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The Jewish Story: The Evolution of American Zionism, part II
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Two Conflicts which Shaped American Zionism Part one presented America as an environment of formation for American Zionism, part two adds the other element of evolution - competition. The struggles between American Zionists and first the European Zionist leadership and then the heads of the new State of Israel still define our political landscape today.
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"Let no American imagine," says Justice
Louis D. Brandeis, "that Zionism is
inconsistent with patriotism. Multiple
loyalties are objectionable only if
they're inconsistent." Now, I've got my
inconsistencies just like everybody
else, but I like to believe my loyalties
lie in the highest of places cuz I'm
Marc B. Shapiro and this is The Jewish
Story.
Episode 2, The Evolution of American
Zionism, Part 2, The Conflicts That
Shaped American Zionism.
So, last episode we talked about America
as the environment of formation for
Zionism. Now, we need to take on another
piece of the evolutionary process and
that's competition. You know, if you ask
most people about evolution, they'll
tell you that it's all about the
survival of the fittest. But as I've
said many times, Darwin never said any
such thing. That was Herbert Spencer,
father of what's called social
Darwinism. Darwin's phrase was more like
survival of that which is most fit. And
as we're going to see in today's
episode, the particular nature of
American and Zionism is perfectly fit to
the environment of formation in which it
finds itself. And like I said, we're
going to look at a couple of conflicts
that really contribute to that. But
before we do, I want to remind you of a
lesson that's come up in previous
seasons a couple of times. And that's
that there are two models, basic models
of how we relate to our past and they
play a very important role in how of
course we're going to understand the
present and the future. The first is the
neoclassical,
the idea that the ideal lies somewhere
in the past. Be it the Greco-Roman world
that lies at the base of the Renaissance
or even in our own tradition, the idea
of the Davidic kingdom, the restoration
of the temple. An idealized version of
the past is actually where things were
best. And the implication of such a
thing
is that the forms which are created by
our journey through history are at best
accidental. And at worst, they're
falsehoods that cover up our true self.
And we have to shed those aspects in
order to get back to the core of who we
really are, meaning who we were, but who
we are. And you can see how this plays a
very important role in the Zionist
notion of Shlilat Ha'Galut, the negation
of exile. It's not for nothing that the
Zionists and the early leadership of the
state of Israel were fond of that
phrase, Min Ha'Tanakh El Ha'Palmach,
from the Hebrew Bible to the striking
arm of the Israeli army, and skip the
2,500
years that lie in between those
accidents of exile, which are really
just false images covering over our real
Israelite self. And of course, the
question for us is where does real
Zionism, or in fact, the real Jew
reside? It's not just a question of
time, it's also a question of locality.
Because if you think of Judaism as a
constant seed being planted, and the
Jewish people, you could look at the
Torah as like the DNA or the source
code, planted in Poland, up spring the
Jews. Planted in North Africa, up spring
the Jews. We've spoken about it before.
But the assertion of Zionism is that
only the tree which grows out of that
seed when it's planted in Israel is the
true Jew. So, you can see that that's
not just a neoclassical longing for a
past time, it's a belief that there's
only one place in which the Jews can
really be the Jews. That's one side of
the argument. The other side of the
argument that we've discussed, that's
not the neoclassical, is the cultural
evolutionary. This is the idea that
every environment of formation that we
encounter through history actually
allows for something genuine to emerge
from within us that would otherwise
never have found expression. Meaning
that forms that we've taken in exile,
the habits we've learned, the things
that we've taught, the people we've
become, aren't accidents, and they're
certainly not falsehoods which cover
over our true nature.
They are elements of our true self which
could only find their expression through
the environment of formation in the
various stops along the way of exile. An
example would be poetry. As we said
before, I mean poetry exists in the
Bible. Of course, the the the prophets
are really the poets of ancient Israel.
But when you look at the encounter
between Jewish culture and Arabic
culture, and you see the flowering of
the poetry of the early Middle Ages, you
could say that we were just aping the
ways of another culture, or you could
say that that was an environment of
formation that set free the poetic soul
within Am Yisrael.
And from this perspective of cultural
evolution,
we have to ask the question of is
American Zionism real Zionism?
Right? Because American Zionism isn't
arguing that Israel isn't the real Zion,
but it fundamentally challenges that
posture of Shlilat HaGalut, of the
negation of exile, which underlies
classic Zionism. Because American
Zionism is premised on a model of
integration of all the experiences of
the past into present identity. And when
it comes to cultural evolution, that
integration of the past into present
identity is what allows us to come to a
fullness of the future. Right? American
Zionism doesn't see itself as an
accident or second best, as we'll see in
the conflicts in the coming episodes.
