The Satmar community’s anti-Zionist stance

The Satmar community’s anti-Zionist stance is presented as both a theological position and a lesson in who may claim Jewish identity. In Devorah’s childhood, opposition to Israel is taught through public protest, religious texts, family memory, and rules restricting travel. The memoir shows how these ideas become part of her understanding of history and belonging, while also placing them within the broader communal order she later comes to question.

Religious and Political Foundations

Each May, Zeidy joins Satmar men traveling from their communities to an anti-Zionist parade in Manhattan on Israeli Independence Day. The demonstration is deliberately difficult to reconcile with ordinary assumptions about Jewish support for Israel: its signs call for Israel’s destruction. Devorah says that, as a child, the message makes sense to her because she has already learned that the state should not exist.

The teaching is grounded in the Satmar Rebbe’s rejection of Zionism as an attempt to bring about Jewish redemption through human political action. In the account Devorah receives, redemption belongs to the messianic future; faithful Jews must wait rather than establish a state by their own efforts. The Rebbe’s manifesto, Vayoel Moshe, is kept in Satmar homes and functions as an authoritative explanation of the position. As Devorah describes it, the book traces Zionism to the early twentieth century and presents its effort to establish a Jewish homeland as a religious transgression, not a fulfillment of Jewish history.

The Rebbe’s arguments also shape the community’s interpretation of the Holocaust. The teaching Devorah hears holds that Zionists gained the political and social power to establish Israel only after the Holocaust, and that invoking the catastrophe to support Zionism dishonors those who died. This is presented as the community’s religious and historical claim, not as a neutral account of the period. Its force in Devorah’s childhood comes partly from the certainty with which it is transmitted by elders and teachers.

Family Memory and Jewish Identity

Bubby’s bitterness toward Zionists gives the doctrine an intimate, familial dimension. She tells Devorah that Jewish refugees seeking safety in Israel were turned away and sent back to Nazi camps, and that Zionist leaders wanted a different kind of Jew from those raised in religious European communities. She also recounts that children were taken because they were young enough to be reshaped. The memoir records these statements as Bubby’s account of the past; her tears make clear that the subject is bound to her own losses and grief.

School lessons reinforce a sharp separation between Jews and Zionists. Devorah is taught that children were abused until they renounced their faith and pledged themselves to Zionism. She comes to believe that a person cannot be both a Jew and a Zionist, and that Hasidim alone are truly Jewish because even a small degree of assimilation disqualifies others. The distinction turns political disagreement into a boundary around religious authenticity. Devorah even says she would have joined the protest for Bubby’s sake, although women are not allowed to attend, because she believes someone must defend the family and intensify the effort against Zionism.

The doctrine is therefore not only an opinion about statehood. In Devorah’s childhood understanding, it organizes a moral map: the Hasidic community preserves authentic Jewish life, while Zionism represents rebellion and assimilation. The memoir lets readers see both the certainty of that map and the family sorrow through which it is made persuasive to a child.

Israel as a Forbidden Destination

The community’s rejection of Israel also appears in rules governing travel. The rabbi forbids visits until the messiah comes, and Devorah’s school warns that a student who goes there, even to see family, could be expelled permanently. She experiences the restriction as especially unfair because the country is also described in lessons as the land of Jewish roots and history. The contradiction leaves her longing for a place she is taught to treat as religiously off-limits.

The rule is not depicted as entirely beyond exception. Devorah knows girls whose families have taken indirect routes into Israel, and she recalls that Zeidy approved when a relative traveled there to pray in connection with a hoped-for child. In that case, he accepted that some rules might be overlooked for the purpose of reproduction. The contrast suggests that restrictions are enforced within a hierarchy of communal priorities, rather than experienced as equally inflexible in every circumstance. It does not, however, erase the prohibition that governs ordinary visits or the threat of expulsion attached to disobedience.

Communal Obligation and the Wider Order

Devorah’s reflections on obligation connect the anti-Zionist environment to a broader question of authority. Zeidy teaches that every Jewish soul was present when the Torah was given and accepted responsibility for its laws. Devorah wonders whether such a commitment could have been made simply out of fear of standing apart. She distinguishes that imagined covenant with God from Zeidy’s later pledge of allegiance to the Satmar Rebbe’s Williamsburg community, made before he knew what it would require and understood by her as binding his descendants as well.

She associates the Rebbe’s authority with restrictions beyond political Zionism: in her account, it determined that she could not read English books or wear red, and helped isolate the community from the outside world. These rules belong to the wider system in which anti-Zionism operates, rather than being identical to the doctrine itself. Their combined effect is to make religious belonging inseparable from control over education, appearance, and contact with life beyond the community.

Later Tension and Significance

As Devorah grows older, she becomes increasingly unwilling to pass the community’s limits on to her son. She fears that his entry into religious schooling will narrow his life, and questions how she could condemn him to confinement while trying to broaden her own horizons. Readers of her anonymous blog warn that a religious court may not allow her to leave with him, deepening the practical stakes of dissent. Her eventual departure, and the new closeness she describes developing with her son afterward, mark a break from the life in which these rules had shaped her choices.

The memoir does not present this later struggle as a direct change in Devorah’s stated view of Zionism. Rather, it traces her movement away from an order that treats dissent and outside knowledge as threats to communal identity. The anti-Zionist stance matters within that account because it links religious belief to history, family loyalty, restricted movement, and a sharply guarded sense of who belongs. Devorah’s changing relationship to that order reveals the pressure such boundaries exert on a person raised to experience them as unquestionable.