamin Moser thinks that Theodore Herzl, the acclaimed founder of political Zionism, was mentally ill and that his delusional ideations underlay his theory of the Jewish state.
Lest anyone think that this startling claim emanates from a crank or an antisemite, it’s worth noting that the last time Moser wrote about someone’s life, including its warts, his subject was Susan Sontag and the book won a Pulitzer prize. His new book opens with harsh critiques of Herzl. Then it progresses to biographies of a dozen Jewish anti-Zionists, none of whom Moser considers crazy. As a Jew and staunch activist in the international movement for Palestinian rights, he sees his writing about Jewish anti-Zionists as an act of imminent sanity.
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History is barely out, but it has already racked up critiques, including a review in The New Yorker that accuses him of being ahistorical about different periods of Zionism; and of sloppy, even ideologically driven errors — particularly when he characterizes Zionists after Hitler’s rise to power as having worked with Nazis out of rank racism and opportunism.
The alleged errors may truly be errors. But in conversations that I had with Moser recently, after reading a review copy of his book, he entertained historical nuance regarding the one chapter we focused on. The events it describes in a small, obscure, American Jewish community were directly experienced two generations ago by members of both of our families. Those events, and the history they nod to, are now mostly mothballed from contemporary Jewish memory. They need airing out, far beyond our families.
This is what Moser and I share: Our immigrant, Ashkenazic great-grandparents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries settled not on the East Coast but instead in a tiny Jewish enclave in the South — in Houston, Texas. Later, their children — our grandparents — became members of Beth Israel, a local Reform temple. Like almost all Reform congregations back then, Beth Israel followed a national set of principles known as the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform. It denied that Jews were a nation or should become one. Instead they were deemed members of a religion, tasked by God to spread humanistic ethics and morality to all people everywhere.
But in 1943, Beth Israel suffered a schism that made national news, including in The New York Times. The congregation’s leadership wanted new members to sign a pledge opposing the creation of a Jewish state — and if they refused, they would be ineligible to vote on decisions affecting the temple. But some of the congregation by then were Zionists. Months of bitter fighting ensued, culminating in a temple-wide vote on the pledge requirement. When the anti-Zionists won handily, dozens of families bolted — including Moser’s grandparents and mine. In fact, my grandfather was a leader of the split. The renegades started a new Reform temple, Emanu El. My grandfather was a core founder, and my family lore has it that when Moser’s father was a little boy at Emanu El, his religious school teacher was my mother.
Moser devotes a chapter to the schism at Beth Israel, framing it through a biography of Hyman Judah Schachtel, the congregation’s rabbi at the time. Schachtel was then a national leader in the American Jewish Reform movement against Zionism — until, rather suddenly, he wasn’t. Almost immediately after Israel declared statehood, he publicly embraced Zionism.
But was that the end of the story, or even the whole of it? Moser’s grandfather had been a lawyer in Berlin before fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s, ending up almost randomly in Houston, marrying a Texan Jewish woman, having children including Moser’s father, and dying before Moser was born. Moser told me he assumes that both of these grandparents were Zionists. But, though he often spoke with his grandmother, who lived until he was in college, “I don’t remember her ever talking about Israel or Zionism,” he said.
I recall something more pointed than silence. Before he died in the late 1970s, my grandfather wrote in a memoir sketch that he had not broken away from Beth Israel because he’d been a Zionist. Rather, he’d felt offended by the idea of creating a membership apartheid, with anti-Zionists privileged over Zionists. He said he thought loyalty tests were undemocratic, especially among Reform Jews. Moser acknowledged that he’d seen evidence of the same attitude among Beth Israel members when he was researching the split. Meanwhile, I shared with him a total lack of memory of any of my large, extended Texas Jewish family talking about Israel during my childhood, much less going there to live or as tourists.
If there was an error in Moser’s account of the schism, I pointed out, it was one of omission. Though he devotes much space in his chapter about the split, he neglects to mention that by the time it happened, the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform was defunct. It had vigorously rejected the establishment of a Jewish state, but a revision in 1937 contained a hint of Zionism. It endorsed “the rehabilitation of Palestine” as “the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren.” And it cited “the obligation of all Jewry” to help Palestine’s “upbuilding as a center of Jewish cultural and spiritual life.” True, it spoke of a “homeland,” not a state. Still, it privileged the idea of Jews’ settling in what would later become Israel.
