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Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left by Benjamin Balthaser. Verso, 320 pages. 2025.
When I was eighteen, I was sent on a trip to Poland to visit the camps. I was reluctant to go because I knew what I would see, and I knew how I’d feel about it. What I did not expect, and what fundamentally changed me, were the monumental remnants of a millennium of rooted Jewish life in a place where I’d imagined mainly mud and death.
The most powerful of these was in Warsaw’s POLIN Museum, where I walked into a room and felt this history’s presence above me. I looked up and saw a gleaming vault, a dome of straight edges extending up into darkness, lacquered wood painted in living primary colors: red vines sprouting blossoms over the blue of heaven, around which turned the zodiac, its figures rendered beautifully but not gravely, almost with humor. Two griffins flanked the tablets of the Law, and at the corners of the wooden firmament were parchment-colored cartouches lined with Hebrew calligraphy. I had never seen anything like it. The Gwoździec Synagogue, of which this was a partial reconstruction, had been burned to the ground, along with nearly every other such wooden shul in Eastern Europe during the early 1940s. I had gone my entire life believing that Jews had no architecture of our own, no history of painting, that we abhorred the image. I was shocked, first, that we had built such colossal wonders for ourselves, and then that we had forgotten them, allowing not only the wood but the memory to be consumed by the flames.
