Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967.
Silver, M.M.
Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967.
By Emily Alice Katz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.
xiii + 215 pp.
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 of non-fiction works about Israel written in the 1950s by Jewish
and gentile writers of proven talent for mass media market production,
compared to the phenomenal publication success of Leon Uris'
Exodus, a novel I myself (following many other commentators) regard as
the key turning point with regard to American Jewish expressiveness
about Israel.
More than anything, this counter-argument would appeal to a
historian's obligation to account for the vast qualitative
difference in American Jewish practices about Israel that separates the
pre-1970s era when Israel's government, the Jewish Agency and
American Jewish organizations were able to impose an impressive measure
of control over philanthropy, tourism, lobbying and even public debate,
compared to the post-1970S era when pro-Israel philanthropy has
privatized and grown, debate has become highly contentious and
pro-Israel lobbying has become highly effective and then also
fragmented. As a description of this sea change in American Jewish
orientations to Israel, my guess is that future scholars will find the
analysis developed by Theodor Sasson in The New American Zionism (2013),
delineating a discernible, substantive transition from a mostly
monolithic paradigm of pre-1967 "mobilization," to
today's fragmented and privatized model of "direct
engagement," more useful than the thesis of evolutionary,
continuing development developed in Katz's revision. Nonetheless,
Bringing Zion Home is undeniably correct to point out that
transformative events in cultural expression, be it the novel and film
Exodus or anything else that occurred after Israel's first decade
of existence, invariably base themselves upon building blocks that are
put in place in earlier, supposedly pre-revolutionary, eras.
M. M. Silver
Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Israel
