Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
A sweeping and revelatory history of the hidden tradition of Jewish thinkers who opposed Zionism, from Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser. In Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, Benjamin Moser uncovers a suppressed tradition that has shaped Jewish thought for generations. Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists, and politicians—from Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America—Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism’s moral and political stakes—often at devastating personal cost, including censorship, exile, and death. Their lives form a sweeping, global narrative that dismantles a powerful myth: that anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. Spanning continents and centuries, these voices—people from the right and the left, Reform and Orthodox, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, men and women, gay and straight—differ sharply in belief and background, yet converge on a shared warning about the consequences of a nationalist project built on exclusion. What emerges is not only a rediscovered tradition of Jewish moral thought, but a startling reappraisal of Zionism itself. Moser’s work restores the full scale and depth of Jewish ethical imagination, affirming that Judaism is older and larger than any single political project. Lucid, unsparing, and deeply humane, Anti-Zionism cements Moser’s place as one of our foremost Jewish writers and presents a framework through which this history—and its meanings—will be understood for years to come. BENJAMIN MOSER is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. Sontag: Her Life and Work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, and The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters appeared in 2023. He completed the present book at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Laila Lalami is the author of six books, including The Moor’s Account [https://lailalalami.com/the-moors-account/about/], which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; The Other Americans [https://lailalalami.com/the-other-americans/about/], which won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction; and The Dream Hotel [https://lailalalami.com/the-dream-hotel/buy-the-book/], which was a national bestseller, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and was a finalist for the Edgar Award. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in the The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Currently, she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.