From Ambivalence to Betrayal is a historic review and analysis of  the abandonment of the Jewish people by the left from the early 19th century  until the present. It also relates to the extraordinarily disproportionate  number of socialist thinkers and leaders who were of Jewish origin and seeks to  explain what motivated so many of them, in the course of their utopian and  futile efforts to “repair the world,” to abandon their people and their heritage  and frenetically seek to deny their kinsmen the right to  self-determination.

The introductory essay is a brilliant overview of the  contemporary Jewish political arena viewed in the context of the concurrent rise  of Zionism, Communism, anti-Semitism and Nazism. It focuses strongly on the  hypocrisy of the existing left, which has become obsessed with demonization and  delegitimization of the Jewish state.

Wistrich demonstrates the  extent to which today’s radical anti- Zionists, despite purporting to represent  the left, often share the identical obsessions and delusions concerning the  alleged malignant influence of the Jews in the modern world as classical fascist  anti-Semites.