William Zuckerman was born in 1885 inside the Line of Settlement, that part of the Russian Empire to which Jews were mostly confined, an area of poverty and pogroms. His family managed to escape and immigrated to America in 1900.
During World War I, Zuckerman returned to Europe to work with a charity that helped American-Jewish soldiers. He later settled in London, where he established the European correspondent of an influential American Yiddish newspaper Der Morgen zshurnal. Upon his return to America in 1948, he founded Jewish Bulletin, when the new state of Israel was born. Zuckerman's columns were carried by dozens of Jewish newspapers; he became the New York correspondent of a British paper The Jewish Chronicle.
Zuckerman might have been accepted by the Jewish establishment as an exemplary public figure, if it weren't for one problem. He criticized the policies of the newly created Jewish state, especially in relation to the Palestinian refugees, who fled or were expelled in the hundreds of thousands and were forbidden to return. "The land now called Israel belongs to Arab refugees no less than to any Israeli," Zuckerman wrote.
Zuckerman's advocacy for Palestinian refugees upset Israeli diplomats, who behind the scenes successfully organized a campaign to prevent his writings from being published in the Jewish press. “Specify Jewish Chronicle to get rid of the services of Mr. Zuckerman, means that the right has been exercised mitzvah", one official rejoiced.
The story of Zuckerman and his erasure is one of many told by Jeffrey Levin in his new book Our Palestinian issue, about the forgotten history of critical Jewish voices in America in the decades after the founding of Israel. It is one of several books to be published this year that explore the history of opposition to Zionism and support for the Palestinian cause among American Jews.
These studies provide essential context for one of the most heated debates in Jewish communities today: how to respond to the murderous strike by Hamas on October 7 and the Israeli assault on Gaza that followed. Many Jews believe that the existential threat posed by Hamas gives Israel the right to take whatever measures are necessary to eliminate the organization. For others, regardless of the horrors of the Hamas attack, the destruction of Gaza, the death of more than 25.000 people and the displacement of almost the entire population is unscrupulous and contrary to Jewish ethical tradition. This split has sparked heated discussions about what it means to be Jewish and what anti-Semitism means.
In the United States, both issues are visible in the aftermath of the Claudine Gay debacle at Harvard University. As head of Harvard, Gay made a disastrous appearance before the Congressional Anti-Semitism Committee in December. She was later forced to resign, when critics found plagiarism in her scientific work.
Following Gay's resignation and criticism of Harvard for failing its Jewish students, the university established a task force on anti-Semitism, to be chaired by Derek Penslar, director of Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies and one of Judaism's foremost historians.
However, as Zuckerman was to a previous generation, to many, Penslar is the wrong kind of Jew, too critical of Israel and not hostile enough to anti-Zionism. Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who chaired the committee that investigated Gay, condemned "his disgusting anti-Semitic views." Jonathan Greenblatt, of the Anti-Defamation League, accused him of "slandering the Jewish state". Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager who led the initial campaign against Claudine Gay, warned that Harvard was continuing "down the path of darkness."
Essay published in 2021 in a Jewish journal Tablet labeled Jews who are too critical of Israel or Zionism as Jewish apostates ("un-Jew"). Three years later, that description seems to have gained wider resonance.
Perhaps in no other country is the official ostracism of "Jewish apostates" so entrenched as in Germany. "To be a Jewish leftist in today's Germany is to live in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance," says Susan Nyman, a Jewish-American philosopher who has been the director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam for the last quarter of a century. "German politicians and media constantly talk about protecting Jews from anti-Semitism," but many of those who "criticize the Israeli government and the war in Gaza are canceled and certainly attacked. I am a citizen of Israel, and in the mainstream media I am accused of being a supporter of Hamas and even of being a Nazi. Do I need to mention that I am neither?”
Germany has outlawed many forms of criticism of Israel (for example, saying the treatment of Palestinians in Israel is "apartheid") and banned expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The targets are mostly Muslims, but Jewish advocates of Palestinian rights are also de-platformed and arrested. According to researcher Emilie Diesche-Becker, almost a third of those dismissed in Germany due to alleged anti-Semitism are Jews. As the Israeli-born architect and professor Eyal Weizman once bitterly observed, there is a certain irony in the fact that "lectures [on how to be a proper Jew] are given by the children and grandchildren of our parents' murderers, who now dare to accuse us of anti-Semitism."
For many supporters of Israel, the history of Jewish suffering, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it necessary to defend the nation and preserve its security at all costs. For dissenters, it is from that history that the moral obligation to defend Palestinian rights springs.
As Levin shows, the Jews who criticized Israel's policy toward Palestinian refugees in the late 1940s and 1950s were committed to a Jewish tradition that rejects discrimination or barbarism against any group. "Oppression must be fought everywhere," said Don Peretz, a researcher from the American-Jewish Committee and an advocate for Palestinian refugees who, like Zuckerman, was targeted by Israeli officials. Today's critics like Najman are also guided by this. The Germans, she says, "forgot the depth of the universalist tradition in Judaism, which goes back to the Bible."
The dismissal of such critical voices as "apostate", even anti-Semitic, also has deep roots. Contemporary campaigns against figures like Penslar and Najman echo those waged against Zuckerman and Perec 70 years ago.
What makes all of this especially troubling, Nyman notes, is precisely the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and elsewhere. Instead of patrolling Jewish intellectuals and activists and "insisting on unconditional loyalty to Israel" while "minimizing the suffering in Gaza," Nyman points out that we should support individuals and organizations in building those forms of solidarity that oppose both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry, and advocate justice in Palestine and Israel.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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