Querencia Press, released Feb 2025, 186 pp.
Like the Jewish-made film Israelism, which triumphed in film festivals throughout 2023, Liz Rose Shulman’s first essay collection A Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad explores politically verboten territory. With daring autobiographical stories told in precisely-crafted sentences, Shulman’s 2025 collection, like the 2023 documentary, traces the evolution of a young Jewish woman from Zionist to anti-Zionist. The film’s marketers describe its trajectory obliquely: “Israelism . . . explores how Jewish attitudes towards Israel are changing dramatically, with massive consequences for the region and for Judaism itself.” Shulman is more direct, delivering her ultimate conclusion, unvarnished, in “My Russia Ukraine,” one of the last essays in the book: “Above all else, Zionism has been a catastrophe for Palestinians. It has resulted in generational trauma, expulsion, and displacement. And Zionism has been harmful to Jews because it has destroyed their ability for empathy and compassion. Like racism and colonialism—for Zionism is these things— it damages both victim and perpetrator.”
Writers tend to bristle when reviewers call their books “brave” or “fearless,” but there is no denying the risks Americans face when criticizing Israel. Charges of anti-semitism get lobbed at ideological dissenters like preemptive strikes, forestalling earnest consideration of the violence required to create and sustain the modern state of Israel. Shulman’s collection guides readers through the ideological formation of American Jewish children, teenagers, and young adults, showing how they are carefully acculturated to conflate Judaism with Zionism—a fusion designed to keep dollars and political will flowing toward Israel, no matter how ferociously it attacks or constrains the people who also occupied the land now called Israel before 1948.
In her preface, Shulman argues, “We must continue to make the distinction between Zionism and Judaism, promising to share “what it looks like to be an American Jew who has separated from Zionism.” Shulman insists that “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.” I appreciate Shulman’s full-throated articulation of this position, which remains hard for many Americans to understand, especially after the October 7, 2023, atrocities and Israel’s subsequent decimation of Gaza. “Many Jews around the world do not support the occupation or the war on Gaza,” Shulman asserts. “Most of us want a ceasefire, the hostages returned, and a right of return for both Palestinians and Israelis with full and equal rights.” Better it comes from Shulman than from a shiksa like me.
As a scholar, I admire how Shulman recounts her intellectual conversion from an unwitting Zionist idealogue to a critic of the Israeli occupation and war. In her opening essay, Shulman explains “Growing up a good Jewish girl meant that I loved Israel and was an ardent Zionist. I believed in Israel as a Jewish homeland. Israel had been a desert, I was told by my family, teachers at Hebrew school, counselors at camp, elders at the synagogue. No one had lived there, they told me.” Living in Israel, loving Palestinians, learning their stories, and frequenting Palestinian and Armenian neighborhoods altered Shulman’s understanding of Israel’s history, and her new understanding complicated relationships with family members and Jewish friends, as she details in essays like “The Stamp Collector.” Distancing herself from Zionism exacted relational costs for the author: she lost friends and disappointed family members. Equal parts travel narrative, coming-of-age story, and conversion narrative, Shulman’s essays limn the interconnectedness of geographic, intellectual, and relational journeys.
Shulman’s writing repeatedly describes the eroticization of Israel-love, an aspect of Zionism the documentary Israelism leaves untouched. Shulman’s essay “Early Love Story: How Many More Orgasms Will Be Had for Zionism” details the sexual experiences of kids at Jewish summer camps: it’s no wonder such camp experiences result in great passion for Israel. Zionist summer camps, Shulman explains, work “to instill and deepen a love for Israel. They are also a place for young people to learn about living away from home and they become a space to experiment sexually under the nationalistic ethos of Zionism. Most of the camps associated with these Zionist youth movements have a goal to build a love for Israel that might ultimately persuade Jews to move there.” She writes, “my deepened love for Israel was inextricable from my sexual coming of age. The boundaries and sense of place and person—of body and nation—merged seamlessly.” Shulman merges place and person, body and nation throughout her memoirs of time spent living, loving, and traveling in Israel.
In “The Nazis Are Coming,” Shulman recounts sensual, tactile activities designed to fuel Israel-love in children, like building maps of Israel out of frosted cake and then eating the Israel-cake or smearing paint into the shape of Israel. “With our moist, dirty fingers,” she recalls, “we created grass and mountains and water and flowers in an abstract place that felt far away from us. It was sexual, of course, to be fingering a country that we were slowly being taught to love, but we were prepubescent children, unaware of the eroticization of things like land—and the landscape of our own bodies—that would be instilled in us as we got older. I didn’t realize at the time, but later, my relationship with Israel would become akin to a lover to me.”
Shulman’s essays also reflect on her favorite authors, such as Amos Oz, whose writing, she finds, sexualizes Jerusalem. Oz writes, “Sometimes, when I had nothing better to do, I used to go to Jerusalem to woo her..Jerusalem is mine, yet a stranger to me; captured and yet resentful; yielding yet withdrawn.” Before she knows it, Shulman as a youngster internalizes this eroticized, idealized Jerusalem, and spends her adult life—and this essay collection—undoing this mythology. Demythologizing Israel-love and Jerusalem-fever are both delicate tasks, which Shulman’s gritty prose and intellectual candor accomplish. She makes the point throughout her narrative and in her subtitle—a “Love Story Gone Wrong”—that her youthful passion for Jerusalem did not survive the moral complexities stimulated by exposure to postcolonial thought and by her own experiences. However, the evolution of Shulman’s thought-life and Israel-experience sound less to me like a love story gone wrong and more like a love story gone sober. For any love to last a lifetime, rapture must yield to realism, and infatuation to emotional maturity.
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Jeanne Petrolle co-hosts the Wild Olive podcast, bringing listeners conversation about literature, culture, and the Bible. Jeanne is author of Religion without Belief: Contemporary Allegory and the Search for Postmodern Faith (State University of New York Press, 2009) and Dancing with Ophelia: Reconnecting Madness, Creativity, and Love (Excelsior Editions, 2018). She has published essays about literature and religion in Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Image: A Journal of Art and Religion, Issues in Integrative Studies, Annals of Biblical Exegesis, Religion and Literature, and Literature and Theology. Jeanne holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois. She is associate dean of faculty and associate professor of English at Columbia College Chicago.
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