I asked Moser if the new platform had rendered Beth Israel’s anti-Zionist pledge requirement functionally obsolete by the time the fight broke out. Wasn’t the temple’s anti-Zionism by then a Reform dinosaur — particularly because of growing fear and horror among American Jews about the spotty news they were already getting in the early 1940s about what would later be revealed as a genocide?
He said he thought the Reform movement nationally in the 1930s had been “trying to kick the can [of the Zionism controversy] down the road” and that “After Israel was created, everyone went over to the Zionist side. Because it was already there.” His chapter about Rabbi Schachtel in Houston is instructive, he said, “because he shows what happened nationally. Among Jews a huge controversy about Zionism raged for 50 years. Then, after 1948, the temperature got turned down, and after the 1967 war the Reform movement formally scrapped anti-Zionism altogether. To me, the story is about how Zionists wrested control of the institutions that organized American Jewry, and how that made it possible for me to grow up in a world where we didn’t even know that anti-Zionists had existed.”
So what was it like, I asked him, to be a child and teenager amid this historical amnesia, including, in Houston, at Congregation Emanu El where he’d been bar mitzvahed? He called being at Emanu El “a waste of time.”
“I remember drawing pictures of menorahs — way past the time I should have,” he said. “It was age inappropriate. It felt anti-intellectual. I remember wondering, ‘What is there of substance about Jews?’ In retrospect, if I was going to answer the question, ‘‘What were we really doing at Emanu El?’ I would say, ‘Learning about the Holocaust.’ Though we did that in my regular, secular school, too.”
“When I was writing the chapter about Beth Israel and Rabbi Schachtel,” Moser added, “I was reading all this Reform history from the 19th century. I was fascinated. It seemed so smart. It was a real ideology. At Emanu El there was no ideology. People weren’t religious. I knew people who on Yom Kippur regretted an email they’d sent: ‘Gosh, what have I done bad this year? Well, I should have called Marjorie on Tuesday.’ But consider what Yom Kippur is, if you really do have a religious background.
“Emanu El was just a cultural community which didn’t have more than that. And because there was no ideology, it was kind of empty. So you could fill it up with nationalism. With Zionism.” Meanwhile, he said, “Nobody ever told me that the majority of Jews historically have been anti-Zionist, and for a very long time.”
As a child at Emanu El a generation before Moser, I recall no lessons whatsoever about the Holocaust (I discovered The Diary of Anne Frank by accident in my dad’s study when I was nine years old; I found US military photos of Buchenwald and Auschwitz in a book on his shelves and told no one I’d read any of this.) I abandoned synagogue attendance when I left for college — before the Six Day War — and didn’t go back for decades.
Still, I think I got something from my childhood at Emanu El. A lot, even. And looking at Moser’s book I thought I saw some of that inheritance in him. His epigraph page features twelve quotations from the Old Testament: from Leviticus, Jeremiah, Amos, Obadiah, Malachi, Zephaniah, Nahum, I Chronicles, and Habakkuk (example: “Because you have plundered many nations, all the remnant of the peoples shall plunder you.” ) Wasn’t finding and honoring this material a legacy of his Reform upbringing?
He wasn’t having it, though he did give a nod to Jewishness. “I studied Hebrew in college,” he said. “I love Biblical Hebrew and reading the Bible in Hebrew. The Hebrew of religion, and poetry. And I love, love reading the prophets.”
“You can go on practically every page of the prophets,” he added, “and see that the idea that we have now, that Jews are uniquely virtuous — which a lot of Jews, as well as Christians, think — is completely foreign to Jews. The Jewish idea is, “We got it comin’.” Meaning, “If you don’t watch your step, you’re going to get kicked out of the land.” For Jews today, he said, the secular translation is that if we do not work for equality and against racism, we, too, have it coming.
So what can be done to prevent that vengeance? I reminded Moser that on his Substack he has written about the disastrous situation in Israel vis-à-vis Palestinians: “What can we do about it?” he asked, then answered his own question: “Nothing…except insist on using real words.”
What, I asked, does he hope that the words in his book will do? Even if those words meet with corrections? Or rancor?
