Introduction

We asked four writers to answer these two questions: What is your own relationship to the state of Israel? And how do you think that American Jews, as a whole, should relate to Israel? These weren't, so to speak, the original Dissent questions or, better, the questions first pondered by the Marxist radicals who founded the magazine. As younger socialists, back in the 1930s and 1940s, they would have asked, "How should democratic leftists respond to a nationalist movement like Zionism?" Because most of these leftists were Jewish, the question might have had a special resonance for them, but they would have denied this. They were good internationalists, opposed to every form of nationalism, including their own, which wasn't really "theirs."