Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (review)

Michelle Mart's Eye on Israel is an intelligent and historically grounded study of the image of Israel in the United States from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s. Deftly using sources that range from State Department documents to popular film, Mart examines the cultural and social attitudes that played a role in shaping U.S. political and diplomatic relationships with the new state. The focus is on the first ten years after World War II, starting with U.S. debates over Israel's founding and ending just after the Suez Crisis in 1956. With her careful attention to this relatively neglected decade, Mart questions the common assumption that the U.S. embrace of Israel was inevitable—that it emerged easily and clearly from shared values, or was forged directly from the ashes of the Holocaust. Instead, she takes seriously the problems that Israel's founding posed for American policymakers, whose interests in the Middle East were complex and at times contradictory. This important study combines cultural and political history to explore the terrain that both policymakers and the public navigated in their path toward the "special relationship."

One of the strengths of Mart's book is that she traces the multiple intersections between attitudes about Jews in the United States and attitudes toward Israel. She does not imagine a one-way relationship, but instead suggests the importance of an ongoing set of questions about Jewish identity, U.S. national self-definition, and the relationship between the two. Mart argues that from the mid-1940s until 1953, U.S. political and cultural attitudes toward Israel were "increasingly friendly, but also complex and not always easy to read" (30). In particular, Americans expressed a profound ambivalence about the particular nature of Israel as a Jewish nation, which seemed at once to be a fulfillment of (justified) universal rights and an expression of (unjustified) particularism. The problem was particularly acute for Americans, in part because of the specific ways in which postwar U.S. culture came to understand the nature of antisemitism.

As World War II came to an end, issues of race and democracy were paramount concerns for many Americans. In the wake of the Holocaust, with the emerging power of anticolonial movements, and facing the dawn of an American Century built on the color line, liberals and conservatives alike touted the importance of embracing "universal" rights for all people.¹ Race talk became an embarrassment. In this context, a spate of novels and films took up the problem of antisemitism in America. Mart convincingly traces the "de-semitizing aesthetic" (15) in these popular culture texts, which demanded that Jews who were accepted into the mainstream should look more and more "Aryan." In perhaps the best known example, Gentleman's Agreement (the 1947 novel and then film), the writer Phil Green decides to pose as Jewish for six weeks. He quickly learns the pervasiveness and corrosive impact of anti-Jewish attitudes. The film and the book both make clear that such prejudice is "un-American"; it is, Phil says, opposed to "everything this country stands for" (7). But for Phil Green, posing as Jewish does not require any real changes on his part: he does not need any particular cultural knowledge or religious values to "become" Jewish. Nor he does not have to "blacken up," as John Howard Griffith would fifteen years later in Black Like Me (1961). This universalizing and assimilationist logic implied that Jewishness had little content. Antisemitism was not only irrational, it had no real referent: prejudice is wrong because, after all, we are all the same.

But in the 1940s and 50s, Jewishness was also understood as something more than decorative difference. Policymakers and popular culture both defined Jews as unique because of their victimization in the Holocaust. John Hersey's The Wall (1950), for example, told the distinctively Jewish story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. And Hersey's novel posits...