Final yr the Tel Aviv Museum of Artwork mounted an exhibition, entitled “Shattered Hopes and Roads Not Taken,” of a dozen monumental drawings by the Israeli artist Netta Lieber Sheffer, who lives and works in Tel Aviv. The drawings are an expression of a want on the Jewish left that historical past had not made Israel the affluent, highly effective, ethnically restricted, violence-plagued, and extensively despised state that it’s at this time. May there have been one other, extra peaceable, extra inclusive means of creating a considerable Jewish presence within the Holy Land? One of many drawings confirmed a gaggle of Jews in a modest wood boat: members of Brit Shalom, a company based in 1925 that advocated for peaceable relations between Jews and Arabs and for the creation of a binational state in Palestine (see illustration on web page 37). Amongst them was Henrietta Szold, the founding father of Hadassah, the Ladies’s Zionist Group of America.
Although she will not be extensively remembered at this time, in her lifetime Szold was, maybe together with Louis Brandeis, essentially the most well-known American Zionist. She was deeply concerned in making a middle-class Jewish life for the youngsters and grandchildren of thousands and thousands of poor, Yiddish-speaking, observant Japanese European Jews who got here to the US starting within the Eighties. Extra considerably, she helped rework the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine from a small group residing in determined situations to a big and established group that might present a house for Jews with no place else to go. She died in 1945, three years earlier than the founding of the State of Israel, so we are able to’t understand how she would have greeted its creation. However one lesson of her life is that “Zionism” can have a variety of meanings.
Szold’s dad and mom had been born in Hungary. Her father, Benjamin Szold, was a rabbi who immigrated to Baltimore in 1859 to take cost of a synagogue there. Her mom, Sophie Schaar, had been a scholar of his when he was a personal tutor. Benjamin and Sophie Szold got here of age when, for the primary time in hundreds of years, it had solely lately turn out to be doable for no less than some Jews to operate as full-fledged members of a bigger society. (The historian Michael Meyer refers back to the German Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, who died in 1786, as “the first Jew to participate prominently in modern European culture.”)
This was an infinite and daunting change. The place you lived, what sort of work you probably did, what you wore, whom you married, the way you had been educated, what you ate, the way you prayed, which legal guidelines sure you, and in what method you had been born, married, and had been buried had been questions that for Jews had lengthy been primarily resolved inside a closed, self-governing Jewish group.
As that group turned much less topic to exterior restrictions, a wider vary of solutions to those questions turned doable. One other determine portrayed in considered one of Lieber Sheffer’s drawings was Abraham Geiger, a mid-nineteenth-century German rabbi who was an architect of what we now name Reform Judaism and who was recognized for his anti-Zionism. (By “Zionism” I don’t imply Theodor Herzl’s use of the phrase, starting within the Nineties, to explain his motion advocating for the creation of an unbiased Jewish state, however somewhat the traditional idea of a Jewish homeland that diaspora Jews want to restore and return to.) As early as 1818 the primary main Reform congregation, in Hamburg, had stopped praying for the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem. In 1854 Geiger edited a brand new prayer guide for his congregation in Breslau that eliminated all conventional references to the fervent hope for a return to Zion.
He did this at a second when each the pressing want for Jews to flee persecution in Europe and the opportunity of establishing a house for thousands and thousands of them in Palestine—then a part of the Ottoman Empire and with a largely Arab inhabitants—appeared far-fetched. (By the late nineteenth century, situations for Jews in Europe had modified for the more serious: racialized antisemitism and pogroms had been on the rise.) The Zionism that Geiger was renouncing implied a tribal thought of Jewish id—of Jews as a individuals somewhat than as members of a faith—that he hoped to transcend. He believed that Judaism may very well be considerably modified with out dropping its maintain on its more and more assimilated adherents. The primary stirrings of Reform Judaism in Germany within the early nineteenth century produced a sequence of alterations in Jewish legislation that had been meant to make Judaism simpler to apply and extra reassuring to Gentiles. Temples put in organs and choirs, changed bar mitzvahs with confirmations, held companies in German somewhat than Hebrew, reduce on weekly Torah readings, and flirted with shifting the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.
