The history of Anti-Zionism with Benjamin Moser

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Dion Fanning (3:14)

Welcome to Free State, everybody. Our guest today is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who has written a new book, Anti-Zionism, a Jewish History, which is one of those books, when you start reading it, it is very hard to move away from it because there are so many different stories in it.

Eye-opening stories in terms of, I think what we understand about Jewish history and the history of the state of Israel. Benjamin Moser, you're very welcome to the podcast.

Benjamin Moser (3:46)

Thank you so much.

Dion Fanning (3:49)

And before we talk about the people you study, because this book is a study of different people who, I suppose we could, would you broadly describe as anti-Zionist or who went on a journey from Zionism to anti-Zionism. Can you tell us your own background and story?

Benjamin Moser (4:09)

Well, I grew up in Houston, Texas, in a very comfortable way, in kind of the height of Imperial America. And we sort of looked at the rest of the world, maybe in the way that a lot of Irish Americans look at Ireland. You know, it's sort of nice and they might go there on holiday once or twice, but they don't really know that much about it, you know. And that, and Israel was our purported homeland, even though no one in my family ever actually went there. Except that my grandfather was a German refugee who escaped from Berlin in 1938 And when he left Germany, the only book that he brought out of there with him was this big blue volume of Theodor Herzl's Zionist writings.

And he didn't go to the promised land of Palestine. He went to another promised land, which was America, and he spent the rest of his life there, and he died there, and only maybe, I don't know, four or five years ago, did I discover that in 1935, he had actually gone to Palestine to visit his sister who lived there. And then he comes back to Nazi Germany. And I was completely intrigued by this, because I thought, who, which Jew goes back to Nazi Germany in 1935? Well, I mean, I don't really know the answer to that, except that he, his mother still lived there. I think that's kind of my theory for the moment. I don't have any idea. But he had come to America, met my grandmother, who was born in America, and spent the rest of his life there. And that gave us, me and my sister, and I think everyone in my family, a kind of sense of closeness to this, to this terror of the Holocaust. And it also gave us something that I've been very surprised, was not given to everybody. I thought it was given to everybody, which was this idea that never again means never again for everybody.