The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left by Michael R. Fischbach (review)

University trends come and go, but spirited, regularly agonized, discussion of Israel, Zionism and Palestine abides. Recent years in particular have seen waves of activism on a number of campuses under the banner of the movement urging Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. While the BDS Movement has, for now, singularly failed to achieve its larger political and economic goals, it has succeeded in, depending on one's point of view, galvanizing, or traumatizing, any number of campuses. Of course, we cannot know whether today's activists will carry their experiences beyond university to their professional and civic lives. Yet they, and their teachers, would do well to remember that today's controversies have a history. Especially now, when, owing to Bernie Sanders's impressive, if ultimately unsuccessful, bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and the growing prominence of younger activists and politicians has breathed new life into the American Left.

Thus, The Movement and the Middle East, by Michael R. Fischbach, Professor of History at Virginia's Randolph-Macon College, comes at an opportune time. The book's chief argument is in the subtitle, which Fischbach well proves through ample documentation. Looking at the many, many sources in the book's footnotes left this reader thinking that in addition to their value as historical evidence, they are a cornucopia of teaching materials, especially for undergraduates engaged in their own explorations of the confluences and strains of their own political, religious, class and ethnic identities.

It is helpful to see what this book is and is not. Fischbach's scholarly intervention is in the history of the American Left, which has often passed over the internal battles over Israel/Palestine he documents at length. One of his lengthy footnotes, for instance, lists all the works about the antiwar movement that omit the issue (230, note 3). He amply demonstrates the extent and intensity of arguments about Israel coursing through the American Left from the 1960s to the 1980s, when his chronicle reaches its terminus.

The book is, for better or worse, much less an intervention in American Jewish history. He presents no historical context for the rich history of pre-1960s American Jewish Leftism from which many of his protagonists emerged, chronicled so well by Tony Michels, the late Ezra Mendelsohn and others, or for the history of American Jewish Anti-Zionism (amazingly, the American Council for Judaism nowhere appears). Nor does he set the Jewish Left activism of the period in the context of all the other fronts of Jewish political activism of those years. Crucially, Fischbach hardly mentions the Soviet Jewry movement. This omission matters not only for its being a different front of Jewish political activism, but also for its centrality to the Cold War politics that so decisively affected the story Fischbach aims to tell. The tapestry of countercultural activists described in works like Gal Beckerman's When They Come for Us We'll Be Gone (2010), and Yossi Klein Halevi's essential Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (2014, first published in 1995), is nowhere to be found. These were also the years of Jewish countercultural spiritual revival, of the rise of the Havurot, and of groups like Yavneh, chronicled by the late Benny Kraut in The Greening of Orthodox Judaism (2011). These, too, go unmentioned, even though some of the participants in Fischbach's story, like Michael Lerner and Arthur Waskow, were involved in both. And Meir Kahane was then offering his own sort of radical challenge to bourgeois Jewish liberalism. Another key omission is the parallel reversal in those years on the other side of the political spectrum, to wit, how after 1967, Israel, once a liberal cause, became identified with the right, and evangelical and other traditionalist Christians who had formerly disdained Zionism came to embrace it.

Above all, Fischbach throughout largely records but scarcely...