Geoffrey Levin’s Our Palestine Question and Oren Kroll-Zeldin’s Unsettled are two of the latest works of scholarship detailing Jewish-American criticism of Israel. At a time when the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has never been stronger, both books offer important rebuttals to those who insist on equating Jewish identity with support for Israel. Our Palestine Question chronicles the years 1948–1978, unpacking an overlooked period of Jewish institutional opposition to Zionism and concern for Palestinian rights. Unsettled takes place half a century later and follows the stories of young American Jews resisting the Israeli occupation today through grassroots activism. Together, Levin’s and Kroll-Zeldin’s books challenge a central assumption that underlies popular perceptions of the Jewish-American relationship to Israel. They show that American Jews’ Zionism has never been constant, and that there has always been a passionate, well-reasoned, and decidedly Jewish critique of the Israeli state.

Our Palestine Question unravels the myth that Jewish Americans were unequivocally supportive of Israel in its early years, reminding readers that both anti-Zionism and Zionist support for Palestinian rights have dotted Jewish engagement with Palestine/Israel throughout its existence. Importantly, Levin illustrates that the broader supportive consensus around Israel that emerged following the 1967 War, as well as the repression and censorship from the Jewish establishment, are not natural outgrowths of an inevitable Jewish-American position. Instead, such approaches were the result of particular decisions and political forces, namely a robust, coordinated campaign on the part of Israeli officials to eliminate threats to the Jewish state’s ideological agenda. Amidst relentless attempts to ahistorically construe Jewish support for Israel as a matter of primordial religious or ethnic identity, Our Palestine Question crucially reminds readers that national belonging is a social construct that often serves the interests of the powerful.

While Our Palestine Question methodically traces an earlier epoch of Jewish anti-Zionism and support for Palestinians, Unsettled more directly intervenes in current debates surrounding Jewish-American dissent by arguing that young Jewish-American activists’ support for Palestinian rights is an expression of their Jewish values. Though often maligned by powerful actors as “self-hating” Jews, Kroll-Zeldin convincingly demonstrates that Jewish anti-occupation activists are driven by their love for their Jewish identities. He argues that while Jewish-American activists are certainly motivated by their opposition to Israeli apartheid and occupation, they are also, if not primarily, motivated by their community’s complicity in such crimes and their desire to transform the Jewish-American relationship to Palestine/Israel. Unsettled thus makes an important intervention into the mainstream discourse by demonstrating how young Jewish Americans are largely motivated by their Jewishness to advocate on behalf of Palestinians.

Addressing different historical eras and players, both authors challenge the “distancing hypothesis,” which maintains that young American Jews are becoming estranged from Israel due to assimilation and a weakened sense of Jewish identity. Instead, Levin and Kroll-Zeldin agree that Jewish criticism of Israel often comes from a place of care and attachment. As Kroll-Zeldin writes, “young Jewish American Palestinian solidarity activists are targeting mainstream Jewish institutions in order to transform the Jewish community they so deeply love, not to destroy it, as their critics so often claim” (p. 98). As Levin similarly concludes at the end of Our Palestine Question, “While disinterest, silence, or even passive acquiescence could arguably indicate the nonexistence of a global Jewish politics, dissent does the opposite… some American Jews today see their support for Palestinian rights as a meaningful extension of their Jewish identity” (p. 226).

Despite reaching similar conclusions, these books use distinct methods to examine two chronological periods with radically different political climates. Through a careful, historical analysis that draws from archives, personal correspondences, and declassified Israeli documents, Levin details the efforts of prominent Jewish (and a couple of Palestinian) leaders as they sought to shape the American relationship to Israel through largely institutional channels. Taking the reader behind the scenes during a crucial period of American foreign policy formation, Levin offers vibrant portraits of figures such as Don Peretz, William Zukerman, Fayez Sayegh, and Elmer Berger. This deep dive into individual stories, along with his pragmatic tone, stands in contrast to Kroll-Zeldin’s ethnographic analysis of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, and All That’s Left. Through interviews, participant observation, and auto-ethnographic reflection, Kroll-Zeldin offers a highly sympathetic and affective account of today’s Jewish-American dissenters.