And that's what's going to set up the
real issue that we're laying out today,
one that's going to follow us through
the whole coming season. We're going to
see today the emergence of a messy love
triangle between American Jewry, or
really American Zionism, between the
World Zionist Movement, and the State of
Israel.
And you know, if I have to look back in
season two, I'd have to give the credit
to Hillel Kook, that great soldier and
fighter who attempted to first awaken
American Jewry to need to fight for
independence in the land of Israel. And
then, when the Holocaust began to
unfold, was the most active voice
amongst American and really world Jewry
in attempting to save his brothers and
sisters. He saw it first. But even as he
was rallying to save European Jewry on
one hand, and lead the Jews of the land
of Israel on the other toward
independence, he foresaw the imminent
conflict between the Jewish American
identity and the identity of the Hebrew
nation.
Here, listen to these words from his
manifesto of the Hebrew nation, written
in 1944.
The Jews today who live in the European
hell, together with the Jews of the land
of Israel, constitute the Hebrew nation.
That's what we call today Israel. There
isn't another nation to which they owe
their allegiance, but the Hebrew nation.
We must state it clearly, the Jews in
the United States do not belong to the
Hebrew nation. These Jews are Americans
of Hebrew descent.
Now, he solved the problem by making a
hard division. The Jews of America are
Jews, not Israelis. Right? And the Jews
of Israel are Israelis. But does that
mean that they're not Jews? Right?
There's a deep question here, and a lot
of it actually comes down to geography.
American Zionism was never premised
on the mass immigration. They didn't see
their staying home in America, so to
speak, as some form of armchair Zionism,
right? That's that old joke that Zionism
is when one Jew asked another Jew for
money to send a third Jew to Israel.
That's not what was happening in
America. The American Jewish experience
of acceptance
offered something fundamentally
different to the concept of Zionism than
European Jewry's experience of
rejection. And we saw that that America
was a unique environment of formation
for Zionism.
So, we have that now. And let's take a
look at two American Zionist leaders and
how their competition with European and
Israeli Zionists will further shape the
evolution of American Zionism.
The founding personality of American
Zionism is unquestionably Louis
Brandeis. He was a child of the second
wave of Jewish immigration. Those were
the German Jews that came over in the
early 19th century. Born to Bohemian
immigrant parents in 1856.
and by 1876 he'd already graduated
Harvard Law School. You know, the legend
says that he had the highest grade point
average ever in the history of the
school. And Brandeis stayed on in Boston
where he founded a law firm. In fact, he
didn't just found a law firm, he became
a leading legal voice of the entire
progressive era. His public profile was
so high in the battles that he fought
that he eventually became known as the
people's lawyer.
And until he was well into his 50s,
Brandeis was completely alienated not
only from Zionism but from most forms of
Jewish life. He didn't live near other
Jews. He didn't belong to any synagogue.
He gave only symbolic gifts to Jewish
charities and his friends were almost
entirely non-Jews.
There are many people later who would
claim to have recruited Brandeis to the
Zionist cause or at least to be able to
explain how he got there. But he himself
attributed his interest in Zionism to
the role he played in mediating the
great New York garment workers strike of
1910. The strike is its own classic
story by the way. Jewish labor, the
immigrant struggle. But for our
purposes, what matters is the role that
Brandeis played brought him in contact
for the first time with the Eastern
European Jewish masses of the third
wave.
Now here were a type of Jews he'd never
encountered. And he was deeply moved. He
labeled them as quote a true democratic
feeling and a deep appreciation of the
elements of social justice. And there
was nothing more important in his eyes
to American character than those two
things, the democratic feeling and
social justice.
So, driven by that excitement over the
potential of this new type of Jew,
Brandeis looked around for what to do
and what he found was the Zionist
Organization of America which he joined
in 1912 and almost overnight his
prestige transformed the movement. It It
just his prestige. Brandeis was a new
type of leader, charismatic, wealthy,
connected, and respected by all levels
of society. His status brought a whole
new scale of operations to American
Zionism. And his timing couldn't have
been better. The second generation of
Eastern European immigrants were now
well-established enough to start to
organize. And their sense of ethnic
solidarity, if not outright nationalism,
brought them to the Zionist movement
when they looked around for where to go.
And together, Brandeis's leadership and
their numbers made American Zionism into
a force within the world Zionist
movement as a whole.
