American Zionists' Place in Israel after Statehood: From Involved Partners to Outside Supporters

After the late 1930s, American Jews became an increasingly significant part of the international Jewish arena and of the Zionist movement as a result of the United States' mounting international importance, its growing intervention in the Middle East, and the destruction of European Jewish communities in the Holocaust. The process intensified in the late 1940s, when American Jews in general and Zionists in particular made decisive economic and political contributions to the establishment of the State of Israel.¹

Despite fears of growing antisemitism in the late 1930s due to the Great Depression and to propaganda from Nazi Germany, broad sectors of the American Jewish community were conspicuously more ready than before to engage in Jewish and Zionist activity. From the beginning of the decade substantially more money was contributed to Jewish philanthropies and to Zionist collections. Hadassah membership increased as did enrollment in the Zionist movement in general, and more Jews attended Zionist gatherings. Jewish solidarity grew in response to the worsening plight of German Jewry, growing antisemitism in central and eastern Europe, and the rift between Britain and the Zionist movement, finding expression in Zionist activity. American Jews' willingness to act on the American scene as an ethnic group with a political agenda grew markedly stronger following the Allies' victory in Europe, as news of the Holocaust reached the United States. The resulting individual and collective shock led American Jews and their leadership to exert their full powers to ensure that a Jewish state would emerge from postwar international negotiations and agreements. As a result, Zionism became the strongest ideological, political, and organizational force among American Jews. The full force and significance of American Zionism in the 1940s and 1950s is to be understood in the light of the identification of American Jews with Zionist goals and with the state of Israel. This identification far exceeded formal membership in the Zionist Organization of America and Hadassah; Jews of the United States realized that in their Zionist endeavors they had chosen a place on the American scene at its particularistic ethnic pole. In so doing they led the way for other ethnic groups.²

The establishment of the Jewish state was a dramatic event that fundamentally affected the American Zionist movement and its supporters. The struggle for statehood was the axis on which American Zionism revolved in the second half of the 1940s. When the struggle succeeded and statehood was granted, American Zionists had to find new ideological and practical content for their Zionist activities, a challenge that forced them to redefine their status in America and forge a relationship between themselves and the young state.³

This article will consider American Zionists' ideological and practical involvement in the State of Israel during the first years after statehood. It will present the varied means used by some of the American Zionist leadership to influence education, economics, and the political system, all in an effort to ensure that the Jewish state would accord with their worldview in general, and their status as American Zionists in particular.

One central question that American Zionists and their leaders struggled with during this period was the desirable extent of their involvement in the internal affairs of the new State of Israel. Abba Hillel Silver, a Reform rabbi in Cleveland and the most important Zionist leader in America in the 1940s, as well as his political partner and personal friend, Emanuel Neumann, held the minority view that favored active involvement by American Zionists. They attempted to propose political courses of action that would influence the character of the young state in its early years of consolidation, and ensure that it would act in keeping with their own general worldview.

In 1948, following the establishment of the state, Silver was removed from all official positions in the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency by David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. This dramatic step was remarkable in light of Silver's public power and his intensive activity during the 1940s on behalf of Zionism in the United States and internationally. Silver...