In 2011, San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum curated an exhibit called California Dreaming: Jewish Life in Bay Area from Gold Rush to Present. The ambitious exhibit illustrated specific regional history of San Francisco's Jewish community. Arranged chronologically, most of exhibit focused on successes of Jewish families in San Francisco and origin of major Jewish organizations-until exhibit reached end of World War II. Instead of celebrating end of Holocaust, exhibit instead needed to contend with American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a Jewish anti-Zionist organization whose strongest chapter was in San Francisco. The wall text of exhibit explains ACJ's popularity as a reflection of in that the Jewish elite of San Francisco, who experienced very little anti-Semitism and held many public offices, found it difficult to imagine dangers encountered by Jews in Europe or even in American cities that were less welcoming toward Jews.1 The strength of San Francisco's anti-Zionism was glossed over as a temporary aberration:With news of Holocaust, tenor of local conversation changed. By time state of Israel was established in 1948, many ACJ leaders had come to regret their earlier positions, recognizing that situation in Bay Area was like no other community and that there was an need for a Jewish especially for Jewish refugees of Europe.2The museum's analysis of Jewish anti-Zionism in 1940s San Francisco assumes several things about relationship between Zionism, Jewish identity, and assimilation, namely, that Zionism is a global, populist movement, responding to an urgent need for a Jewish state, and that anti-Zionism must therefore be a result of assimilation, comfort, financial success, and a kind of provincialism-an inability to see beyond success of Jews in San Francisco Bay area.This article pushes against assumption that American Zionism and American anti-Zionism are mutually exclusive political ideologies and, particularly, that Zionism emerged in United States as an alternative to Jewish assimilation. Rather, by examining public statements of San Francisco chapter of American Council for Judaism, it argues that both Zionism and anti-Zionism in United States took up project of and Jewish normalcy. As uniquely American political movements, both worked to situate American Jews within US racial liberal capitalism. In 1940s California, American Zionism and American Jewish anti-Zionism shared similar ideals and discursive formulations, albeit while arguing for radically different positions regarding role of state of Israel in American Jewish life.The American Council for Judaism was founded in 1942 and quickly became largest Jewish anti-Zionist organization in United States. Rather than see ACJ as a precursor to present-day anti-Zionist movements, I analyze organization's attempts to resist Zionism by defining Jewish American identity through normative discourses of proper American colonial masculinity. The political project of ACJ did not contest dominant racialcapitalist order and in fact explicitly supported supremacy of United States. The ACJ touted Jewish capitalist success as evidence of US democracy and advocated for a uniquely American Judaism. Rather than dismiss ACJ as assimilationist, however, I will situate their political position in context of American Zionism's dominance and, in doing so, question grounds for assimilation itself. The interplay between Zionism and arguments of ACJ reveals much about complexity of belonging-or assimilating-in postwar US urban landscape. Both ACJ and dominant Zionist organizations of time were preoccupied with what made a normal Jewish life. As David Biale, Daniel Boyarin, Raz Yosef, and Todd Samuel Presner note, boundaries of Jewish normalcy at this time were intimately connected to properly embodied masculinity. …