Unlike Levin’s characters, who often had the ear of US presidents, corresponded with high-ranking Israeli officials, and were on the CIA’s payroll, Kroll-Zeldin’s interlocutors are grassroots activists who choose to operate outside the realm of formal politics. Accordingly, while greater in number, Kroll-Zeldin’s protagonists are much further from the loci of governmental power than Levin’s. Like the subjects of his book, Kroll-Zeldin maintains that “social transformation requires harnessing people power rather than relying on community leaders or elected officials to make change” (p. 29). With Unsettled’s activists thus serving as a direct foil to the community leaders and elected officials profiled in Our Palestine Question, the two books shed light on opposing tactics for social change as well as how wider geopolitical developments informed these divergent strategies.

Throughout Unsettled, Kroll-Zeldin is decidedly optimistic about the impact of Jewish anti-occupation activism. He lauds the model of change of groups like IfNotNow, which maintains that reducing Jewish-American support for Israel will transform public opinion and ultimately end US complicity in Israeli crimes. In particular, he contends, activists seek to polarize those who are neutral on Palestine/Israel by raising awareness about the brutality of Israel’s occupation. As one of Kroll-Zeldin’s interviewees explains, “once you… bring people’s attention to the ways that their lifestyles and their institutions are actively complicit, that’s when the game starts to change” (p. 174). Like his interlocutors, Kroll-Zeldin’s model of social change relies on two assumptions: 1) recognition of complicity in Israeli oppression will lead to moral outrage and 2) moral outrage and public disapproval will change US foreign policy.

In contrast to Kroll-Zeldin’s celebratory portrayal of his subjects’ activism, Levin chronicles the ultimate failure of Jewish-American criticism of Israel to change Israeli policy. In his conclusion, Levin explains that despite “Zionism’s rhetoric about global Jewish peoplehood,” his subjects’ Jewish identity gave them little political power on issues related to Palestinian affairs. Focusing on the case of Breira, which mirrors the politics of organizations like J Street today, Levin concedes that even greater Jewish communal clout “likely would have had little influence on Israeli policy” (p. 223). In sum, even though Levin’s characters had direct influence in the American government and were often courted, rather than shunned, by Israeli officials, the author ultimately concludes that their being Jewish gave them minimal sway over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. As he bluntly states, “Israel had no respect for such diasporic dissent, which it viewed as naïve at best and dangerous at worst” (p. 224).

Accordingly, while Levin offers a sobering analysis of how broader geopolitical forces repeatedly undermine Jewish-American attempts to advocate for Palestinians, Kroll-Zeldin paints a more hopeful picture. Such optimism is evident throughout Unsettled, namely in chapter four, where he details the ways in which Jewish and Palestinian grassroots activists are resisting the occupation on the ground together in Palestine/Israel. Kroll-Zeldin’s analysis emphasizes how “co-resistance,” or direct actions carried out jointly by Jews and Palestinians, offer material benefits to Palestinians in the West Bank. In addition to the ways such actions serve practical functions such as protecting Palestinians from settler and military violence, Kroll-Zeldin also argues that clearing roads, planting trees, and holding Shabbat dinners in vulnerable Palestinian villages are “changing the politics of Jewish identity” (p. 156). Levin and Kroll-Zeldin both concede that Jewish-American dissent is not going to end the occupation any time soon, despite the hopes of some early Israeli doves and Palestinians. As Kroll-Zeldin admits, “these strategies are not doing enough to erode the deeply entrenched status quo of occupation, apartheid, and Israeli state violence perpetuated against Palestinians” (p. 204). Instead, he maintains that the primary success of such activism lies in its symbolic value, namely the ways it is changing the American Jewish community.

While both authors are clear that their books tell a Jewish-American story, not a Palestinian one, their shared focus on how American Jews’ activism for Palestinian rights primarily affects American Jews, as opposed to Palestinians, raises several pressing questions. First, if Levin’s historical analysis shows that Jewish-American dissent did not change Israeli policy at a time when Israeli officials depended on them, what, then, is the value of Jewish-American dissent today when it is almost entirely dismissed by the Israeli establishment? Relatedly, when Levin writes that today’s young Jewish anti-occupation activists “have antecedents who they did not know existed,” what lessons can today’s Jewish-American critics of Israel learn from their predecessors (p. 220)? More broadly, what insights do Unsettled and Our Palestine Question offer to those whose primary goal is not a more moral or inclusive Jewish community, but, instead, the liberation of Palestine?

