When a Christian Zionist Took on Jewish Anti-Zionists

With so much discussion in the Jewish community these days concerning anti-Zionism and antisemitism, it’s fascinating to recall a remarkable critique of Jewish anti-Zionists that was authored seventy years ago this summer by an American Christian Zionist.

It was written by Thomas J. Sugrue, a Catholic, who was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and The American Magazine and spent six months in Israel in 1948-49.

Sharing his observations of the new state in The Zionist Quarterly in the summer of 1951, Sugrue occasionally indulged in the kind of rhetoric typical of early journalistic affection for Israel— “weather-kissed kibbutzniks,” a taxi driver pointing out the hill “where Samson was born”— but mostly his essay was a heartfelt reflection on the meaning of the Jewish state and its place in the world.

Sugrue described how, upon his return to New York City after his Middle East journey, he was not surprised to encounter Christian acquaintances who hated Israel because its existence contradicted their theological belief “that the Jews are destined, because of their crime of deicide, to wander forever through the earth, homeless and wretched.”

But Sugrue was shocked to also discover, in his social and professional gatherings, Jews who were against Israel.

“The anti-Israel Jew baffled me from the moment I saw his face change and his eyes shift while I spoke enthusiastically of the social pattern of Israel and the magical serenity of the sabras,” Sugrue wrote. 

“The anti-Israel Jew baffled me from the moment I saw his face change and his eyes shift while I spoke enthusiastically of the social pattern of Israel and the magical serenity of the sabras,” Sugrue wrote. “I was acquainted with anti-Zionism of the pre-Israel type, but I could not, for the moment, adapt this attitude to the world of post-Israel Jewry. The state was a fact…[Yet] they wanted to hear bad news [about Israel], news of dangerous trends and wicked alliances…What sort of Jew was it who didn’t want to hear good news about it?”

The “pre-Israel” Jewish anti-Zionists in the United States to whom Sugrue referred fell into three categories. There were some officials of groups such as the American Jewish Committee, who opposed Zionism because they feared a Jewish state would endanger their American citizenship; and there were some Orthodox Jews who believed Jewish statehood belonged only in a future messianic era. However, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Israel’s creation, most members of both groups shifted from anti-Zionism to acceptance of the Jewish state.

The third anti-Zionist faction, however, were the diehards. Many were connected to the American Council for Judaism, which had been created in 1942 by anti-Zionist Reform rabbis. They argued that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality, and that Jews should be scattered around the world in order to spread Judaic principles. They continued clinging to those notions in the years following Israel’s creation.

But Sugrue didn’t believe they were actually motivated by those theological principles. His conversations with anti-Zionist Jews convinced him that something else lay behind their position.

The truth, he argued, is that anti-Zionist Jews simply “long desperately for the privilege of fading into the American pattern.” Their chief concern is their fear of “irritating the latent anti-Semitism of the watching Gentiles.”

The “fallacy in the reasoning” of the “sleek and slick and well-turned-out” Jewish anti-Zionists is the assumption that rejecting Israel will enable them to escape antisemitism. What the anti-Zionist Jew needed to recognize—according to Sugrue—is that “the more he assimilates, the more he camouflages his identity, the more he imitates the 100% Americans, the more he heads straight for whatever concentration camp—heaven forfend—may in the future be set up in America.”

Sugrue was not predicting a Holocaust in the United States, but rather imagining the fate that likely would befall Jews—even Jewish anti-Zionists—in a hypothetical scenario in which extremists of either the right or the left ever were to rise to power.

“No matter what method brings the loss of our freedom, if it goes, the assimilationist Jew will suffer,” Sugrue predicted.

“No matter what method brings the loss of our freedom, if it goes, the assimilationist Jew will suffer,” Sugrue predicted. A fascist regime would persecute Jews “for living among the Gentiles and making money as they do,” while a Communist government would target even the anti-Zionist Jew “as a rich capitalist, and his Jewishness will be reason for shooting him early.”

Sugrue’s critique did not pull punches. Jewish anti-Zionists, he wrote, “are unhappy people, and they project their unhappiness into theories, prejudices and neurotic accusations.” They “need therapy, perhaps of the kind discovered by Sigmund Freud, but rather than accept this they would try to put a roadblock across the highway of history, seek to jettison a young nation, deprive the persecuted Jews of the world of an opportunity for salvation and a homeland…”

Sugrue concluded with an anecdote about a meeting he recently had with a group of Israelis who were studying at universities in the Boston area. One of the Israelis remarked, “I can always tell a Jew in this country. If I ask him what he is and he says, ‘I am an American,’ I know he is a Jew.”

“A young Israeli finds it irrational to imagine a Jew anywhere in the world who is not proud of his heritage,” Sugrue continued. “So do I, as I find it irrational to imagine a Christian not being continuously happy in the faith of which he is a part…That such a generation of Jews should have been brought into the world in the twentieth century is, by the most scrupulous standards, a miracle.”

Just two years after his essay in The Zionist Quarterly, Sugrue passed away during surgery. Although taken from this world at the young age of 45, Sugrue left behind a notable literary legacy—seven books and hundreds of articles—including the food for thought contained in his unique outsider’s view of the contemporary Jewish condition.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.