Lenni Brenner’s Anti-Zionist Libels

In an attempt to discredit Zionism, the American leftist activist Lenni Brenner concocted an argument, first put forth in his 1983 Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, that Zionists and Nazis agreed on fundamental principles, that leaders of the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis to arrange for the deportation of German Jews, and that Zionist leaders intentionally abandoned European Jews to their fate. Brenner’s claims, which Paul Bogdanor shows to be utterly spurious, are frequently cited by anti-Semites on the far right and the far left—most recently in the claim of London’s ex-mayor Ken Livingstone that “Hitler was a Zionist.”