American Jewish Organizations Research Articles

How Israel's Illiberal Democracy Became a Model for the Right

ABSTRACT: Amid the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, it is easy to forget the political drama that gripped Israel only one year ago. After assuming power in December 2022, a new far-right government led by Benjamin Netanyahu had proposed a slate of judicial and administrative reforms that prompted a wave of anti-government protests. Concerned journalists, former U.S. and Israeli government officials, and major American Jewish organizations issued ominous warnings about democratic backsliding. Israel, it seemed, was heading in the direction of illiberal Hungary.

Israel's Relations with Emerging African States

Israel developedits relations with African countries relatively early. The initial boom in the 1950s was followed by a slowdown in the 1960s and then, in many respects, a standstill after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel was seen by many African countries as an anti-colonial power, which gradually changed over time. In 1957, the Jewish state recognized the independence of Ghana, and in 1958 it set up a separate organization, the Agency for International Development Cooperation (MASHAV), to assist the newly independent African states. In 1963, it established a new embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Based on newly discovered Hungarian state security documents, this paper will give an insight into how Hungary – as a member of the Soviet-led Eastern European socialist bloc – in the early 1960s and 1970s, viewed its relations with Israel and African countries, and the information and political-ideological patterns on which it based its approach. The state security surveillance (through the Hungarian diplomatic missions) later covered not only Israel, but also the American Jewish organizations which, according to the agencies, had been in contact with African states and organizations at the instigation of Israel. Archival sources with a strongly anti-imperialist tone and bearing the imprint of Soviet state security suggest that the treatment of Israel as an enemy occurred in this region before the 1967 break-up, i.e. the diplomatic freeze did not significantly affect the way the Jewish state's relations with the emerging African nations were viewed.

Immigration, Ideology, and Public Activity from an American Jewish Perspective: A Journey Across Three Continents by Zohar Segev (review)

Reviewed by: Immigration, Ideology, and Public Activity from an American Jewish Perspective: A Journey Across Three Continents by Zohar Segev Michael Keren (bio) Immigration, Ideology, and Public Activity from an American Jewish Perspective: A Journey Across Three Continents. By Zohar Segev. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2022. x + 233 pp. One of the hardest questions related to the Holocaust concerns the failure of Jewish organizations in the United States to persuade the American government to rescue European Jews by the bombardment of Auschwitz or by any other means. In order to understand that failure, it is useful to look at the persuasion efforts made at the time by American Jewish leaders as well as by second level officials within American Jewish organizations. Zohar Segev's book is based on the personal archives of four Europeanborn Jews who found refuge in the United States during the Second World War and held several positions in American Jewish organizations. Arieh Tartakover, an historian and sociologist who later taught at the Hebrew University, chaired the World Jewish Congress's Welfare and Relief Committee; Arieh Kubovy, later an Israeli diplomat and head of Yad Va'shem, chaired the World Jewish Congress's Rescue Committee based in New York; Benjamin Akzin, a jurist who later taught at the Hebrew University, was a consultant to the American Zionist Emergency Council in Washington; and Jacob Robinson, a lawyer and researcher, founded the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the research arm of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress. The experience of individuals who operated within the American Jewish organizational network in the 1940s seems an invaluable source for an exploration of the political, administrative and cultural causes behind the successes and failures of that network to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Since the author has decided, however, that this question [End Page 418] is beyond the scope of his study, we are left with a description of activities conducted by the four men, mainly letters they wrote, which in themselves had no impact on the outcome of the war. Some of the letters are quite instructive though, if only because of the responses they elicited. Consider the responses Kubovy received to letters he wrote to Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. In August 9, 1944, he conveyed a request from a Jewish activist in Czechoslovakia to bomb Auschwitz and the railway lines leading to it, which McCloy rejected on the grounds that such actions would require the use of significant air power and might not be effective. He also made the incredible claim that the bombardment could lead the Germans to institute even stricter measures against the Jews. When a few weeks later Kubovy sent McCloy another letter calling not for aerial bombing but for destruction of the death camp by paratroopers, the response was striking in its bureaucratic language. The assistant secretary informed Kubovy that the operations he suggested fell within the jurisdiction of the Allied Mediterranean Commander, who had been fully informed of the situation in the death camp areas. McCloy added that he was sure the theater commander "would do anything he felt he could to check these ghastly excesses of the Nazis" (87). One wonders why this dismissive response led Segev to conclude that it reflects serious consideration of the matter by government officials in Washington and American military leaders. The author is aware of the enormous frustration the four men felt as a result of the ineffectiveness of the rescue efforts they took part in. However, with some exceptions, such as Kubovy's criticism of Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress, we are given few clues as to their attitudes toward the top Jewish leadership, a matter which, once again, is claimed to be beyond the scope of this study. The book thus makes a contribution by bringing to light documents by four refugee immigrants who worked in American Jewish organizations during the 1940s and played an active role in the Zionist movement before and after the establishment of the State of Israel, but the documents are still awaiting an analysis within a broader scope. [End Page 419] Michael Keren University of Calgary and Western Galilee Academic College Michael Keren...

Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund by Frank Wolff

Reviewed by: Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund by Frank Wolff Gennady Estraikh (bio) Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund. By Frank Wolff. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. xix + 512 pp. The continuing economic development of Imperial Russia and the pre-1880s state policy of "civilizing" Jewish subjects through luring them into general education prepared ever larger numbers of Jews to give up their traditional ways and live a life culturally compatible with that of the urban Christian population. A very small minority even converted to Christianity and thus emancipated themselves from the stifling legal restrictions placed upon adherents of Judaism. However, hundreds of the converts later officially returned to Judaism after realizing that conversion did not alleviate the stigma of their origin. A new stratum of [End Page 220] people, with one leg in traditional society and the other in the non-Jewish world, arose in Russia. Not only state school and university graduates steeped in Russian culture belonged to this stratum. The same or nearby social space was populated by "semi-intelligentsia" (54). This snobby tag described haphazardly educated autodidacts, many of them renegade Talmudic students. Yet secularized "conscious" or "enlightened" workers (soznatel'nye rabochie in Russian, bavustzinike arbeter in Yiddish) formed the most populous group of modernized Russian Jews. They, together with the "semi-intelligentsia," dominated the Jewish civil societal space, sandwiched between the traditional Jewish and the dominant Christian societies. This space—distinct in its lifestyle, social organization, values, and behavior—was an important recruiting ground for diverse political and cultural movements and groupings, including the Jewish Labor Bund established in 1897 by a group of Marxist secular socialists. Characteristically, "workers often tended to retrospectively view joining the workers' movement as an act of conversion." (210) Judging by the level of literacy among Jews arriving in America, people from the modernized groups played a more salient role among the immigrants than among those who stayed in Russia. Not only were they more receptive to radical ideas, but they were also more mobile. Some of them had to leave Russia fleeing persecutions and oppression, though economic reasons for emigration prevailed. The book Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration, originally published in German in 2014 under the title Neue Welten in der Neuen Welt: Die transnationale Geschichte des Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbundes, 1897-1947, focuses on one of the cohorts in the Jewish civil societal space: members of the Bund, which had grown into the largest among the Jewish, and generally one of the most numerous, Marxist parties in imperial Russia. At the same time, Russia is mainly a point of departure, because Frank Wolff is primarily interested in what happened to and around the Bundists who chose or had little choice but to emigrate to the United States and Argentina. Although the émigré Bundists did not create any influential organizations of the Party's members, they "inspired the rise of the powerful Jewish organizations of secondary Bundism" (19). Indeed, such eminent figures in the American labor movement as Baruch Charney Vladeck (1886-1938), Sidney Hillman (1887-1946), and David Dubinsky (1892-1982) were Bundists in their youth. Hillman's brainchild, the Amalgamated Bank, established in 1921, still exists as the largest union-owned bank. Bundists became tone-setters in many American Jewish organizations, including the Workmen's Circle (now The Workers Circle), established in 1900. Journalists with a Bundist pedigree played an important role [End Page 221] in the Forverts (Forward), the biggest Yiddish newspaper. Although not a few Bundists jumped on the communist bandwagon, others remained in the circles of uncompromising anti-communist socialists. Many were central in organizing and running Yiddish afternoon schools. A separate study could be devoted to those Bundists who inherited or built successful business enterprises and acted as generous sponsors of Yiddish cultural and other projects. Among them were Motl Zelmanowicz (1914-2010), the last president of the International Jewish Labor Bund, and Bono Wiener (1920-1995), president of the Jewish Labour Bund in Melbourne. Frank Wolff's excellent, though structurally challenging, book contributes a great deal to our understanding of the social environment created by Yiddish-speaking socialists in North...

