Citizens of the Whole World

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.

Author Biography

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.