Americans for Progressive Israel: Radical Zionism in the United States, 1967–1973

Abstract

Americans for Progressive Israel (API) was one of the prominent forces in the larger Radical Zionist movement in the US. The chronicle of its rise, the way it established itself as a social, political, and ideological movement, and the causes of its decline offer valuable insights into how the encounter between Zionism and the New Left played out in North America. My perspective on API is based on two historical theses, both of which challenge major elements of current scholarship on Radical Zionism. First, I argue, the tension between the New Left and Zionism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s had its origin in a dissonance between established ways of thinking in both the New Left and in Zionism, and in newly emergent political and social conditions. Radical Zionism, the ideology on which API was founded, had dropped out of sight at the end of World War II, only to gain new relevance after the Six-Day War. My second claim is that, as an ongoing historical phenomenon, Radical Zionism in the United States was born of the interaction between three theaters of events – the United States, the Jewish world, and the Zionist establishment. As such, it cannot be understood only on the basis of one of those arenas. I will show how the interactions between these three social spaces shaped API between 1967 and 1973.