On Thursday, March 14th at 12pm ET, virtually:

In the months since October 7th, we’ve witnessed a high-water mark in American Jewish anti-Zionist politics. As thousands of Jewish leftists have protested Israel’s war on Gaza, Jewish leaders like ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt have maligned them as antisemites and as misguided youth bucking their communal tradition. Two new books make the case that, to the contrary, such dissent has a long history in the American Jewish community.

In Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978, the historian Geoffrey Levin counters the common narrative that the creation of Israel in 1948 essentially ended the once-lively American Jewish debate over the Zionist project, instead showing that even in the decades following the state’s founding, there were American Jews who remained vocally concerned for Palestinian rights and skeptical of nationalism. These individuals and organizations—including, at times, key figures within mainstream organizations like the American Jewish Committee—were gravely concerned about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that had been displaced by the fledgling state and about Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. In The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism, Marjorie Feld traces such debates from the late 18th century to the 1980s, showing how Jewish communal leaders often worked tirelessly to marginalize dissenting perspectives, ultimately leading each new generations of critics to believe no one before them had strayed from the pro-Israel party line.

Join Feld and Levin for a members-only conversation, moderated by Jewish Currents associate editor Mari Cohen, on those figures in the American Jewish past who questioned the community’s unqualified support for Israel, and on the lessons this history holds for politics today.

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