Both Kroll-Zeldin’s and Levin’s analyses imply that American Jews’ anti-occupation advocacy is often more so about the Jewish community than about Palestinians. As Levin demonstrates in the first half of his book, many early Jewish critics of Israel were primarily driven by internal Jewish affairs, namely concerns around the framing of Jews as a nation rather than a religion. A large portion of Our Palestine Question focuses on the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which saw itself as a universalist humanitarian organization, though it reflected the interests of an elite, relatively wealthy sector of American Jews. Guided by their liberalism, Americanism, and integrationist ideologies, the AJC did not originally oppose Zionism because of anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians, but because they felt it was important to preserve their own community’s standing as assimilated Americans. This logic, rooted in self-preservation, was mirrored by ardent anti-Zionists such as Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), who similarly saw Zionism as a threat to both Judaism and “the equality of American Jews as individual citizens of the United States” (p. 157). In other words, many early Jewish-American critics of Israel were not motivated by the threats posed by Zionism to Palestinians, but by the threats Zionism posed to Jews.

Moving from the 1950s to the 1970s, chapter six of Our Palestine Question examines Breira, the first leftist and Zionist group to advocate for a Palestinian state, or what is known today as the “two-state solution.” Unlike their predecessors in the early AJC and ACJ, Breira’s members acted from a place of attachment to the Jewish state. As Levin writes, they “came to this position not out of disdain for Israel but because its members believed that achieving Palestinian self-determination would help secure Israel’s future” (p. 11). Because of this connection to Zionism, Breira conceptualized Jews’ future, safety, and own moral standing as more deeply tied to Israeli actions, causing the group to form criticisms around Israel in relation to its members’ own identities.

Many parallels can be drawn between the work of organizations like Breira and today’s anti-occupation activists. As Levin suggests:

Levin is correct to assert that today’s activists are not outwardly driven by integrationist logic that rejects Jewish peoplehood, but instead by their deep attachment to Jewish cultural and ethnic identity. As one of Kroll-Zeldin’s interviewees explains, “I participate in Palestine solidarity activism because I want Judaism to survive. I want it to continue to be relevant, moral, powerful, and vital. I want Judaism and Jewishness to continue being a source for how to live a good life and to build a better world” (p. 8). Responding to the derision and ostracization referenced by Levin above, Unsettled demonstrates that today’s Jewish anti-occupation activists are absolutely “proud, well-meaning Jews” who care about their Jewish identity (p. 221). Kroll-Zeldin explains that many activists see their work on behalf of Palestinians as morally redeeming, if not saving, the Jewish-American community, as opposed to abandoning it. As he writes, “[t]heir drive stems from a hope that future generations of Jews will be able to experience a more holistic, inclusive, and tolerant Jewish education and practice” (p. 114). In the final section of his conclusion, entitled, “Occupation Is Not Our Judaism,” Kroll-Zeldin argues that these efforts are largely successful in “forcing a change in the American Jewish community that could eventually lead to its ability to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century” (p. 205).

Like their predecessors in Our Palestine Question, today’s Jewish activists are driven by a concern for their Jewish community and progressive values. Yet where they differ from each other is that today’s dissidents have largely organized around the presumption that Jewish-American support for Israel, in and of itself, represents a key pillar of Israeli apartheid and occupation. Though Levin does not say so directly, the historical context detailed in chapters four and five suggests that the necessity of American Jews’ support for Israel has substantially diminished since the Israeli state’s early years. As Levin details, “prior to the christening of the ‘special relationship,’ and long before the rise of a powerful right-wing brand of Christian Zionism,” Jewish-American opinion mattered deeply because Israel’s position in relation to the United States and wider Cold War geopolitical alliances was ambiguous (p. 222). Yet, as Levin explains, by the late 1950s, “Israel no longer appeared like an impediment to America’s Middle East strategy but rather like a potentially integral part of it. This development, alongside growing American cultural identification with Israel, diluted the bases of the AJC’s long-standing ‘dual loyalty’ concerns” (p. 145). Accordingly, there is no longer ambiguity around Israel’s global alliances, and support for Israel is not simply a Jewish issue, but instead a matter of American geopolitical interests rooted in the military industrial complex, Western hegemony, and Christian Evangelicalism. As a result, Jewish-American support is now less important to Israel precisely because early Zionists were so successful at securing the Israel-US alliance, namely through the Israeli “management” of American Jews, as chronicled in Our Palestine Question.

