Israel never did develop into the “normal” country so many of its supporters hoped and prayed it might. But during its infancy, it was hardly the cultural, political, religious, and ideological battleground it would eventually become. Within the United States, the young nation enjoyed press coverage that was generous to the point of purposeful propaganda. A 1949 article in The New Republic found Israelis to be “like Americans… aggressive, competent and impatient to get things done.” Three years later, The New Yorker’s John Hersey described Israeli children as “regular Californians—sturdy, open-faced, sun-coppered,” and “potentially bigger, it seems, than their parents, and perhaps bolder too.” The rosy view of the young country was decidedly bipartisan. The historian Bat-Ami Zucker noted that the Congressional Record of the 1960s is replete with comments from senators and congressmen from both parties saluting Israel as a “democratic oasis in a desert of dictators” and “a solid bastion of freedom and democracy against the forces of aggression and totalitarianism.”1
Israel’s intellectual achievements and democratic character were often pitted against what was implied to be the backward and barbaric character of the Arab nations surrounding it. Eleanor Roosevelt visited Israel in 1952 and found it to be “like a breath of fresh air after the Arab countries.” And on Israel’s tenth birthday, in 1958, speaking at a rally in New York, the liberal historian Henry Steele Commager described it as “devoted to peace,” while surrounded by peoples ruled by “chauvinism, militarism, and territorial and cultural imperialism.”2
As no diaspora community had ever had to deal with a sovereign Jewish nation in two millennia, the nature of the relationship between the American Jewish community and the Israeli government required definition. It should have come as no shock that despite the best of intentions, an entirely new set of challenges arose—ones for which few, if any, historical precedents, much less roadmaps, could be found.
To Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, the biblically based call for the ingathering of exiles in the nation’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (aka Declaration of Independence) was not merely rhetorical. Ben-Gurion was not remotely religious, but he believed that God had given the land of Israel to the Jewish people, and that only by living there and working the land could the Jewish people redeem themselves from the shameful combination of timidity and powerlessness that had led inexorably to the tragedy of the Shoah. To this end, he would sprinkle his arguments with Talmudic quotes, such as the famous admonition from Ketubot 110b: “He who dwells outside of the land of Israel is like one who has no God.”3
But precious few American Jews chose to take up the call. American Jews’ embrace of Zionism had been predicated on the formula enunciated by Justice Louis Brandeis in the 1920s. It focused exclusively on the dire need to find a home for Jewish refugees. American Jews liked America just fine. Not much more than 1 percent—six thousand of roughly five million American Jews—had chosen to emigrate to Israel after its founding. One Israeli reporter at a World Zionist Congress meeting described raising the topic of “aliyah” in the United States as inappropriate “in polite company”—like speaking of “sex in Victorian England.” Pollsters were reporting a significant diminution of American antisemitism in the wake of the discovery of the Shoah, and the doors opening to Jews for the first time in American society made the postwar future appear brighter than ever. The Jewish sociologist Theodore Sasson would later characterize the relationship between American Jews and Israel in this period as “attending Israel day festivals and parades, dancing the hora, and decorating their homes with Israel-related art and artifacts,” along with the occasional “tightly scheduled synagogue mission or denominationally sponsored youth tour.” This distance, added his Brandeis University colleague, the historian Jonathan Sarna, allowed American Jews to imagine Israel as an “idealized dream world.”4
The crisis was over, and the hard work of nation-building was underway, but the problems Israel now faced, understandably, were not foremost in the minds of American Jews or high on the list of priorities for American Jewish organizations. While the latter did raise funds and awareness about Israel, they were primarily concerned with problems closer to home. Israel usually appeared near the end of the American Jewish Committee’s annual reports, under the heading “Overseas Concerns.” In his popular study of American Judaism, originally published in 1957, the sociologist and former Commentary editor Nathan Glazer could not but be mystified by his own observation that “the two greatest events in modern Jewish history, the murder of six million Jews by Hitler and the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine, have had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”5