The improvements of Reform Judaism produced a counterreaction: the emergence, first in Germany and later within the US, of the variations of Judaism we name Conservative and Trendy Orthodox. The founding father of what would turn out to be Conservative Judaism, Zacharias Frankel, presided over the seminary in Breslau the place Benjamin Szold accomplished his research. Frankel retained the references to a return to Zion within the liturgy and advocated towards Reform Judaism’s abandonment of different conventional practices. Temple Oheb Shalom, the congregation Szold led in Baltimore, was Reform, as a result of that was what its primarily German-born members wished, however he turned more and more uncomfortable with the motion’s evolution.
In 1883, when Hebrew Union Faculty, the brand new Reform seminary in Cincinnati, graduated its top quality of rabbis, Szold was one of many audio system, and his twenty-two-year-old daughter Henrietta was additionally there as a correspondent for The Jewish Messenger. The banquet after the ceremony was nonkosher; each Szolds had been horrified. In 1885 the American Reform motion’s elders gathered in Pittsburgh to draft a platform, which formally deserted all Jewish dietary legal guidelines—and in addition Zionism:
We contemplate ourselves now not a nation, however a spiritual group, and subsequently count on neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship underneath the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the legal guidelines regarding the Jewish state.
This was a decade earlier than Herzl’s embrace of political Zionism.
The objective of this prestate model of anti-Zionism, then, was to normalize and universalize Judaism as an atypical non secular denomination as a substitute of a kahal, or separate group. Within the US and Germany, Reform Jews dreamed of full acceptance by non-Jewish elites, which might contain not simply dropping most of the inconvenient parts of Jewish non secular apply and people who appeared peculiar to non-Jews but additionally altering Jews’ loyalties and self-conception. The yr after the Pittsburgh Platform was adopted, the Jewish Theological Seminary, modeled on Frankel’s seminary in Breslau, was based in New York and have become the rabbinical coaching floor and mental house of the American Conservative motion. Benjamin Szold tried unsuccessfully to steer his congregation in Baltimore to desert classical Reform Judaism, then limped alongside to retirement as a rabbi profoundly out of tune together with his membership.
Henrietta, the eldest and most good of the Szolds’ 5 daughters, was formally educated solely via highschool and lived at house along with her dad and mom till she was in her early thirties. By the Eighties, when she was in her twenties, she was strongly drawn to Zionism. She disliked the Reform motion’s watering down of conventional Jewish observance and recognized strongly with the Japanese European Jews who had begun to reach in the US and whose presence made many assimilated, prosperous German Jews uncomfortable. She embraced “Zionism” as a form of code phrase for an all-encompassing Jewish id—a way of solidarity and shared peoplehood with all Jews regardless of the place they lived or what they had been like—and for a dedication to conventional Jewish observance. For a Szold-style Zionist, Jewishness ought to pervade a Jew’s every day life, as expressed within the well-known line within the Ebook of Deuteronomy: “When thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”
This model of Jewishness, to Szold, was inseparable from a deep sense of attachment to the Holy Land. Palestine could be a refuge for persecuted Jews fleeing Europe, and it will moreover be the positioning of an excellent revival of conventional Jewish tradition. This included Hebrew, which had not been a spoken language in over two thousand years. Its important presence within the Holy Land would enrich the Jewish lifetime of your entire diaspora and quell the temptations of assimilation, which Szold thought of “Jewish self-negation.” In 1903, when Herzl promoted the British authorities’s provide of land for a Jewish state in Uganda, Szold was utterly opposed: it was the unsuitable location.
