Much of your book centers on the internal struggles of the American Jewish Committee, which you write was considered by Israelis as “the single most politically influential Jewish group in the United States in the 1950s.” What readers may not realize, and is a key theme in the book, is that the AJC, like the American Jewish community itself, wasn’t always the pro-Israel juggernaut we know today, but has a much more complicated relationship with Israel. It may not be apparent now, but the Jewish mainstream at this time was still conflicted about supporting a Jewish state, for a variety of reasons.
This doesn’t make sense to a lot of people today, but basically the AJC was saying, “We want to help Israel because there are Jews there, but we don’t ascribe to the more doctrinaire vision of Zionism at the time that requires Jews go back to Israel or views Jews as a nation.”
Your book includes chapters on the wide variety of American Jewish dissent over Israel, well before the current era. There are American Jews who are ideologically and religiously opposed to Zionism; others who are, let’s say, prematurely pro-Palestinian, but were certainly committed to the idea of a Jewish state; and activists who say Jews don’t deserve a state and certainly not in Palestine.
This is a book about people who have all these labels, who are Jewish, who care about Palestinians in a variety of ways and imagine lots of solutions. So there were anti-Zionist Jews in the ’40s and ’50s who didn’t necessarily care about Palestinians, but were anti-Zionist because of the American context and what their idea of Jewish identity is. In the ’50s and ’60s, I show this story about how some people began making the Palestinian rights issue part of their chief reasons for opposing Zionism. There are people like Rabbi Elmer Berger, executive director of the American Council for Judaism [from 1942 to 1955], who comes out of the Reform tradition and a Jewish tradition of anti-nationalism for Jews, and people like Sharon Rose, who calls herself a “nice Jewish girl from New York” and goes to Israel and rejects Zionism because of the Palestinian rights issues, in the 1970s, when it wasn’t a huge movement.