https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/a_walk_in_the_lions_den_zionism_and_the_left.html
I was on a speaking tour discussing “When Zionism Became a Dirty Word.” My wife warned me that I will be walking into a lion’s den.
Susie Linfield was at a pleasant, tony New York dinner party, until she realized she was in the lion’s den as the only Zionist present willing to speak up. The experience inspired her book, The Lions’ Den: Zionism from the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (Yale University Press, 2019). The book is a brilliant, intellectual, sociological exploration of eight popular, prolific thinkers and writers. Her focus is on their ideologies regarding the modern Jewish people; our track-switch from religious faith to political and military creeds; and the great love of our life, the inamorata State of Israel.
Israel was conceived, founded, and remains in stewpots of controversy and derisiveness. At the dinner party, one guest disparagingly dismisses the work of a particular journalist because, “oh, he’s a Zionist!” Condescension fills the air. Then Linfield retorts with, “‘Well, so am I.’ A frozen, stunned silence ensues … [as] they shoot pitying glances at my partner.”
Linfield’s subjects are not all consumed by anti-Israel ideology. Maxime Rodinson, Albert Memmi, I.F. Stone, and Fred Halliday intellectually and ideologically struggle about Israel’s right to exist and the behavior of the Jews and Arabs. “Rodinson was acutely aware of, and unsentimental about, the consequences of the Arab world’s underdevelopment, which is part of the realist Marxist tradition.” The book “is not a general survey” of the Left’s relationship with Zionism or the relationship of Jews with the Left. It is a series of portraits uncovering a rich, fraught, sometimes buried intellectual history, tackling “the Zionist Question.” The points of view of her subjects are meticulously researched. There are 34 pages of footnotes and an equally long bibliography.