In 1896, simply earlier than Herzl printed Der Judenstaat, which laid out his arguments for a Jewish state, Szold delivered a Zionist lecture to the Baltimore chapter of the Nationwide Council of Jewish Ladies. In line with a legend repeated in two new biographies—Francine Klagsbrun’s Henrietta Szold: Hadassah and the Zionist Dream and Dvora Hacohen’s To Restore a Damaged World: The Lifetime of Henrietta Szold, Founding father of Hadassah—one of many delegates at Herzl’s First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel remarked that he knew of solely two Zionists in the US: Szold and Stephen Smart, a Reform rabbi in New York. Klagsbrun describes Szold’s model of Judaism as “a complete system of living that could have its greatest fulfillment in the Land of Israel.” Hacohen quotes Szold:
The Jew [is] occupied with the questions, political, social, superb, which can be without delay summed up and solved within the phrase Zion—Zion, that’s, the mountain of the home of the Lord, to which the nations shall stream to be taught the methods of the God of Jacob, to stroll in His paths.
One can argue that Herzl and Szold had been radically completely different figures representing completely different visions of Zionism and Jewishness. Herzl was assimilated and secular. Szold was deeply non secular and against assimilation. However in apply it was troublesome to separate cleanly Herzl’s “political” Zionism and Szold’s “cultural” Zionism. When, for instance, admirers of Herzl’s based the Federation of American Zionists within the early years of the 20th century, Szold unhesitatingly turned its secretary and a member of its government committee. Each Szold’s and Herzl’s followers (he died in 1904), of their other ways, pushed relentlessly for a detailed identification of Zionism with Palestine and for Jewish immigration and institution-building there, though they had been effectively conscious of the extreme Arab opposition to it. Every part Szold did helped lay the inspiration for the institution of the State of Israel, even when she by no means explicitly referred to as for a Jewish state.
It’s additionally the case that cultural Zionism—the form of Zionism that Lieber Sheffer’s drawings are supposed to have a good time—was all the time a tiny motion. In line with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, Brit Shalom “never had more than several dozen members,” and its Nineteen Forties successor, Ihud, had solely ninety-seven.1 On reflection a deep and abiding dedication to the Jewish venture in Palestine, regardless of the motivation and anticipated finish level, appears as essential because the narrower query of statehood. In any case, in Szold’s youth the excellence between Zionists and non-Zionists was much more important than the distinctions amongst sorts of Zionism.
In 1893 Szold was employed as a secretary—or underpaid workhorse—by the fledgling Jewish Publication Society. After her father died in 1902, she petitioned the Jewish Theological Seminary to enroll in its rabbinical coaching program. Solomon Schechter, the pinnacle of the seminary, informed her she may research there however couldn’t be ordained. (The Conservative motion didn’t ordain feminine rabbis till the Eighties.) So she moved to New York, the place, on project from the Jewish Publication Society, she started working with Louis Ginzberg, a Lithuanian-born rabbi and a member of the JTS school, on his multivolume Legends of the Jews, an unlimited compilation of the traditional Jewish tales, speculative riffs, and suppositional embellishments referred to as Aggadah. Ginzberg wrote in German. Szold served as a minimally credited organizer and translator. She additionally fell hopelessly in love with him.
On a go to to Berlin in 1908, Ginzberg met and rapidly turned engaged to Adele Katzenstein, who was 13 years youthful than him; Szold was 13 years older. Though it appears as if Szold and Ginzberg weren’t lovers within the bodily sense, it additionally appears inconceivable that Ginzberg may have been unaware of how she felt about him. She was so emotionally and bodily devastated by the information of his engagement, after which by the information that Adele was pregnant, that her imaginative and prescient started to deteriorate. The detached or clueless Ginzberg had no hassle asking her to proceed working for him.
The next yr, as a part of her effort to recover from Ginzberg, Szold and her mom took an prolonged journey to Europe and the Center East, together with Palestine. Already there have been thirty Jewish agricultural settlements there, populated primarily by Japanese European Jews who had fled horrible situations, together with pogroms; a protection power referred to as the Hashomer protected them from assaults by their Arab neighbors. The Szolds visited fourteen settlements, in addition to the desperately poor Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Jaffa. In a report Szold wrote just a few years after this journey, she mentioned there have been 100,000 Jews in Palestine (up from 25,000 in 1880), out of a complete, primarily Arab, inhabitants of 700,000.2
Szold is usefully regarded as a member of the technology of American feminine social reformers who led the settlement home motion. Like Jane Addams of Hull Home in Chicago and Lillian Wald of the Henry Road Settlement in New York, she devoted her life to establishing establishments that will assist the poor instantly. In 1889 Szold began an evening college in Baltimore for Japanese European Jewish immigrants, the place she helped them modify to American life. The actions of Hadassah, which she based in 1912 after she lastly stopped working for Ginzberg, had been undertaken in the identical spirit, however in Palestine. Its first main venture, establishing a visiting nurse service, was modeled on Wald’s at Henry Road.
