Even before it existed, Israel was on American minds. Colonial preachers called their new land Canaan; Herman Melville saw Americans as “the peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our time”. In the Second Great Awakening of the late 18th and early 19th century, American Protestants became obsessed with the Holy Land, and it was perhaps in response that one Jewish preacher had called in as early as 1818 for Jews to establish themselves in Ottoman Syria. Christian Zionism flourished, remaining a powerful force in American politics to this day. But Zionism in the modern sense was largely a product of the mass migration from the Russian Empire, and even in the interwar years pro-Zionist movements in America were still outranked socially by the officially “non-Zionist” American Jewish Committee (AJC), which represented the leadership of the most assimilated section of the Jewish population whose arrival predated the “Russians”. Their attitudes were reflected in the 1898 resolution of the American Reform movement, which declared itself “unalterably opposed to political Zionism” on the grounds that “the Jews are not a nation, but a religious community”.
Into the 1930s, the AJC opposed the setting up of an international quasi-parliamentary Jewish organisation lest it imply that Jews owed an allegiance to one another that ranked above their allegiance to the political institutions of their own homeland. When the creation of the World Jewish Congress was mooted, the ΑJC objected to the view that “the Jewish people” was, or could ever be regarded as, “a united national organism”. The wartime AJC president, Judge Joseph Proskauer, regarded Zionist propaganda for a homeland in Palestine as “a Jewish catastrophe”, and insisted that “from every point of view of safety for Jews in America there has got to be an open, vocal Jewish dissent from nationalism and political Zionism”.
The abandonment of this position and the wholesale American Jewish shift in the direction of Zionism only really took place during and after the second world war. In 1942, against the opposition of both the wartime American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist voice, and the American Jewish Committee, several groups convened to demand the postwar establishment of a “Jewish commonwealth” in Palestine.
The threat posed by antisemitism was taken very seriously by all sides, but they came down in different places as to how a Jewish state would affect it. The Zionists believed a Jewish national home would end the problem by providing a sanctuary to which all Jews would naturally gravitate. For anti-Zionists, antisemitism was a problem of racial prejudice and incomplete democratisation that was best fought in solidarity with other minorities in labour movements and unions and could not be solved by turning another people, the Palestinian Arabs, into a homeless minority in turn. The chief worry of the American Jewish Committee was that American antisemitism would undermine Jews’ acceptance in the United States, and so it remained committed to the long-term ideal of political emancipation worldwide. “We refuse to accept the thesis that Jewish emancipation is a failure because it has been repealed in many countries under Nazi pressure,” ran an internal wartime analysis.
But with the establishment of Israel in 1948, hailed across the board by American Jews as an epochal event anti-Zionism as a political position was weakened, and the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism shrank to virtual irrelevance.
Of the few figures who stood out against the tide, perhaps the most notable was William Zukerman, a journalist who had been reporting on international Jewish affairs since the 1920s. Arguing that since 1948 the terms anti-Zionist and Zionist had lost their meanings, Zukerman described himself as “pro-Israel” but “anti-nationalist”. He criticised what he called “the wave of Messianic nationalism which the Hitler Holocaust has released” among American Jews. In embracing the ethnic chauvinism that had swept over the world since the late 1930s, he argued that the Jews risked adopting a cruelty that was already changing “the entire character of the people”. Israel had turned Jews into “conquerors” whose indifference to the plight of the Arab refugees betrayed Judaism’s tradition of sympathy for the oppressed. For Zukerman, the Israeli leadership’s deliberate efforts to identify the country with Jews abroad served merely to increase the danger of antisemitism faced by the latter since it introduced “new diplomatic and political reasons in addition to the old social, economic and psychological ones”.
Zukerman’s articles were much discussed by American Jews at the time and are attracting new interest today. Nor was he alone: other Jewish leaders expressed similar concerns. But such a stance carried costs, and he was denounced as a “self-hating Jew” and an antisemite. What he termed a “perverted chauvinistic reasoning” meant that his opinions were treated “as almost the equivalent of treason”. He wrote: “To criticise any policy of Israel, whether it is the rendering homeless of a million native Arabs, the treatment of the Arab minority as second-class citizens or the transformation of the new state into a racial theocracy, is denounced not only as anti-Israel but as antisemitic.”
