BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Jewish not Zionist
By Marilyn Garson
Circaidy Gregory Press (UK edition 2025)
REVIEW BY FELICITY LAURENCE
Marilyn Garson’s book Jewish not Zionist was published in late 2024 in her home country of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has now been republished in a UK edition, by Circaidy Gregory Press, because of its acute relevance to everyone here too who is concerned with what it means when someone says they are Jewish, but not Zionist, at this time. Marilyn Garson looks not only at the crux of what it is to be Jewish, but also, of what it is to be human, and fellow-human. As quoted on the front cover of the UK edition, the book is indeed ‘essential reading for Jews and non-Jews alike’ in these days of the confusion so often expressed about the tangled and varying interrelationships between Jewish people, Judaism, Zionism and Israel.
Although Garson’s story takes place in Aotearoa New Zealand, she brings to it her lived experience across the world: her Zionist upbringing in Canada, her training in philosophy and other disciplines, her journey from and then back into Judaism, and her work over many years in the war grounds of Afghanistan, Cambodia and, for four years, Gaza.
When Garson returned to New Zealand in late 2015 from Gaza, having lived through Israel’s massive bombing campaign of 2014, she embarked upon her first book Still Lives: A memoir of Gaza which re-
counts her time there and the lives of the talented and vital young people with whom she worked to help develop the various enterprises to which they were dedicated. With this story, she wanted to puncture the dehumanisation of Palestinian people that she had encountered so repeatedly throughout her life, and to open up some new understandings both within her religious community and beyond it.
But she found herself the recipient of outrage from her own synagogue, and from further afield. She was accused of treachery simply for having lived and worked in Gaza, and her attempts to argue the equal humanity of the Palestinian people were buried in the sustained abuse that poured upon her, unceasingly, from the community to which she had thought she belonged.
IMMENSELY THOUGHT- PROVOKING
While Jewish not Zionist chronicles this traumatic experience, it is also the story of her survival of it, and the subsequent founding of the group Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ) (AJV) for those who take a critical view of Zionism, who see Palestinian people as having equal human rights, and who want to explore their own stance as Jews of the diaspora.
Her introductory explication of ‘Why I am an anti-Zionist’ reflects:
‘Anti-Zionist Jews walk a paradoxical path of loss, exclusion and discovery as we outgrow everything we have been told. We situate our Jewish selves in the actual world before our eyes. The motif of passage is familiar to us. We are inveterate wanderers, explorers, guests on the threshold hoping to be welcome.’
Part One describes her return to New Zealand from Gaza, the ostracism from her synagogue, the silencing of her voice in many other public spaces, and the profound trauma, both mental and physical, that she endured over a period of several years. Then comes the story of her emergence from this, and her co-founding of AJV, as described above, which now has a strong profile and representation across many institutions including at governmental level in the country.
Part Two starts with two major essays, respectively on human rights and on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism (the IHRAWDA, usually abbreviated to the IHRA).
Both discussions are immensely thought-provoking. Her discussion of the IHRA constitutes a seminal analysis of this ‘definition’ of antisemitism, which was never intended to be the final word, has no legal status despite its adoption by so many official organisations, and was in fact renounced by its author more than seven years ago for being badly misused to stifle free speech.
PROFOUNDLY ENRICHING
Garson argues that:
‘The IHRA[WDA] is a definition, a project and a strategy of influence. […] It is the enforcement regime of the Zionist project of occupation and power.
The IHRA definition has hemmed in the space of speech and protest, rendered statements of Palestinian identity and rights suspect, foreclosed on millennia of Jewish pluralism, and elevated political difference to the absolute wrong of racism. […] Every message must now be filtered (or rammed) through a language that places Zionist-Jewish discomfort before Palestinian survival.’
A further invaluable aspect of the book is the interweaving throughout of posts from press articles and the AJV blog, each one a short but sharply illuminating reflection on its particular topic; collectively, these provide a riveting and enlightening counterpoint to the personal narrative. The book concludes with her ‘Afterword: the new Jewish International’, which discusses, in her words, the ‘growing presence of Jewishness beyond Zionism’.
A reader of this book has noted that: “For people like me, who are not Jewish, this book brings welcome assistance in the struggle to make sense of and to distinguish between Jewish race, religion and culture, and, when looking at ‘Judaism’ and ‘Zionism’, to distinguish the religious and the political. People like Marilyn Garson are ideally placed to help develop the growing movement for united anti-racism across the world.”
For those of Jewish heritage, like me and so many others all over the country, whether religious or secular, who can neither identify with nor support Israel’s actions – and who are often confronted by family and friends who take another view – the book is at once profoundly enriching in its huge sweep of experience and knowledge, and a source of solace and wisdom.
Buy from kaygreen.blog/2025/02/17 or email KayGreen [email protected] Or ask in Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings, or your local bookshop, for Jewish not Zionist
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