“First of all,” he said, “give Jews a sense of their genealogy with anti-Zionism so they can realize, ‘I’m not the first person to think this way.’ And I hope to strengthen the people who are doing all sorts of work in all sorts of ways. We still don’t have the organization. We don’t have the AIPAC. We certainly don’t have the White House and the Pentagon. We’re just people who are fighting a sense of outrage, of futility that is demoralizing and depoliticizing. If you say, ‘Oh, there’s nothing you can do,’ it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
He said it was hard to pick the 12 people who ended up in his book, ranging from a long dead, 19th-century rabbi in Eastern Europe to New York City photographer Nan Goldin, who is alive and politically active: “There have been so many anti-Zionist Jews in history. I wanted them to be chronological. I wanted a fair representation: Latin Americans, women, gays, and other kinds of people,” he said. “I wanted everybody to have a different take on anti-Zionism. I wanted to tell the story of what happened in Iraq, for instance. In Houston. Johannesburg. I wanted Orthodox people to read it, feminists, people whose background is Sephardic or Mizrahi and not just Ashkenazic or Reform. I wanted people who don’t know this story to have a way into it.
Moser said he hopes that readers can use his book to “say to the people who are claiming that they’re doing this to the Palestinians in Jews’ name, ‘No, that’s not true.’ By creating a Jewish voice against that claim, eventually we can maybe stop sending bombs to Israel, maybe stop killing people. Everybody’s probably going to be dead by the time that happens. We might not live to see it. But it does matter. And we’re still working.”
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Three years after Oct. 7, survey says Jewish engagement has reached an elevated ‘new normal’
(JTA) — Levels of engagement in Jewish life have risen overall, establishing a “new normal” three years after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to a survey released Thursday by the Jewish Federations of North America.
Thirty-eight percent of Jewish respondents surveyed by the federation umbrella group in May and June said they had increased their Jewish engagement in some way in the last three years, an increase of 7 percentage points over rates in 2025 yet down from the 43% rate in March 2024, in the months after the attacks. The survey had a margin of error of 1.8 percent.
JFNA researchers say the results demonstrate that this initial spike in engagement — which the organization dubbed “the Surge” — has had a lasting effect, prompting people to deepen their involvement in Jewish life even three years on.
“I think the fact that people are continuing to engage with community during a difficult time is a good thing, and it’s an opportunity for us to meet people’s needs in this moment,” Mimi Kravetz, JFNA’s chief impact and growth officer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of the release of the findings Thursday morning.
The number of “Surgers,” she said, includes Jews who were already engaged but have found ways to become more engaged since the attacks.
Many in the Jewish community feared that Jewish engagement “would continue to decline as we got further out from the events of Oct. 7, and that likely people would return to something like their behavior prior to Oct. 7,” Kravetz said. “That is usually what happens after a major incident.”
JFNA surveyed more than 2,800 Jews by text message in May and June of this year. Follow-up questions were generated by AI, which Kravetz said allowed researchers to ask open-ended questions about respondents’ relationship to Jewish community and quickly sort the answers by category.
This approach unlocked new insights. A top motivator for Jewish engagement was “social or interpersonal” connections in informal settings, such as Shabbat dinners or personal invitations to Jewish events. And in what seems like an encouraging sign for congregational Jewish life, 65% of Jews who “Surged” were turning to synagogues — though Kravetz noted that not every shul’s membership has grown as a result.
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose adherents place a premium on interpersonal connections and often operate in environments lacking in other Jewish communal infrastructure, was the second-most-popular engagement option.
Jews who had increased their levels of engagement were also more likely to voice support for Israel, the findings said. Ninety-three percent of “Surging” Jews said they were “emotionally attached to Israel,” compared to 51% of Jews whose level of engagement did not change. Additionally, 75% of Jews who grew their engagement agreed that “in general, Israel makes me proud to be Jewish,” compared to 36% who did not “Surge.”
Overall, respondents’ most frequently cited barrier to participation in Jewish life was Israeli politics. Large numbers of Jews said they struggled to connect with Jewish community spaces because they felt misaligned on Israel in one direction or another — data that JFNA said it did not quantify because it came out of the open-ended section of the survey.
The most common complaint, Kravetz said, was that Jews were seeking spaces they thought of as “apolitical.”
Kravetz said that many of those Jews, instead of dropping out of Jewish life, indicated they eventually found communities that aligned better with their values.
“These aren’t people who are walking away,” Kravetz said. “These are people who are leaning into Jewish community and are experiencing this tension. And usually, what we see is people are interested in finding Jewish spaces that meet their needs.”
The challenge for Jewish leaders, Kravetz said, is “to make sure that we have and support that diversity of spaces for people, so that they can find the right space that meets their needs.”
But that diversity has limits, as many prominent Jewish leaders — including heads of JFNA — have also urged Jewish communal spaces to reaffirm a commitment to Zionism at a moment when more and more Jews feel divided on Israel. Some Jewish leaders have explicitly called to reject anti- and non-Zionist Jews.
