Daniel Lazare is the author of, most recently, The Velvet Coup:
The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American
Democracy (Verso).He is currently at work on a
book about the politics of Christianity, Judaism and Islam for Pantheon.
Editor's Note: Due to an unfortunate glitch in production, two lines are missing from the printed version of Daniel Lazare's essay. They have been restored in this version.
Is Zionism a failed ideology? This question will strike many people as
absurd on its face.
In its first issue after the fall of the World Trade Center, The New
Yorker published a handful of short reaction pieces by John Updike,
Jonathan Franzen and others about the horror that