Anti-Zionism receded considerably among American Jews. Nonetheless, thanks to the strong support of the Sulzberger family, the intensely anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism continued to enjoy coverage in the New York Times that could only be explained by the owner’s own obsessions. The constant complaint of the ACJ’s executive director, Rabbi Elmer Berger, regarding the alleged Zionist plan “to retain a medieval control over a so-called ‘world-wide Jewish people’” also won the council favor in the US State Department. Its officers employed ACJ press releases to pretend that such beliefs enjoyed significant support among American Jews. But the primary purpose of the council seemed to be to heighten the blood pressure of the leaders of more mainstream Jewish organizations. Among these was the non-Zionist American Jewish Committee, whose grandees slowly made peace with the notion of Jewish “peoplehood.” But its members still struggled to find their footing when dealing with the reality of an actual Jewish state. Their politics notwithstanding, their hearts were stirred by what they saw in Palestine. As AJC officer Milton Himmelfarb wrote in a confidential memo to his board of directors, “Those of our contemporaries who fear Jewish nationalism cannot avoid being stirred by the establishment of a Third Commonwealth two thousand years after the destruction of the Second and three thousand years after the founding of the First.”6
Mordecai Kaplan, perhaps American Jewry’s most influential theologian of the twentieth century and a self-described Zionist, thought that Jews in the diaspora would “likely… act as a brake on the chauvinistic tendencies that the Israeli struggle for survival is only too apt to arouse in the Jews of Israel.” AJC members concurred and began to lobby the Israeli government to accord its Arab population more rights and greater respect. They even took an interest in monitoring the harsh treatment meted out to both Arab refugees and those Arabs who remained inside Israel, for a brief period paying staff to document it. But they found they had little leverage with the Israelis on such matters and eventually decided to keep their concerns to themselves.7
Despite having been out of step with the Zionist sympathies of most American Jews at the time of Israel’s founding, the AJC managed to maintain its central role in Jewish politics. Israel could not hope to survive, much less thrive, without significant financial support from America’s Jews, together with low-cost US government loans. Ideology aside, these contributions were understood by both sides to come from a place not only of generosity but also of guilt. American Jews had not done nearly enough to try to save the Jews of Europe and were terrified of making the same mistake twice. In the aftermath of the worst catastrophe ever suffered by the Jewish people, Israelis were embarked on what appeared to be an unprecedented and heroic experiment in the reinvention of an ancient, battered people. They were birthing a new, egalitarian society under constant threat of destruction, with the benefit of few of the sorts of luxuries American Jews took for granted. The least American Jews could do was to help pay for it. Beyond writing checks, however, Israelis expected American Jews to shut up and salute.
After all, if they wanted a voice inside Israel’s political debate, Ben-Gurion and company were always more than happy to remind them, they were welcome as immigrants. Israeli leaders, journalists, intellectuals, and especially poets did not hesitate to term American Jews to be living in the latest iteration of traditional Galut (exile) and mock their concern with acceptance by their gentile neighbors. The conflict between the “New Jews” of Palestine and all others was a fundamental precept of Labor Zionism, the founding ideology of Israel’s ruling party for the first thirty years of its existence. A. D. Gordon, one of the movement’s ideological forefathers, had written, as early as 1911, “Every one of us is required to refashion himself so that the Galut Jew within him becomes a truly emancipated Jew; so that the unnatural, defective, splintered person within him may be changed into a natural wholesome human being who is true to himself.”8
American Jewish leaders squirmed over Israeli statements that consistently likened them to quislings frightened before their Christian overlords. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL)—which had been founded the wake of the 1913 “Leo Frank Affair,” in which Frank, a Jew, was arrested and falsely convicted of a rape and murder in Atlanta, and then lynched by a local mob—had undertaken the mission of fighting all discrimination. But its particular focus was antisemitism. Its national chairman, Meier Steinbrink, complained to the Israelis of the “danger implicit in” such pronouncements, as they could “only form the basis of the continued charge made against us by our enemies that we of American birth and American citizenship are guilty of dual loyalty.” The AJC’s president, Jacob Blaustein, warned the Israelis that the “misunderstandings” such talk caused could only result in “headaches.” It would have an “adverse effect on obtaining maximum cooperation (funds and otherwise) for Israel from American Jews,” he said, and strengthen the mutually detested American Council for Judaism.9
Internal AJC documents evince considerable concern about “the allegation of conflicting loyalties” returning to haunt American Jews, should Israeli leaders continue to speak as if they owed their primary allegiance not to their home country, the United States, but to the Jewish state. This concern was naturally heightened by the fact of the socialist orientation of Israel’s ruling political party. The increasingly paranoid political atmosphere in Cold War America, especially given the anti-Communist right’s obsession with the activities of Jewish radicals in New York, Hollywood, and elsewhere, also played a role. AJC representatives consistently advised Ben-Gurion to identify with US Cold War aims lest resentment “be vented on American Jews who would be charged with Communist sympathies.” Thus began the decades-long public relations campaign by American Jews on behalf of “the only democracy in the Middle East.” But the Israelis didn’t care. Over and over, they would repeat some version of their contemptuous demand that American Jews cease their whining and “come home.” “Our next task,” Ben-Gurion announced just before Labor Day, 1949, “consists of bringing all Jews to Israel.… We appeal chiefly to the Jews of the United States.”10
