Contemporary debates about Zionism in Jewish communities in Israel and abroad often revolve around a growing discomfort that liberal Jews feel with the consequences of Israel's long-lasting occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The clear contradiction between liberals’ commitment to democracy, civil rights, and human rights, and Israel's conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories is leading some toward more reluctant support of the state, and others even to new articulations of anti-Zionist positions. But Jewish anti-Zionism has a much longer history. It is as old as Zionism itself, and its fiercest advocates historically have not been progressives and liberals but rather highly conservative ultra-Orthodox communities. Motti Inbari's Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism and Women's Equality astutely reminds us of this fact. It urges us to consider alternative histories that, while not neglected academically, have been nevertheless marginalized in the writing of official national history and are often absent from the contemporary debate. When images of anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox groups appear in the media today, they are usually seen as almost kooky eccentrics. Perhaps the most famous recent example is the attendance by representatives of the radical ultra-Orthodox group Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City) at a 2006 conference in Teheran devoted to Holocaust denial. A Washington Post staff writer glossed their attendance as “meshuga” or crazy, and indeed without context there's something extremely baffling about such vehement Jewish alignment with an extreme anti-Zionist agenda that even flirts with anti-Semitism.

Inbari's book takes us back to a time in the late 19th century and early 20th century when Jewish anti-Zionism was not a completely marginal and seemingly eccentric phenomenon, but rather a strong, although a minority, current both in pre-state Israel and in Europe. By following, among others, the lives and work of two of its most notable advocates — Rabbi Amram Blau (1894–1974), head of Jerusalem's Neturei Karta, and Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), the founder of the Satmar community in New York — Inbari provides us with the historical and analytical context to understand the roots and worlds of Jewish anti-Zionism. Although the holocaust destroyed the Jewish communities in Europe that were the fertile ground of ultra-Orthodox objections to Jewish nationalism, some have been recreated in Israel and in the United States and continue to be relevant to contemporary politics. The Satmar movement, as Inbari points out, is currently “one of the strongest Hasidic movements in America and around the world, with an estimated one hundred thousand followers in the United States alone” (2).

The book puts forward a thesis that provides a useful framework to understand the motivations and worldview of this modern phenomenon. Rather than seeing it as simply a one-dimensional obsession with an objection to a Jewish state, Inbari argues that the opposition by Teitelbaum, Blau, and the other thinkers the book covers, “must be understood as part of their broader struggle against modern culture in all its manifestations.” Their campaigns against Zionism fit within their more comprehensive work against social, cultural, and political changes that the encounter with modernity brought to European Jewish communities. These entailed new relationship with the state, including greater openness to secular education required by modernizing states in Europe, the learning of national, non-Jewish, languages, new professions, modification in religious practice and even secularism, the changing role of women, and alongside all of these, the rise of Jewish nationalist sentiments. For radical ultra-Orthodox thinkers observing the rise in popularity of Zionism among Jewish communities, the trend signified a catastrophic innovation that turned away from traditional Jewish rabbinical doctrine, and, of more significance, constituted an open rebellion against God. Instead of waiting for God to end the Jewish People's Exile, Zionists shamelessly took matters into their own hands, challenging God's will and defying His plan. The demonological portrayal of Zionists by these groups as Inbari explores in the book is startling. Its most extreme form is the allegation that the Holocaust was God's punishment for this modern Jewish rebellion.

However, delving deeper into the writings, personal correspondence, and documents of notable leaders in these anti-Zionist streams, Inbari also exposes disagreements, equivocations, ambivalences, and contradictions in their public and private responses to Zionism in particular and to modernity more broadly. Foremost among these contradictions is the question of passivity versus activism both in the spiritual, messianic realm, and in matters of earthly politics. Some scholars have identified the rejection of Zionism as a rejection of messianic activism, of taking matters into one's own hand in hastening the beginning of Redemption. In this respect, they see these radical ultra-Orthodox streams as advocating spiritual passivity and quietism. Their renouncing of modern Jewish politics and Zionist institutions in the pre-state years and in the state of Israel also seems to imply political passivity. But as Inbari shows, in both of these realms his protagonists are anything but passive. The book chronicles the tense rhetorical and scholarly battles prominent figures in these movements took upon themselves in their renouncing of Zionism as false messianism. It also demonstrates the deep, and very active, messianic strand of this ultra-Orthodoxy, which through its fight against modernity and nationalism hoped to hasten a true, as opposed to false, Redemption for the Jewish People. Perhaps the most striking example of this in the book is the chronicling of Rabbi Chaim Elazar Shapira (1871–1937), one of the most influential early advocates of anti-Zionism, who in 1930 traveled to the Holy Land with the hope of crowning Rabbi Shlomo Eliezer Alfandri, known as “the Holy Grandfather,” as the true messiah.