By 1915, only 3 years after he joined
the ZOA, Brandeis was already Zionism's
leading spokesman in America. And he was
a close associate of Horace Kallen, who
we spoke about last episode. In fact, he
deeply shared Kallen's vision of Zionism
as an expression of cultural pluralism.
Right, Zionism and Americanism were one
in the same in Brandeis's eyes. As he
told the delegates to the 1915 ZOA
convention, "By battling for the Zionist
cause, the American ideal of democracy,
of social justice, and of liberty will
be given wider expression."
Not only
did Brandeis espouse this sort of
cultural pluralist view of Zionism,
but he was able to put to rest the
deepest fear of many American Zionists,
American Jews in general. Right, that
fear that they'd be forced to choose
between their loyalties.
But Brandeis held up the belief that
loyalty to America demands that each
American Jew become a Zionist. "Only
through the ennobling effects of its
strivings can we develop the best that
is within us and give to this country
the full benefits of our great
inheritance."
That's the essence of Kallen's vision of
cultural pluralism, that becoming a
Zionist means finding your full voice as
a Jew, and finding your full voice as a
Jew means being able to contribute your
most to the harmony which is America.
In 1916, Louis Brandeis was appointed by
President Woodrow Wilson to be the first
Jew to serve on the Supreme Court of the
United States.
And what could be a greater affirmation
of his vision that a good Zionist is a
good American?
Overnight, Justice Brandeis became the
ultimate proof that dual loyalty was
nothing more than a bugbear that haunted
a shallow imagination of some American
Jews. He was the essence of a Zionist
and the best of Americans.
So, his formal leadership of American
Zionism extended between 1914 and 1921.
This was a time, like I said, it wasn't
just his ability.
The suffering of Jews in Europe during
World War I and in Palestine
at the same time mobilized American
Jewry while they were coming into a
status social and economic that allowed
them to actually marshal their
resources.
So, in good progressive fashion,
Brandeis set about bringing order to the
Zionist camp. You know, they say he
installed a time clock in the offices as
the first time, and it was a symbol of
his belief in the almost sacred quality
of organizational efficiency, child of
the progressive era that he was. And he
also helped the American movement raise
an unprecedented amount of money, much
of it from his own pocket, and that put
American Zionism on track to becoming
the next great source of funding for
world Zionism.
I could list all of his accomplishments.
Brandeis played a critical
behind-the-scenes role in winning
American support of the Balfour
Declaration in 1917. He helped author
the official program of American Zionist
movement, the Pittsburgh program of
1918, and he finally was elected
honorary president of the World Zionist
Organization in 1920.
It was at a time when it looked like the
center of Zionist activity might
actually be moving away from Europe.
Well, first of all, the continent was
devastated by war.
And now, with the story that we already
told in season 2 with the rise of the
British mandate, a Jewish home in the
land of Israel had become a question of
practical work and no longer one of
political organization.
But, this aspect of organizational
efficiency and the track of American
Jewry to become a major source of
funding, together with Brandeis's
charismatic and somewhat dogmatic
personality,
set him on the track for trouble.
The real breakdown between European
American Zionism came at the ZOA
convention in Cleveland in 1921.
And depending on which historian you
ask, that was either when the followers
of Louis Brandeis deserted the Zionist
movement or when they were purged by the
party of Chaim Weizmann.
The fight had actually begun a bit more
than a year before. It was triggered by
the European proposal to create a
central financial agency for the
development of the Jewish home, the
Keren Hayesod. Now that the mandate
had been created and that the dream of a
Jewish home had become actual public
policy for the British Empire,
the goal of the Zionist movement became
to raise 25 million British pounds from
world Jewry all over toward the
development of the Yishuv, of the
settlement of Jews in the land of
Israel.
Now, the idea was appealing, but the
progressive administrator in Louis
Brandeis was horrified by the charity
orientation of the plan. And just, by
the way, as the Europeans were disgusted
by his cheap American focus on
investment, looking to make a profit,
apparently.
And Brandeis also criticized what he saw
to be a gross lack of professional
qualification on the part of the
suggested leadership for this Keren. It
was a judgment that the European
Zionists saw as heretical. It was a
denigration of the national heroes of
the Jewish people who'd been fighting in
the wilderness for the Zionist dream for
decades.
Now, his criticism was part of a larger
problem that the ZOA, the Zionist
Organization of America, saw in the
activities of the World Zionist
Organization.
