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  • Early American Zionist Responses to the Israeli Demand for Aliya*
  • Ofer Shiff (bio)

INTRODUCTION

In its larger framework, this article explores the American Jewish responses to an image of Israel as being essentially different, and perhaps superior, in its Jewish characteristics from the Jewish diaspora.1 Often, some Israeli speakers present this difference as one between an all-embracing Israeli Jewish vitality and a partial, artificial and stagnant, hyphenated diaspora Jewish existence.2 My goal is to suggest some basic patterns of American Jewish copings with this condescending and hierarchical Israeli stand—a stance that becomes especially challenging for those who regard identification with Israel as an essential component of a long-term and vital diasporic Jewish continuity. This article will explore this larger issue by focusing on one concrete case: American Zionist responses to the Israeli demand for Aliya (immigration to Israel) during the early years after the foundation of the State of Israel. During this period, the ideological importance attributed by the Israeli leadership to Aliya was seen by many American Zionists as a challenge to the very viability of Jewish life outside of Israel, undermining the legitimacy of their long held Zionist belief of which Aliya was never a significant component.

A focus on the responses to the calls for Aliya during this period reveals two basic archetypal patterns. While the two approaches starkly differed from one another, they both strove to reframe the Israeli demand for Aliya in a way that, rather than challenging the legitimacy and viability of Jewish life outside of Israel, would support and even [End Page 96] empower American Jews in the complex endeavor of preserving Jewish distinctiveness while being an integral part of their American surroundings. To demonstrate this claim, this article will include a comparative analysis of two books, one written by Mordecai M. Kaplan, the other by Ben Halpern, during the period immediately following the foundation of Israel.3 These responses to the challenge of Aliya may be indicative of a continuous question that even today remains crucial to the understanding of the dialectic nature of diasporic identification with Israel: how to preserve Israel as a focus of Jewish identification while, at the same time, transforming its Israel-centered agenda into a diaspora-building enterprise?

THE CHALLENGE OF ALIYA BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF ISRAEL

This article focuses on the immediate years following the foundation of Israel. However, the questions guiding it are rooted in Abba Hillel Silver's response to the challenge of Aliya during the pre-Holocaust years of the 1930s.4 A succinct layout of the dilemmas and questions raised by Silver thus serve as an important introduction to this research.

Silver was an American Zionist leader and Reform rabbi who was known for his Zionist activism, especially when he led American Jewry in a quite militant and adamant manner in the struggle for Jewish statehood during the second half of the 1940s. Despite Silver's militant Zionist reputation, throughout the 1930s and prior to the campaign for Jewish statehood, he consistently opposed the Aliya of German Jews to Eretz Israel. Thus, in a sermon he gave in 1936 he warned against the perception of Aliya as the ultimate Zionist solution for the "Jewish problem":

Even if we get two or three million Jews out of the countries of Europe and settle them in Palestine that does not solve the problem for the rest of the Jews who are going to remain in the diaspora. . . The Nazis prepare destruction for the Jewish people, but there is a law of history which . . . says that in the long last, bigotry, intolerance and hate do not win the day.5

Silver was on sabbatical from his prestigious Cleveland Reform synagogue "Tifereth Israel" (known as "The Temple") when he visited Germany and witnessed first-hand Nazi persecution and Hitler's rise to power.6 When, several months later, he was interviewed by the American press about the situation in Germany,7 he described the German persecution of the Jews as more evil and dangerous than the pogroms of tsarist Russia. For Silver, the real threat posed by Nazism was that of Jewish exclusion from German society. As he [End Page 97...

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