Israel came late to American Jews
My mom died last month.
Going through some of the personal items she left for me, I found this book.
The Jews of America was the textbook that virtually all of my sisters and I used in religious school, or Sunday School as it was called in Reform synagogues of the time, as we made our way toward our bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s how we learned about Jewish history and heritage, not just in America, despite the title, but across time and space.
Ours was a typical Reform temple in the suburbs, so I assume this was a pretty standard text. The book came out in 1969, with a new edition in 1973. My sisters and I would have used it between, roughly, 1974 and 1984.
Look at these three pages of the table of contents. What do you notice?
Virtually the entire book, from pp. 7-146, has hardly a mention of the State of Israel or Palestine. Only on the very last two pages of the book does Israel appear in any substantive way. It doesn’t even merit an entry in the index—though other countries, like Germany and Russia and Poland and Spain and Portugal, have their own entries, with multiple pages referenced.
I don’t want to overstate things. As I’ve written before, Israel was a big part of my family’s Jewish life in the 1970s and 1980s, and it became, over time, a big part of our synagogue’s life. But that’s the point: over time. Initially—I’m talking about the mid 1970s and before—it wasn’t that important.
Historians have written about this, how Israel came late to America. Though they debate the causes of the increasing Zionism of American Jews, there’s little doubt that it was sparked and stirred by a combination of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the rise of Black and other forms of identity politics in the United States. It had less to do with the Holocaust and anti-Semitism than with the changing status of white ethnics in the face of the Black Freedom struggle.
But judging by this text that my very mainstream temple chose and continued to use well into the 1980s, it took a while for that sense of nationalism to spread deep into and across the Jewish-American community. It really wouldn’t be until the 1980s that it became the central pillar of Jewish-American identity. Another point that Joshua Leifer makes in his excellent Tablets Shattered.
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6 Comments
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Daniel Falcone
Outstanding post. I recently reread Lawrence Davidson’s America’s Palestine, similar priorities and themes.
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Justin Schwartz.
Agreed.
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I’ve been researching the history of the Worcester (Mass.) Jewish community since 1920, and what I’ve seen contradicts your thesis. The English-language weekly Jewish Civic Leader (the only one in Worcester) began publishing on March 15, 1926, and the headline of that first issue trumpeted the start of a major joint fundraising effort by the United Palestine Appeal and the United Jewish Campaign; the following month later the newspaper proudly announced in the same fashion a New England Zionist gathering in nearby Providence RI; and nearly every issue contained news from Jewish communities in Palestine. In 1941, the city’s annual Jewish Welfare Fund campaign focused on European Jewish refugees AND Yishuv efforts in Palestine; Fund campaigns from 1948 were at least partially about helping Israel absorb immigrants and built institutions; and in 1967 the community’s concern and focus on trying to do whatever it could to help is palpable.
BTW, I’m from Southern California, didn’t become a member of any Jewish organization until 1971 or 1972, but remember well in 1973 the huge rallies in Los Angeles for Israel.
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Rosalind Petchesky
Well, Corey, your experience in a Reform synagogue in suburban America in the 1970s was certainly different from mine growing up in Tulsa, OK, in the 1950s & 60s. There, Israel was at the center of our observance and Zionism a deep part of our belief system. My very Zionist grandmother traveled to Israel, proudly, in the 1950s, and we were all putting coins in the little blue and white t’zedakah boxes to “plant trees for Israel” from the time I was a small child. We were staging pageants about the noble Israeli “pioneers” (settlers) in Sunday school and singing Israeli songs and dancing Israeli dances (stolen from the Palestinian dabka). My own more recent research in the archives of Tulsa’s Temple Israel (yes, that was its name) revealed sermons and statements by local rabbis insisting, very defensively, that Jewish treatment of indigenous Palestinians should in no way be compared to what Anglo American settlers did to indigenous peoples here in earlier centuries. And great energy and enthusiasm had been invested into the Israeli and Zionist org led campaign to persuade our Jewish youth to join summer trips to the Holy Land, the forerunners to Birthright. (I write about my experience on one such trip in the summer of 1959, when I was 16, in A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism, 2021.) Obviously some kind of debate was going on. Of course, “late” is a relative concept, but my impression is that the deliberate campaign of hasbara to recruit these rabbis and their congregations into steadfast Zionism began several decades earlier than you imagine.
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Richard Peres
Do you really think that Israeli nationalism is today the “central pillar of Jewish American identity”? Three fourths of Jews do not even go to temple and only two percent of Israel consists of American citizens even though they have a free pass to settle there. Support for Israel was strong after WWII (I am 78) and I think it lessened by the 1980’s when it became evident that Israel (with America’s billions) can take care of itself.
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Tim
Hi Corey – my condolences. Losing a parent is difficult.