One senses the shock he felt at the term being applied in this way to someone like him, who had done as much as anyone to chart the rise of antisemitism in interwar Europe. We are here at the very beginning of what one might call a kind of Zionist usage of the term that was only conceivable once Israel itself had come into existence. Recent research has revealed that Israeli diplomats were concerned enough about Zukerman’s influence to mount a behind-the-scenes campaign against him, enlisting American Zionist organisations and eventually pressuring the proprietors of Jewish newspapers to drop him. As a result, his articles ceased to be widely available and when he died in 1961 his Jewish Newsletter, which he had kept going for 14 years, folded.
More consequential, because of its powerful position in American Jewish public life, was the transformation of the avowedly “non-Zionist” AJC, whose political sympathies by the late 1940s were adjusting to the establishment of Israel. Alongside the work it was doing to reconstruct Jewish life in Europe, the AJC was also supportive of Jewish refugees making their way to Palestine. But it disliked the Zionists’ braggadocio, and its anxieties about American Jewish vulnerability to the “dual loyalty” accusation were acute, above all in a time of cold war tensions, spy scares and mistrust of foreigners.
The AJC was constantly worried about the Israelis as well; in fact it was far from assuming the cheerleading role of recent times. It is worth bearing in mind that in 1950 there were four times as many Jews in the United States as in Israel, and almost twice as many in New York City alone. A tussle for power between the community notables of American Jewry, on the one hand, and the Jewish state and its leaders, on the other, was all but preordained.
American journalist Edward R Murrow interviews David Ben-Gurion in May 1956. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
The Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was the new political factor. He had very little time after 1948 for the organised American Zionist movement, which he believed lacked any further raison d’être once Israel had come into being. He assumed American Zionists worthy of the name would want to move to Israel, and he questioned their fibre – on occasions in public – when, to his dismay, this did not happen. For Ben-Gurion, as for Zukerman, who agreed at least on this, the underlying issue was a simple one: if the creation of Israel spelled the end of anti-Zionism, understood as a movement opposed to a Jewish state coming into existence, did it not also by the same logic spell the end of Zionism as well?
Although not especially attuned to American sensitivities, Ben-Gurion understood that winning over American Jewry really meant wooing the “non-Zionists” of the AJC, whose leader, Jacob Blaustein, enjoyed influence in Truman’s White House. But this was complicated by Ben-Gurion’s repeated calls for American Jews to settle in Israel, something that infuriated Blaustein. Driven by his fear that Israel lacked a large enough population, Ben-Gurion saw the United States as a badly needed reservoir of superior “human material” (preferable in many ways to the tattered and traumatised survivors coming in from wartime Europe).
“Ben Gurion urges US parents to send their children to Israel for permanent settlement” was the headline reporting a speech he gave in Israel in 1949. “We appeal to the parents to help us bring their children here,” he had said, before pouring fuel on the flames by adding: “Even if they decline to help, we will bring the youth to Israel.” The AJC leadership were so angry that they warned Ben-Gurion they would protest publicly if he did not refrain. He needed, they insisted, to revise his assumptions. American Jews were not in exile; America, not Israel, was their home, and their families, not Israeli politicians, were responsible for Jewish children. They wanted this message spelled out lest it make them liable to the accusation that their American patriotism was lacking.
Tensions grew so bad that in the summer of 1950, Blaustein visited Israel at the prime minister’s invitation to sort out their disagreements. It was an extraordinary meeting. Ben-Gurion’s remarks afterward were conciliatory; Blaustein’s were longer, tougher and emphatic. Speaking almost as the senior partner in the relationship, he emphasised “American Jewry” as an equal to Israel itself, willing to support it but nonetheless with its own interests. He stressed the need for liberal democracy to take root in the new country and offered the assistance of American Jews “within the framework of their American citizenship”. But he warned that goodwill was “a two-way street”.
Both men got what they wanted, but perhaps one got more. Blaustein clarified that American Jewry were not in exile but Ben-Gurion did not actually disavow the ideal of aliyah (Jewish emigration to Israel); on the contrary, even though American emigration to Israel in the 1950s averaged fewer than 400 people a year, Ben-Gurion kept up his calls for Jews to come and settle. It was a constant theme in the campus visits he made to the United States in 1960.
