The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.
–Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin’s eighth thesis on the philosophy of history is cited ad nauseam only because its relevance is inescapable: to write history from below is always to write in a state of emergency, to seize a memory as it flashes up in the moment of danger before the victors’ history obscures it once again. This is the methodology referenced and well-practiced in Benjamin Balthaser’s Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left. The title itself comes via an unpublished 1930s novel by the Jewish left film critic Robert Gessner, one of the many things recovered by Balthaser from what he terms “the Jewish memory machine.”
Bourgeois Jewish institutions in the U.S. are victors in the Benjaminian sense that their embroilment in networks of capital and oppression have allowed them to suppress and obscure the long history of the Jewish left. When Zionist organizations claim to represent and preserve Jewish history, they in fact remake it in their image. Thus, when the new Jewish left looks to our “communal institutions” for a record of Jewish history, we find a false rupture which perpetrates the illusion that the left “vanguard” of today is brand new (39).
Balthaser’s careful, fine-grained history, traced from the garment workers and Communist party members of the 1930s, through the heavily Jewish Students for Democratic Society and Socialist Workers Party in the 1960s, to the Jewish identity-based socialist collectives Chutzpah and Brooklyn Bridge in the 1970s, to Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and the Jewish Solidarity Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America (JSC) today, insists on a never-marginal, resilient, and continuous tradition of the Jewish left.
In this light, the proliferation of American Jewish opposition to Israeli genocide and apartheid post-October 7th is the return, after a comparatively short but unforgivably devastating hiatus, of what was never fully gone. For today’s JVP, JSC, and others, this history of the Jewish left offers a twofold resource for our dangerous moment.
Firstly, Balthaser tells us that Jewish subjectivity as constituted by the left has always been dialogical. This point is largely developed as we learn from the Jewish groups of the 1960s and 1970s, who explain in their manifestos that Jewishness was a vehicle to enter a political field constituted by identity. “For the radical left of the late 1960s, ethnic and racial identification were the primary entry points to revolutionary activity.” Balthaser quotes the activist Sheryl Nestel, “It was Black students, it was the Chicano students, it was the Asian students, and it was the Jewish students… Everybody else had a place…” Balthaser concludes that members of Jewish left organizations “understood their forming of Jewish socialist collectives as moving the New Left forward, as a project of the left, aligned with other organizations also on the left” (137).
Secondly, this history should serve to preserve the Jewish left as a left, offering an account of past successes and pitfalls, chief among which is the drift into soggy liberalism that has historically diluted radical politics. Interestingly, Balthaser’s history quietly implies that memory can help hold what he terms the differing “secular” and “religious” epistemologies and subjectivities offered by various Jewish left groups. This difference is best encapsulated by what the Chutzpah collective termed the ‘Moishe-to-Mao” continuum between a politics of immanent Jewish (national) identity and expansive left internationalism. Balthaser, careful not to collapse the two, tells us that the Jewish left has always contained both Moishe and Mao, and the sheer fact of this ‘always’ might enable it to continue to do so.
The problem with memory politics is that they can quickly turn to self-congratulatory nostalgia or otherwise be neutralized into the cultural form of the ridiculous. This difference is thematized by Balthaser as the Jewish left folk-memory which acts and the memory which merely haunts Jewish liberalism, from Seinfeld playing its Communists for laughs, to Philip Roth involving them in bedroom drama, to the Dude in The Big Lebowski being, in passing, a founding member of SDS. In this sense, the left is felt in the liberal as “temporal placeholders in which the past is evoked” to provide cultural texture and yet “does not threaten to reemerge” (216).
Balthaser’s answer to the danger of citational memory is a fuller engagement with the history itself; JVP and the JSC need it precisely to avoid the absorption of political charge into the warm ambiance of pervasive whiteness coupled with progressive Jewish identity. Surely, the point is well taken: history should be known, else it repeats itself. Zionist institutions must not be allowed to make Jewish history in their image.
What are the questions raised by this history in the light of the present? And how might they be colored by Balthaser’s clear observation that, though not without precedent, the “religiosity (of the Jewish left) is quite new, or at least its public mobilization is new” (2)?
As fascism’s pitch increases in the US, the Jewish anti-Zionist movement faces the inadequacy of its most legible tactic: identity-based moral appeal simply does not work in front of a fascist politics that neither recognizes nor requires Jewish approval. At a recent JVP meeting I attended, someone asked a question along the lines of, “Do we really think anyone cares anymore that we are Jews opposing Zionism and the American death machine? Isn’t it time, under fascism, that we recognize it doesn’t matter anymore and join the international left in the streets as a universal political mass?”
This is an extremely good point given that, for some time now,the majority of American Jews would not call themselves Zionists and general American opinion of Israel has hit an all-time low. Of course, the ideological battle is far from won. But who can really say, should things continue to trend in this direction, that mobilizing Jewish identity in anti-Zionist organizing would have any effect in the face of that extremely wealthy Jewish and evangelical few who have serious political and theological interests in maintaining the Israeli ethnostate? And, more importantly, how much can such discourse say to American empire’s interests in maintaining a military base in the Levant that can muddy the water with extrajudicial assassinations of foreign leaders?