Hadassah turned the main Jewish ladies’s group in the US. From the beginning, it referred to as itself Zionist. By the point Szold died, it was the biggest Zionist group on the planet. Hadassah’s choice to make Zionism the central organizing precept of its proliferating native chapters in the US was one other instance of the schism between Reform and Conservative Judaism. The Nationwide Council of Jewish Ladies, based in 1893, was Reform and non-Zionist; it centered on good works in the US, not in Palestine. For Hadassah, the idea of Zionism was much less a political trigger than a pastoral one, in addition to a cultural and religious binding agent for American Jewish ladies: it promoted a extra ethnic, much less comfy diasporic Jewish id than the council provided. (Hadassah is the Hebrew identify of Esther, the heroine of the Purim story; New York’s Purim Affiliation, dominated by Reform Jews, dissolved a decade earlier than Hadassah was based, partly as a result of the Purim celebration was too noisy and martial for Reform sensibilities.) It turned out that Jewish ladies in America had been particularly motivated to take part in particularly Jewish good works aimed toward serving to Jews they’d by no means met who lived midway all over the world.
As Hadassah’s actions in Palestine expanded—it created a big community of medical doctors, nurses, and hospitals, and finally a nursing college—it required increasingly more cash, far past what donations from its working-class and middle-class members within the US may present. Szold, a tireless and efficient fundraiser, was in a position to persuade the nation’s main Jewish philanthropists, who had been male, German, and Reform, to help Hadassah. One of many curiosities of the early, prestate interval of American Zionism is why these males, who thought of themselves anti-Zionist, supported a Zionist ladies’s group. Daniel Schulman’s The Cash Kings, an extensively researched historical past of the American German Jewish elite within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focuses on their companies, nevertheless it additionally helps clarify their philanthropic motives.
German Jews who got here to the US in the course of the quarter-century earlier than the Civil Struggle often began out as peddlers and retailers and ended up as retailers or bankers. Probably the most spectacularly profitable of them—households just like the Schiffs, Seligmans, Lehmans, Warburgs, and Loebs—fashioned a decent cohort during which intermarriage was widespread. Not like Szold, they didn’t welcome the poor Japanese European Jews who started arriving in a lot better numbers within the Eighties. They believed that the seen presence of the brand new immigrants in city slums would imperil the complete acceptance into the non-Jewish elite that they felt was inside their grasp.
Delegations of German Jews sometimes visited the White Home to foyer the president to strain Russia to deal with its Jews higher—partly out of real humanitarian concern, partly within the hope that fewer of them would need to immigrate. They financed schemes to steer poor Jews to go away the slums and turn out to be farmers or to settle in the midst of the nation somewhat than on the city East Coast. They supported settlement homes. They based Di yidische velt (The Jewish World), a Republican-leaning, much less Zionist, much less bumptious different to Forverts and the remainder of New York’s Yiddish newspapers; its tone didn’t comport with the temper of its meant viewers, and it went out of enterprise. They helped create the Joint Distribution Committee, which aided non-American Jews in want. Though they had been Reform, they helped the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary set up itself, partly as a result of they thought it would encourage the immigrants and their youngsters to undertake a means of being Jewish that included sporting typical clothes, talking English, and finding out nonreligious topics at school.
