(Reviewer: Milton Shain, Vol. 81, #1, Summer 2026)
In A History of Christianity, the Oxford scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch – a keen observer of ecclesiastical history and religious conflict – warns against facile and glib constructions of the past. “There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified,” he writes. Historians, MacCulloch asserts, “should seek to promote sanity” (MacCulloch 2009, 12).
Steven Friedman ignores this. Good Jew, Bad Jew is a polemic from beginning to end – a sustained effort to undermine the Zionist idea and the Jewish state. Context and nuance are absent – all in service of Friedman’s assertion that Zionists have weaponised, misused and manipulated antisemitism in their struggle against non-Zionists. He claims they have even sought to define the nature of Judaism. Those who criticize Zionism, asserts Friedman, are deemed “bad Jews” or “self-haters” by Zionists, and theologians who challenge the Zionist idea are sidelined.
Friedman has little understanding of Zionism. Selectively cherry picking from a fractious history, he delivers anachronistic judgements in which differences between past and present are minimized and modern thinking grafted onto the past. This is not to say historians should not judge, but they should carefully consider context. By not doing so, they create what the Cambridge philosopher and historian Herbert Butterfield called a giant “optical illusion.” (Butterfield, 1973: 30). Friedman is guilty of this. Good Jew, Bad Jew smacks of “presentism” – a cardinal sin in the eyes of historians (Tosh, 1991, 145).
In the first instance, Friedman shows no appreciation for the Jewish predicament in late 19th Century Europe, the context in which Zionism arose. Hopes for Jewish emancipation – manifest in the French Revolution – had eroded. Europe was facing what was known as a “Jewish Question.” This was evident in pogroms in southern Russia in the early 1880s, the rise of Boulangism in France, accusations of “Blood Libel” in Hungary, and the Dreyfus Affair a decade later.
Jews grappled with options. Some chose emigration to the “new world.”
Some believed liberalism and assimilation would solve the “Jewish Problem.” Others found hope in modifying and adapting traditional Jewish beliefs to so-called modern standards and emphasising Judaism’s ethical principles. A significant number of Jews – especially in eastern Europe – looked to socialism and communism as an answer to Jew-hatred. Internationalism and a classless society, they believed, would put an end to the “Jewish Question.” Karl Marx stands out in this regard, but he was followed by many other Jews. Leon Trotsky, for example, looked to the internationalist socialist revolution to solve the “Jewish Question.”
On the other hand, some socialists in the Russian Empire – conscious of ethnicity – sought Jewish autonomy as a solution to the “Jewish Question.” These Jews founded the Bundist movement in 1897. In that same year the Zionist movement was formally launched under Theodor Herzl. It called for the establishment and support of an independent state for the Jewish people in its ancient homeland. Zionists had no confidence in the liberal, Reform or Bundist position.
These were challenging debates. But Friedman fails to get into the shoes of the actors at the time and, when he does, he reads their thoughts through present-day spectacles. This is evident in his outrageous assertion: “Democracy has offered Jews more safety and personal autonomy than an ethnic nationalist state can. In practice, democracies around the globe – from France to India – have not discriminated against Jews” (Friedman, 2023, 80-81).
This was not what Jews felt at the time Zionism emerged as a solution to the “Jewish Question.” French Jews reading Edouard Drumont’s La France juive (1886) and the vitriol spewed by La Libre Parole would not have had the same confidence in democracy. Nor would those who followed the “Blood Libel” charge in Hungary in 1882, or those who observed France being torn apart at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, or those who witnessed the Kishinev pogrom in 1903.
By the end of the Great War Jews had been squeezed out of the Austrian, Polish and German working-class socialist movements, despite their preponderance in these movements in the early years. The leading communist Jews – Trotsky and Zinoviev, Kamenev and Radek – were all victims of Stalin by the end of the 1930s.
Herzl had clearly gauged the power of antisemitism. As Zeev Sternhell writes: “… he saw the rise of state anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire, which now clearly sought to rid itself of its Jews: from the 1880s there began a Jewish exodus to the United States, in which millions of people took part until that country closed its gates in the 1920s. Half a century before the Shoah, Europe thus began to vomit up its Jews: bodily in Eastern Europe, ideologically on both sides of the Rhine” (Sternhell 2010, 106).
Instead of appreciating Jewish dilemmas and the foreclosing of options, Friedman places the Zionist movement within a “settler colonialist” paradigm. This framework has increasingly been used by the enemies of Israel (including a minority of Jews) in their quest to delegitimize the Jewish state. To label something “colonialist” is to imply it lacks all legitimacy. In Israel’s case this is lazy thinking. Colonialism necessitates a metropole – the source of power over the colony with dominant influence over the territory. The metropole benefits from the resources and labour of the colony (Kirsch 2024, 106-09).