In spite of this historical context, many of the activists in Unsettled operate from the premise that Jewish support for Israel sustains its occupation and mistreatment of Palestinians. Yet, as Our Palestine Question reveals, Israeli officials sought to influence Jewish communal leaders not simply because they were Jewish, but because they held close ties to powerful US leaders and other channels of influence. In other words, Israeli officials monitored, debated, and sought to win over Jewish-American critics of Israel in its early years not because they valued an inclusive and democratic approach to Jewish peoplehood. Instead, Israel’s actions, like all states, were guided by political and economic calculations to secure its own power. In this way, Jewishness has relatively little to do with American support for Israel, since Israel routinely prioritizes its own political and economic interests as a neoliberal state over an inclusive approach to the needs and values of the Jewish people.

Our Palestine Question, accordingly, reveals two potential flaws in the thinking of Unsettled’s activists. As Kroll-Zeldin argues, many American Jews in the movement for justice in Palestine believe that their being Jewish provides symbolic and material value to the Palestinian struggle. This belief partly rests on the assumption that 1) Israel cares what Jews in the United States think because they are Jewish and 2) policy changes are largely responses to moral crises rather than broader political and economic forces. Yet, as Levin details in “Chapter Six: Zionists for Palestine,” such an approach ostensibly failed in the 1970s. As Marcia Freedman, a former Israeli-American Knesset member speaking on behalf of the Israeli left, said in a quote:

This belief that nation-states, whether Israel or the United States, respond to moral appeals over political and economic interests helps explain why the symbolic acts of Jewish solidarity with Palestinians described in Unsettled seem to have done little to prevent Israel’s current genocidal campaign. In addition, such approaches to Palestinian rights, like Breira’s in the 1970s and groups such as J Street today, sidestep the fact that the United States and Israel are both settler-colonial states guided by a shared commitment to sustaining global capitalism through Western imperialism. Accordingly, while radically transforming American Jews’ relationship to Zionism back when US foreign policy to Israel was still forming could have changed the course of the current Israel-US alliance, today that alliance is so deeply entwined with larger geopolitical and economic interests that Jewish-American dissent wields little political power.

If Jewish-American solidarity with Palestinians repeatedly fails to impact Israeli policy, as both Kroll-Zeldin and Levin’s analyses imply, what, then, is the purpose of Jewish advocacy for Palestinian rights? Both Our Palestine Question and Unsettled provide answers to this question. First, by challenging the “American Jewish institutional relationships to Israel and Zionism,” Kroll-Zeldin suggests that Jewish involvement in the Palestinian cause pressures Jewish institutions to become more politically and morally relevant (p. 203). Like Levin’s protagonists, who felt it was important to show that Israel, as an extension of their own identities, “left no stone unturned in its search for peace,” Jewish-American dissenters throughout Israel’s existence have sought to maintain Jewish moral standing by pushing for the consistent application of their progressive values in Palestine/Israel (p. 201).

Relatedly, both authors imply that Jewish involvement in the pursuit of Palestinian rights is often seen as a way to fight antisemitism. As Levin writes, “Berger contended that Zionism’s emphasis on nonreligious traits of Jews diminished Judaism and provided fuel for antisemites” (p. 156). Similarly, the AJC worried deeply about antisemitic dual loyalty charges and sought to liberalize Israelis so as to not provide fodder for antisemites who often invoked Israel’s violence against Palestinians in their anti-Jewish ideologies. While Kroll-Zeldin does not frame Jewish Palestine solidarity activism as a tool in the fight against antisemitism, he frequently references the ways such activism improves Palestinians’ and Jews’ perceptions of each other.

Rather than see Jewish advocacy on behalf of Palestinians as a purely self-serving endeavor, both the activists in Unsettled and Our Palestine Question often invoke the idea of Palestinian and Jewish interests being linked. In a letter from Don Peretz to AJC Executive Vice President John Slawson, Peretz wrote of the Palestinian issue: “only through mutual concern for each other’s problems can these peoples prosper” (p. 48). Similarly, as Kroll-Zeldin explains, today’s Jewish critics “highlight an emancipatory Jewish identity based on the understating that the liberation of all people is intimately linked to one another” (p. 94). While it is invariably true that Jewish and Palestinian liberation is bound together, just like all peoples, the leftist visionaries who coined the mutual liberation framework would never have accepted the validity of a settler-colonial state that aligns itself with the US as a stand-in for an oppressed identity. As Levin discusses in chapter four, American leftists, such as those in the Black Power movement, were clear that Israel was aligned with the capitalist and imperialist forces they fought against. Therefore, while some Jewish progressives see themselves as fighting for the liberation of Palestinians and Jews, as historically marginalized groups working in partnership, the success of early Israeli diplomats to bind Jewish identity to Zionism led well-meaning Jewish Americans, such as those of the Jewish Liberation Project, Breira, and many liberal Jews today, to find themselves defending a settler-colonial state as an expression of their progressive values. Rather than challenge the roots of oppression (i.e., capitalism, racism, and patriarchy), many Jewish Americans continue to uphold state securitization as a stand-in for Jewish safety, which then disguises ethnically-motivated self-interest in a neoliberal world order as solidarity with the oppressed.

