In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor's Introduction
  • Eric L. Goldstein

Israel, Palestine, Zion, the Holy Land—although known by many names, this ancient territory in the Middle East has for centuries been a touchstone for both Jewish and non-Jewish Americans. Although it is thousands of miles away and—even today—the majority of Americans have never been there, it has been a central ground on which they have enacted and contested their religious, historical, political, and cultural identities.

While the place held by the Land of Israel in the American and American Jewish imaginations has been well examined, the current issue of American Jewish History demonstrates that the potential for scholarly study of this topic has hardly been exhausted. Three of the articles presented here explore this theme in new and unconventional ways, showing how American ties to Israel and prestate Palestine provided a context for working out some of the most central issues and conflicts regarding American Jewish worship and religious practice, the education of Jewish youth, Jewish–Christian relations, the academic study of the Middle East, and the relationship between Jews and American national identity.

Deborah Waxman's and Joyce Galpern Norden's study of the decorative sanctuary murals erected by the Society for the Advancement of Judaism details the struggle of Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan and his protégé, artist Temima Nimtzowitz, to introduce figural representation into the décor of Jewish worship spaces in the United States in the 1930s. Part of Kaplan's larger effort to reconstruct Judaism by defining it as a multifaceted civilization, the murals crafted by Nimtzowitz focused on Jewish life in Palestine in visualizing how Jewish aspirations and values might be translated into an all-encompassing way of life. Ultimately, however, the lack of enthusiasm for the murals among congregants and American Jews more broadly revealed the limits of both interest in Kaplan's theological innovations and the ability of Palestine to symbolize the religious self-understanding of American Jews.

Rachel Hallote's article on Jacob H. Schiff and his role in creating the field of biblical archaeology in the United States casts our attention to the way in which historical imaginings of the Middle East were a battleground in defining the place of Jews in American and European culture and society. Halotte traces Schiff's crucial role during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in loosening American archaeological research from its academic moorings in Assyriology, a field that favored exploration in Iraq over the biblical heartland and marginalized [Begin Page vii] Jews in the history of the ancient world. Through his philanthropy to Harvard's Semitic Museum and his underwriting of the Samaria expedition, Schiff successfully promoted a greater focus on Palestine and the Jews, to whom, he argued, "mankind is indebted [for] its religion."

The evolving relationship between Zionism and the Reform movement has been a central theme in studies of American Judaism, but Emily Alice Katz's article on the informal religious education of Reform youth in the United States provides an important new dimension to this history. Examining a host of untapped materials including youth group and summer camp memorabilia and the widely read Reform youth periodical, Keeping Posted, Katz reveals the dramatic turn toward Israel and Zionist-oriented themes in Reform youth programming during the immediate postwar years. Most significantly, she shows that these trends were not simply a reflection of the larger Reform turn toward Zionism, but were a significant shaping factor in and of themselves, serving as a vehicle through which a group of Zionist educators helped create "a new prototype of the Reform Jew" that came to dominate the movement by the end of the twentieth century.

In addition to the three articles that treat American connections to and imaginings of the Land of Israel, we also include in this issue a fourth article that is no less compelling in its ability to open up the field of American Jewish history to new approaches and concerns. Sarah Abrevaya Stein's study of deaf American Jewish culture is a first of its kind in interweaving the history of American Jews and the history of disability in the United States. Exploring the development of institutions for the...

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