Before the New Antisemitism: Arab Critics of Zionism and American Jewish Politics, 1917-1974

Before the New Antisemitism:Arab Critics of Zionism and American Jewish Politics, 1917-1974 Geoffery P. Levin1 (bio) On June 5, 1937, WNYC radio aired a town-hall event organized in New York by an Arab American group, the Arab National League (ANL). It opened with ANL President Dr. Fuad Shatara reading a cable from the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, congratulating the guest of honor, poet Ameen Rihani, and continued with several speeches critical of Zionism.2 Almost immediately, the ANL and WNYC came under attack by New York City Alderman Samson Inselbuch, who charged them with spreading antisemitism.3 WNYC and the ANL, however, soon found defense from the highest echelons of American Jewish leadership—B'nai B'rith Vice President Louis Fabricant, American Jewish Committee (AJC) official Sol Stroock, Orthodox leader Rabbi Herbert Goldstein, the National Council of Jewish Women, and most notably, Rabbi Stephen Wise. Defending WNYC, Wise, a leading Zionist who headed the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC), wrote that "absurdly enough, it has been charged with anti-Semitism—as if Arabs and Jews alike were not Semites."4 The episode says much about American Jewish perceptions of Arabs, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism. It reveals that the trend of viewing Arab opposition to Zionism as antisemitic has a long history in the United States, predating Israel's creation. Yet it also shows that America's most prominent Jewish organizations did not perceive early Arab critics of Zionism as inherently antisemitic. On the contrary, American Jewish [End Page 103] leaders vigorously pushed back against labeling Arab critics of Zionism as antisemites, a characterization which Wise, arguably the most influential American Zionist of the era, considered absurd. The response of American Jewish groups to the 1937 controversy may come as a surprise given that in recent decades, some of these same organizations have argued that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic and at times have specifically emphasized "Arab" and "Muslim" forms of antisemitism.5 In seeking to understand the origins of this rhetoric, scholars have focused on the emergence of the term "the new anti-Semitism" in the 1970s. Daniel Schroeter writes that in the aftermath of the 1967 war, advocates for Israel "alarmed at what they saw as growing sympathy for the Arabs and Palestinians began to use the term 'new anti-Semitism,' which they understood as antisemitism either expressed or disguised as anti-Zionism." Central to the "new anti-Semitism," Schroeter continues, "was Arab hostility to Israel and the Jews ('Arab anti-Semitism'), as well as Western support for the Arabs and Palestinians."6 The 1974 book The New Anti-Semitism by Anti-Defamation League (ADL) leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein gave a name to the concept.7 "Islamic anti-Semitism" soon became part of the "new anti-Semitism" discourse as Islamism ascended in Middle Eastern politics.8 Some began portraying Muslims' opposition to Zionism as part of a long history of anti-Jewish feelings within Islam dating back to the medieval era, drawing from what Mark Cohen has termed the "neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history," a revisionist narrative that emphasized the mistreatment of Jews in Islamic lands. According to Cohen and Schroeter, this "neo-lachrymose conception" had been developed in part to rebut [End Page 104] Arab advocates' claims that Zionism had ruined an otherwise idyllic history of Jewish-Muslim relations.9 Yet while the 1970s marked the creation of the term "the new anti-Semitism," the first crucial shift in American Jewish discourse on the connection between Arabs, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism came much earlier, not long after the WNYC controversy. Throughout the interwar period (1918-1941), American Jewish organizations generally downplayed Arab discontent with Jews and Zionism, preferring not to categorize it as antisemitism. But even when these same organizations began vocally condemning Arab anti-Zionist advocates in the 1940s and 1950s, they did so without characterizing their anti-Zionism as inherently antisemitic. Instead, these Jewish groups called attention to collaboration between Arab anti-Zionists and non-Arab domestic antisemitic groups, critiquing Arab advocates not for their Middle East agenda but for their alleged threat to Jews in the United States. Only after...