As both Unsettled and Our Palestine Question reveal, Jewish advocates for Palestinian rights have wrestled with these contradictions for decades. As Levin powerfully details, in the late 1960s Jewish Americans suddenly found themselves at odds with the new left, who had taken up the Palestinian cause as one of antiracist and anti-imperialist politics. Today, the events of October 7th have similarly placed many progressive Jews in an untenable position in which they must choose between an anti-Western Left and their attachment to Israel. Like today’s American Jews who felt alienated by the Left on October 7th, Levin writes that for radical Jews in the 1960s and 1970s, “a choice now had to be made: embrace the Palestinian cause wholeheartedly, or try to reconcile Zionist and leftist commitments, including, perhaps, by recognizing the legitimacy of Palestinian calls for self-determination” (p. 190).

Our Palestine Question, therefore, tells a familiar story of Zionism’s ongoing inability to reconcile itself with American progressivism. In the 1950s and 1960s, the AJC had to choose between trying to make Israel less repressive or trying to silence dissent against it. After the AJC chose the latter and decided to side with organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism, groups such as the Jewish Liberation Project and Breira emerged in the 1970s to fill the void and provide a space where American Jews could be both Zionist and leftist. Despite its relative political moderacy and strategic decision to platform Israeli “establishment dissidents,” Breira ultimately failed in its mission and closed its doors in 1978. Levin attributes the collapse of Breira largely to their fateful decision to meet with leaders from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), who many American Jews saw as “terrorists bent on destroying the Jewish state” (p. 204). Accordingly, like many anti-settlement groups today that platform Israeli “establishment dissidents” to legitimize their controversial positions, providing any legitimacy to the notion of Palestinian armed resistance leads to immediate ostracization within the Jewish community.

Such attempts at moderacy, namely attempts to remain legible within the broader Jewish-American establishment, are salient themes throughout each of Levin’s chapters. In “Chapter One: Zionism’s Wayward Son,” Levin chronicles the thoroughness of Israeli officials’ attempts to shut down Don Peretz’s modest proposal to address the Arab refugee question in the 1950s. Despite largely advocating for Palestinian resettlement in other Arab countries, and not even pushing for full repatriation, Peretz endured relentless repression. Legitimacy among American Jewry did not protect Jewish-American journalist William Zukerman either, as his broad appeal worked against him. As Levin explains in “Chapter Two: A Yiddishist’s Dissent,” “Zukerman’s danger stemmed from his projection of concern for Israel and for Jews, and the fact that his critique of Israel drew from liberal ideals, values that many American Jews shared” (p. 70). Finally, Palestinian-American diplomat Fayez Sayegh similarly challenged Zionism through decidedly liberal frameworks and studiously avoided antisemitic rhetoric in his anti-Zionist advocacy. Yet, as Levin explains, “Sayegh must have felt that he was playing a game that he could never win. His Arab Information Center faced accusations of antisemitism from the ADL even before it opened its doors” (p. 224). After meeting with the AJC in the hopes that they could give him a “formula” to help Arabs learn to critique Israel in a way that would not threaten non-Zionist Jews,” it became clear that even AJC officials “could not articulate a legitimate way for Arabs to criticize Israel… accepting the idea that there was no form of anti-Zionism that was not ‘bad for the Jews’ and ultimately ‘anti-Semitic in effect’” (p. 224).