Political and social activism is also very much present in the pre- and post-independence periods. As Agudat Yisrael, the main association representing ultra-Orthodox communities in the Old Yeshuv (pre-state settlements), accepted a degree of reluctant cooperation with the Zionists, anti-Zionists under the umbrellas of HaEdah HaHaredit and Neturei Karta broke away with it to maintain their own parallel rejectionist institutions. Their political activism was reflected in local and international efforts too. HaEdah HaHaredit and Neturei Karta, for example, were active before the United Nations vote on the 1947 partition of Palestine, in attempts to safeguard their community from Zionist rule. They even appealed to the United Nations Secretary-General with a request to internationalize Jerusalem, stating: “…we shall not abandon ourselves to a regime whose principles and methods desecrate all we hold sacred, and which is determined to undermine our religious life. Accordingly, we request that we be rescued from the Zionist regime by all means you consider worthy” (45). After the establishment of the state, Neturei Karta and HaEdah Haredit continued to involve themselves in public battles, including fierce demonstrations against the public desecration of the Sabbath and other issues of importance to them. Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum's work to rebuild a shattered community of Holocaust survivors into an increasingly large and influential community in the United States is also a far cry from withdrawn passivity.

Yet ultimately, the book tells a tale of failure that was almost inevitable from the start. The protagonists, despite all their efforts, largely fail in their struggle to stop modern changes in their own communities, or to convince many others to join their struggle against nationalism. Even withdrawing to isolated enclaves as a way to shield themselves from modern advancements has been only partially successful. The most fascinating example of this provided in the book is these streams’ grappling with women's equality and changing roles in society. As the book explores, while HaEda Haharedit, Neturei Karta, and Satmar have all vehemently stressed women's modesty in dress and comportment, and the regulation of the interaction between the sexes, their larger hope to stall transformations in women's education within their own communities was unsuccessful. Critical of Agudat Yisrael's Beit Yaacov network that provided increasingly more expansive vocational education for girls, the non-Zionists streams sought to create their own more conservative and limiting educational frameworks for women. Inevitably, though, these girls’ institutions began to offer a more expansive curriculum that prepared young women for the job market and provided them with employment opportunities. In all of these streams, women's secular education and employment have far surpassed that of men, who devote all of their time to religious scholarly study.

But if this particular “failure” is a happy one, the larger failure to offer a non-nationalist platform that would be attractive beyond a very small circle emerges as somewhat tragic. In the 21st century, Neturei Karta is perhaps the only one of these streams that appears to still be deeply and actively committed to its founding principles. Yet, the movement has only a few thousand adherents and is viewed more as a harmless freak-show by mainstream Jewish public opinion than any kind of a real ideological challenger. The other anti-Zionist movements discussed in the book, and in particular Satmar, appear to have developed a degree of accommodation with political realities and balance of power. In later years, after the establishment of the state of Israel, even with their staunch opposition these ultra-Orthodox strands never wanted to entirely alienate the vast majority of Jews in Israel and around the world, who were sympathetic to Zionism. In 1968, Teitelbaum even argued that “we Jews have the Torah which forbids us to have a state during exile, and therefore we cannot ask the Americans to support the state. But the non-Jew has no Torah, and by supporting the state he feels he is helping Jews. And on the contrary: if an American non-Jew is against the Zionist state, he shows he is an anti-Semite” (163). As Inbari mentions in the epilogue, while the Satmar community in the United States is growing, so are its members’ sympathy toward Israel. Inbari quotes a survey that finds that 31% of Hasidim in Williamsburg, New York, the heart of the Satmar community, report that they feel “very attached” to the state of Israel (239).

Inbari ends his account with these observations, but they raise so many questions that I wish were also addressed in the book. Of course, there is only so much one book can cover, and Inbari already provides a vast narrative that spans from the late-19th to the mid-20th century. Perhaps this is a subject for a second book in a series, but it did leave me asking what are the political, social, and cultural transformations that explain this erosion in active and vocal anti-Zionism within these anti-Zionist streams? What explains the rise of Hasidic groups like Chabad, whose spiritual founders had been staunch anti-Zionists yet their current politics lend unconditional support to the most hawkish Israeli governments? And how do the current politics of Satmar align with the continuation or transformation of their doctrine? (Just as an anecdote, in the 2016 election the Satmar leadership in New York officially endorsed a woman — Hillary Clinton — for president and urged all its members to vote for her.)

Overall, Inbari's Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism and Women's Equality gives us a comprehensive and fascinating account of the ideological origins of some of the most significant radical ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist movements, shedding new light on their fraught battle with modernity. Particularly illuminating is his use of new documents from Rabbi Amram Blau's personal archive, recently acquired by Boston University. These and other documents the book employs paint a nuanced picture of these anti-Zionist streams and exposes the private and public challenges and contradictions their leaders grappled with over the course of their lives. The materials also shed light on important women who played key roles in the lives of these leaders and in their movements, such as Ruth Ben David, the convert who was Blau's second wife, and Alta Feige, Teitelbaum's wife who was the strongest person in his court in the 1970s and following his death. While much attention is often paid to the highly conservative gender politics of these movements in terms of adherence to extreme modesty dress codes, sex segregation, and male religious authority, it is rarely that the influence of specific women as political actors in the movements is addressed. In this respect, Inbari shows us that women are indeed often agents, rather than simply passive targets, of their movements’ politics.