By Noah Millman • June 19, 2012, 4:17 PM

I haven’t read Jack Ross’s book about Rabbi Elmer Berger and the legacy (such as it is) of Reform Jewish anti-Zionism. But I wanted to make a couple of comments apropos of Paul Gottfried’s review.

First, I’ve never really understood why the existence of a Jewish state should raise unique problems of dual loyalty. Those charges were leveled repeatedly in the pre-state period, so statehood was not a necessary condition. And it isn’t a sufficient condition either: when was the last time you heard charges leveled against Polish Americans for dual loyalty? Or against Armenian Americans? Even groups that actively try to influence American foreign policy, like Cuban Americans, don’t get charged this way. Charges of dual loyalty come up largely in two contexts: conflict between states (thus, German Americans during World War I and Japanese Americans during World War II came under suspicion), and situations where the group being attacked is a “market-dominant minority” that the majority resents (hence Ugandan expulsions of South Asians, Indonesian riots against their Chinese minority, etc.), a factor that is an important component in modern anti-Semitism before World War II (and afterwards, in the Soviet Union). The existence or nonexistence of a Jewish state has little to do with it, and the fact that many Reform Jews were so concerned about this question says more about the nature of Reform Judaism at the time than it does about the nature of anti-Semitism.

Second, while Jewish peoplehood is overwhelmingly attested to in Jewish religious texts and structure, such that high German Reform objections to the concept of peoplehood were always tenuous, it’s not the case that statehood or nationalism is similarly well-grounded religiously, and the traditional texts that oppose any move to found a third Jewish commonwealth are actually quite firm. Zionism was a radical departure from traditional Jewish teaching, not because it affirmed Jewish peoplehood (that goes all the way back) but because it was a political doctrine, and traditional Jewish sources rejected the idea of a Jewish politics beyond the question of communal self-protection and self-governance within the existing political structure of the world as they found it, and rejected specifically the idea of Jewish sovereignty. The book to read on the subject, and on how the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world got around to supporting a Jewish state that their own religion says is of questionable validity, is Aviezer Ravitzky’s Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism.

Personally, I have a lot more interest in excavating the diversity within the Zionist camp than in exhuming pre-state anti-Zionism. Because the State of Israel is a fact, and Zionism already achieved its main aims, so the question now, both for Jews and non-Jews, is how to relate to the state that exists, not what alternative realities we might imagine to be more emotionally satisfying.