In the eyes of the Americans, the only
purpose of a world Zionist movement was
the building of a national home. And
they were concerned that the nearly
$75,000
a month, which American Zionists were
currently contributing to the WZO
budget, was at best going to broader
political and cultural activities. And
at worst, supporting an administration
of professional Zionists in London and
Palestine that had become an end unto
itself.
But the finances weren't the issue, cuz
the financial argument quickly devolved
into a questioning of loyalties.
The Europeans claimed that by opposing
Keren Hayesod, the Americans were
halting the progress of Jewish history.
While Brandeis said flatly that any
departure from efficiency is in a real
sense treason to our cause.
Those are fighting words, right?
Nevertheless,
there was no break between the ZOA and
the WZO at the London conference where
the Esod was established.
The Keren came into being,
and the American Zionists decided to
wait and see what relationship would
develop between it and the WZO Executive
Committee.
Meanwhile,
Brandeis went about remaking the Zionist
movement in America in his image. He
streamlined its administration. He
created a Palestine Development
Committee and put at its head business
professionals that he felt could direct
American money towards true goal of
efficient and effective investment.
And furthermore, the contributions of
American Zionism were to the WZO, the
World Zionist Movement, were reduced,
but not cut off.
In hopes of maintaining crucial American
support, in fact, the WZO actually began
to restructure along the same American
lines, but slowly and with very little
success.
Arguments around the Keren Hayesod, this
universal appeal,
and the independent nature of American
Zionism simmered all year until finally
Chaim Weizmann decided to cross the
Atlantic himself in April of 1921 with
the goal of setting up the Keren Hayesod
in America.
Once he set foot on American soil, the
battle burst into flame once again.
American Zionists began to line up, some
on the side of Brandeis and some on the
side of Weizmann and the administrative
argument became political. Neither side
was interested in compromise.
I could go through all the details of
the fights, the proposals, the
rejection, but I'd rather look at the
two foundational issues that I see
that really divided the the visions of
these camps well beyond the financial
battle over the Keren or the political
battle between the power of Brandeis and
Weizmann. The first one is a question of
sovereignty.
In the eyes of the European Zionists,
the World Zionist Organization, the WZO,
was a legislative form of the entire
Jewish people. It and only it
represented the sovereignty of a people
who didn't yet have a state.
The Americans, on the other hand,
fundamentally disagreed. To them, the
purpose of the WZO was simply the
building of a Jewish home in the land of
Israel. And any other political work
could now be dispensed with since the
British mandate had come into being with
the goal of creating a Jewish home.
And furthermore, in the eyes of American
Zionists, if there was anybody that
could claim to express the sovereign
voice of Jewry in America, it was
rightly the American Jewish Congress
that had been founded only a few years
before in 1918. That was a democratic
organization, a grass-root effort to
actually wrest the leadership of
American Jewry away from that generation
of German Jews and their assimilationist
stance, a story again unto itself.
But let's just be clear about the
argument. As far as Brandeis and his
followers were concerned,
even when a Jewish government would come
into being in Israel, it would exercise
sovereignty only over the Jews of that
country. It would not represent the Jews
of America or anywhere else. And
therefore, the WZO was not the sovereign
voice of world Jewry.
Now, there's another piece aside from
sovereignty. And that's the very nature
of Zionism.
European Zionism, as we've said many
times, is based on this notion of
shlilat hagolah. Life in exile is
debased by definition. All the forms the
Jews have taken through our in our long
journey away from home and then back
again are to be discarded upon arrival.
The Jews have to be returned to Eretz
Israel, to the land of Israel, in order
first of all to escape anti-Semitism,
and second of all to become that normal
accepted member of the family of the
nations which was at the heart of the
Zionist dream.
Now, they did, they being European
Zionists, they did support a sort of
diaspora nationalism because they wanted
the Jews of Poland, Russia, and of
course America to see themselves as a
national minority in exile, not as
citizens of the land in which they
lived. And that was a gateway which was
meant to serve the rebirth of the Jewish
nation as one organic whole in its land.
Well, American Zionists saw things very
differently. First of all, despite the
surge in political anti-Semitism that
happened in the '30s and '40s, most
American Jews, to this very day, don't
define themselves through the experience
of hatred and rejection by the world
around them.
That's one. Number two, American Jewry
never saw itself as subject to Herzl,
Nordau, and Ber Borochov, all those
classic Zionist thinkers,
their vision of this inexorable law of
Jewish destiny, which was to return to
the land of Israel and a denial of
Jewish life anywhere outside it.
