Americans Fearful of Zionism
Cohen, David
Americans Fearful of Zionism Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism 1942-48 Thomas A. Kolsky Temple University Press, 1990. 269 pp., S39.95 Reviewed by David Cohen The American...
...On humanitarian grounds, the ACJ supported immigration of refugee Jews during World War II to the United States and Palestine...
...The ACJ could neither connect with the Shoah nor see Palestine as a place for Jews...
...It argued with cold rationalism as if there were no Hider...
...Although today the Jewish community is more participatory and constituency based, we also continue to fear differences displayed in public discussion...
...Both are legitimate and healthy...
...During World War II, a minority of Reform rabbis opposed the Reform movement's support for organizing a Jewish army in Palestine...
...Once Israel was established, the ACJ no longer mattered in American Jewish life...
...But it was no substitute for thinking strategically about retaining American support for Israel as a major consensus issue of American politics...
...It rejected the idea that Jews are a people...
...The ACJ's other message—securing protected places for Jews worldwide—was drowned out by its hostility to a Jewish state...
...Who, under 50, can identify the ACJ or Lessing Rosenwald and Elmer Berger, its principal leaders...
...The organized community embraced the Bush administration's Persian Gulf policy, a tactic designed to help Israel...
...The ACJ feared Zionist intrusion into American Jews' lives...
...But it opposed the creation of a Jewish state as undemocratic and anachronistic...
...Kolsky's work has contemporary relevance: Zionists and anti-Zionists acted as insiders, operating in the corridors of power rather than organizing constituencies and publicly persuading the undecided...
...Kolsky keeps the historical record straight by clarifying who within the Jewish community stood where on the creation of the state of Israel...
...Today American Zionist support of activities in Israel is philanthropic and political...
...American-style Zionism today rejects the notion that one must live in Israel to be a Zionist or that living in America is exile...
...The ACJ leadership missed the historic moment by not understanding why after the Shoah ajewish state should be created...
...269 pp., S39.95 Reviewed by David Cohen The American Council for Judaism (ACJ) is a perfect question for a Jewish Trivial Pursuit game...
...This led in 1942 to the formation of the ACJ that, at its start, waged a vigorous anti-Zionist campaign...
...Thomas A. Kolsky capably captures the history of the ACJ, its relationship to other Jewish organizations and to the Reform movement, its civil war with the pro-Zionist groups and its all-out efforts to influence American policy to oppose creation of Israel as a Jewish state...
...The ACJ stressed that Judaism is a religion...
...David Cohen is codirector of the Advocacy Institute and codirector of the Center for Israeli Peace and Security of Americans for Peace Now...
Vol. 16 • October 1991 • No. 5