Kravetz doesn’t see those values as contradictory or damaging to the “Surge.” She pointed to another recent JFNA survey, released earlier this year, querying Jews about their relationship to Zionism.
While that survey found that only a third of American Jews identify as Zionist, it also found that 88% of the same population agree with what has historically been a basic tenet of Zionism: that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, Democratic state.”
“I think being supportive of the premise of Zionism, and in how we define Zionism, is very much aligned with engaging the majority of the Jewish community,” she said.
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On Oct. 7, Mamdani spoke in support of Palestinians. A father from Gaza did it better.
On Wednesday in New York City, on the third anniversary of Oct. 7, two people spoke up for Palestinians. One of them was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The other person actually said something helpful.
In a statement from the mayor’s office, Mamdani expressed sorrow at the loss of over 1,100 Israeli lives and Hamas’ “horrific war crimes,” then pivoted to condemn Israel for its war against Hamas in Gaza, accusing Israel of ongoing genocide, war crimes, apartheid and occupation.
Then came the Hallmark-ian ending, “To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”
It was four paragraphs of blame with a coda of pablum: no vision for a way forward and no idea of how to improve Palestinian lives, much less Israeli ones.
Vision and healing — that is, leadership — came not from the mayor, but from a Palestinian and an Israeli who spoke later that day at a forum uptown.
“It’s my choice to give the children the anger and the pain or to give them a chance” at a future, said Jaser AbuMoussa, a Gazan who suffered unfathomable loss during the recent conflict. “And I will choose the chance every day.”
“Our neighborhood, from Nir Oz to the sea, can be a paradise because of the human factor on both sides of the border, and not because we necessarily love each other,” said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, a member of the ravaged Kibbutz Nir Oz. “You don’t have to agree on everything to get there.”
AbuMoussa and Dekel-Chen appeared on stage together at the 92nd Street Y, speaking across chasms of grief. From the West Coast, I tuned into a livestream of the event, because if Israelis and Palestinians want a secure and just future, it starts not with pain-inducing pronouncements like Mamdani’s, but with painful conversations like this one.
On Oct. 15, 2023, an Israeli airstrike hit AbuMoussa’s home in Khan Younis in Gaza, killing his wife and two of his children, as well as a nephew, sister-in-law and a cousin. A second airstrike killed his mother, sister, uncle, aunt, a niece and a nephew. AbuMoussa, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, managed to evacuate with his two surviving children to the United Arab Emirates, where they underwent lifesaving surgeries.
“She was an architect,” he said of his wife, Heba. “She was a novelist. She was a poet, and above all, she was a wife and a mother.”
Hamas terrorists took Dekel-Chen’s son Sagui into Gaza, where he was held for 498 days before his release. Terrorists killed 47 out of 420 kibbutz members and took 76 people hostage, including the Bibas family.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen “rampaged for nine hours through the kibbutz, destroying everything in their path,” said Dekel-Chen, a historian at Hebrew University and visiting professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, which co-sponsored the event. He said he is only alive because he and his wife were on a work trip to the United States at the time.
So many arguments over Oct. 7 turn into comparative victimhood — Mamdani’s statement was an example of that, making sure to emphasize Palestinian loss.
But the Palestinian at the 92nd Street Y didn’t do that.
“To me, suffering is like an absolute value, and we are not here for a competition,” AbuMoussa said.
While on the same day in the same city, the mayor’s statement used the words “genocide,” “apartheid” and “war crimes,” the Gazan father who lost his wife and two of his four children used none of those words.
Both men made it clear that the pain and anger of Oct. 7 and the years that followed are ever-present, a fact of life. But so is the choice of how to channel that anger.
“I will not point it at people,” said AbuMoussa. “I will not point it at Jonathan because he is an Israeli. But I will point it at policies, at leaders, at systems that were invented to kill people.”
While he held Israel responsible for helping to create the catastrophe in Gaza — he pointed out that Israeli attacks have killed 1,400 Palestinians since the ceasefire — AbuMoussa — again, in contrast to Mamdani — excoriated Hamas. The group corrupted Gaza’s political, economic, social and above all religious life. It cast itself as the only legitimate interpretation of Islam, though AbuMoussa said Oct. 7 itself contravened Islamic law.
Hamas never treated protecting civilians as its job, AbuMoussa said, pointing out that Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar’s family went into the tunnels while ordinary Gazans were left out, unprepared.
The Westerners who took to the streets and college campuses in support of resistance hurt Palestinians more than helped them, AbuMoussa said, because they blur Palestinians together with Hamas and the Iranian axis.
