[1] Written in 1933 and published in 1934, it was, according to historian Francis R. Nicosia a "pointed rejection of the largely assimilationist tradition in German Jewry and a call to all Jews to embrace Jewish culture and heritage".
[2] In it, Prinz promotes Theodor Herzl's rejection of assimilation and support of Zionism, and argues that antisemites have done "... more to preserve Jewry and to awaken an active Jewish impulse than the Jews themselves...".
[7][better source needed]Nicosia writes that "Prinz clearly saw little alternative to embellishing the ethno-nationalist basis of Zionism with terminology that the Nazis might find familiar and, perhaps, even appealing".
Liberal Jews in particular (such as Bruno Weil, Karl-Heinz Flietzer and Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky), writing in the Centralverein Zeitung, condemned his fatalistic attitude and defended the legacy of Emancipation.
[12] The book has also been controversial because anti-Zionists have attempted to make the case that Zionists like Prinz were not primarily concerned helping Jews to escape Nazi oppression, discrimination, bigotry, and persecution.
Anti-Zionists like Lenni Brenner have claimed that Prinz's advocacy for German Jews to escape to a Homeland for the Jewish people is somehow an indication that the Zionists approved of Nazi anti-Jewish values.
[15] Deniers of the Holocaust and groups with neo-Nazi affiliations, such as the Institute for Historical Review, have also repeated unsubstantiated claims that Wir Juden indicates an association between Jewish Zionism and the Anti-Semitic Nazis.