Now, the claim that Jewish left politics is continuous and non-marginal becomes necessary but not sufficient. The same is true of the identity claim JVP makes in showing up as Jews at Grand Central: demonstrating that Jewish consensus on Zionism does not exist and thus cannot be used to justify Palestinian death works to jam a spork in the ideological argument of the American Zionist machine. But this tactic may be approaching its limit. What lies beyond is perhaps not dialogical bonds with the ideologically aligned, but responsibility—responsibility as an anti-Zionist Jew for the Zionist Jewish community.
This responsibility claim is still a form of identity politics, but one which is fundamentally shaped by a theo-logic. The Halachic Left, an organization of observant Jews working against Jewish supremacy, makes this logic explicit in their FAQ: “As religious Jews we believe in the concept of kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh — the Jewish people are all responsible for each other. We have an obligation not only to care for each other, but also to provide rebuke when Jews are behaving unethically.”
That this grammar is named as “religious” and the left’s as “secular” should not be taken as self-evident. Both categories are parasitically produced by a particular genealogy of liberal modernity, and the Moishe-to-Mao continuum itself suggests they were never cleanly separable. But Balthaser’s distinction between “religious” and “secular” movements is nonetheless useful for naming two different illiberal accounts of obligation, identity, and subjecthood.
The left’s claim against liberalism is structural and historical: liberalism mystifies class relations, absorbs radical content into pluralism, and naturalizes existing hierarchies as the outcome of free individual choice. Balthaser helps us see this through a conversation with Myron Perlman, one of the founders of Chutzpah, who worked summers for Jewish bosses without recognizing the exploitation as such since Jewish solidarity had preempted class consciousness. Perlman came to his politics by learning to see his identity dialogically through shared class position with workers across ethnic lines rather than through assumed solidarity with bosses with whom he shares an ethnicity.
How can the worker be responsible for the boss? The answer Balthaser’s history has mostly given, and it is not without force particularly in cases of intra-Jewish racism or class-based violence, is that the worker is not responsible. To presume otherwise is a kind of mystification.
The Talmud says all of Israel is one body, but it cannot be for me here to take up the question of what it means when the left hand cuts the right. Instead, what I mean to point to is that the theological logic does not wait for it the righteous question of conflicting interests to be resolved, doing its binding before the question of whether the bond is just or convenient can even be asked.
This is why the illiberal theological claim of Jewish peoplehood is different in kind from both the liberal identity logic JVP sometimes deploys tactically and the secular anti-liberalism Perlman arrives at through class consciousness. Both make obligation secondary to recognition, elevating either the decision to “show up as a Jew” or clarity about where one’s class interests lie. The theological claim operates prior to any such recognition.
Here, liberalism is wrong at the level of its foundational anthropology: the picture of the human being as a self-constituting subject who takes on obligations voluntarily and can exit them when they stop serving his interests is not a Jewish theological character. The Talmud acknowledges that Israel received the Torah under coercion, a mountain held over their heads, which would render the covenant legally void; only Esther’s generation is read as having reaccepted it freely.
Yet even this reacceptance does not exhaust the binding force of the covenant since there is no halakhically recognized conversion out of Judaism. Obligation precedes and survives assent. As Rabbi Caleb Brommer wrote in the Halachic Left’s Yamim Noraim reader: “If the whole Jewish people is covenantally bound to each other…then we are none of us blameless, all of us implicated” (30).
Perhaps Jewish “religiosity” has emerged after October 7th with new fervor partially because anti-Zionism is especially hospitable to its theological claim. Among the American anti-Zionist Jewish Left, there is an intuitive responsibility for the crimes of Zionist Jews. The point cannot be to say,“We are Jews who support Palestinian liberation.” Fine, we are! But there are other Jews who do not, and even if as individuals we are materially divested from every Zionist synagogue, day school, and family member, responsibility remains, and that remainder is precisely what the logic of theological identity makes legible.
The argument proffered by the activist in that JVP meeting, while deeply salient, also elicits a deep uneasiness. Why? Because to abandon identity logic would be to claim not to be responsible or to be responsible only when politically expedient for the bloody crimes of the community to which I am, we are, irrevocably bound. In this sense, religious ontology swallows secular epistemology because it cannot by its nature recognize a secular disavowal.
The move of the Halachic Left to be collectively responsible and responsive as a particular to the universal is the anti-liberal move sometimes also made implicitly by JVP and which, perhaps if made explicit, could prevent the slip towards liberalism from another angle. This case of Jewish identity is a paradoxical case of a universalizable particular, within those identities which, although differently constituted are also operate illiberally, inescapably, and yes, often theologically in the ties that bind different particularities to themselves.
What sustains this paradox is not memory alone but the present reality of the Jewish right that aims to destroy Palestinian life. Balthaser’s history is necessary: without it, the “Jewish left” has no shape, no lineage, no proof of its own non-marginality. But this left memory cannot be the ground of Jewish obligation, only its occasion. The question Balthaser’s book raises at its edges, in the new religiosity it observes but does not theorize, is what a politics looks like that is answerable not only to those it stands with but to those it cannot leave.