Antisemitism and BDS on US Campuses: The Role of Jewish Voice for Peace

Antisemitism on university and college campuses in the United States has been rising significantly in recent years. On many campuses, Jewish students are facing verbal and online harassment on account of their perceived support for Israel or because of their Zionist identities. Many Jewish students have reported feeling the need to shed or disavow the Zionist component of their Jewishness in order to participate in campus life, particularly in progressive spaces and causes. In this article I focus on Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the self-identified “Jewish wing” of the US-based Palestinian solidarity movement, and the role that it plays in minimizing these concerns and even contributing to a hostile campus climate. JVP’s campus chapters typically discredit concerns about antisemitism by casting them as deceitful efforts to censor discourse and debate about Israel. But JVP activists on campus are also increasingly becoming purveyors of antisemitism themselves, for example by promoting the “Deadly Exchange” campaign which holds Israel and mainstay American-Jewish organizations complicit in harming minority communities in the United States. Specific cases of JVP’s activism on American universities and colleges, including instances where JVP has managed to serve as an alibi and a support for campus antisemitism, are presented.

Tweeting in echo chambers? Analyzing Twitter discourse between American Jewish interest groups

ABSTRACT Recent research of interest groups’ use of Twitter focuses on its use for intra-group member mobilization. Less has been said about social media’s effects on the discourse within an issue community. Do interest groups that are part of a larger community, but whose positions divert from each other, use Twitter to engage each other? Our research explores whether groups within a defined issue community – American-Jewish organizations advocating on U.S.-Israel relations – use Twitter for dialog, or whether their Twitter networks represent echo chambers. Based on the results of our social network analysis we find the use of Twitter is more complex than the black-and-white narrative of echo chamber vs. public sphere. We find groups interact with both supporters and detractors, using Twitter’s communication tools (we focus here on @mentions) strategically – but on balance the results of our analysis support a “sphericules” interpretation of social media.

«Un programme unique dans le monde entier»: le Congrès juif canadien et la lutte pour le droit à l’égalité «raciale» et religieuse au Québec (1945-1950)

What were the characteristics of the program developed by the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) to fight anti-Semitism and racism in postwar Quebec? Why is this program described by the CJC as “unique in the entire world”? Part of the answer rests with the fact that contrary to their counterparts from other Canadian and American Jewish organizations, the leaders of the CJC in Quebec put legal and judicial approaches aside and developed an ecumenical and persuasive strategy to encourage the public repudiation of anti-Semitism by civil and religious authorities. They also abandoned human rights language in favour of a legitimating discourse based on the notions of order, duty, morality, and common good enshrined in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Finally, they concealed the issues around race and racism by linking their struggle for “racial” equality to the ongoing debates on French-Canadian nationalism and to the linguistic and religious cleavages dividing Quebec society at that time.

Shifting Sands: Zionism & American Jewry

The current willingness of major American Jewish organizations and leaders to dismiss the threat from white supremacists in the name of supporting Israel represents a new stage in the shifting relationship of U.S. Jews toward Zionism. In the first stage, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the majority of U.S. Jews did not take to Zionism, as its goals seemed antithetical to their aspirations to join mainstream American society. In a second stage, attitudes toward Zionism grew more positive as conditions for European Jews worsened, and Jewish settlement in Palestine grew substantially. Following Israeli statehood in 1948, U.S. Jews began gradually to support Israel. Jewish groups and leaders increasingly characterized criticism of Zionism as inherently anti-Semitic and attacked Israel's critics. In a third and most recent stage, many major Jewish organizations and leaders have subordinated the traditional U.S. Jewish interest in combatting white supremacy and bigotry when it comes into conflict with support for Israel and Zionism.

Israel’s Deportation Policy of African Migrants: Internal and External Aspects

In 2016 Prime Minister of Israel Benyamin Netanyahu declared its comeback to Africa and Africa’s return to the Jewish state. The key reason for a new Israeli-African cooperation (especially between Israel and East African countries) seems to be an intent to regulate crisis with illegal immigrants from Africa in Israel. The author examines the drivers of the big inflow of African asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan trying to find ‘safe heaven’ in the Jewish State. Netanyahu prefers to treat these African asylum seekers as economic migrants. He often stresses that Israel is too small to accept everyone who is afflicted. In the Israeli society negative sentiments towards African asylum seekers are generally prevailing. However, there are some grassroots initiatives aimed at protecting Africans and their rights. Opposition parties, Zionist Union and Meretz, are not united and have not succeeded in challenging the government’s course. The main goal of this research is to evaluate the Israeli government’s approaches, including deportation of immigrants to ‘third countries’ like Rwanda and Uganda, aimed at resolving the crisis. The deportation of African asylum seekers provoked some new debates about rights of socially vulnerable groups in Israel and, moreover, its democratic character. The critique of the Netanyahu’s policies spread well beyond the borders of the State of Israel. The United Nations tried to resolve the crisis by offering a deal that would relocate Africans from Israel to different countries, but the head of the Jewish state, first agreed to sign it, but later changed his mind. Special attention is paid to the role of the American Jewish organizations in stopping the deportation of Africans from Israel. The American liberal progressive groups, for example J street, have been openly protesting against Netanyahu’s policies. The conclusion is drawn that the way out of the crisis lays in elaborating a long-term comprehensive migration strategy.

