There is a good deal of heated discussion today about what is and isn’t anti-Zionism. Much of it surrounds the question of whether harsh forms of criticism of the state of Israel can be deemed antisemitic. What is rarely recalled in those debates is that one of the most prominent anti-Zionists of the twentieth century was a Jew, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), the founding Satmar Rebbe, who formulated a detailed theological rationale for his opposition to the state of Israel.

When set in cool water and heated only gradually, the frog—in a resonant metaphor—allows itself to be cooked without struggle. From the comfortable remove of history, foregone teloi in mind, we may shake our heads at the unthinkable complacency. It has often been through such a metaphor that we have gazed at certain apparently blindered aspects of Jewish bourgeois life in 1930s Germany.