Pre-Israel Palestine appealed to American German Jewish philanthropists as a substitute vacation spot for European Jewish refugees. The Holy Land’s transformative results had been additionally enticing: nearly in a single day, it appeared, Yiddish-speaking, bearded and bewigged, observant shtetl dwellers had been changing into muscular, bronzed, secular Hebrew-speakers residing on kibbutzim and in moshavim, tilling the soil as many European Jews had been forbidden to do for hundreds of years. And Szold’s insistence that Hadassah’s companies be accessible to Muslim and Christian purchasers in addition to to Jews struck a universalist notice that was particularly essential to American German Jews (who had been additionally main funders of civil rights organizations within the US such because the NAACP).
It could be unsuitable to disregard the compassion of those philanthropists, however this shouldn’t be mistaken for a way of solidarity with poor Jews in or lately arrived from Japanese Europe. Considered one of Felix Warburg’s sons wrote about his father, “He disliked almost everything about the Jews except their problems.” Considered one of Szold’s closest allies, Judah Magnes, left his submit as a rabbi on the German Jews’ grand non secular headquarters, Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in New York, due to the congregation’s discomfort over his Zionism and his advocacy of a return to the bar mitzvah and different conventional non secular practices. In 1922 Magnes moved to Palestine, the place he spent many of the remainder of his life, primarily as president of Hebrew College. (He was one of many liberal cultural Zionists depicted in Lieber Sheffer’s drawings.) However simply two years after he left Temple Emanu-El, the primary essential assembly to arrange Hadassah was held there: Zionism was value supporting, so long as the cultural and non secular practices related to it happened elsewhere.
Szold traveled continually between Palestine and the US, particularly after the dying of her mom in 1916. In 1917 Nice Britain established army rule in Palestine simply weeks after it issued the Balfour Declaration endorsing the institution of a Jewish homeland there. Circumstances for Jews in Japanese Europe had been getting worse. Szold and the opposite early Zionists, along with their efforts to enhance situations and create establishments in Palestine, relentlessly urged the often reluctant British officers to allow extra Jewish migration there. When the US, which had been the primary vacation spot for Jews leaving Japanese Europe, enacted extreme immigration restrictions in 1924, the strain to permit extra Jews into Palestine elevated.
There was periodic, escalating violence between Arabs and Jews within the Twenties and Thirties. The Arab management, conscious that the inhabitants steadiness in Palestine was altering considerably, lobbied the British to restrict Jewish migration, whereas the Jewish management was lobbying to extend it. In 1939, after the Arabs rejected a partition plan, the British authorities issued a white paper that withdrew the promise of a Jewish homeland and severely restricted Jewish migration to and Jewish land purchases in Palestine. In the meantime the state of affairs for Jews in Europe was changing into dire; Zionists in Palestine (although not Szold) more and more turned to unlawful technique of Jewish immigration and to violent ways towards the British.
Szold’s crowning achievement was directing the Palestine operations of Youth Aliyah, a program that introduced Jewish youngsters from Germany and different Nazi-controlled areas and resettled them on kibbutzim. She started this work, which required ceaseless fundraising in the US, organizing in Palestine, and negotiating in Europe, in 1933 on the age of seventy-three and continued till she died at eighty-four. By that point, Youth Aliyah had introduced greater than 10,000 Jews to Palestine.
Would Szold, a lifelong cultural Zionist, have embraced political Zionism if she had lived to see the institution of Israel in 1948? Would she, that’s, have formally endorsed or opposed the brand new state? Her biographers give completely different solutions. Klagsbrun insists that till the tip of her life she “still dreamed of a single state where Jews and Arabs might live together in harmony.” It isn’t clear whether or not Szold was an official member of Brit Shalom, which fell aside by 1933, however Klagsbrun considers her to have been a de facto member. Within the Nineteen Forties, Klagsbrun writes, Szold was a pacesetter and full-fledged member of Ihud, one other group of Jewish intellectuals who had been in favor of a binational state. However Hacohen writes that whereas the members of Brit Shalom thought of Szold to be considered one of them, she discovered their views “naïve and unrealistic” and believed that “the Jews stood little chance of flourishing in a binational state.” A a lot earlier biography, Henrietta Szold: Report of a Life (1952) by Rose Zeitlin, with an introduction by considered one of Szold’s sisters, splits the distinction by claiming that as she lay dying, Szold summoned Magnes, the main cultural Zionist, and Chaim Weizmann, the main political Zionist, to her bedside and had the three of them clasp fingers as she handed from this world to the subsequent.