For similar reasons, the Israeli premier also insisted that Zionist organisations abroad had an absolute obligation “under all circumstances and conditions” to “aid the Jewish state”. This statement was made during the show trials in eastern Europe, and was hardly helpful for the Jewish communities in those countries defending themselves against Communist accusations of dual loyalty; the AJC was once again furious. Nor was it happy that Israeli officials had begun the practice, not regarded in those days as quite as normal as it is today, of discussing antisemitic incidents abroad directly with governments over the heads of local Jewish communities, as though it were in fact their primary protector. Eventually Blaustein accused Ben-Gurion of contradicting the assurances he had given him at their meeting in 1950. To demand the allegiance of every Zionist to help Israel, whether or not their own government wished it, was “an unheard‑of request for allegiance to a foreign power”.
Jacob Blaustein. Photograph: colaimages/Alamy
Yet the Ben-Gurion government continued to assert that it had the authority “to speak and act for Jews everywhere”. Its 1952 legislation that settled the fate of the old international Zionist organisations begins with the statement: “The State of Israel regards itself as the creation of the entire Jewish people.” The AJC had argued for the inclusion of a crucial clause: “The State of Israel, representing only its own inhabitants, regards itself as the creation of the entire Jewish people.” But to Blaustein’s fury, this clause did not appear in the version passed by the Knesset. Ben-Gurion was not especially apologetic: he told the angry Americans that Israel was like any other state, and therefore had no need to define whom it represented.
Both men understood what was really at stake and knew who had come out on top. Ben-Gurion caused uproar once again when he told the 25th Zionist Congress that Jews living in the comfort of the west were violating the faith itself and that Judaism “faces the kiss of death, a slow and imperceptible decline into the abyss of assimilation”. Once more the AJC complained; once more to little avail.
In the early years of Israel’s existence, as this to‑ing and fro-ing suggests, the new state did not generate the kind of widespread support among American Jews that we associate with it today. The scholar Ben Halpern had shown in 1959 that a general sentiment of support for, and identification with, Israel did not mean that most American Jews necessarily saw their own fates as bound up with its welfare in the way they would come to do later. In 1966, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, among the most acute commentators on the American Jewish scene, even chided American rabbis for their coolness toward Israel. “No one can today make a major career within American Jewry through Zionist political activity,” he wrote. The dual allegiance inhibition remained strong; the assimilationist ideal remained powerful and discouraged public assertions of American Jewish connection to Israel.
It was the six-day war in 1967 that was perhaps the real turning point, immeasurably boosting Israel’s image in the United States and thereby transforming the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. After it, the last of the sharp ideological conflicts and disagreements that had been evident through the second world war gave way to a mutual embrace, emotional as much as political.
Zionism – in a new and attenuated sense of being generally supportive of Israel and feeling some special kinship with it – increasingly unified the American Jewish mainstream. In the words of the Israeli historian Evyatar Friesel, “not only was Zionism ‘Americanised’, American Jewry became ‘Zionised’”. It is hard now to recapture the radical nature of this shift, not least because it was something of a paradox. As the commentator Henry Feingold noted: “The American Jewish identity, which Zionists predicted was destined to fade … was actually strengthened by the establishment of the Jewish state.”
How passionately the six-day war made ordinary American Jews feel about Israel – and by extension about their own lives – emerges in interviews given by the Jewish residents of a midwestern suburb to the brilliant sociologist Marshall Sklare. Working for the American Jewish Committee’s Division of Scientific Research, Sklare had first visited the place he called “Lakeville” in the 1950s; after thesix-day war he returned. (Lakeville was likely the Chicago suburb of Highland Park on Lake Michigan.)
The people Sklare spoke with said they had been swept up in the intensity of the moment more than with any other event they could remember. All had felt unambiguously pro-Israel and sure which side was right. They had also felt no strain between their loyalties to America and what they felt for Israel, or more precisely, in Sklare’s words: “They strove not to perceive any such strain.” They had all given money as a way of helping, and Sklare was struck by the fact that “strange as it may seem”, and despite the lack of any evidence for the belief, “even today [they] connect their own actions with the Israeli victory”.
