Content area
Full Text
The Lions' Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, by Susie Linfield. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. 389 pages. $32.50.
Reviewed by John Jacobs
In The Lions' Den, a study of Zionism, Israel, and the Left, Susie Linfield, who teaches cultural journalism at New York University, explores relevant components of the ideas of eight prominent 20th century writers - Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Maxime Rodinson, Isaac Deutscher, Albert Memmi, Fred Halliday, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Linfield describes the backgrounds and upbringing of each of her subjects, the works they discussed Israel or Zionism in, and changes in their positions over time.
Her thesis is that changing attitudes toward Israel on the Left can be attributed to "the transformation of the Left itself" (p. 4). The Left, as Linfield sees it, had, in an earlier part of the 20th century, defined itself first and foremost as anti-fascist but began, in the second half of that century, to characterize itself as, above all, anti-imperialist. This shift within the Left, according to Linfield, helps to explain the increasingly strong criticism of Israel on the Left in recent decades.
Linfield makes her political perspective quite clear. She is a Zionist, and asserts that "the goal of the Zionist movement was to generate a thoroughgoing cultural tion and a new Hebrew democracy" (p. 305). She is also a sharp critic of the occu pation, and of Israel's settlement policy, but is a critic who rejects both the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) and one-state solution...