These were the very people Mamdani seemed to be pandering to in his statement — who turn Gaza, in AbuMoussa’s words, “into a flag or a pin.”
Dekel-Chen said his harshest critics are often Diaspora Jews who fail to separate what’s good for Israel from the government of Israel.
Because they spent no time trading accusations and blame, both men had plenty of time to discuss their vision for a better future.
Gazans aren’t leaving, despite the Israeli far right’s fantasies, and Israelis aren’t leaving, despite the Islamists’ fantasies, Dekel-Chen said.
It’s the simplest truth, but it carries extra weight when an Israeli Jew who lives a mile from Gaza says it: there are roughly seven million Jews and seven million Arabs between the river and the sea, and no one is going anywhere.
AbuMoussa said he is open to a confederation between Israelis and Palestinians, two states or “whatever.” But Oct. 7 proved the folly of believing the status quo, or just managing the conflict, will bring stability.
The way forward for now, both men said, is to push leaders to carry out the 20-point plan President Donald Trump put forward to help Gaza recover. They agreed that Washington still has the most leverage.
If Gazans had some sort of hope, AbuMoussa said, “I don’t think they will choose Hamas ever.”
Dekel-Chen said the insistence that Hamas fully disarm before any rebuilding “hurts us all.”
“Nothing positive will happen on our side of the border,” Dekel-Chen said, until most Gazans have hope in a post-Hamas future.
That is ultimately why both men decided to speak together — because they recognize what continuing the hatred costs.
“It’s the only way that I know how to honor those that I grieve, and the loss of life on both sides,” Dekel-Chen said.
It was a message, and a conversation that I wish Mamdani had heard in person. Instead, he spent the evening in Union Square, where anti-Israel protesters booed him for appearing with a group called Israelis for Peace.
To his credit, he showed up. But the same constituency the mayor seemed to court that morning turned on him that night, for standing beside actual Israelis calling for peace.
AbuMoussa and Dekel-Chen could have told him: You can stoke division or you can build a future. Choose the future.
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Israel is the one thing both Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidates agree on
(JTA) — Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and GOP opponent Stacy Garrity faced off on Wednesday in a heated gubernatorial debate, clashing over most policy issues — with the notable exception of Israel.
“I want to recognize the anniversary of the Hamas attacks, where 1,200 innocent people were killed, including 49 Americans,” said Garrity, referring to the third anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“I want to remember the lives that were stolen, the families that were changed forever, and the Americans that didn’t make it home,” she added.
While Garrity, Pennsylvania’s state treasurer, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump, Shapiro has a 25 percentage point lead in a poll released Wednesday. Both candidates won their primaries uncontested in May, and both have been outspoken against antisemitism.
Shapiro, who himself is Jewish, likewise recognized “the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre” at the debate. He recalled how “Hamas, a terrorist organization, broke into Israel and murdered 1,200 innocents, took over 250 hostage, including many Americans.”
“This is a moment where my heart stands with the people of Israel,” he said. “My heart stands with the Jewish community, who I know are grieving as a result of this.”
“This is a moment where we need to stand together against terrorism, against hate and against antisemitism,” the governor added.
Although the candidates shared similar perspectives on Israel during Wednesday’s debate, they clashed on numerous other topics, including the death penalty, voter identification, taxes and tariffs.
Asked by the debate moderator about the plunging support for Israel in the Democratic Party, Shapiro replied that he has “been very, very consistent” in both his “love of Israel” and his disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Shapiro then noted that Israelis will head to the polls in just a few weeks to choose their next leader. He expressed hope that they would not elect Netanyahu, whom he said “has led Israel down a very dangerous and isolated path.”
“I want America to have a strong relationship with Israel and with the Israeli government,” Shapiro added. “That’s not possible right now with the Netanyahu government in charge.”
Shapiro, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats nationwide, was among the final candidates considered by Kamala Harris in her vice-presidential search in the 2024 election. He is also seen as a possible 2028 presidential hopeful.
But Shapiro has also faced the challenges posed by increasing antisemitism in America. During Harris’s search, for example, a website and social media feed labeled him “No Genocide Josh” over his support for Israel.
In April 2025, an arsonist set fire to Shapiro’s house just hours after his family had conducted a Passover seder. In 2018, while Shapiro was serving as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, a terrorist killed 11 people and injured six others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh..
Garrity, meanwhile, has more than tripled Pennsylvania’s investment in Israel bonds in her current role. She invested $20 million after the Oct. 7 attack and another $35 million in July 2025.
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