Mosse's upbringing attuned him to both the advantages and the dangers of a humanistic education. His book "German Jews Beyond Judaism" (1985) describes how the German-Jewish dedication to "Bildung", or cultivation, helped Jews to transcend their group identity. But it also argues that during the Weimar Republic, "Bildung" contributed to a blindness toward the illiberal political realities that later engulfed Jewish families. Mosse's liberalism also informed his supportive but critical stance toward Zionism and the State of Israel. In an essay written on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Zionism, he wrote that the early Zionists envisioned a liberal commonwealth based on individualism and solidarity, but a "more aggressive, exclusionary and normative nationalism eventually came to the fore."