Cultural pluralism that lies at the
heart of American Zionism sees America
as something other than exile.
It has a vision that it's possible to be
nationally whole within the harmony of
the American ethnic commonwealth.
It was probably best said
by Judge Julian Mack, a Brandeis
supporter, at that Cleveland convention.
He said, "The Jews scattered throughout
the world
are a living nationality in the sense of
people with a common inheritance, a
common tradition, and for large part a
common religion.
In Palestine, the Jews would form a
political nation, but the thought of a
political status of the Jews of the
world was an impossible conception."
In plain language, American Zionism saw
itself as working for the rebirth in the
land of Israel not of the Jewish nation,
but of a Jewish nation.
Now, you can see that this is a very big
gap.
And once the extent of that rift was
seen,
the Europeans felt that there was no
logic
in including within the WZO, the World
Zionist Organization, people who denied
the unity of the Jewish people and
denied therefore the right of the WZO to
exercise sovereignty on their behalf.
Weizmann put it this way,
"I have and I formulate here a definite
accusation, a definite charge, before
the bar of history. American Zionist
leadership did not understand the
moment. They failed to grasp it. Here
began the degradation of our movement.
The American Zionist leaders cut the
Zionist program to fit their
circumstances.
And the rest is history."
You might think that Brandeis would have
the home court advantage in Cleveland,
but nevertheless, don't forget the rank
and file of American Zionism, as I said,
was composed of the first and second
generation immigrants from Eastern
Europe, and they came from Weizmann's
world.
In the end, Keren Hayesod succeeded in
establishing the American arm known as
United Israel Appeal. It's around even
today. Chaim Weizmann went on to become
the elder statesman of the Zionist
movement, and eventually Israel's first
president. While Louis Brandeis, along
with the majority of his loyalists,
resigned from the Zionist Organization
of America following that Cleveland
conference.
It was a major break.
And it exposed a deep ideological rift
besides the financial and political
fight.
Nevertheless, the collective trauma of
the Shoah, and the excitement around the
birth of the state of Israel succeeded
in papering over the questions of
sovereignty and definitions of Zionism
that lay between them. And in fact, the
mission of establishing the state is
going to push ideological Zionism into
the background altogether.
The definition on the near horizon of
our story is Zionism as active support
for the state of Israel, full stop,
regardless of where you live or how you
conceive Jewish identity. And that will
succeed in uniting American Jewry in an
unprecedented fashion, which is good for
the state of Israel cuz it will be their
financial and political backing that
play a crucial role in the development
of the state in the coming decades.
But, if you've been paying attention,
then you know that the questions of what
it means to be a Jew, an American, a
Zionist, or an Israeli don't go away.
The difficulties of negotiating between
those elements of identity are actually
the bread and butter of today's Jewish
story.
If Louis Brandeis was the founding
father of American Zionism, then Abba
Hillel Silver was its first successful
general. Abba Hillel Silver was born in
1893, fourth of six children to Mosha
and Dina Silver, immigrants from
Lithuania to the Lower East Side of New
York City.
And a true child of the third immigrant
wave, at age nine, if you'd found Abba
Hillel running around, you'd seen him
speaking Yiddish and sporting payot side
curls.
And you might have been quite surprised
to know that only 15 years later, he
would be hired as the rabbi of the
leading reform
of Cleveland, known simply as The
Temple. Yes, when I grew up, it was
still The Temple or occasionally
Silver's Temple.
And I can imagine that when Silver moved
from New York ghetto to begin his
studies at the Hebrew Union College in
Cincinnati at age 19, the culture shock
was extreme.
The reform movement at that time was
still completely a product of the German
Jews of the second wave. And as we know,
they tended to look down at the
obviously ethnic nature of Eastern
European Jewry in general. These were
the cultural assimilationists.
But nevertheless, despite that formative
stamp of a cultural assimilation and a
desire to be more American than anything
else,
Abba Hillel's journey toward the
leadership of the American Zionist
movement was direct. It began a little
after he graduated and he took a
sabbatical from his congregation in 1933
to Europe. Silver arrived in Berlin in
January of 1933.
And what he found was a city on the edge
of chaos. Nazi marches, communist
counter-marches, street battles,
violence was in the air.
And he was there the month that Hitler
was appointed as Reich Chancellor. And
Abba Hillel immediately reached the
conclusion that the Nazis' anti-Jewish
legislation was a threat to the very
foundation of Jewish existence within
Germany.
