A History of the Jews in America by Howard M. Sachar

Author:Howard M. Sachar [Sachar, Howard M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5052-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Hibernation of American Zionism

THE AMERICAN-JEWISH RESCUE effort of the mid- and late 1930s operated on two tiers. The first was directed to immigration, the second to the growth and welfare of alternative sanctuary in the Jewish National Home in Palestine. The redemptive effort in Palestine in turn depended heavily upon the strength and vitality of Zionism in the United States. It is recalled that the movement experienced its most spectacular growth during the World War I era of Louis Brandeis’s leadership. In 1918, some twenty-seven hundred American Jews served in the Jewish Legion that participated in General Allenby’s final liberation of Palestine. That same year, American Zionists dispatched a medical unit to Palestine. In 1919, seven affiliated Zionists were among the ten members of the American Jewish Congress delegation to the peace conference. Within the United States, organizational changes appeared further to infuse this Zionist renaissance. By 1919, too, membership in the revamped and centralized Zionist Organization of America (successor to the old Federation of American Zionists) reached 140,000 members, functioning in three hundred districts and collecting millions of dollars in funds, while Hadassah and other ancillary groups added thirty-five thousand members of their own to the Zionist ranks.

During these same years, Brandeis was seeking also to define the concept and structure of the Jewish National Home. As always, he conferred extensively with the philosopher Horace Kallen. Early in 1918, the two men produced a document, “Constitutional Foundations of the New Zion,” which they submitted to the Zionist convention in Pittsburgh for discussion. Once accepted by the delegates, the statement in effect embodied the essence of Brandeisian Zionism. Outlined in six concise sections, its formula for a progressive Jewish homeland envisaged political and civil equality for all inhabitants; public ownership of land, resources, and utilities; land-leasing policies to promote efficient economic development; cooperative management of agriculture, industry, and finance; free public education; Hebrew as the medium of schooling. It was a neat blend of pragmatism and idealism.

In the euphoric aftermath of the Balfour Declaration, however, the “Pittsburgh Program” turned out to be rather too pallid for the tastes of European-born ideologists. Ironically, this would not have been their reaction in the early, parlous days of American Zionism, when immigrants had considered respectability as Americans to be more important than ideology as Jewish nationalists. But now that the Jewish National Home was a fact and enjoyed international approbation, the East Europeans felt freer to adopt a maximalist position. Where in the Pittsburgh Program, they asked, was there acknowledgment of the religious and mystical unity of the Jewish people? The historic significance of Hebrew culture? Why such emphasis on political and civic equality for non-Jews in Palestine? The statement hardly reflected the deep-rooted folk Zionism of the Eastern Europeans, for whom Jewish nationalism represented nothing less than ethnic survival. On much of the Lower East Side, then, the Brandeisian vision fell flat. The non-Socialist Yiddish press ignored the document, regarding it as bloodless and vapid in its “American” contempt for ideology. For the time being, to be sure, opposition remained muted.

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