Book Review: The Zionists Who Hate Jews
Book Review: The Zionists Who Hate Jews by Joss Sheldon
The Zionists Who Hate Jews is an ambitious, provocative, and unapologetically polemical examination of the relationship between Zionism and antisemitism. Joss Sheldon challenges the familiar claim that Zionism necessarily protects or represents Jewish people. His central argument is that prominent Zionists have repeatedly disparaged certain Jewish communities, collaborated with antisemites, endangered Jewish lives, and attempted to silence Jews who oppose Zionism.
The book follows this argument from the origins of modern political Zionism to contemporary Israeli politics. Early chapters examine figures such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Moses Hess, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben-Gurion. Sheldon quotes statements that he interprets as contemptuous of assimilated Jews, religious Jews, Diaspora Jews, and Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin. He argues that some early Zionist leaders accepted antisemitic assumptions about Jewish weakness, separateness, and supposed social defects, even when they believed that establishing a Jewish state would solve those problems.
Later chapters address Zionist dealings with European governments, including regimes and political leaders openly hostile to Jews. The book also discusses the Holocaust, Jewish displacement from Arab countries, the treatment of Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews in Israel, Christian Zionism, American support for Israel, compulsory military service, restrictions on marriage, and attacks directed at anti-Zionist Jewish organizations and individuals. Its scope is enormous, covering more than a century of history and drawing on an extensive bibliography of books, academic studies, government documents, journalism, speeches, diaries, and organizational records.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its insistence that Jewish opinion is not monolithic. Sheldon emphasizes the diversity of Jewish identities, denominations, political beliefs, and historical experiences. He gives particular attention to anti-Zionist Jews, Haredi communities, Arab Jews, and other groups whose perspectives are often overlooked in mainstream discussions. The glossary is especially helpful for readers unfamiliar with terms such as Aliyah, Bundism, Haredi, Mizrahi, Nakba, Revisionist Zionism, and Yishuv.
Sheldon writes in an energetic, conversational voice. Serious historical discussion is interspersed with Yiddish expressions, jokes, rhetorical questions, and direct appeals to the reader. This makes a long, heavily sourced book more accessible than a conventional academic study. It also makes the author’s moral outrage unmistakable.
That style, however, is simultaneously one of the book’s limitations. The frequent insults, emphatic declarations, and sweeping conclusions sometimes overwhelm the historical analysis. Terms such as “schmuck,” “putz,” and “yutz” may entertain sympathetic readers, but they can also make the book appear less measured than its research deserves. Readers approaching the subject from a different political perspective may feel confronted instead of persuaded.
The book would also have benefited from more sustained engagement with opposing interpretations. Quotations from historical figures can be revealing, but their precise meaning may depend upon context, translation, audience, and the political vocabulary of their era. Sheldon often moves quickly from an offensive quotation or controversial decision to a broad conclusion about Zionism as a whole. More consideration of distinctions among political, cultural, religious, socialist, and revisionist forms of Zionism would have strengthened the argument. So would a clearer separation between documented historical events, disputed claims, and the author’s own moral judgments.
The final section presents an “Anti-Racist Definition of Antisemitism.” Some elements—such as opposition to violence, discrimination, antisemitic stereotypes, and Holocaust denial—are likely to command wide agreement. Other provisions incorporate the author’s anti-Zionist conclusions into the definition itself and will undoubtedly be disputed. Nevertheless, the section succeeds in encouraging readers to think carefully about who has the authority to define antisemitism and whether criticism of Israel can be distinguished from hatred of Jewish people.
This is not a detached or neutral history, nor does it pretend to be. It is an advocacy work written to expose what Sheldon regards as a largely unrecognized form of anti-Jewish prejudice. Readers should approach its most controversial historical assertions critically and, where appropriate, consult the cited sources and competing scholarship. Even so, the book raises difficult questions that are too often avoided and collects a striking amount of material in one volume.
The Zionists Who Hate Jews will appeal most strongly to readers interested in Jewish history, Zionism, Israel and Palestine, antisemitism, colonialism, and political ideology. Whether readers ultimately accept or reject Sheldon’s conclusions, they are unlikely to finish this forceful book without reconsidering some of their assumptions.
Goodreads Book Review
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8953487335