Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped Passions About Israel by Shalom Goldman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped Passions About Israel by Shalom Goldman Jessica Carr (bio) Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped Passions About Israel. By Shalom Goldman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 256 pp. In Starstruck in the Promised Land, Shalom Goldman recovers many unheralded figures and events that diffused Zionism into United States consciousness, as seen in Chapter Four, "Advocates for Zion: Sinatra, Steinbeck, Baldwin, and Bellow." The book also aims to recover the ways that US celebrities as different as Whitney Houston, Barbra Streisand, and Madonna have served the State of Israel. Assembling brief reviews of the reception of these personalities allows us to see the role of celebrity, a tactic that Israeli state builders have used to develop strong feelings of love and pride in Palestine/Israel and in the United States. This tactic jettisoned features of the place for emotions and ideas about the place. These state builders, Goldman suggests, knew what they were doing—building national myths—and they tapped American celebrity and the lens of the Bible through which Americans saw "the Promised Land." The greatest contribution of Goldman's work is to demonstrate the similarities between American capitalist marketing strategies and Zionism. The book attends to both "geopolitical factors" and "softer cultural factors" (75). He illuminates the power marketing strategies offered to [End Page 440] Zionists to gain control of the narrative in the United States and the United Nations. In his analysis of the film Exodus, for instance, Goldman brings up its appearance in an early episode of Mad Men. Don Draper tells his Israeli clients, "All I know is the Bible," and Draper's extramarital lover Rachel explains she will not move there because "For me it's more an idea than a place" (79). Goldman includes this scene to emphasize Exodus as similar marketing, but he disagrees. He argues, "But for Draper's Israeli clients, Israel is first and foremost a place, and one that they would like to see promoted in the United States" (79). Goldman brings much to analyzing the iconography of Israel in film by recalling this scene in Mad Men. However, it seems that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing by turning to Draper, who knows that it is emotion, and not a thing itself, that sells. The Israelis intentionally selected a non-Jew with no familiarity with the State of Israel or Jewish Americans to popularize the new nation. Goldman recounts Israeli officials courting "American cultural icons." Ben Gurion, he writes, "developed a strong rapport with many visiting celebrities" (84). The State of Israel made a case for itself via celebrity and celebrities. Goldman shows that politics and theology are always culturally mediated. The book bridges memoir and research, often including Goldman's personal perspective. Yet Goldman does not always climb far enough out of his own background to be critical. Though Chapter Five offers some sense of how religious Zionism moved politically right and theologically toward millennial messianism, it is not "traditional" to seek a Jewish state. Desire for a Jewish nation-state only appeared recently and was controversial among Orthodox Jews. Goldman shifts between historicizing "that potent mix of culture and politics" in transnational Zionism and expressing more emotional dedication to the State of Israel (67). In Chapter Four, he describes his upbringing: "The Orthodox Judaism that my family practiced—a form of traditional Judaism that decades later would be described as 'modern Orthodoxy'—was deeply committed to a religious Zionist ideal that saw the return to the Promised Land as the fulfillment of both biblical prophecy and Jewish millennial hopes" (74). As for many in America, Israel took a larger and larger position in the center of Goldman's sense of Jewishness. He volunteered for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) following the 1967 War. His childhood experiences led him to chafe at some of the presumptions of Orthodox practices, and the opportunities for "secular" Jewishness in Israel as well as his disillusionment with anti-Arab racism in the IDF became formative. He recounts his own military experience and responses from family and Americans in Israel, but it is unclear...