Shabbat Reading: Susie Linfield's The Lions' Den

#whatireadovershabbat Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (Yale University Press, 2019)

“The Left had betrayed the Jewish people time and again.” These words seared themselves in my mind as I read The Lions’ Den, an unapologetic study of the Left’s obsession with Zionism. They echo what we saw this week: The most twisted readings of the left political tradition used to justify violence so abhorrent that even its planners, confronted by near-universal repulsion, are now trying to deny that it occurred. Linfield is smart to focus on Jewish thinkers—people tied to Jews and conflicted about and critical of the Left’s Israel-fixation. Had she done otherwise, you’d throw the book down in disgust before you learned anything.