Israel and the American Jewish Community: A Mutual Connection: A Review of Three Books

For the individuals who are discussed in the three books before us, the inadvertent or unconscious play of social or intellectual influences was not enough. All of them applied their full energies to exert as much overt influence as they could in order to shape their own versions of the relation of the Jewish National Home and the American Jewish community to each other. As persons of stature and power, they ardently wished their respective messages to be taken to heart by Jews in Eretz Israel and America. Influence is thus an underlying common theme of these books as they deal with the Israeli-American Jewish relationship. The influences that have emanated from the two sides are analyzed here through a range of perspectives by the power of the word—in speeches, poems, judicial decisions, prayers, memoranda, or persuasive conversation.

As the title of Michael Brown’s book implies, he takes up early Yishuv attempts to influence American Jewry before 1945 by concentrating on six notable figures, two of whom came to Eretz Israel from the United States. On the other hand, Allon Gal’s numerous contributors show how the American Jewish community and Eretz Israel have affected each other in financial, cultural, and political contexts. Perhaps assertions of deliberate influence do not precisely apply when speaking of Chief Justice Simon Agranat, who was the soul of judicial discretion. Pnina Lahav’s portrayal of Agranat’s life and judicial career shows that both were conducted far from the publicity and spotlights that have accompanied much of the Israel-American Jewry relationship. His important judgments, however, have drawn respectful, widespread attention, and have injected developing Israeli jurisprudence with distinctively American Bill of Rights doctrines and sociological jurisprudence. Agranat’s life work as interpreted by Lahav shows the deep influence of American legal thought in which he was educated during the 1920s. The aliyah of the young Chicago lawyer in 1930 is itself an American Zionist story. What other reason would a promising young lawyer in an American metropolis have had for removing to remote Palestine in 1930?

Envisioning Israel, edited by Allon Gal, is a collection of suggestive articles that grew out of a conference on this subject at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1993. Its title, if not all its chapters, argues that, alongside their well-known political and financial support, American Jews have envisioned a specific kind of Israel. As outlined by S. Ilan Troen in “American Experts in the Design of Zionist Society,” they have contributed detailed plans for the country’s economic development. The contributions of Abel Wolman, which are not mentioned here, and Robert R. Nathan to the management of water resources and economic growth respectively could be supplemented by the dominance of American economics in Israel’s academic economics, which in its turn has exerted far-reaching influence on Israel’s public policy. The Chicagoan Dan Patinkin, an alumnus of the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics, built The Hebrew University’s economics department in Chicago’s image. Although not of Chicago, Simon Kuznets, the great economist of Columbia and Harvard, also exerted significant influence. Probably no field of the humanities or social sciences has been as dominated by the American example as economics. Certainly not the writing of history where the French, and even the British and Germans, predominate, nor of course Jewish historiography, which is now emerging from the domination of ideologically directed Israeli masters of the last generation.

Gal’s book takes us backward to three early visions of Zion cherished by early American Hebraist maskilim, ¹ as presented by Jonathan Sarna. To them, the...