Rabbi Balfour Brickner, Interreligious Dialogue, and the Ironies of Liberal Zionism in America, 1967‒1980

Abstract

After the June 1967 Middle East war, liberal Zionism in the United States was transformed from an assumption into an embattled claim. From the 1940s to the 1960s, most Americans had assumed that liberalism and Zionism went together naturally. Only under pressure of criticism did liberal Zionists emerge as a self-aware faction within American Zionism. Starting in 1967, among the first to question the assumption of liberal Zionism were progressive Protestants, and fissures around Zionism among American progressives appeared in interreligious dialogue between Reform Jews and liberal white Protestants. Rabbi Balfour Brickner, a leading liberal Reform rabbi and a key interlocutor for such Protestants, stood in the thick of this dialogue, and his negotiation of liberal Zionism's passage from assumption to claim reveals that transformation vividly.