Perry Anderson’s long essay ‘The House of Zion’ was published in the November-December 2016 issue of New Left Review, the ‘flagship journal of the Western Left’. Fathom invited Mitchell Cohen, Michael Walzer, Shany Mor, Cary Nelson, John Strawson, Einat Wilf and Cary Nelson to respond to Anderson. In this Fathom Highlight Mitchell Cohen, a US social democrat and long-time co-editor of Dissent Magazine, reads Anderson’s essay symptomatically, as an example of long-standing intellectual maladies on the far-left. Anderson has reduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to no more than a facet of a battle between the House of Imperialism and the House of Anti-Imperialism. Politically, he wants war against Israel. A credible left, argues Cohen, can do better than that. We include the other contributions to the Symposium below.

Perry Anderson’s House of Zion: A Symposium | Mitchell Cohen

by Mitchell Cohen