How Rabid Zionism Split the Libertarian World, by Jose Alberto Nino

Many of libertarianism’s leading lights are Jewish. How do they reconcile Zionism with libertarianism? From Jose Alberto Nino at unz.com:

Walter Block. Credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

The quiet corridors of libertarian academia echoed with a familiar tension. Beneath the polished language of universal principles, old loyalties and invisible borders stirred once more. What seemed like an argument over ideas was, at its core, a reckoning of identities no theory could contain.

The recent falling out between economist Walter Block and the Ludwig von Mises Institute was not a routine dispute over doctrine. It revealed something far deeper, a reminder that even among those who preach the supremacy of logic and liberty, human nature resists the purity of abstraction. Intellectual movements, however rational they may appear, remain vulnerable to the same ethnic and cultural divisions that have divided men for centuries.

Walter Edward Block embodied this paradox. He emerged from the intellectual heart of Brooklyn’s Jewish community, a world where fierce debate was a form of devotion. Born in 1941 to Abraham and Ruth Block, he began as a socialist idealist and evolved into one of the most uncompromising defenders of anarcho-capitalism.

Block’s conversion began with an encounter that would shape the trajectory of libertarian thought. Attending an Ayn Rand lecture as an undergraduate, followed by meetings with Nathaniel Branden and Leonard Peikoff, he eventually found his intellectual home under Murray Rothbard’s mentorship. This progression from Objectivism to Austrian economics positioned Block as one of the rising Jewish voices in the Austrian school.

His 1976 masterwork Defending the Undefendable established Block as libertarianism’s most provocative voice, willing to defend society’s most marginal figures—prostitutes, blackmailers, and drug dealers— through the rigorous application of property rights theory. The book’s central thesis separated economic analysis from moral judgment, creating a framework that embodied Block’s Jewish character of challenging gentile norms wherever possible.

With over two dozen books and more than 700 scholarly articles, Block constructed an intellectual empire spanning road privatization, water capitalism, and space economics. His positions at institutions such as Baruch College, Holy Cross, and Loyola University New Orleans provided platforms for developing anarcho-capitalism while maintaining respectability within academic circles. Yet beneath this impressive scholarly output lay dormant ethnic loyalties that would eventually surface with explosive consequences.

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