“The Edge of the Abyss”: The Origins of the Israel Lobby, 1949–1954

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Rossinow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
American Jews ◽  
The West ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Main Components ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Israeli Soldiers

The main components of the Israel lobby in the United States were organized in the spring of 1954, six years after the State of Israel declared independence, in response to a crisis in U.S.–Israel diplomacy that erupted in October 1953. Israeli soldiers had massacred more than sixty Palestinian villagers in Qibya, on the West Bank, eliciting widespread condemnation; American Jews, in reply, mobilized to defend Israel in new ways. The American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (later renamed AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, established at this time, displayed two outstanding features. They were Jewish united front organizations that brought together Zionist with “non-Zionist” groups. They also emerged from transnational contacts with Israeli leaders and realities. A staunch near-consensus in defense of Israel in the most trying circumstances established a lasting framework in American Jewish life.

DAVID MITTELBERG, The Israel Connection and American Jews (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.) Pp. 209. $55.00 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-138
Author(s):  
J. ALAN WINTER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
American Jewish Identity ◽  
State Of Israel

The Israel connection whose impact on American Jews David Mittelberg examines is that engendered by a visit to Israel by an American Jew, not that of any special relationship between the nation-state of Israel and of the United States. The book's conclusions, then, are not offered with an eye toward Israeli or American foreign policy. Instead, they are offered as a possible contribution to those “formulating strategies and allocating resources which will have an impact on Jewish education and community survival” (p. 2) in the United States. Mittelberg advises those engaged in such activities that the survival of an American Jewish identity requires not only a religious component, but also an ethnic one based in a Jewish community. Moreover, that community “must choose to exist not mainly for the sake of philanthropic, social welfare, and political activities, but as an end unto itself [whose] boundaries include all of Jewish history and Jewish peoplehood” (p. 133).

A New American Jewish World

1998 ◽  
pp. 294-297
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter shows how the battles over the Pittsburgh Platform were being fought over a terrain which other factors were already transforming. Large-scale migration from Eastern Europe had begun. The number of Jews in the United States, estimated at 250,000 in 1880, reached the million mark in 1900, the year of Wise’s death. The acculturated community, speaking English albeit with a German accent, largely middle class, reformed in religion, was outnumbered by one that spoke Yiddish, belonged to the proletariat, and was untouched by Reform Judaism. The processes which Wise saw at work when he arrived in 1846 had to begin over again; but although many of the factors were similar, the answers were not necessarily the same. Incidentally, the presence of a second and larger Jewish community enhanced the importance of New York in American Jewish life and diminished the significance of Cincinnati and other Midwest communities where Wise had held sway.

Ofira Seliktar. Divided We Stand: American Jews, Israel, and the Peace Process. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. xvi, 272 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 412-413
Author(s):  
Harold M. Waller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Israeli Government ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Run Up

Israel, and before that the idea of a Jewish state in the traditional homeland, has long captured the imagination of many, if not always most, American Jews. The close connection between Jews in Israel and the United States intensified as the events of the last century unfolded, especially the Holocaust, the struggle for Israel's independence, and then the unending effort to safeguard that independence and ensure security. The 1967 Six-Day War, the run-up to which conjured up images of another calamity, had a profound effect in the Diaspora, driving home the reality of Israel's precarious security and the state's central importance in modern Jewish life. That watershed produced a relatively short-lived period when it seemed that American Jews were united in their support for Israel. But, since 1977, that “sacred unity” has been called into question as sharp divisions have appeared—exacerbated by controversial Israeli government decisions and the pressures of the peace process since 1991.