Even when Klagsbrun’s account is essentially the most correct, it wouldn’t make Szold into a completely believable avatar of what many Jews on the left at this time, particularly in the US, would contemplate a usable previous. She sometimes indulged within the fantasy of many liberal Zionists of her technology that Palestine was unpopulated. In 1922 she wrote to her household in Baltimore a few automotive journey to Haifa: “For five hours and a half we flew through an empty, deserted country. What harm to the Arabs if Jews develop it?” However for essentially the most half she was effectively conscious that bitter battle was embedded within the creation of Jewish settlements in Palestine (which she enthusiastically endorsed), lengthy earlier than there was a Jewish state. Szold-style cultural Zionism entailed seeing Jews as embodying a form of ethical purity that required holiness, good works, and the dream of peace, not the standard appurtenances of a state, like bureaucracies, legal guidelines, and armies. Nonetheless, constructing the Jewish presence in prestate Palestine was inescapably political, requiring negotiations with officers and administration of tensions between teams. Arab–Jewish violence was intermittent throughout all of Szold’s time in Palestine. The extra Jews arrived, particularly after the Nazis took energy in Germany, the more serious the violence turned. Within the years instantly after Szold’s dying, two of her closest aides, Chaim Yassky and Hans Beyth, had been murdered whereas working there in the course of the 1948 battle.
Szold’s angle towards the Arabs appears to have been some mixture of sympathy and worry. She was annoyed that the hawkish wing of the Yishuv—the prestate Jewish group—made issues harder than they needed to be, and she or he by no means gave up hope that the battle may one way or the other be resolved. Throughout the 1936 Arab revolt, which got here in response to the arrival of extra Jewish refugees from Europe, she wrote:
The fears of the Arabs will not be groundless. Our peaceable endeavors in our personal behalf have pressed them to the wall. The primary requisite is that we must be sincere and honest in our need to dwell on phrases of equality with them on this land on which we’ve got a shadowy (within the political sense) however a powerful sentimental declare, and upon which they’ve the declare which is phrased: possession is 9 factors of the legislation.
Just a few weeks later she wrote, “I see the future dark…. Is there no Arab side to the problem? Is it not our business to see the Arab side, too, and think out the necessary adjustment? Or am I a wishy-washy Liberal?”
Nonetheless, Szold all the time did all the things she may to deliver extra Jewish refugees to Palestine and to advertise the concept Zionism—which she noticed as a powerful emotional connection to Palestine and the constructing of a Jewish society there—was important to Jewish id within the diaspora. Consequently she saved many Jewish lives, contributed considerably to the creation of Jewish establishments in Palestine, and helped Jewish communal life in America to thrive in the course of the first half of the 20th century. Her writings display that she was conscious of the difficulty all this could trigger in Palestine. Her actions display that Zionism was nonetheless her overwhelming precedence.
The institution of the State of Israel led instantly to battle with its Arab neighbors and to substantial Jewish migration from Japanese Europe—the place pogroms had began once more and Jews residing in displaced individual camps had nowhere else to go—in addition to from Libya, Iran, Yemen, and different Center Japanese nations. In the US, the house of the good majority of diaspora Jews, Zionism turned the dominant stance of the main Jewish organizations and the establishments of Jewish group life. Right this moment one could be onerous put to discover a flourishing synagogue that operates with none reference to Zionism or Israel, because the outdated Reform temples used to do.