Both the Don Peretzes of Israel’s early years and the “young American Jewish ‘Don Peretzes’” of Unsettled operate from a genuine concern for Palestinian rights (p. 221). Yet both Levin and Kroll-Zeldin’s protagonists’ moderacy and failure to fully and unapologetically join the anticolonial left have arguably led to their shortcomings as allies of the Palestinian struggle. The anti-Zionist ACJ collapsed because it fought against the work of people such as Norton Mezvinsky to integrate Jewish concerns with the broader left. The AJC, unwilling to give up its role in Jewish communal politics, ultimately decided to abandon its non-Zionism and now operates as a mouthpiece for Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. And, like many liberal Zionists today, Breira found itself without a clear political path forward in the 1970s, as the Israeli right-wing won national elections and Breira became further ostracized within the Jewish community, notwithstanding its best attempts at securing Jewish, and even Israeli, legitimacy.

Today, despite their commitments to Jewish peoplehood, the organizations featured in Unsettled find themselves in a similar position as they work to provide “safe and comfortable” spaces for Jews to reconcile their leftist politics with the attachments to Israel that often accompany their Jewish identities (p. 148). Also, like their predecessors, JVP and IfNotNow lack powerful Israeli counterparts amidst the rise of Israel’s right-wing, and both find themselves sidelined by the Jewish establishment as misguided, “self-hating” Jews, despite the fact that, unlike JVP, IfNotNow has worked tirelessly to remain palatable to the mainstream Jewish community. Like many key organizations and characters in Our Palestine Question, Unsettled’s activists claim that support for Palestinians can emanate from a place of Jewish self-preservation and, for some more moderate groups, even as a corollary to Israeli security. Yet, as the constant rise and fall of Jewish organizations advocating for Palestinian rights suggests, supporting Palestinian liberation out of a particularist, Jewish self-interest through a state-centric approach to safety seems to do little to materially contribute to Palestinian liberation. Despite the contention that Jewish solidarity with Palestine meaningfully complicates tropes of Palestinian antisemitism and offers symbolic value to the Palestinian struggle, Levin’s analysis suggests that anti-Zionist Palestinians will always be deemed antisemitic (as Sayegh’s experience shows), and that being Jewish does not inherently afford American Jews influence over Israeli policies. Our Palestine Question should therefore send a clear warning to contemporary activists, such as those featured in Unsettled, that strategic moderacy and liberal identity politics cannot decolonize Palestine.

Perhaps what is needed, instead, is for more progressive Jews to join the broader working-class left, where solidarity emanates from globally unifying frameworks like collective opposition to capitalism and imperialism, rather than particularist interests based on Jewish identity. Figures like Noam Chomsky and organizations like CONAME feature briefly in Our Palestine Question. For these more radical groups, their focus was not on their own Jewish identities. They did not attempt to be relevant to mainstream Jewish institutions and they did not discuss their solidarity with Palestinians as a matter of their own safety or fight against antisemitism. As Sharon Rose, one of the few women featured in Our Palestine Question, explains, “we cast our lot with the Palestinian liberation movement… and will attempt to combat the Zionist propaganda machine… we thank our Palestinian sisters and brothers for welcoming us here… to see for ourselves the fascist nature of Zionism” (p. 191). Rather than the predominately cultural and identity-based politics featured in Unsettled, the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Left largely eschews moral appeals that aim to transform liberal institutions and instead seeks to provide material versus symbolic support to the Palestinian struggle. While some of the groups and individuals in Our Palestine Question and Unsettled only offer solidarity to Palestinians when they are disempowered or, as Peretz explained, do not “constitute a threat,” anticolonial leftists unconditionally support Palestinian self-determination (p. 48). Although perhaps uncomfortable at first for some Jews, such reconfigurations of Jewish solidarity may be necessary to more efficiently bring about the end of Israeli apartheid and occupation.

Levin and Kroll-Zeldin steer clear of such recommendations for today’s activists, limiting their analyses to the Jewish Americans advocating for Palestinians rather than suggesting what is needed to end Israeli settler colonialism. For understandable reasons, both authors seem to replicate some of their own subjects’ desire to remain legible within mainstream circles, leading their books’ conclusions to relate more to the Jewish-American community than to questions of Palestinian liberation. Yet, while some may be critical of these authors’ hesitancy to more directly engage with their findings’ implications for Palestinians, both books still do what academic scholarship does best: they honestly document historical facts and analyze data against powerful tides of harmful propaganda. Through their meticulous research and sharp insights, Unsettled and Our Palestine Question lay bare the wider social contexts that motivate, confine, and sustain Jewish-American activism on behalf of Palestinians. In this way, these two important pieces of scholarship brilliantly correct ahistorical conflations of Zionism with Jewishness, and they provide essential knowledge on the Palestinian cause that will benefit both activists and scholars for years to come.