"Weizmann to her was God": Dorothy Thompson's Journey to and from Zionism

Abstract

"Weizmann to her was God":Dorothy Thompson's Journey to and from Zionism1 Walker Robins (bio) At a 1941 event at the Hotel Astor in New York City, Zionist statesman Chaim Weizmann took the stage before 2,500 guests to hail American columnist Dorothy Thompson as a "modern Deborah" and to thank her for her efforts on behalf of the Jewish people.2 Those efforts were by then well known to the American public. As a journalist, Thompson had been among the earliest, most vociferous critics of Nazism. As a political commentator, she had used her platform to focus Americans' attention on the unfolding refugee crisis in Europe while privately organizing support for the refugee population. By the 1941 event in New York, Thompson was well on her way to becoming perhaps the most high-profile non-Jewish supporter of Zionism in the United States. She was unrelenting in these causes. Some called her Cassandra for her oftprophetic tones. For Jews like Weizmann, though, she was Deborah. Within a decade, however, many Jewish leaders had different names for Thompson. By 1949, Rabbi Joseph Shubow of Boston was proclaiming that "The Dorothy that we once knew as a veritable prophetess Deborah … has since become a Jezebel."3 What had changed? In the years since World War II, Thompson had ceased her pro-Zionist activism and penned several columns critical of Zionist and Israeli actions. Thompson was hardly an anti-Zionist at the time, but Shubow's condemnation came as Jewish activists affiliated with the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism (ACJ) were recruiting her to their cause. Their efforts would prove effective. Within months, Thompson published what became—at least to many American supporters of Israel—an infamous critique of American Zionism in Commentary. Within two years, she helped found the American Friends of the Middle East, an organization dedicated in [End Page 55] part to countering the effects of American Zionists on US relations to the Middle East. By then, the woman who had arguably been the leading non-Jewish supporter of Zionism in the United States was among its foremost critics. Because of Thompson's previous renown as an advocate for Jews and Zionism, the question of what caused her shift took on outsized significance. Was something wrong with Zionism? Or with Thompson? Contemporaries offered a number of explanations. Jewish critics like Shubow and Rabbi Baruch Korff suggested that she had been bought off by Arab interests or that her third husband, Maxim Kopf (a Czech citizen of ethnic German background), was responsible.4 Thompson's close friend Meyer Weisgal, Zionist editor and secretary to Weizmann, argued that it was such attacks themselves that had pushed her into the arms of anti-Zionist activists.5 Another close friend, journalist Vincent Sheean, claimed that her change of heart had come after experiencing a vision of Jesus while hospitalized in Jerusalem.6 Thompson herself put the matter simply—that her support for Zionism had been based on assumptions that proved untrue.7 Scholars have likewise offered varying explanations, with most centered on Thompson's first substantial exposure to the Arab perspective during a 1945 trip to Palestine.8 [End Page 56] Amid so many explanations—or, accusations, even—of why Thompson shifted her support, scholars have not thoroughly analyzed the substance of her views as they evolved over time.9 This essay does that, tracing Thompson's engagement with Zionism as she moved from journalist to advocate and from advocate to critic. In doing so, it reveals Chaim Weizmann as the pivot around which Thompson's relationship to Zionism turned. Thompson's relationship with Weizmann was decisive in turning an existing appreciation of Zionism into passionate advocacy—Thompson not only came to adopt and adapt Weizmann's arguments for the movement but to view the statesman himself as the embodiment of it. She therefore fit a largely understudied pattern in American non-Jews' engagement with Zionism of investing the "true" meaning of the movement in the image of specific leaders.10 For a time, Thompson's identification of Zionism with Weizmann led her to advocacy. In the years following World War II, however—as Zionists began campaigns of terror against...