Following painstaking negotiations of the kind associated with postwar treaties between formerly warring nations, in August 1950 Blaustein managed to secure significant, albeit entirely rhetorical, concessions from Ben-Gurion. The Israeli prime minister declared, “The Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have only one political attachment and that is to the United States of America. They owe no political allegiance to Israel.” To further clarify the point, Blaustein felt compelled to add in a response that he “would be less than frank” if he did not say “that American Jews vigorously repudiate any suggestion or implication that they are in exile.” Here Ben-Gurion refused to agree. Even so, he was consistently pilloried inside Israel for the concessions he did make, especially when he agreed to reaffirm the remarks eleven years later.11
Establishing a tradition to which future Israeli prime ministers would studiously adhere, Ben-Gurion proceeded to ignore whatever the Americans believed they had been promised. For instance, in December 1960 he declared that the “Judaism of the Jews of the United States and similar countries is losing all meaning,” before adding that “every religious Jew has daily violated precepts of Judaism and the Torah by remaining in the Diaspora.” He kept this up for decades, calling Zionist support groups outside of Israel “wandering Jews.” Such statements would provoke outrage among American Jewish leaders, and then the process would repeat itself. The Americans would complain that the Israelis were giving aid and comfort to American antisemites, but the Israelis did not care. As far as they were concerned, American Jews’ fear of antisemitism was just one more reason why they should stop their whining and make aliyah. Israelis shared a deeply—one might say religiously—held belief in the moral decadence and likely disappearance of the diaspora, via some vaguely defined combination of assimilation, prejudice, persecution, and personal self-indulgence that was somehow inherent in the conditions of Galut. This attitude proved especially painful for those American Jews who were paying attention—admittedly a small number—because the Israeli attitude was inextricably linked to the widely held Israeli belief that diaspora Jews shared some responsibility for their own passivity in the face of the Nazis. As the great Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell once observed, Zionist ideology, with its doctrine of shlilat ha’golah—the negation of the diaspora—“at times resembled [that] of the most rabid anti-Semites.”12
The Blaustein exchange with Ben-Gurion remains in many respects a puzzling document. The AJC leader, historian Jack Wertheimer would write in an AJC-sponsored history of the organization, “was trying to work out an understanding between the Israeli government, on the one hand, and a population with no political or legal connection to the Jewish state, on the other.” He might have added that Blaustein had no specific authority over that population, and, as a non-Zionist, did not even share its most fundamental beliefs. What’s more, by choosing the AJC as his interlocutor with American Jews, Ben-Gurion was snubbing those organizations that had stood with the Zionists during the struggle for statehood. But money talked then, as it undoubtedly does in the moment you are reading this. As the owner of American Trading and Production Corporation, then America’s fourteenth-largest company, Blaustein was possibly the wealthiest Jew in America. His fellow grandees were also no slouches in the fund-raising department.13
The Israelis agreed to Blaustein’s language, according to an AJC publication, in the hope that it would “yield certain economic results.” The AJC, with Ben-Gurion’s public promise in its pocket, could rest easy that anyone who questioned the loyalties of America’s Jews got their answer, even if they lacked the ability to enforce its contents. Meanwhile, dedicated American Zionists had little to bring to the table save their desire to stick their noses into how the Israelis governed themselves—something for which Ben-Gurion had no patience. Publicly scorned by Ben-Gurion for their failure to put their feet where their hearts were said to be and move to Israel, those who pledged their loyalty to the ideology of Zionism but did not participate in its realization as citizens of the Jewish state were viewed by Israelis as impotent hypocrites. The then twenty-seven-year-old rabbi Arthur Hertzberg framed the dilemma in a 1949 issue of Commentary: “What shall I do with my Zionism?” he asked in an article titled “A Movement in Search of a Program.” To this question, he had no answer, and the Israelis had no interest.14
The frustration of American Zionists grew significantly as Blaustein successfully inserted himself as the go-between for the Israelis and American Jews. President Truman confided to the AJC leader in early 1949 that he had become “thoroughly disgusted with some of the high-pressure groups” acting on behalf of Israel, adding that it was “in spite of the obstructive efforts of some of them” that he had had chosen to support the Zionists in the end. The president also no doubt appreciated the fact that Blaustein managed to keep the contents, and even the fact, of his presidential conversations to himself. That was a decidedly rare quality in a Jewish American leader, then as now, but one that would soon be especially prized by US presidents as conflicts erupted between Israel and the United States in increasingly greater quantity and intensity.15