While Israel has interlocked geo-politically with global powers at different times (including the Soviet Union), Zionists followed a distinctive road that differed from that of classic colonialism. This is evident in the creation of modern Hebrew and in efforts not to exploit colonial subjects and instead use “Hebrew labour.” Predictably, anti-Zionists have characterised this decision as arrogant and detrimental to Arab labour; but if the Zionists had chosen Arab labour they would have been accused of exploiting the “natives” in typical colonial fashion. It also needs to be noted that unlike conventional colonialists, many Zionists chose to “orientalise” the settlers rather than to act as representatives of “western” culture in the orient.
To support their case, enemies of the Zionist enterprise frequently cite the word “colonial” in early Zionist organisations and discourse. This is misleading. The word “colonisation” in many European languages at that time referred to settlement of the land. When Tsarist authorities encouraged Russian Jews to become farmers in southern Russia, for example, this was known as “colonisation.” This was similarly the case when Jews settled in the Argentine under the Jewish Colonisation Association, financed by Baron Maurice de Hirsch of Paris. Zionist spokesmen, employing many languages, did speak of “colonisation”, “colonies” and “colonists” in Palestine, but this was not synonymous with “colonialism” in contemporary discourse (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 75).
Invariably extracts from the writings and diary entries of Theodor Herzl are quoted to support the “colonialism” thesis. Close analysis reveals this to be misguided. It is hardly surprising, for example, that Herzl appreciated the music of Wagner and envisaged a state in which Jews would replicate to some extent the life they saw disappearing in Europe. This is not indicative of a colonial project. While Herzl may have been naïve for being blind to Palestinian national consciousness, at the time his utopian novel Altneuland was published in 1902, there was no Arab national movement besides “Young Syria” which was directed against the Ottomans. Unlike the French or British colonialists, Herzl did not see the Palestinians as objects.
Zionism, then, was a normative ethno-national project, driven by Jewish suffering and realised by people who could reasonably have been defined as refugees with no colonial “home.” Which colonial “mother” country sent their Jewish citizens to Palestine? Even British patronage manifest in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was eroded by the time of the 1939 White Paper, which effectively curtailed Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine.
Given burgeoning European Jew-hatred in late 19th Century, it is difficult to understand why Friedman asserts that that Zionism was not “a rebellion against Europe’s refusal to accept and include Jews” but rather “an application form for membership to the European club from which Jews were excluded” (Friedman 2023, 98). Yet he does so. He arrives at this assessment through a specific reading of Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, largely based on the work of Daniel Boyarin. Interesting as such speculation is, it is a giant leap from notions of “Jewish self-hatred” in the 19th Century to 21st Century Jewish political behaviour. A straight line from Jewish “self-hatred” to the “negation of the diaspora” is similarly fanciful.
Zionism historically incorporated a range of intellectual currents. But underpinning all was Jewish insecurity and a wish for national revival. Only by becoming a nation like others would the “Jewish question” be solved, wrote the Polish-born Russian Leo Pinsker in Auto-Emancipation, a pamphlet published in 1882 (Pinsker 1984, 179-85). Where better for rebirth than a return to the ancestral homeland – at that time a backwater province of the Ottoman Empire? After all, Jews were for millennia physically, culturally and spiritually connected to the “land of Israel” (Freeman 2025). They are indigenous to the land – as recognised by the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko when he told the General Assembly of the United Nations on 26 November 1947 (during the debate on the partition of Mandate Palestine) that “the Jewish people has been closely linked with Palestine for a considerable period in history.”
Importantly, land was not conquered by the Zionists. For the most part it was purchased from the Turkish authorities or absentee Arab landowners and effendis (Stein 1984, 35-79). This is not to deny Arab opposition to Zionist settlement which was evident from the late 19th Century; but there was also support for Zionism among Arabs (Small 2016, 35 and Sachar 1979, 120-21). There was indeed reason for guarded optimism that a modus vivendi could be reached between Jew and Arab.
Instead of appreciating the complex genesis of Zionism, Friedman crudely accuses Zionists of labelling their opponents antisemites. He even claims that from the 1960s Zionist scholars colluded to attack the “new left” that had begun to challenge the hegemony of Zionism. Collusion, he proclaims, is manifest in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organisation focusing on combatting antisemitism and ensuring that the memory of the Holocaust is preserved. Through the IRHA’s definition of antisemitism critics of Zionism are characterised as antisemites, according to Friedman.
