Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism

“Reading Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism feels like sitting in a room with the mentors, friends, and inspirations who have shaped how I think about building a Judaism beyond nationalism. The greatest strength is how different their paths are: rabbis, Mizrahi and Arab Jewish writers, campus organizers, doctors, lawyers, people writing about their own families, all arriving at the same position by entirely different roads. Carolyn Karcher has gathered decades of these accounts, from early skepticism toward Zionism to the reckoning forced by Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To have this much wisdom, in so many distinct voices, collected in a single volume is an incredible gift to everyone seeking to reclaim Judaism from Zionism.” – Rabbi Andrue Kahn, Executive Director, American Council for Judaism
“As more and more people recognize the apartheid nature of Israel, there is no site of that shift more important than in the Jewish community. Carolyn Karcher has assembled a diverse set of personal journeys of Jews who have left their blind support of Israel behind in a quest for justice. This book shows us a path toward a Judaism that recognizes Israel’s harm to the Palestinian people, but finds a future that condemns and escapes from that harm.” – Mitchell Plitnick, President, ReThinking Foreign Policy
“[The contributors] walk the path of human rights activism inspired by the values of justice, solidarity, and equality held sacred in the prophetic Jewish tradition. These very personal stories inspire compassion, moral reflection, and, yes, courageous action. Such stories nourish the soul and are worth reading whether or not you are Jewish.” – Friends Journal, Quaker Book Reviews
“Carolyn Karcher has constructed an anthology that addresses the departure from Zionist ideology of a diversity of Jews from both the U.S. and Israel. Each section gives voice to a particular segment of Jews critically considering the impact of Zionism on their lives and choices, and most importantly, the life-threatening consequences of this ideology for Palestinian residents of Israel, and for those who live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. This book is valuable in that it describes and gives voice to the challenge to distance one’s self from an ideology that is presented as a liberation movement. These voices must contend with being called anti-Semitic and self-hating Jews by strangers as well as by family members. Jewish nationalism, as in other forms of nationalism spreading across the globe, is by its very nature discriminatory, creating Us and Them polarities that favor the dominant culture over all others. Israel has been able to do this because of American tax-payer money to the tunes of billions of dollars over the decades.” – Eleanor Roffman, Mondoweiss

Carolyn L. Karcher is professor emerita of English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Temple University. She is the author of many books and articles about the struggle for racial and gender equality in the U.S.

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