Returning to Cleveland,
Abba Hillel Silver did not wait long to
take action. And in his first leadership
role, he helped to start a movement for
an economic boycott of Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, despite this vision that
the Germans the Nazis, I should say,
were so dangerous, Silver at this point
still insisted that if the Jews left
Germany, they would be surrendering to
the anti-Semitic view that the Jews had
no right to live in Europe. Like I said,
he wasn't a Zionist per se at this
point. He still imbibed that German
reform notion that to be a Jew was to be
a good American or in this case to be a
good German.
However,
by 1941,
cables began to arrive in Europe that
said that the mass murder of Jews were
underway. And when he looked around,
Abba Hillel Silver an anti-Semitic wave
sweeping through the United States
itself.
The solution therefore in his eyes
became Zionism.
And in his Sunday sermons, he began to
declare that if the Jews of America made
do with a local struggle against
anti-Semitism and didn't open up a
battle on the real enemy of Nazism, then
what lay in wait for them was the same
terror destroying Europe.
And the only solution to their
helplessness and fear was the
establishment of a Jewish state in the
land of Israel.
Now this, coming from a leader of one of
the largest reform congregations in
America, was simply a bombshell.
He made it even worse when in 1942,
as the annihilation of almost 2 million
Jews had become an established fact at
least amongst the Jews of America,
Silver said in one speech that the
horrific suffering and death of the
Jewish victims must become the drum on
which the Zionist struggle would beat in
order to promote the establishment of a
state. It's an uncomfortable question
today, one that we're going to have to
explore going down the line, of what
exactly the connection between the
Holocaust and the state in Israel state
of Israel are.
But in his time, that type of
confrontational rhetoric was avoided
like the plague by the rest of the
American Jewish leadership. Just go back
to season 2 and episode 35 and you can
see what his contemporary Rabbi Stephen
Wise was doing.
Despite the confrontational nature of
what he had to say,
this type of speech actually placed Abba
Hillel Silver at the head of the
American Zionist movement. In some ways,
he became the leader of American Jewry
altogether.
Now I do want to make clear
that Silver's turn towards Zionism was a
pragmatic turn, not an ideological one.
He simply believed that the world was
more likely to come to the aid of the
Jews if they presented themselves as a
nationality in search of a home rather
than refugees seeking aid.
Listen to this. Do not think that we are
in favor of nationalism. It is
considered reprehensible and not part of
the tradition of the Jewish prophets.
Nationalism is currently the language
the world understands and the Jews must
have a state. It is only when we finally
have a home of our own that we will be
able to forget about nationalism and
devote ourselves to our true mission,
which is to be fighters in the cause of
world social justice for the cause of
eliminating nationhood and establishing
a universal state.
Now, we're going to speak a lot in
season 3 about this tension between the
particular and the universal that you
hear in his voice and what I see to be a
uniquely American perspective that our
particular nationalism should be in
service of universal peace. But for now,
the very fact that Abba Hillel Silver
could make that statement in the midst
of the Holocaust speaks volumes about
him and the American Zionist vision he
represented.
But despite this hesitancy around
nationalism, David Ben-Gurion saw in
Abba Hillel's analysis that the
destruction of of European Jewry would
help force the gates of Palestine open,
a critical source of alliance. Now he
finally had an American leader with whom
he could work. And so, in 1942, the two
joined together with Chaim Weizmann to
convene the Biltmore Conference. 600
delegates from the Zionist Organization
of America, Hadassah, religious and
labor Zionist parties all met at the
Biltmore Hotel in New York in order to
publish a unified statement of vision
for American Zionism.
The platform declared that, quote, "The
post-war order envisioned by President
Roosevelt could not be realized without
a solution to the problem of Jewish
homelessness.
It further called on the British mandate
to open the gates of Palestine to all
the refugees of Europe immediately. And
then,
it made a bold call, which up to now had
been a complete anathema to American
Zionists, and frankly, other Zionists
world over, the demand for actual Jewish
statehood. The final plank in the
conference declaration insists, quote,
that Palestine be established as a
Jewish commonwealth integrated into the
structure of the new democratic world.
It's impressive, but making a
declaration is one thing. Changing
American foreign policy is entirely
another.
In the wake of the Biltmore conference,
Abba Hillel Silver began a frenzied
effort to unite American Jewry behind
the idea of Jewish statehood.