One can agree or disagree with the IRHA definition of antisemitism, but to impute collusion among “Zionist” scholars smacks of paranoia. The ability of Jew-hatred to morph through the millennia has long been noted. In the ancient world the Jew was a classic other; in Christian medieval Europe a sinister deviant, and in the post-Enlightenment world an alien, defined by race. Many scholars of antisemitism see anti-Zionism as the latest incarnation – a hygienic form of Jew-hate.
It is certainly apparent that much anti-Zionist discourse displays well-worn anti-Jewish tropes that have blended with an emergent ‘Third-Worldist’ weltanschauung. This has laid the foundations for a “settler colonialist” paradigm that stamps Israel as both uniquely evil and an outpost of European (‘white’) colonialism. Such thinking informed the United Nations Resolution 3379 in 1975 equating Zionism with Racism (overturned in 1991) and was vividly on display at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances in Durban in 2001 (Shain 2023, 145-47).
Friedman fails to appreciate this. He even mocks those who identify Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite, despite the former Labour Party leader consorting with and inviting known terrorists to parliament. Does Friedman not know that Corbyn defended Stephen Sizer, a former Church of England Vicar, for publicizing a shocking conspiratorial antisemitic website? Is he unaware that Corbyn stood with Raed Salah who claimed American Jews working with Israel organised 9/11? Four thousand Jews were warned not to come to work on that day, according to Salah. Six years later the same Salah revived the “blood libel” – that Jews used the blood of gentile children for the baking of matzah (Lipstadt 2019, 55-67).
It is this blindness that informs Good Jew, Bad Jew. Friedman is oblivious to 100 000 Jews being slaughtered in the Ukraine in 1920-21, the pernicious spread of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a foundational antisemitic text and a ‘Warrant for Genocide’ in the words of Norman Cohn) and burgeoning Jewish exclusion throughout Europe in the 1930s. None of this enters Friedman’s critique. Instead, contemporary issues are read backwards in service of his anti-Zionism.
Argument is healthy. And Zionism can be challenged. But, when all is said and done, the conclusion reached by Walter Laqueur writing on the “New Left” in the 1970s still has resonance:
Zionism no doubt can be subjected to trenchant criticism from different points of view. But as a national movement and a Weltanschauung, its validity can neither be proved nor refuted; it is as legitimate, or illegitimate, as other national movements or nations. And as far as anti-Semitism is concerned, Zionism has a strong case; its analysis has been more fully confirmed by recent history than the predictions of its critics (Laqueur 1971, 574).
Those disagreeing with Laqueur are not “Bad Jews” – but nor are those who agree with him.
- Milton Shain is Emeritus Professor of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town. His most recent book Fascists, Fabricators and Fantasists: Antisemitism in South Africa from 1948 to the Present appeared in 2023 (see JA review https://www.jewishaffairs.co.za/fascists-fabricators-and-fantasists-antisemitism-in-south-africa-from-1948-to-the-present/)
References
Books
Butterfield, Herbert. 1973. The Whig Interpretation of History. London: Penguin.
Kirsch, Adam. 2024. On Settler Colonialism. Ideology, Violence, and Justice. New York:W W Norton & Company.
Lipstadt, Deborah. 2019. Antisemitism. Here and Now. Australia: Scribe Publications.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. 2009. A History of Christianity. London: Penguin Books.
Leo Pinsker. 1984. “Auto-Emancipation”, in Hertzberg, Arthur. The Zionist Idea. New York: Atheneum.
Sachar, Howard M. 1979. A History of Israel. From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Shain, Milton. 2023. Fascists, Fabricators and Fantasists. Antisemitism in South Africa from 1948 to the Present. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Johannesburg.
Small (ed) Charles Asher. 2016. The Yale Papers. Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective. New York: ISGAP.
Stein, Kenneth. 1984. The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.
Tosh, John. 1991. The Pursuit of History. London and New York: Second Edition, Longman.
Yakobson, Alexander and Rubinstein, Amnon. 2009. Israel and the Family of Nations. London and New York: Routledge.
Journals
Freeman, Ben. 2025. “Jewish Indigeneity to the Land of Israel.” Fathom, February 2025. https://fathomjournal.org/jewish- of-israel/ indigeneity-to-the-land-
Laqueur, Walter. 1971. “Zionism, the Marxist Critique, and the Left.” Dissent December: 560-74.
Sternhell, Zeev. 2010. “In Defence of Liberal Zionism.” New Left Review 62 (March/April): 99-114.
