This isn't accurate. Zionism appealed not to idealist but to realists in the Russian Pale.

In fact, all the revolutionary movement appealed to Jews because they were being denied their rights as human beings.

Anti-Zionism does appeal to "idealists," so called and that is what is wrong with it.

On the one had there fear drives anti-Zionism among some Jews, on the other hand they try to put on a brave face by attacking other Jews knowing full well that they risk nothing.

btw:Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld was a Zionist. He was the President of the Anerican Zionist Congress I believe. I am sure you know that but many of your readers may not.

As for marching against desegregate , been there done that. Do I feel proud of that? No.

I feel it was the necessary thing to do and that I was doing my duty. I never thought of myself as an idealist.

Real leftists don't think of themselves as idealists.

The magazines I subscribe to are Dissent and Telos, not Tikkun.

I also subscribe to the Euston Manifesto, check it out:

http://eustonmanifesto.org/joomla/

But let's remember that it took a hundred years after slavery for the South to desegregate. And de facto segregation persists throughout the USA – look at New York, Boston, most of California. There are now pockets of integration in middle class areas, but economic segregation is endemic, and that tends to lead to segregation by race/ethnicity.

Re: anti-Zionism as the new Zionism. Hmmmm… well I do find that Jews of my generation (cusp of baby boom/generation X) who criticize Zionism tend to be from families with a red inheritance. Their grandparents were socialists or even Communists. I married a non- (not anti-, just non-) Zionist Jew whose non-Z mother is from a West Coast Jewish family that was pinkish; (successful business people with socialist leanings).

I spent my 20s and 30s moving away from the pinkishness of my own family, rejecting "knee-jerk lefties." However, the horrors of the 21st century (my forties) have moved me away from the center and back to the left. Marx is looking not so stupid after all…

It's also only natural that Diaspora Jewry come to a parting of the ways with Israeli Jews, since their interests are sometimes contradictory. Here's an article about German Jews reacting negatively to an Israeli immigration society being set up in Germany. The article notes that American Jews have exactly the same reaction–"Include us OUT!"

http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=178&nid=12962

This is true up to a point, my Latin quoting Jewish friend.

More than half the Jews in the world today live in Israel. In the next generation as intermarriage and assimilation proceeds the number of Jews in the West will dwindle even more.

Our host, Philip for example claims to be Jewish, but will his children be Jewish? What about his grandchildren.

The issue you bring up in Germany is unique given that countries history of antisemitism.

Remember that just socio-political conditions change from one generation to the next and with it attitudes towards Jews.

I happen to favor an established Jewish community there but only time will tell how it will all work out.

The more motivated of this subclass of racist Jews morphed themselves rather neatly into "neoconservatives," and in league with amoral oil profiteers were able to engineer the dismemberment of Iraq, and now they clamor for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran. What is more mad than that? As someone else has asked, if this is not barbarity, to use nuclear weapons on innocents, then what is barbarity?

It is an action only a deeply racist person could contemplate. People who advocate first use of nuclear weapons against Iran should be shunned, treated as pariahs, by all normal members of civilization.

But that's just me.

I don't see anti-zionism being a "new Zionism," because anti-zionism is not predicated on racism, does not necessarily, as a precondition, think of arabs as untermenschen. Is it idealism or is it
fanaticism, when one marshalls one's energy for a cause that is, in actual practice, abhorrent to any
accepted standards of decency?

As repugnant as it is to supporters of Israel, the South African model still applies. There are, I'm sure, many white Afrikaaners who still look on blacks as inferiors, but they've made their political peace with them, and at least in terms of the structure of their society, acknowledge their basic human dignity. We will not see an effective end to the Zionist imperative until the racist element in Judaism (the same people are always quick to speak sotto voce about "the schwarze")can at least recognize in arabs a common humanity.

I laugh as I write that, knowing how quixotic it sounds.

I thought it was less than a third. In fact, most sources say more Jews are living in the U.S. than in Israel. Perhaps you're applying your own customized definition of Jewish?

Quite true, though that's not just a trait of the younger generation.

I think a great deal of the criticism of Israel is triggered off, not so much by Israeli practices in themselves, but by the lies about them.

Julien Benda, who was a 'Dreyfusard', once wrote that he hadn't been attracted to the cause so much by concern with Dreyfus' fate but rather by General Mercier's attempt to impose an official version of the 'truth' 'with his big sabre'.

The heftier the bills Israel pays to the public relations firms working on its behalf the more intense the recruitment to the anti-Zionist cause.