Israeli tanks advance during the six-day war, June 1967. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Most said they had been pleasantly relieved that non-Jews too had supported the Israeli side, and they believed American Jews had won a new respect in American eyes because of the Israeli victory. To Sklare’s surprise, none of them had visited Israel over the previous decade, even though flights had become cheaper, and more surprisingly still, only one of them had any plans to. As for the idea of making aliyah and settling there, that was a nonstarter: Life was good in “Lakeville”.
At bottom, their sense of intense commitment to Israel, Sklare concluded, was less about Israel itself (which most of them knew little about) than it was about the history of the 1930s, and could only be understood in psychological terms.
For Sklare, the memory of the Holocaust and the significance American Jews attached to it was central. In his view, the six-day war had reawakened the thought that the Holocaust could be repeated; and accompanying that, the reflection that if it happened again, American Jews would once more escape unscathed just as they had done during the second world war, through no special virtue of their own but by mere chance. If their good fortune the first time around seemed hardly justified, they could at least act now in such a fashion as to suggest that their exemption had led to “some good purpose … Thus our support for Israel is intimately connected with our desire to preserve a feeling of our worth as human beings.”
Sklare argued that Israel’s creation and existence had restored what he called “a sense of meaning” for American Jews after the second world war. At least for the inhabitants of Lakeville, it could seem that “something new, clean and good was born” out of the genocide. Thus, were Israel to be annihilated, the final victory would – in some metaphysical sense – belong to Hitler, and American Jewry would be faced with a “complete loss of meaning” and “total anomie”. Sklare’s analysis suggested that it was because the destruction of Israel would threaten the psychic existence of American Jewry itself that people felt so strongly that the country had to be supported. At the same time, he suggests, its victory ensured the even tenor of American Jewish life could continue largely undisturbed.
It is perhaps in this largely forgotten pamphlet that we encounter the most searching and thoughtful exploration of the roots of American Jewry’s impassioned engagement with Israel in the moment of its emergence – before “standing with Israel” was taken for granted and before it became regarded as a normal and self-evident dimension of communal life, an aspect so essential to being Jewish that any deviation would itself seem remarkable.
American public backing for Israel in the 1967 six-day war revealed the existence of an essentially supportive national political environment that has only begun to fracture in recent years. American Jewry itself, never a monolith, came together in support as never before. “Israel became the focus of American Jewry,” writes one scholar. Giving to the United Jewish Appeal rose from $65m in 1966 to $240m the next year and to $511m by 1974. This was the real beginning of pro-Israel political advocacy in the United States, though it was as yet on a small scale compared with today.
As American Jewish rallies revealed how popular the cause had become, the AJC abandoned what was left of its residual “non-Zionism”. When AJC leaders flew to Israel to urge peace on the prime minister, he asked them not to get involved in the question of territorial concessions. Unstinting backing was now expected, and with only sporadic exceptions it has been given ever since. In the AJC’s annual report for 1966–67, “Israel” had come far down the list, below the struggle for civil rights and against discrimination and antisemitism; in 1967-68 it had moved to the top. And there it stayed.
Yet in one critical respect the times remained very different from ours. There were already voices, many of them Jewish, warning that the country’s military triumphs and territorial conquests might yet yield only a Pyrrhic victory. But condemnation of Israel was not yet so regularly connected to the issue of antisemitism. In the 1950s, antisemitism was still associated in the minds of most American Jews with nazism and ideas of white supremacy and racial prejudice – what was left of a world “that had seemingly been destroyed with Hitler’s armies”, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), but that had not been completely eradicated.
A conference to discuss antisemitism that the ADL held in New York in 1962 offers an intriguing snapshot of how the subject was understood in the decades before it automatically came to be linked with the Middle East. Participants focused chiefly on rightwing extremism (which they saw as on the wane), Christian fundamentalism and surviving patterns of social and professional discrimination. A sociology professor talked about stereotypes and the difficulty of really understanding the phenomenon theoretically. There was discussion of continued Jewish exclusion from resorts and private clubs, of the malleability of youth, and of fostering the ability to “agree to disagree”. There was surprisingly little discussion of the civil rights movement or the fight to end segregation, however, and two matters that would today be inseparable from any treatment of the subject simply never came up. One was the Holocaust; the other was Israel. In the space of a generation, things were to change radically.
Adapted from On Antisemitism: A Word in History by Mark Mazower, published by Allen Lane. To support the Guardian, order a copy from Guardianbookshop.com
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