“Sometimes a Bee Can Move an Ox”: Biblical Epics and One Man's Quest to Promote Jewish Values in Blacklist-Era Hollywood

In the 1950s, the top American Jewish organizations chose a single man, John Stone, to represent their collective interests in Hollywood. Over the course of the decade, Stone's Motion Picture Project sought to prevent antisemitism on film and to inspire the creation of positive Jewish characters. Negotiating the cultural politics of the era, however, resulted in an increasing tendency to favor depictions of biblical Jews over contemporary American ones. In a strange twist, Stone endorsed no film with as much zeal asBen-Hur, a New Testament celebration of Jesus. By following Stone's tortuous attempts to navigate Cold War controversies, and by casting new light on the phenomenal success of biblical epics in the 1950s, this essay suggests that at the heart of postwar popular culture was a shift toward a particular discourse of liberal humanism.

“The Edge of the Abyss”: The Origins of the Israel Lobby, 1949–1954

The main components of the Israel lobby in the United States were organized in the spring of 1954, six years after the State of Israel declared independence, in response to a crisis in U.S.–Israel diplomacy that erupted in October 1953. Israeli soldiers had massacred more than sixty Palestinian villagers in Qibya, on the West Bank, eliciting widespread condemnation; American Jews, in reply, mobilized to defend Israel in new ways. The American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (later renamed AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, established at this time, displayed two outstanding features. They were Jewish united front organizations that brought together Zionist with “non-Zionist” groups. They also emerged from transnational contacts with Israeli leaders and realities. A staunch near-consensus in defense of Israel in the most trying circumstances established a lasting framework in American Jewish life.

Immigration, Politics and Democracy: The World Jewish Congress in Europe, 1936–1939

AbstractDuring the 1930s, the leadership of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) tried to turn the question of European Jews into an international political issue that transcended traditional philanthropic assistance to Jews in need. This article presents examples of the broad political activities that demonstrate the desire of the WJC's founders to deviate from the patterns of conventional philanthropic activity traditionally adopted by American Jewish organizations in the latter half of the 1930s, and to work on behalf of Europe's Jews and Jewish refugees in Europe by political means that involved blending the Jewish issue into Europe's international political and economic texture and promoting the Jewish cause in ways that transcended mere provision of economic assistance.

The Effect of Public and Private Schooling on Anti-Semitism

Most major American Jewish organizations oppose voucher and other school choice programs based in part on the fear that private, mostly religious, schools do not check the development of anti-Semitism as well as do government-operated public schools. To examine whether private and public schools differ in their effect on the emergence of anti-Semitic attitudes in adults later in life, we conducted a large survey of a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States. Subjects were asked to provide details on the type of school they attended each year between 1st and 12th grade, including whether the school was public or private, religious or secular, and whether it was affiliated with a particular religious institution. We also adapted a series of measures used by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to gauge people’s anti-Semitism.We find that the more people attended private school when they were younger, the more favorable their attitudes toward Jews. This finding holds even after controlling for a variety of background characteristics, including age, gender, race, childhood family religion, childhood economic circumstances, mother and father’s education, being raised by two parents, and being born in the United States. The reduction in anti-Semitism associated with private schooling is roughly as large as that produced by having parents who are college educated rather than high school dropouts. The benefit of attending private school on reducing anti-Semitism is concentrated among religiously affiliated private schools. Secular private schools are similar to secular public schools in the level of anti-Semitism among their former students. We therefore have some reason to believe that religious, mostly Christian, institutions are playing an important role in restraining anti-Semitism. The overall picture on American anti-Semitism is more worrisome than earlier research by the ADL suggests. The ADL measure of anti-Semitism asks respondents to agree or disagree with a series of 11 anti-Semitic statements. But the ADL survey failed to offer subjects neutral response options, like “don’t know” or “no opinion.” In our study, we added those options and discovered that between one-third and one-half of the subjects switched to a neutral answer. A large portion of people who the ADL would have coded as not anti-Semitic are in fact ignorant or indifferent when confronted with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Although the level of anti-Semitism uncovered in our survey remains relatively low, the situation is more concerning than earlier research would lead us to believe.If we wish to reduce anti-Semitism, major Jewish organizations may wish to reconsider their historic opposition to vouchers and other private school choice programs. Rather than posing a threat, private, especially religious, schools appear to help restrict the development of anti-Semitism.

