Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967 by Emily Alice Katz (review)

This is a valuable study that conveys a wealth of useful information about Israel’s presence in American Jewish life, and in the United States generally, in the period preceding the 1967 Six Day War. Claiming that American Jewish culture was “constructed” in the 1950s via the development of various performances and practices, Katz concentrates on topics in performing and visual arts, non-fiction publication, and economics that have been mostly overlooked by historians whose work on early American-Israel connections focused overwhelmingly on diplomatic, military and political issues (13). Most of the book’s findings on subjects such as the mini-cult of Israeli folk dance, patterns of consumption of Israeli products, and exhibitions of Israeli fashion or art, derive from careful, original research. Future explorations of the Israeli-American Jewish relationship and its origins will need to take Katz’s findings into account because it is impossible to separate dynamics in realms of high culture or consumer choice from more overtly political or identity issues that have dominated discussions of American Zionist history.

Katz analyzes ways in which American Jewish cultural or economic entrepreneurs utilized Israeli practices and products in this pre-1967 period due to a mix of motivations, some of them contradictory. They brought Israeli artistic or religious products into their own homes and sponsored Israeli art exhibitions or folk dancing events in public venues as a result of their own existential needs to express Jewish particularity, or to articulate ideas of compatibility between American and Israeli historical experience, or to identify themselves as patriotic Americans harnessed to various Cold War ideals and projects of cultural exchange. She is particularly insightful in the identification of cultural orientations, some of them gender-based, in areas of performing arts, fashion and consumerism, and publication, that ran counter to an evolving “muscular” narrative celebrating Israel as a fighting, victorious counterpoint to Jewish suffering in the Diaspora.

As an important corrective to over-stated descriptions of American Jewish reticence about Israel in the 1950s, a Cold War period when Jews in the U.S. faced considerable pressure about political loyalty and relatively little official support from the Eisenhower administration to boost their emotional attachments to the newly founded Jewish state, Katz’s informative study will add nuance to considered discussions of how American Jewish-Israeli connections have evolved. Investigating ways to develop relationships with their Jewish somethings-or-other in Israel (co-religionists? compatriots?), American Jews after 1948 operated in uncharted territory, and Katz is entirely correct to assert that judgmental aspersions about the putatively paltry results of their explorations and efforts are unfair. No Jewish or American ethnic standard will ever avail itself as an objectively certain measure of what they were trying to do.

On the other hand, this study’s assertive declarations about its value as a revision of long-standing historical judgments about the relative passivity of American Jews about Israel in the 1950s and 1960s before the Six Day War are often unpersuasive and distracting. Katz depicts herself as revising generations of historical scholarship about American Jews and Israel. However, willfully or not, Katz overlooks a wide array of counter-arguments that could be made against such revisionist packaging of her findings. A partly or fully compelling counter-argument would contend that the various cultural performances and practices Katz has identified (American Zionist youth group fixation on the hora, or annual Hadassah exhibitions of fashion products designed by its Fashion and Design Institute in Jerusalem, or the purchase of Israel-made Judaica or other products) emerged in the 1950s precisely because they allowed American Jews to avoid other, emotionally inconvenient commitments or, potentially compromising political practices, much as Hadassah’s exceptional popularity in the inter-war American Zionist scene partly derived from its “non-political” character. Another counter-argument would point to issues of scale. These are evidenced by the quite modest sale figures...