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"Jews Political activity United States History 20th century."
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Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, and the Jewish New Left
It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the \"wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism,\" as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This \"conversion\" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this \"conversion\" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left's anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S.'s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged their support for Black Power critiques of Zionism. In this way, Jewish members of the New Left also attempted to critically challenge their own whiteness, aligning support for Israel after 1967 with support for the racial and economic structures of militarism and capitalism at home.
Journal Article
The American Jewish Community and the Bosnian War
The purpose of this article is to analyze the contribution of the American Jewish community to ending the Bosnian War. In the literature on the American response to the 1992–1995 war, the community’s advocacy for Bosnia has been neglected. This article will argue that the American Jewish community worked toward four objectives: (i) closure of death camps in Bosnia, (ii) providing humanitarian assistance, (iii) advocating for the setting up of a war crimes tribunal and (iv) urging for the UN-imposed embargo to be lifted. The sympathy and support of the American Jewish community for Bosnia and Bosniak Muslims during the 1990s is a a fascinating but understudied aspect of the American response to genocide in Europe at the close of the twentieth century.
Journal Article
Signposts: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society and World War I
For much of the period of time when Kohler and his co-writer simon Wolf researched and wrote these two articles, which together ran up to more than 250 pages including hefty appendices of primary documents, the United states, because of its non-belligerent status and its geographic isolation suffered none of the disruption caused by the war. even after america's declaration of war and its soldiers went \"over there,\" the atlantic provided americans with a safe space, removed from the ravages of the conflict. as such the Jews of the United states constituted the only sizable Jewish population in the world living in a land not marred by trenches, not in the path of armies on the move, not in danger of invasion. even england endured, from 1915 on, aerial bombing.
Journal Article
American Jews: diehard conservatives. (analysis of 1988 presidential election voting)
American Jews tend to resist change and in the 1988 presidential election voted democratic in about the same percentages they traditionally have. An exploration of the demographics of the Jewish vote are explored.
Magazine Article
Immigrants against the State
From the 1880s through the 1940s, tens of thousands of first- and second-generation immigrants embraced the anarchist cause after arriving on American shores. Kenyon Zimmer explores why these migrants turned to anarchism, and how their adoption of its ideology shaped their identities, experiences, and actions.
Zimmer focuses on Italians and Eastern European Jews in San Francisco, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey. Tracing the movement's changing fortunes from the pre–World War I era through the Spanish Civil War, Zimmer argues that anarchists, opposed to both American and Old World nationalism, severed all attachments to their nations of origin but also resisted assimilation into their host society. Their radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity instead embraced diversity and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. Though ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of Americanism and other nationalisms, the anarchist movement nonetheless provided a shining example of a transnational collective identity delinked from the nation-state and racial hierarchies.
eBook
The Fervent Embrace
When Israel declared its independence in 1948, Harry Truman issued a memo recognizing the Israeli government within eleven minutes. Today, the U.S. and Israel continue on as partners in an at times controversial alliance - an alliance, many argue, that is powerfully influenced by the Christian Right. In The Fervent Embrace, Caitlin Carenen chronicles the American Christian relationship with Israel, tracing first mainline Protestant and then evangelical support for Zionism. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, American liberal Protestants argued that America had a moral humanitarian duty to support Israel. Christian anti-Semitism had helped bring about the Holocaust, they declared, and so Christians must help make amends. Moreover, a stable and democratic Israel would no doubt make the Middle East a safer place for future American interests. Carenen argues that it was this mainline Protestant position that laid the foundation for the current evangelical Protestant support for Israel, which is based primarily on theological grounds. Drawing on previously unexplored archival material from the Central Zionist Archives in Israel, this volume tells the full story of the American Christian-Israel relationship, bringing the various players - American liberal Protestants, American Evangelicals, American Jews, and Israelis - together into one historical narrative.
eBook
Political Culture and the Legacies of Antisemitism: The Heller-Campbell Congressional Race in South Carolina 1978
The blatant nature of Sprouse's attack upon Heller's religion and identity was rare for a modern US House race. [...]his congressional campaign, Heller's Jewish identity had benefited his political career, but Heller had only run in the city of Greenville, not the more blue-collar Spartanburg or the rural portions of Greenville County that also formed part of the Fourth District. By the early 1970s, the combination of the Cold War and school desegregation had heightened antisemitic sentiments in the South, especially the rural South.5 The nature of Greenville politics—where integration occurred through aggressive intervention by the business elite—rendered Heller, a member of that elite, uniquely vulnerable to a linkage between antisemitism, anti-elite sentiments, and a backlash to integration.6 Ironically, while Sprouse's attacks helped to end Heller's career, they also tarnished the winner in the race, Republican Carroll Campbell, who would serve four terms in the House and eight successful years as South Carolina's governor. The career of Georgia's Tom Watson, the Populist Party's vice-presidential candidate and later US senator (D-GA), showed how populist sentiments fueled antisemitism.8 By contrast, Mississippi governor and US senator James Vardaman (D-MS) shared Watson's radical economic beliefs and intense racism, but hailed Jews as \"wise, conservative, patriotic, and provident. Since emigration to the United States required affidavits from sponsoring US citizens, Heller requested Mills' assistance.18 A local factory owner, Shepard Saltzman, sponsored Heller and his sister.
Journal Article