Signposts: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society and World War I

Signposts: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society and World War I Hasia R. Diner (bio) Max J. Kohler and Simon Wolf, “Jewish Disabilities in the Balkan States: American Contributions Toward their Removal, With Particular Reference to the Congress of Berlin,” 24 (January 1, 1916), pp. 1–153. Max J. Kohler, “Jewish Rights at the Congresses of Vienna (1814–1815) and the Aix-La-Chapelle (1818)” 26 (January 1, 1918), pp. 33–125. World War I, the plight of the Jews caught in the conflict’s cross-fire, and the intervention of America and its Jews to ameliorate their condition served as the backdrop for Max J. Kohler’s two articles, which appeared in the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society during the middle years of the 1910s. The first of these empirically dense and deeply researched pieces came out in January 1916, as the United States staunchly proclaimed its neutrality, electing a president later that year who would make staying out of the war a key campaign promise. The second of Kohler’s pieces, also like the first, long, meticulous, and accompanied by primary sources, appeared a half year after Woodrow Wilson and the United States Congress brought the nation into the war. Wilson justified that dramatic about-face to humanitarianism and to a broad, nearly messianic vision of the world to emerge from the bloody protracted conflict, to be based on the protection of minorities, enduring peace, and global reconciliation. The articles also reflected a specific American and American Jewish context. Readers of the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, as well as the smaller number who had heard these papers delivered orally at the Society’s annual meetings, would have known that as early as 1914, just months after the hostilities broke out, American Jews had geared into action to do what they could for those millions of Jews impacted by the war. Their involvement began almost immediately after the assassination in Sarajevo and the explosion of hostilities on a global scale. In August of that year Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire witnessed the plight of the Jews of Palestine who, cut off from the rest of the world because of the war, faced starvation. Morgenthau dispatched a telegram to banker-philanthropist [End Page 209] Jacob Schiff in New York on August 31, 1914, bringing to his attention their wretched conditions. This telegram catalyzed the formation of several American Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Relief Committee, the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War, and the People’s Relief Committee, which banded together later that year to form the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, known in short as the Joint. By 1915 the Joint, as well as other American Jewish organizations and the Jewish press, both English and Yiddish, publicized to the American Jewish public the vast suffering of Jews and the brutal dislocation of Jewish life in the Czarist Empire. For much of the period of time when Kohler and his co-writer Simon Wolf researched and wrote these two articles, which together ran up to more than 250 pages including hefty appendices of primary documents, the United States, because of its non-belligerent status and its geographic isolation suffered none of the disruption caused by the war. Even after America’s declaration of war and its soldiers went “over there,” the Atlantic provided Americans with a safe space, removed from the ravages of the conflict. As such the Jews of the United States constituted the only sizable Jewish population in the world living in a land not marred by trenches, not in the path of armies on the move, not in danger of invasion. Even England endured, from 1915 on, aerial bombing. The small Jewish population centers in South Africa, Australia, and the various countries of South and Central America had little clout and more importantly, lived in nations with no particular influence in the outcome of world events. This meant that the Jews of the United States experienced the war in profound safety, a matter which heightened their sense of responsibility for those Jews who faced grave, indeed life threatening hardship. This...

Waging relief: the politics and logistics of American Jewish war relief in Europe and the Near East (1914–1918)

This article examines the work of private American Jewish associations during the First World War. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in particular created complex, dynamic international networks in order to find information about suffering Jews on both sides of the Eastern Front and in Palestine and to channel funds for their relief during the war. It forged alliances with officials in the US State Department, foreign governments, Jewish organizations operating in the war zones, and relied on familial banking ties and their own commissioners who travelled throughout the war-ravaged regions to render humanitarian assistance. This article demonstrates the complexity of maintaining these aid networks and also the challenges American Jewish relief organizations encountered while attempting to maintain multi-governmental sanction for their aid services in the volatile sphere of wartime diplomacy.

