American Zionists' Place in Israel After Statehood: From Involved Partners to Outside Supporters (Essay)

After the late 1930s, American Jews became an increasingly significant part of the international Jewish arena and of the Zionist movement as a result of the United States' mounting international importance, its growing intervention in the Middle East, and the destruction of European Jewish communities in the Holocaust. The process intensified in the late 1940s, when American Jews in general and Zionists in particular made decisive economic and political contributions to the establishment of the State of Israel. (1) Despite fears of growing antisemitism in the late 1930s due to the Great Depression and to propaganda from Nazi Germany, broad sectors of the American Jewish community were conspicuously more ready than before to engage in Jewish and Zionist activity. From the beginning of the decade substantially more money was contributed to Jewish philanthropies and to Zionist collections. Hadassah membership increased as did enrollment in the Zionist movement in general, and more Jews attended Zionist gatherings. Jewish solidarity grew in response to the worsening plight of German Jewry, growing antisemitism in central and eastern Europe, and the rift between Britain and the Zionist movement, finding expression in Zionist activity. American Jews' willingness to act on the American scene as an ethnic group with a political agenda grew markedly stronger following the Allies' victory in Europe, as news of the Holocaust reached the United States. The resulting individual and collective shock led American Jews and their leadership to exert their full powers to ensure that a Jewish state would emerge from postwar international negotiations and agreements. As a result, Zionism became the strongest ideological, political, and organizational force among American Jews. The full force and significance of American Zionism in the 1940s and 1950s is to be understood in the light of the identification of American Jews with Zionist goals and with the state of Israel. This identification far exceeded formal membership in the Zionist Organization of America and Hadassah; Jews of the United States realized that in their Zionist endeavors they had chosen a place on the American scene at its particularistic ethnic pole. In so doing they led the way for other ethnic groups. (2)