Rabbinic Judaism in the Making by Alexander Guttmann

Author:Alexander Guttmann [Guttmann, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Judaism, Theology, History, Jewish
ISBN: 9780814344019
Google: _mVwDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2018-02-05T15:59:44+00:00

THE ZIONIST LOBBY: COMBATING ENEMIES

The American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) secession from the American Jewish Conference especially worried American Zionists. While it was not a mass-member organization, the AJC represented some of the wealthiest and most prestigious Jews of the United States. The Committee could also justly claim many impressive successes in protecting Jewish civil rights at home and abroad since its establishment in 1906.30 With its impressive financial and political resources, the AJC might be able to block the Zionist quest for hegemony within the American Jewish community.

Abba Hillel Silver, at the helm of the AZEC, aggressively responded to the American Jewish Committee threat. He charged that the Committee’s refusal to accept the decision of the democratically elected American Jewish Conference proved that non-Zionists would cooperate with Zionists only on their own terms. Silver urged that everything be done to break the influence of the American Jewish Committee.31 Heeding an AZEC request, over half of the eighteen national organizations affiliated with the American Jewish Committee, including Hadassah, cut all ties with the group.32

Zionists, believing that world Jewry was involved in a battle for survival, accused the AJC of treason. By withdrawing from the American Jewish Conference, the AZEC argued, the Committee seriously undermined Jewish unity and significantly weakened the “Jewish war effort.” A letter from the Council of Jewish Organizations of Bensonhurst and Mapleton (Brooklyn) is typical of the attacks on the American Jewish Committee. The Brooklyn Council chastised AJC President Joseph Proskauer for refusing to cooperate with the American Jewish Conference in protecting “our people against a future of continued horror, persecution, discrimination, and murder.” The letter included a dire warning that “those who undermine the unity of our Jewish People give aid and comfort to the forces of evil by practicing their policy of ‘divide and conquer.”’33

With all America mobilized for the war effort, the charge of giving aid and comfort to the enemy was certainly serious and powerful. Believing that only they could free the Jewish people from a 2,000-year-old tradition of persecution, Zionists realized that the AJC’s opposition to the American Jewish Conference’s platform threatened to do more than just challenge Zionist claims to community leadership; it might condemn future generations of Jews to the horrors of another Hitler. Given this view, the Zionist assault on the AJC is understandable and perhaps justified.

The leaders of the AJC found it difficult to resist Zionist pressure. In an attempt to maintain some leadership role in the American Jewish community, they decided that the Committee would have to undergo a drastic organizational transformation. The organization, which had always been content to restrict membership to a relatively few prominent Jews, launched a mass membership drive shortly after the American Jewish Conference. However, its struggle was futile. As American Jewry learned about the horrible extent of the Holocaust, the Zionist promise to put a “certain end” to Jewish homelessness, the principal cause of Jewish persecution, became nearly irresistible. By 1946, the AJC, finally prepared to bow to the will of American Jewry, began to cooperate with the Zionist crusade.

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