Stephen Norwood's fascinating study delineates the roots and continuities of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism within the ranks of the American far left from the 1920s to the present day. Although his focus is on a small movement that never received electoral strength in the United States, the author's main premise is that the far left's influence far exceeded its numbers. In fact, he surmises that the far left's “contempt for Zionism and Israel and toleration of antisemitism have increasingly become part of mainstream opinion” (232). Norwood, who has written extensively about anti-Semitism in the American university past and present, outlines the history and characteristics of far-left anti-Semitic discourse, but fails to fully answer the question why academia and today's mass media have proven such fertile ground for hostility toward Jews and Israel.

After sifting through a plethora of writings and speeches by leading American communists and Trotskyists; by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Black Panthers; by Old Leftists and New Leftists alike, Norwood concludes that the far left has all too often mirrored the anti-Semitic arguments on the extreme right and routinely downplayed the existence of anti-Semitism in favor of supporting socialist revolution and anticolonial struggles, even if perpetrated by militant Islamists fighting in the name of jihad. He notes that their anti-Semitic discourse embraces early twentieth-century conspiracy theories put forth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by defining Jews as exploitative capitalists and imperialists. Far leftists further equate Zionist with Jew, question the uniqueness of the Holocaust and declare anti-Semitism a nonissue. And especially in the last four decades, the far left, Norwood asserts, has characterized Israel as a mere outpost of Western imperialism, and – in its most radical inversion – accused the Jewish state of acting like Nazi Germany.

One of the author's main objectives is to prove anti-Semitism in the far left's anti-Zionism early on and to show that those arguments lie at the very heart of the demonization of Israel and Zionism today. Hence he looks at the American Communist Party's (CP) support for the 1929 Arab pogroms against Jews in Palestine not just as one rooted in anticolonialist and revolutionary sentiment but in setting “a precedent for the far left's [post-1967] backing for or excusing Palestinian terrorist attacks against Jews” (22). According to the communist Daily Worker, the 1929 riots amounted to a class war against the imperialists, “Zionist–Fascists had provoked the Arab uprising,” and Jews had joined the British imperialists to fight the Arabs (29). In other words, the Arabs had no choice but to defend themselves by any means possible against a better-equipped and better-funded Jewish people.

Norwood further explains that the CP's sole focus on class struggle and on economic rather than racial interpretations of anti-Semitism even caused it to downplay the anti-Semitism in the Nazi movement and to conflate Zionism with Fascism. Most disturbingly of all, he notes, the party directives coming from Moscow to defend the 1939 Stalin–Hitler pact distorted the CP's revolutionary principles. The pact not only stretched the ideological justifications for a Nazi–Communist alliance, but also encouraged the far left's outright whitewashing of Nazi anti-Semitism that turned a blind eye to the tragic betrayal of members of the International Brigades. Once celebrated as heroes who had fought against the forces of Fascism in Spain and then found refuge in the Soviet Union, members of the Brigades – of which a disproportionate number happened to be Jews – were now returned to Germany under the Hitler–Stalin pact, where they found themselves incarcerated or worse.

The author sees patterns of paradoxical behavior that have characterized the far left and have now also entered mainstream opinion. He tells an intriguing story about the CP's near slavish subservience to the policy course and directive of the Soviet Union which would “automatically rationalize and defend any of the Soviet leadership's crimes against Jews, despite its professed concern about antisemitism” (76). This reliance on the Soviet Union's policy direction also explains the CP's shift to a pro-Zionist stance and endorsement of the newly created state of Israel, when in 1948 the Soviet Union had emerged as the champion of an independent Jewish state against the evils of British imperialism. Yet with the successive anticolonial uprisings in the Middle East, the Soviet Union changed course yet again, and with it the CP. American communists would turn a blind eye to the Soviet Union's blatant anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist policies, claiming it was nothing more than Western propaganda. After the overwhelming military success by Israel against its Arab neighbors in 1967, the far left began to justify its anti-Zionism by pointing to the decline or nonexistence of anti-Semitism and by raising the accusation that Israel was exploiting the Holocaust purely for political purposes. And while the far left seriously declined in membership in the 1970s, its ideology would become more prominent than ever.

Norwood, surprisingly, does not spend much time on the topic of the Soviet-sponsored UN resolution in 1975 that denounced Zionism as racism, but his narrative could benefit from Gil Troy's discussion in Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight against Zionism as Racism (2013). UN Resolution 3379 would become the rallying cry of the oppressed and disenfranchised masses in the Middle East and beyond. It would lay the groundwork for the infamous United Nations World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 that both denigrated Israel and labeled it an apartheid state. Israelis, Jews, had come to represent the elite to members of the Third World; the process of assimilation had turned them into “white folks.”Footnote ¹ They were the oppressor now who could no longer claim victim status, a point Norwood makes but does not fully develop. And maybe that transformation from perceived victim to perceived perpetrator, from David to Goliath, helps explain the growth of anti-Semitism and why it has permeated academia and – aided by mass media – the court of public opinion. To Troy, Senator Patrick Moynihan's crusade against UN Resolution 3379 was the opening act to a civilizational fight that put Americanism and Zionism on the side of freedom and democracy in a global struggle against the forces of totalitarianism and terrorism. Norwood's account is less concerned with the civilizational struggle afar than with the growing dissent at home, where “American colleges and universities are ensuring the transmission of antisemitism to the next generation” (240).