At first glance, it might have seemed an
impossible task. I mean,
assimilationists, socialists, immigrants
just trying to survive. I mean, even
American Zionists were ambivalent around
actual statehood. But things had
changed, and the critical moment arrived
in August 1943 as delegates representing
almost every stripe of American Jewry
assembled at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel
in New York. And like I said, things had
changed, because at this point in
American Jewish history, the
demographics had shifted. The
assimilationist elite was no longer in
control. I mean, witness the fact that
Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver were
rabbis educated, one a product of, and
the other educated within the German
Jewish tradition of assimilation, and
nevertheless were now the heads of
American Zionism. The internationalist
socialist Yiddish element had been also
overtaken to a certain degree by the
ethnic Jews. And so, what you found
there at the Waldorf conference was a
majority who were associated with
Zionist organizations.
Nevertheless, there was still a lot of
opposition to statehood overcome. Even
Stephen Wise, who was co-chair with Abba
Hillel of the American Zionist Emergency
Council, got cold feet at the last
moment and began to urge the delegates
not to adopt the Biltmore Program's
final plank.
Silver, in recognition of his sort of
fiery nature, had not been given any
speaking time at the conference, but the
militant Zionist delegates of the
American Jewish Congress managed to send
him up on the platform anyway. And this
is what he had to say.
The reconstitution of the Jewish people
as a nation in its homeland is not a
playful political conceit of ours. It is
the cry of despair of a people driven to
the wall, fighting for its very life.
From the infested, typhus-ridden ghetto
of Warsaw, from the death block of
Nazi-occupied lands, where myriads of
our people are awaiting execution by the
slow or the quick method, from a hundred
concentration camps which befoul the map
of Europe, comes the cry, "Enough! There
must be a final end to all this, a sure
and certain end."
How long is it to last? Are we forever
to live a homeless people on the world's
crumbs of sympathy? Are we going to take
counsel here of fear of what this or
that one might say, of how our actions
are likely to be misinterpreted, or are
we to take counsel of our inner moral
convictions, of our faith, of our
history, of our achievements, and go
forward in faith?
We cannot truly rescue the Jews of
Europe unless we have free immigration
to Palestine. We cannot have free
immigration to Palestine unless our
political rights are recognized there.
Our political rights cannot be
recognized there unless our historic
connection with the country is
acknowledged and our right to build our
national home is reaffirmed. These are
inseparable links in the chain. The
whole chain breaks if one of the links
is missing. Do not beguile yourselves.
Do not let anyone beguile you.
His speech carried the day.
Historians say that weeping delegates
rose to sing Hatikvah over and over
again, and then moved unanimously to
endorse the resolution calling for the
establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth.
The president of Hadassah, Tamar de Sola
Pool, described it like this. She said,
"We have now won over not merely
individuals. We have now have at our
side whole national organizations with
thousands and thousands of members. They
are now flesh of our flesh, bone of our
bone. All that we stand for, all that we
struggle for, has become for them, too,
an integral ideal."
And from the Waldorf conference to Harry
Truman's recognition of the state of
Israel in 1948 was still a long road,
but it was one which Abba Hillel Silver
traveled with unparalleled devotion and
complete success.
I would love to end this episode with a
happily ever after, to tell you that in
the glow of the success of 1948, all the
divisions between American Zionism, the
WZO, the leadership of the newborn state
of Israel were just wiped away.
But it's simply not true.
In the wake of victory, many of the
differences were put aside, but there
were two problems that led to an almost
immediate breakdown between Ben Gurion
and Abba Hillel Silver. And cuz they're
indicative of problems that divide many
American Jews and in the Israeli
leadership even today, they're worth
mentioning.
The first was a question of worldview.
You know, Abba Hillel Silver visited
Israel in 1948, and he gave a news
conference on the state of Israel and
the world affairs. In it, he said that
Israel's orientation should be toward
the United Nations, that she should
refuse to align with the East-West
division that was rapidly developing and
shaping the world into a new Cold War.
He further emphasized that this policy
is actually what made possible the
establishment of the state in the first
place. In his eyes, the Zionist issue
was the only one that had yet helped
break down the Iron Curtain between East
and West in the UN, and that's a fact
that went well beyond the political
context of Zionism.
Now, Silver's political views were
actually a product of his understanding
of Judaism's place in modern Western
society.
He saw Judaism as advancing human
progress. In particular, he felt that it
needed to lead the fight for political
freedom and an end to imperialism and
colonialism.
In Silver's eyes, the essence of Judaism
is the direction of human society toward
the eradication of ignorance and racism
and the promotion of peace and
international collaboration. And
therefore, in a sense, the UN was
ushering in the Messianic era.
