The Six-Day War and World Jewry (review)

"Some events, when they occur," Eli Lederhendler and the editorial board of The Six-Day War and World Jewry (Haim Avni, Sergio DellaPergola, and Gideon Shimoni) argue, referring to the 1967 Middle East War, "seem to divide history into a 'before' and 'after' all their own" (p. ix). In the most general sense, the essays collected here seek to test whether this hypothesis obtains for Jewish life in the Diaspora. That is, as the editor, Eli Lederhendler, puts it in his introduction, "Did the Six-Day War, a significant event in Israeli history, also significantly affect Jewish communities around the world at the time in question or subsequently? To what extent has the Six-Day War become an icon—a determining event of historic and symbolic depth—for Jews living outside Israel? What, in fact, has changed in the Jewish Diaspora as a result of that war?" (p. 2). By including well-researched and incisive essays that address all of the major Jewish communities—North and South America, Soviet Russia, Europe and South Africa—Lederhendler's collection succeeds admirably in providing exhaustive and nuanced answers to these questions, supplanting the heretofore apocryphal (and usually hyperbolic) impressions of the war's impact on world Jewry.

Lederhendler organizes the essays loosely, but usefully nonetheless, into three sections: 1) essays that seek to establish rather quantitatively the response of Jews (e.g., rates of wartime volunteers, rates of aliyah, tourism, fundraising, etc.) throughout the world to the war; 2) essays that explore the Jewish experience in those countries that conform more or less to an ethnically and politically pluralistic model (the United States, Canada, France, Argentina, Mexico, and South Africa); and 3) essays that explore the Jewish experience in ethnically monist and/or politically authoritarian societies (Muslim states, the Soviet Union, and Poland). While these divisions, as Lederhendler notes, may be overly reductive (can any single rubric define both the government of the United States and South Africa during apartheid?), his organizational structure does succeed in emphasizing how critical a role the internal politics and policies of the various Diaspora governments played, and continues to play, in shaping the effects of the Six-Day War on Jews living in different regions throughout the world.

Definite parallels emerge as one considers the essays within each of the latter two clusters. In the countries that conform to a more or less pluralist-democratic model, the Jewish communities reacted swiftly and decisively to support Israel during its time of crisis. As Harold M. Waller notes, for example, the Canadian Jewish community "raised unprecedented sums of money, and enthusiastically supported the positions of the Israeli government" (p. 83). Deborah Dash Moore examines the way in which both the popular press in the United States and Leon Uris's best-selling novel, Exodus (1956), galvanized Jewish and mainstream American support for Israel's struggle. The South African Jewish community sent 801 volunteers to Israel by the end of September, a figure that exceeded the number of volunteers from the United States (p. 149. Haim Avni-while he acknowledges the relatively few Jewish volunteers from Argentina-documents the "sustained and highly successful emergency fund-raising campaign" initiated by Argentine Jews (p. 163).

Jews, then, living in countries that granted them the freedom, more or less, to express their support of Israel, generally did so. However, the long-term effects of the Six-Day War on these Jewish communities appear less dramatic than one might suppose. The rates of aliyah in these countries, for example, did not rise dramatically, if at all, in the years after the war. And the public status of the Jews and Jewry in these countries appears to have changed minimally. "The euphoria that accompanied identification with the State of Israel," Bokser-Liwerant contends, "could not cross the threshold of Mexican' society's expectation of national homogeneity as a sine qua non for national belonging" (p...