Allan C. Brownfeld
In “The Threshold of Dissent” (New York University Press), Marjorie N.
Feld, professor of history at Babson College, shows that today’s vocal
debates among Jewish Americans over Israel and Zionism are simply the
latest chapter in a history that stretches to the 19th century. She
brings alive the dissenters of the past who have often been
forgotten—-and now seem increasingly wise in their assessment.
Throughout
much of the twentieth century, the organized American Jewish community
projected a unified position in support of both Israel and Zionism.
This public display of unanimity was, in fact, “a manufactured
consensus, as Jewish leaders increasingly discounted and marginalized
dissent,” Feld notes. “They often punished those who criticized
Israel…or who openly rejected Zionism.”
In
Feld’s view, “The lack of rigorous and respected scholarship on Jewish
critics of Zionism in the United States has had far-reaching
implications…In the last ten years, shifting sentiments toward Zionism
and Israel offer a chilling corrective to the imposed Zionist consensus
that is largely still supported by the mainstream Jewish communal
leaders. There is a growing understanding of the costs of imposing this
consensus, of maintaining a low threshold of tolerance for
intracommunal debate over Israel.”
Israel’s Diminishing Role
Today,
Feld points out, “IAmong younger American Jews, Israel plays a
diminishing role in their Jewish identity. American Jews are more
fractured than ever before about Israel…This evidence suggests that the
forced American Jewish consensus on Zionism actually works against
communal interests, as many young Jews no longer see their worldviews
…reflected in mainstream Jewish communal organizations and, as a result,
may choose to leave Jewish belonging behind.”
This
book, Feld writes, “documents and analyzes how American Jewish Zionist
leaders attempted to marginalize many voices of Jewish dissent. In our
current political environment, many seek to equate on-the-rise
sentiments of anti-Zionism with antisemitism….these tactics and debates
are not new…opening up conversations on Zionism lends itself to greater
pluralism, even democratization , within American Jewish life.”
Reform
Judaism, Feld points out, opposed Jewish nationalism from the
beginning. In Its 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, a group of Reform rabbis
declared that Judaism was a religion of universal values, not a
nationality. Beyond this, she writes, these Reform rabbis “recognized
both Christianity and Islam as what they called ‘daughter religions of
Judaism’ and as sharing a ‘providential mission’ in the ‘spreading of
monotheistic and moral truth.’ The document made clear that Reform Jews
in the United States would identify as a religious community
only…Reform leaders…insisted that the return to the land of Zion
embedded in the Jewish liturgy was a spiritual and not a literal
journey.”
Jewish Opposition To The Balfour Declaration
In
March 1919, a group of prominent Jewish Americans presented a petition
to President Woodrow Wilson to protest the creation of a “Jewish
homeland” in Palestine which was called for in the Balfour Declaration.
It rejected Jewish nationalism and held against the founding of any
state on the basis of religion and/or race. Among those signing the
petition were New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, E.M. Baker,
president of the New York Stock Exchange, Henry Morganthau, Sr., former
U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, and Rep. Julius Klein of California. Their
views represented the dominant American Jewish view on Palestine and
Zionism.
Later, as antisemitism grew in Eastern
Europe and later in Germany, many American Jews, including Reform Jews,
became sympathetic to Zionism. The American Council for Judaism, Feld
shows, was established to keep alive the original Reform Jewish
philosophy and worldview. At the Council’s founding meeting, Feld
writes of Rabbi Morris Lazaron, longtime leader of the Baltimore Hebrew
Congregation and a former Zionist: “He identified himself as a former
member of the Zionist Organization of America, who ‘left the
Organization because I could not accept its philosophy, its aims and its
methods.’ At this founding meeting on June 1,1942, Rabbi Lazaron read a
moving speech. He spoke first of the immediate need to defeat the Axis
powers…He declared, ‘a state based on race or creed was fundamentally
wrong and indeed is the antithesis of one of the principles for why this
war is being fought.”
Writing in Life Magazine
(June 28, 1943), Council president Lessing J. Rosenwald titled his
article, “Why Americans of Jewish Faith are Opposed to the Establishment
of a Jewish State.” Feld reports that, Edith G.Rosenwald “recounted
years later that the magazine had ‘carried an article by King Ibn Saud
(first king of Saudi Arabia) and another by Zionist leader Dr. Stephen
Wise on the Palestine problem,’ adding that Lessing ‘wanted to make
clear that there was a third viewpoint.’ She saw this, her husband’s
column, as the Council’s first ‘walk on the stage of history.’”
Equal Rights And Responsibilities For All
In
1946, Rosenwald appeared on the popular radio program hosted by
journalist Tex McCrary. He asserted that Palestine should be a “state
where Jews, Moslems and Christians can worship as they see fit and are
accorded equal rights and responsibilities.”
The
organized Jewish community, Feld reports, did its best to silence the
Council’s opposition to Zionism and create the false impression that the
Jewish community was united behind Zionist goals: “In 1944, leaders of
the Zionist Organization of America formed a group originally called
the Committee to Combat the American Council for Judaism, later the
Committee on Unity for Palestine, with 112 local branches…that wrote
‘hundreds of thousands of pieces of pro-Zionist literature.’”
Feld
highlights other prominent Jewish critics of Zionism such as Yiddish
language journalist William Zukerman, who started the English-language
Jewish Newsletter. Zukerman disputed the central role of Zionism in
Jewish life, insisting that Jews “should remain loyal to their nation of
origin, where he believed their own Jewish future should lie,” she
writes.
Organized resistance to the likes of
Zukerman and others who challenged Zionism, or expressed concern for the
rights of Palestinians, was fierce. Feld points to the fact that “in
the 1950s, Zionist Jewish leaders in the U.S. joined with Israeli
diplomats to limit public discourse and deny funding and access to
American Jews such as Zukerman.” The attacks on Jewish critics of
Zionism became brutal. In 1951, Shlomo Katz, editor of the Labor
Zionist journal Jewish Frontier attacked Zukerman by suggesting a link
between him and the kapos (Jewish prisoners who supervised forced labor
in Nazi concentration camps).
Policing Criticism Of Israel
Feld
warns that policing criticism of Israel within the Jewish community has
“ultimately weakened Jewish communal life” and detracted from Jewish
efforts to promote social Justice. “if mainstream Jewish communal
organizations continue to hold fast to unqualified support for
Israel…will young American Jews continue to look at American Jewish life
and find if wanting? she asks. “And…how would future historians
assess the impact of this forced consensus on the safety of Jews and all
others.”
How will future generations assess
this period in American Jewish life? Feld concludes this way: “Across
the last century, American Jewish Zionist leaders enforced a threshold
of dissent by marginalizing progressive American Jews who were able to
see Palestinian suffering. Theirs is a fraught and difficult history
and one entangled with immense destruction in the name of Jewish
safety. If mainstream Jewish communal organizations continue to hold
fast to unqualified support for Israel, insisting that American Jews and
American politicians subscribe to a forced Zionist consensus, will
young American Jews continue to look af American Jewish life and find it
wanting? And, finally, how might future historians assess the impact
of this forced consensus on the safety of Jews and all others?”
Marjorie
Feld has written an important book, properly telling the story of
American Jewish opposition to Zionism which others have largely
ignored. It is a subject to which more and more scholars, fortunately,
are beginning, to turn their attention.
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Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of ISSUES,
The quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.