Zukerman, for his part, is paradoxically the least well-known but culturally perhaps most recognizable of these three figures. He represented a once-dominant left wing Yiddishkeit sensibility, one that Levin associates with the Eastern European Jewish Workers Bund. Yet the Bund had very little presence in the United States—only a single office in New York City after the war, mostly catering to left-wing, Yiddish-speaking Holocaust refugees.

Zukerman’s political and cultural orientations—socialist and secular, culturally nationalist and yet anti-Zionist—owe less to the Bund than to the Popular Front of the 1930s, whose Jewish socialists and Communists took many similar positions as the Bund in a distinctly American context, supporting Soviet experiments in Jewish autonomous communities, Yiddish language, Jewish humanism—and of course, anti-Zionism. Zukerman, Feld summarizes, “saw the global, universal Jewish mission as one with socialism.”

While Zukerman never joined the Communist Party—and avoided blacklisting and prison during the Red Scare—he nonetheless identified Zionism with the forces of McCarthyism and racial apartheid. Writing for the newspaper he founded, the Jewish Newsletter, he compared the anti-Palestinian 1952 Israeli Citizenship Law to Jim Crow, drew a parallel between the permanent exile of Palestinians and the anticommunist and anti-immigrant McCarran-Walter Act, and likened Zionists to “Dixie-crats and the Ku-Klux-Klan.”

When Zukerman spoke of the “sacrifice of the principle of universal justice for reasons of nationalistic expediency,” the analogy to American racism and Indian removal would not have been far from his left-wing readers’ minds.

Zukerman spoke an idiom of an earlier socialist moment that embraced neither the Council’s assimilationism nor the racially exclusive, militaristic nationalism of Zionism. In a 1934 essay for The Nation, he saw in early Zionists the “menace of Jewish fascism,” noting with bitter irony that the “the newcomers [to Palestine] are not only the victims of fascism but spiritually also its supporters.”

Though he acknowledged many of the Jewish residents of Mandatory Palestine were themselves refugees from Europe, the most militant and successful of them, he decried, wanted “a fascism of their own” that, like European fascisms, wished to “revive the glory of their passing world.”

The idea of Zionism-as-fascism spoke not only to the racial violence inherent in the settler project but also to the ways that nation-building bound Jewish workers to the Jewish bourgeoisie. Referring to Zionism as “machine-gun Judaism,” Zukerman linked the [ethno]state to both gangsterism and militarism in a single image.