Judaism and Jewishness in Histories of American Jewry

2021 ◽  
pp. 253-260
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jews ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter reviews five books on American Jewish history, written by Joyce Antler, Jessica Cooperman, Kirsten Fermaglich, Rachel Kranson, and Jack Wertheimer. Reading these books together is challenging because they present substantially different interpretations of American Jews. If no definitive single interpretation of 20th-century American Jewish history emerges from these five books, what can be learned about American Jews by reading them together? Two key points emerge. Judaism proves a highly contested arena of American Jewish life. Yet despite the importance of religion, this fractious domain involves only a small portion of American Jews. Cooperman, Kranson, and Wertheimer all explore limits that confound efforts to promote Judaism in the United States among ordinary Jews. By contrast, “Jewishness” opens a valuable window into the complexity of life among Jews in the United States. Fermaglich focuses on how New York Jews coped with rising discrimination that impeded their ambitions for social and economic mobility. In her exploration of Jewish women's politics, Antler illuminates varied components of Jewish identity only occasionally influenced by religious dimensions.

A New World Babylonia

2021 ◽  
pp. 252-275
Author(s):  
Deborah Dash Moore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New World ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Creation

This chapter discusses the distinctive rise of American Jews as a new center of Jewish culture. It focuses on the conditions in the United States, especially separation of church and state, which encouraged religious creativity, and the genocide of the Holocaust that spurred the transfer of aspects of European religious and intellectual Jewish life. It argues that feminism encouraged women to contribute in vital ways to the creation of Jewish culture that had a profound impact throughout the Jewish world. America has exemplified a new Babylonia, one that would produce influential forms of Judaism shaped by women as well as men.

Embodying Musical Heritage in a New–Old Profession: American Jewish Cantorial Schools, 1904–1939

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
JUDAH M. COHEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Training Models ◽  
Digital Repositories ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
American Jewish

AbstractCurrent scholarship on music in Jewish life generally views American cantorial training as a postwar process of transplantation, translating a culture decimated by the Holocaust into a higher education program in the United States. Recently available digital repositories of historical materials, however, show at least five organized efforts to establish American cantorial schools between 1904 and 1939. I closely examine these efforts here, which reveal during this period a complicated and active negotiation surrounding the role of the cantor—and music more generally—in American Jewish life. Organizers of these schools engaged in active dialogue with cantorial colleagues in central and eastern Europe, subsequently creating institutional training models that imbued the cantor with a character, history, musical repertoire, and professional lifecycle compatible with the United States’ religious marketplace. Understanding the urge to establish these schools in the first half of the twentieth century, and the tendency to forget or minimize these efforts after World War II, offers insight into the flexibility of musical tradition as it sought to reassert itself on American soil.

Ideology and Politics in the Early Years of the State of Israel, 1951–1956

Hadassah ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Mira Katzburg-Yungman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Other ◽  
Practical Work ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Zionist Organization

This chapter details further developments within the international Jewish community as well as Hadassah's role in these affairs. Despite Hadassah's unrelenting focus on practical work, it could not ignore the questions about the essence of Zionism that arose as a result of the establishment of the State of Israel. In the context of debates over aliyah and ḥalutsiyut, the question arose whether Hadassah was a Zionist organization or an organization of ‘friends of Israel’; the leaders of Hadassah firmly refused to ‘demote’ the organization to the level of ‘friends of Israel’. Another focus of debate between the Zionists in Israel and American Zionists was the concepts of ‘exile’ and ‘diaspora’. In this respect Hadassah, more than the other Zionist organizations in the United States, supported the view that can be defined as affirming the value and authenticity of Jewish life in the diaspora.

Materially Poor, Spiritually Rich

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Kranson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
American Jews ◽  
World War ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
State Of Israel

As the fortunes and social status of American Jews grew in the years after World War II, the symbolic power of the shtetl, the immigrant slum, and the struggling new state of Israel gained in importance. Jewish writers, educators, and clergy depicted these locations as deeply authentic Jewish spaces, uncorrupted by the influence and comforts of the non-Jewish world. Isolated rather than integrated, impoverished rather than affluent, they seemed to represent the opposite of mid-century American Jewish life. In the romantic imagination of American Jewish leaders, the deprivations suffered by their ancestors and co-religionists transformed into sources of pleasure, strength, and Jewish authenticity, and poverty and isolation emerged as integral components of a genuine and deeply satisfying Jewish identity.

Mafias on the Move

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Varese
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
At Will

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.

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