Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

My Father and the Withering of Liberal Zionism

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“The country is now Eretz Israel and that’s the way it stays.” So Leonard Waldman wrote in a 1948 letter to his family in Montreal, from what is now known as the state of Israel. His experience in the war that led to Israel’s founding would stay with him his entire life, shaping his political outlook and that of his children — a Zionist ideology tempered by socialist values and a desire for peace. “Our religion was Labor Zionism and our god was Israel,” the novelist Ayelet Waldman writes in this intimate portrait of her father. But since the October 7 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Gaza, which has seen even many liberal Israelis turn their backs on the plight of the Palestinians, Ayelet has come to question the narrative that Leonard laid over their lives. In this epic personal and political history, she explores the elisions and repressed memories that form the basis of that narrative — and whether a liberal form of Zionism has any hope of saving Israel from itself.

—Ryu Spaeth, features editor, New York 

My Father and the Withering of Liberal Zionism Was my family’s dream of a Jewish socialist utopia all a lie?

Photo: Courtesy of Ayelet Waldman
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