I Spent My Life Anticipating Trump’s “War on Antisemitism”

Zionism upholds the core belief of classical antisemites: that Jews are a collective body with a singular political agenda.

When Jake Klein, The Black Sheep’s co-founder and lead editor, wrote for The Black Sheep last winter about the sharp contradiction between opposing identity politics and supporting Zionism (Jewish identity politics), he was describing a conflict that has defined my whole adult life and vocation.

In 2011, while still in my twenties, my first book was published on the forgotten midcentury Reform Jewish anti-Zionists—nominally a biography of Elmer Berger, the highly polarizing long-time leader of their organization, the American Council for Judaism. After my third book was published a little over a year ago (an excerpt of which ran on this Substack), I’ve also now edited a primary source reader on the American Council for Judaism, being released this month by De Gruyter.

I was raised a minimally observant Conservative Jew, but I managed before knowing almost anything about American Jewish history to intuit that I would have liked to be a Reform Jew in the era before the Holocaust and Israe…