We'll talk about Ben-Gurion's Messianic
vision in an coming episode. And we're
going to deal with the challenges of an
ethnic state and the almost tribal
nature of society here. But for now,
just know that his political vision in
particular couldn't have been more
different.
Ben-Gurion trusted the UN not at all.
And in fact, he supported stationing
American soldiers in the region
immediately upon independence. This is
how he saw the post-war world. Quote,
"There will be an army in every country.
There will be an American army in every
country. I saw it start in Africa. I
hope they'll come to the land of Israel,
too. I pray that they come to the land
of Israel. They will have the strength.
Americans can send 100,000 soldiers and
that will be enough to keep the peace."
But aside from this ideological
difference, or political one really,
there was it was really a practical
question that led to the breakdown
between the two leaders.
In the lead-up to Israel's
establishment, Silver was the head of
the United Nations delegation that
represented the World Zionist Movement.
And he was seen by many as a leader on
par with Chaim Weizmann and even
Ben-Gurion himself.
Nonetheless, on the day the state was
declared, Silver chose to return from
New York back home to Cleveland.
The rest of the delegation was stunned.
They saw him as almost a traitor.
But the reason was very simple.
Silver had resolved the tension within
himself between being a Zionist and
being a leader of American Jewry long
ago. And once the declaration was
achieved, his job as a Zionist was done.
Now, it was Friday and his congregation
was waiting.
Although I'd have to say it seems his
mind wasn't entirely made up because
just after Shabbat, Silver called
Ben-Gurion and asked if he should make
aliyah.
If he should come home to the newborn
state of Israel.
And what do you think happened?
Ben-Gurion, the ideologue, the true
believer in a Zionism founded on the
negation of exile and the immediate
in-gathering of the Jews, did not
hesitate.
He told Abba Hillel to stay in the
States.
He told him to fight to have the
military embargo lifted and to raise
funds for Israel.
Now, there's an important arc here for
American Zionism, one that we're going
to trace in coming episodes. From
independent movement to funding source
to Israel lobby.
But, I'm not going there right now. I
want to end on a more personal note. Cuz
like a loyal soldier, Abba Hillel
carried out his assigned task and like
the leader that he was, he succeeded.
But, when the big loan came through and
President Truman's personal advisor
called to inform him, he was astounded
to hear that Abba Hillel Silver had
resigned from all of his political posts
within the Zionist movement.
The details of the struggle between Abba
Hillel and Ben-Gurion aren't crucial to
our story right now.
Just let it be known that Abba Hillel
Silver made an attempt at Hafrada, at a
separation within the World Zionist
Movement. He insisted that the political
leadership of the new state, meaning
Ben-Gurion,
resign from the leadership of the World
Zionist Movement because in Silver's
eyes, to be both a leader of the state
of Israel and of the Zionist movement
was to risk dual loyalty between being
an Israeli and being a Zionist.
But, Ben-Gurion had no intention of
allowing for the formation of an
autonomous Zionist force outside of
Israel, not any more than he had of
allowing for independent political base
that opposed him within Israel.
And so he forced Abba Hillel Silver out
of the Zionist movement with the same
alacrity he used to keep Menachem Begin
out of the government. Although
fortunately for Silver with more
peaceful means.
Ben Gurion's fanatic devotion to the
unification of the state, that statist
philosophy which really danced around
the edges of fascism and did much damage
while at the same time succeeding
against incalculable odds
in bringing an almost miraculous state
into being is going to be a topic of
discussion for some time going forward.
But for now, I just want to end with
this observation.
Once Israel became independent
and Abba Hillel Silver was forced out of
his position
efforts by the leaders of American
Zionism to mold the Zionist vision
came to an almost complete stop.
Now, it's true that it was partly due
the opposition of Ben Gurion and the
other leaders of the new state who
quickly came to see their intervention
as a meddling in the internal affairs of
a sovereign state.
But even more crucially
I think it was a result of the mistake
that Abba Hillel made in listening to
Ben Gurion.
To this very day, when thank God
American Jewry has begun to re-engage
their role in shaping the vision of
Israel the fundamental problem remains
the same.
You cannot direct the development of the
Jewish state while you remain in
America.
Okay, I just want to thank a few people.
I want to thank you actually for putting
up with the hoarseness in my voice.
Bless me that I should get rid of this
cold. And I want to thank people who
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I want to thank the Land of Israel
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amazing Jews. And I want to thank you
for listening. I'm Rob Lonner