Lustick likened conditions there to those of a shtetl, and he was occasionally the object of anti-Semitic harassment, though the family had a strong sense of patriotic attachment to the country, typical of Jewish immigrants of European background.
After graduating from high school, he attended Brandeis University, arriving in 1967 just as a countercultural wave of student activism was sweeping through higher centres of learning.
In a 1989 review of his early work the anti-Zionist rabbi Elmer Berger called Lustick a "first-class Zionist academic", and praised his "meticulous scholarship".
[10] It appeared under the imprint of a series of monographs the Council of Foreign Relations considered a "responsible treatment(s) of a significant international topic worthy of presentation to the public.
[d][e] Elmer Berger wrote that he knew of "no better documented source in English for anyone interested in greater understanding of both the parties and the leading representatives of this phenomenon" (of Israeli religious fundamentalism).
[f] At the same time, he argued that Lustick shared shortcomings discernible in the works of Israel's revisionist New Historians in that the territorial expansionism and racial discrimination documented as recent Zionist trends by the 1980s wave of young Zionist scholars – Lustick charts these traits as bursting into the secular mainstream of Israeli society with the emergence of messianic movements like Gush Emunim in the 1970s – underplayed, minimized or whitewashed tendencies that were intrinsic to Zionism from its pristine beginnings.