Anti-Zionism, Mistranslation, and the Problem of the Century

How have Jews and Zionism, Israel and Palestine been read, debated, and represented in the United States since the early twentieth century? Michael Eskin addresses this question in a work of cultural-discursive archeology. Focusing on the convergence of pro-Palestinian and Black lives activism before and especially after Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, he traces a line of influential interventions from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) through Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979) to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message (2024). Eskin argues that entrenched patterns of Black antisemitism have at times merged with broader U.S. anti-Zionism, shaping today’s controversies. He further contends that key debates rest on enduring misreadings and mistranslations of foundational Zionist texts by Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky, among others, originally written in German and Russian, perused in the original ostensibly by only a few, yet consumed in noxious mistranslation by a great many with often-calamitous real-life consequences.