American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (review)

Two Large, Seemingly Antagonistic Missions, the first regarding the American dream for all 'the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,' and the second embodied in Zionism's vision of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, emerged from the bloodshed and suffering of World War I to foster a remarkable set of opportunities for Jewish women living in the United States. Through a paradox that seems incomprehensible, Zionism, itself, helped convince most Americans that the central reason for its existence—the insecurity of life for Jews living in the Diaspora—did not apply to the United States. While helping Jews in Palestine, American Zionists seemed to forfeit their own condition of exile.

Much of the compelling force of the Zionist vision comes from its rejection of other alternatives for Jewish survival. The Balfour Declaration and its subsequent incorporation into the League of Nations Mandate that set the terms for British rule in Palestine appeared, to Zionists, to render the national home as the climatic fulfillment of Jewish history. American Jews, however, could not help but see in their own homeland so many promises, so many opportunities, and so many rewards for energy that they could not conceive of having to seek liberation beyond their own shores.

Shulamit Reinharz and Mark Raider's magnificent study, American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise challenges us to understand how faith in Zionism and in the American dream nourished and changed the meaning of both projects. This is a story not of ideologies or for the most part, of ideologues, but rather of the creators of a new tradition. The essays in this collection bring some of the leaders of Hadassah, Pioneer Women, and of Mizrachi beautifully to life and show how a dedication to the Zionist cause deepened a commitment to American values, and enlarged the Zionist perspective, to preserve a set of liberal principles reaching across the ethnic and national divide in Palestine even in the worst of times and raging communal violence. Reinharz and Raider are as qualified as anyone today to put together this history. Both have written as knowledgeably about American Zionism as about the lives of Jewish women. In this book, Reinharz and Raider assemble essays that chart the rich profusion of movements, institutions, and activities—including Aliyah—that Zionism inspired in Jewish women living in the United States.

"Although the number of American Zionists who actually immigrated to Palestine was never large, the number of Jewish women who subscribed to the Zionist cause was significant." (p. XXII) So much of the Zionist enterprise encouraged collective action that we forget how often and surprisingly it also created the context for individuality, where the particular deeds of ordinary women could affect the course of history. Many of the women described in the pages of this collection lived more dangerously, made themselves at home under more political volcanoes, and looked deeper into more social abysses, than most American women of their class and age. This book helps us to see the complexities and ironies in the lives of Jewish women who developed the Zionist movement in America and to think about them in radically new ways. An incomparable body of research by historians in recent years is beginning to show how the very existence of women's Zionist organizations served to forge a distinctive consciousness among their members that became one important source of the movement's historic potency.

In 1925, for example, both the centrist Organization of America (ZOA) and Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, had countrywide memberships of approximately 27,000. A decade later the ZOA membership had dropped to less than 17,000 while Hadassah (which declined somewhat during the Depression) rose to approximately 33,000. Thereafter Hadassah's membership trajectory stayed well ahead of the ZOA except for a brief period on the eve of statehood when the ZOA attained parity with Hadassah and reached its peak strength of 250,000.

(p. XX...