TL;DR
Before the Holocaust, the Jewish Labor Bund, eastern Europe's most influential Jewish political force, was explicitly anti-Zionist, complicating the modern claim that anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic.
Mention Jewish politics and most people think of Zionism. But in the early twentieth century the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe was the Jewish Labor Bund. It was secular, socialist, and firmly anti-Zionist.
The Bund held that a Jew's home was wherever they lived (doikayt, Yiddish for 'hereness'). The book's title, 'Here Where We Live Is Our Country', says it all. Moving to a 'thereness' in the Middle East was the wrong path.
Jewish left vs the 'there'
In the 1930s American Jews were mostly working-class and left-wing. They were seen by the Protestant mainstream as the 'most racially alien' immigrants. To them, Zionism was 'petit-bourgeois, right-wing nationalism and imperialism'.
Scholar Benjamin Balthaser writes that Zionism was understood as a 'separatist, chauvinist, clerical, and conservative' culture, the polar opposite of the progressive, secular, internationalist Yiddish-speaking organisations.
A legacy forgotten and reawakened
Israel's founding in 1948 and the expulsion of nearly 700,000 Palestinians bore out the left's warnings. Yet in the following decades, Zionism was claimed to represent 'the Jewish people' as a whole.
That anti-Zionist legacy now lives again in writers like Peter Beinart and Judith Butler and in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. One line: not all Jews once supported a Jewish state.
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