Review: The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, by Susie Linfield

The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky , by Susie Linfield. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. 400 pages. $32.50 cloth, $20.00 paper. The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky bears a subtitle that is a grave misnomer. Of the “Left” intellectuals treated in this book, all but one—former New Left Review editorial board member Fred Halliday—are Jewish. Not that there is anything wrong with Susie Linfield’s focus on Jewish intellectuals in itself. At a time when critics of Israel are being wantonly targeted as anti-Semites, a book that offers a broad spectrum of Jewish responses to Zionism valuably reminds us of the long and venerable tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism. It is no accident that this selection sells the Left short. It is one thing that the anti-Zionist Left is rarely invoked except as an anonymous block (“Many if not most leftists rejected the very existence of a state for the Jewish people” [p. 209]); it is another thing that this “Left,” despite being supposedly in thrall to third-world nationalisms, is almost entirely Euro-American. How is it possible to write a book that pretends to be an account of Zionism and the Left without including—except in perfunctorily negative asides—Edward Said, whose “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” remains a classic and remarkably generous Left engagement with that ideology and its consequences.* …