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Introduction : A double grief, and a hope -- Part one. Europeans. Hannah Arendt : left, right, or wrong? -- Arthur Koestler : the Zionist as anti-semite -- Part two. Socialists. Maxime Rodinson : Marxism, Zionism, and the Arab world -- Isaac Deutscher : a very Jewish Jew -- Albert Memmi : Zionism as national liberation -- Fred Halliday : the journey of a '68er -- Part three. Americans. I.F. Stone : the limits of Isaiah -- Noam Chomsky : the responsibility of intellectuals -- Conclusion : The genius for failure.

In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how eight prominent twentieth-century intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism, and then with Israel and its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal and the political, the book includes philosophers, historians, journalists, and activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, I.F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. In their engagement with Zionism, these influential thinkers also wrestled with the twentieth century's most crucial political dilemmas: socialism, nationalism, democracy, colonialism, terrorism, and anti-Semitism. In other words, in probing Zionism, they confronted the very nature of modernity and the often catastrophic histories of our time. By examining these leftist intellectuals, Linfield also seeks to understand how the contemporary Left has become focused on anti-Zionism and how Israel itself has moved rightward.

ABSTRACT: In Left Is Not Woke , the moral philosopher Susan Neiman attempts a sorely needed intervention against the woke left in the hope of rescuing it from its addiction to identity politics in their most reduc tive form. Neiman is the author of, among other acclaimed works, Learning from the Germans , an account of how a country can come to terms with its barbaric past. Her new book will hopefully be read by those whom it critiques. It is also a missed opportunity. Neiman is an American who directs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam; she has lived in Germany for many years (and has written about the experience of being a Jew in Germany). Despite its essen tial insights, her book illustrates the great intellectual gap between the left in the United States and Europe—in ways that, frankly, left me profoundly dispirited. And it illustrates the intellectual abstraction that bedevils parts of the left.

The very posing of this question is profoundly dispiriting. It shows how bad (that is, not left-wing) the political situation of contemporary Israel is; how radically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has deteriorated; and how historically ignorant and blindly anti-Israeli today's American left is. The short answer is: yes, of course. Zionism has been Leninist, socialdemocratic, liberal, secular, pacifist, anti-imperialist, proletarian, even, until this became impossible, binational. It has also been militaristic, authoritarian, bourgeois, racist, religious, messianic, imperialist, and neofascist.

At a downtown Manhattan dinner party several months ago, the name of a widely respected journalist—author of an acclaimed book on genocide in Africa—was mentioned. This is a man whose work, though not immune to criticism, is generally regarded as brilliant and humane. "Why, he's a Zionist!" one guest hissed, with the contempt that in previous eras would have been reserved for fascists or members of the Ku Klux Klan. Everyone at the table seemed to nod with satisfaction—we're done with him!—until I said, somewhat stumblingly, "Well, I am too. I mean, I believe in a state for the Jewish people." The other guests—left-wing academics, accomplished people, smart people, good people, some of whom I not only like but love—looked dumbfounded. An embarrassed silence ensued.

A review essay on books by: (1)Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012); (2)Cershorn Corenberg, The Unmaking of Israel (HarperCollins, 2011); (3)Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me (Hill and Wang, 2012); and (4)I.F. Stone, Underground to Palestine and Reflections Thirty Years Later (Hutchinson & Co., 1979).

It would be easy—and perhaps entertaining—to write a history of Maoism in France that would lampoon the misjudgments, blind spots, and grandiosity of the movement. (Maoism in the United States never attained the power or cachet that it garnered in France; Maoism in certain other places—such as Peru, as embodied in the Shining Path, and Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge—was no laughing matter.) After all, chastising the Left of the 1960s, and blaming it for as many contemporary ills as is conceivably possible, has, apparently, become a requirement of political discourse in both the United States (see under: Bill Ayers) and France (note Nicolas Sarkozy's linkage of riots in immigrant suburbs with the student radicals of 1968). It is to Richard Wolin's great credit that he abstains from the seductions of derision—though not from the responsibilities of criticism—in The Wind from the East , his history of Maoism in the French Left and, in particular, of the influence that China's Cultural Revolution exerted on French intellectuals.