Le travail social dans les organisations juives françaises après la Shoah : création made in France ou importation américaine ?

This article analyses the transformation of social work in Jewish circles in post-World War II France and asks how American Jewish organizations influenced this process. Our inquiry will focus especially on the role of the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which reestablished its French presence in December 1944, and thereafter sought to reform social work practices in the French Jewish organizations it subsidized. The JDC initially worked closely with these organizations by imposing new standards and providing staff trainings. Yet in 1949, it increased its involvement by opening the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work, which offered a one-year program based on the American social work curriculum to students from Europe, North Africa and Israel. The efforts of the JDC to reform French Jewish welfare coincided with a larger French movement to institutionalize the social work profession, providing an additional catalyst for reform. I argue that the transformation of French Jewish social work can be best understood as the outcome of interaction within the Jewish world, but also between the Jewish world and the larger French and American national contexts.

The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, Stephen Norwood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xi + 339 pp., hardcover $29.99, pbk. $21.99

Contributing to a large body of scholarship on the actions (or inactions) of American and American-Jewish organizations during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, Stephen H. Norwood focuses on the American university to explore the attitudes—often sympathetic—of administrators, faculty members, and students toward Germany and its Nazi regime. In the author's words, this is “the first systematic exploration” of the subject. Norwood reveals a paradoxical relationship between institutions meant to advance knowledge and (by extension) humanity, and the emerging Nazi ideologies that enjoyed considerable university acceptability even as they foreshadowed war and countered any conception of the university's mission of enlightenment. Norwood has organized The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower into eight chapters and an epilogue, surveying Harvard, Columbia, the University of Virginia, the Seven Sisters colleges, and Catholic universities. The author details national trends among departments of German and closes his study with a discussion of how events in 1938, especially Kristallnacht, revealed the limitations of the effectiveness of campus protests.

Jewish Nonprofit Organizations in the U.S.: A Preliminary Survey

Organizations are at the heart of American Jewish life. Though there has been considerable research on specific organizations and types of organizations, there has been very little on the overall organizational structure of the Jewish community. This article takes some preliminary steps in that direction. It pulls together historical data on American Jewish organizations and data on contemporary Jewish organizations from a source not previously used: the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s database on nonprofit charitable organizations. A majority of the 9,482 Jewish organizations listed are educational and religious but there are significant numbers of other types as well. Hundreds of organizations link American Jews to Israel and close to 300 link American Jews to Jews in other countries. New York State remains the organizational center of American Jewry. Few organizations are targeted to the needs of Jewish young adults. An agenda for future research is provided.

Mass Mobilization to Direct Engagement: American Jews' Changing Relationship to Israel

The practices of American Jews relative to Israel seem increasingly to break with patterns established during the second half of the 20th century. Lobbying by American Jewish organizations on the political left and right increasingly competes with the consensus-oriented efforts of organizations such as AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CPMAJO). Direct giving to Israeli civil society organizations has replaced the federations’ annual campaigns as the primary vehicle for diaspora philanthropy. The number of American Jewish teens and young adults visiting Israel has surged, but most are going with private tour companies under the auspices of Birthright Israel rather than programs of the North American denominations. Aliyah is up, but managed by Nefesh b’Nefesh, a private not-for-profit organization, rather than the Jewish Agency for Israel. In short, how American Jews relate to Israel is very much in flux. This study argues that the mass mobilization model that organized American Jewish practices relative to Israel since the founding of state has declined, and a new direct engagement model has emerged alongside it. Increasingly American Jews relate to Israel directly, by advocating their own political views, funding favored causes, visiting frequently or living there part time, consuming Israeli news and entertainment, and expressing a distinctively “realistic” rather than idealistic orientation toward the Jewish state. Their new homeland practices have given rise to (and been encouraged by) a new set of organizations that operate privately, beyond the orbit of the semi-public agencies of the established American Jewish polity. These developments are described against the backdrop of the waning mass mobilization paradigm, and their significance for diaspora Jewish organizations and Israeli democratic institutions is examined.