Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left

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Benjamin Balthaser

Citizens of the Whole World

Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left

Benjamin Balthaser

$39.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Verso Books
04 November 2025

Social & cultural history; Religious groups: social & cultural aspects; Jewish studies; Revolutionary groups & movements

Since October 7th, 2023, the world witnessed a massive American Jewish uprising in support of

Palestinian liberation, from sit-ins in Congress and Grand Central Station, to petitions and marches in which thousands of Jews are vocally making it known the Israeli state is not acting in their name. Rather than view this upsurge of Jewish anti-Zionism as a rupture with progressive American Jewish history, Citizens of the Whole World proposes a longer view of the American Jewish socialist left, excavating how the politics of anti-Zionism, diasporic constructions of Jewish identity, cross-racial solidarity, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism have been constitutive for Jewish radicals over the last century.

Beginning the with ""red decade"" of the 1930s and concluding with the present, Citizens offers expressive and granular insight into radical Jewish novelists, memoirists, interviews with Jewish revolutionaries from SDS to SWP to the DSA, suggesting a buried if nonetheless unbroken continuity between left Jewish Americans and diasporic internationalism. Far from just the politics of Zionism, Citizens further explores the cultural expressions of American Jewish radicalism, from an embrace of Jewish de-territorialization, to Jewish revolutionary traditions of Marxist internationalism, to the aesthetics of Jewish solidarity with Third World revolutionary struggles and Black diasporic traditions in the U.S. A book of historical and cultural recovery, Citizens stages an intervention into current anti-Zionist politics, suggesting activists can learn from the past struggles of the Jewish left as a means to help form a politics of a post-Zionist future.

By: Benjamin Balthaser
Imprint: Verso Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 477g
ISBN: 9781804291375
ISBN 10: 1804291374
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 04 November 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Benjamin Balthaser's critical and creative work explores the connections among radical U.S. social movements, racial and class formation, internationalism, and culture. He is the author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Radical Transnational Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and Dedication (Partisan Press, 2011). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as American Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Boston Review, Jacobin, Shofar and elsewhere. He is currently associate professor of multi-ethnic U.S. literature at Indiana University, South Bend, and associate editor of American Quarterly.

Reviews for Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left

As more American Jews join the ranks of those calling for a world free of the institutions that wield Judaism and antisemitism as a means to justify and entrench genocide, Benjamin Balthaser offers a deep dive into the roots of today's Jewish anti-Zionist left. -- Sumaya Awad, co-editor of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction Finally, thanks to Benjamin Balthaser, the Jewish left has a voice which has been suppressed in the face of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. -- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States Citizens of the Whole World is in a class by itself. Bracingly original, edgy and provocative, witty and cerebral, Balthaser's tour de force provides a stunning rebuke to the myth that the twenty-first century alignment of radical Jews with Palestinian self-determination is discontinuous with the past. His punchy amalgam of social movement history, oral interviews, and readings of imaginative literature affords a coolly reasoned argument for a diasporic internationalism with Jewish characteristics that is a fresh manifestation of a laudable tradition. -- Alan Wald, author of Exiles from a Future Time Once, not very long ago, many Jews believed that our distinctive historical experiences and cultural traditions presented us both the opportunity and the obligation to practice a universal solidarity-a solidarity whose content was socialist, anti-colonialist, and anti-racist. Balthaser recovers this memory for us as it flashes in a moment of danger. -- Gabriel Winant, author of The Next Shift Citizens of the Whole World soberly and expertly excavates ideas long marginalized, thereby enabling us to better understand the complexities of the Jewish past and the possibilities for a more variegated and robust Jewish future. -- Shaul Magid, author of The Necessity of Exile