Reform Judaism is as soon as once more the biggest Jewish denomination in the US, partly as a result of it has buried its Pittsburgh Platform origins. The Holocaust was clearly the primary purpose its founding place disintegrated. In 1937 the motion—which in 1917 had formally condemned the Balfour Declaration—produced a brand new platform that formally eliminated its longtime renunciation of Zionism. Magnes, who started his profession as too Zionist for the Reform motion, ended it as too anti-Zionist, solely reluctantly acceding to the creation of the State of Israel. He was extremely controversial amongst Hebrew College school and the management of Hadassah, which misplaced seventy-eight medical support employees within the Arab assault that killed Chaim Yassky. In 1941 Hadassah issued a press release calling for a Jewish state, one thing it hadn’t taken a place on beforehand, and repudiating the binational aspirations of Magnes and his allies. Simply earlier than Israel declared its independence, Magnes, who was ill, returned to the US for medical remedy. He died in New York in late 1948.
American Jews are an overwhelmingly liberal group politically, and most Jews within the postwar years selected to see Zionism as a liberal trigger: Israel was a refuge for oppressed individuals, a miracle of society-building within the desert, with a social democratic authorities. For the 2 or three generations of American Jews who had been raised on such assumptions, the truth that Israel at this time has a strongly right-wing authorities and that Zionism is anathema to many of the international left is profoundly upsetting. That explains the revival of Jewish curiosity in cultural Zionism, or of binationalism, as roads not taken (as expressed by the title of Lieber Sheffer’s exhibition in Tel Aviv).
One typically hears the concern from Jews on the left that reflexive help of Israel by mainstream Jewish organizations will imperil the way forward for Jewish life in America by driving a youthful technology away. Israel’s conduct of its wars in Gaza and Lebanon has made this concern particularly intense. On the identical time, it’s true that the key previous try and separate Zionism from American Jewish id and apply failed—not due to Israel’s insurance policies however as a result of occasions on the planet undercut its assumptions and since it surrendered a lot of Yiddishkeit that Judaism misplaced its maintain on its members. As way back as 1967, Stephen Birmingham ended his gossipy greatest vendor Our Crowd: The Nice Jewish Households of New York, a collective portrait of roughly the identical group as Daniel Schulman’s “money kings,” with the commentary that many of the elite German Jewish households had deserted Judaism fully. They had been giving their youngsters first names like Peters and Bradford.
Szold’s model of Zionism started out of concern for Jewish assimilation in the US that was motivated by alternative and the will to appease antisemites. Hacohen writes, “Szold believed there was only one solution: Zionism. Antisemitism would disappear when the Jews had their own country.” This has not come true, to say the least. Neither did the early German and American Reform Jews’ prediction that their renunciation of Zionism would trigger antisemitism to vanish.
Israel, house to only underneath half the world’s Jews, has a excessive diploma of inside political competition, particularly underneath its right-wing authorities, however the thought of changing the explicitly Jewish state that has existed for greater than three quarters of a century with a brand new state during which Jews could be within the minority would have minimal help there. Probably the most attention-grabbing query that the lifetime of Henrietta Szold poses at this time is much less about the way forward for Israel, which isn’t more likely to surrender its statehood, than about the way forward for Judaism within the diaspora, particularly the US. In founding Hadassah as an American group that did its work in Palestine, Szold demonstrated her conviction {that a} connection to the Holy Land could be profoundly significant to most American Jews. That was not typical knowledge on the time, nevertheless it proved right: American Jewish group life turned centrally Zionist, first within the sense of orientation towards Jewish life in Palestine, then within the sense of robust help for the Jewish state.
The present second raises the alternative query: Can there be a powerful communal Jewish life in the US that’s non-Zionist or anti-Zionist? It could be an infinite venture to ascertain one with the size and the sturdiness of the institutional community of which Hadassah has been an essential half. One purpose is that it will even be a secular venture. Should you belong to a synagogue, that in a thriving Jewish group, any individual all the time has to arrange the kiddush and gather the Excessive Holy Day pledges. At the next stage, there’s the query of how profound, how specific, Jewish id must be to flourish. Szold could maintain up effectively as a heroic and admirable determine, however her reply to that query—very profound and really specific, with intense bonds of loyalty between American Jews and Jews in Israel—wouldn’t be comfy to many Jewish Individuals at this time.
