American Jewish Organizations Research Articles

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

Mass Mobilization to Direct Engagement:American Jews' Changing Relationship to Israel Theodore Sasson (bio) 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. [End Page 173] The article is also meant as a contribution to the field of diaspora studies. Not all diasporas but many—including Jews, Greeks, Irish, and Armenians—maintain links to ancestral homelands. Most scholarly literature on the diaspora-homeland relationship emphasizes the political sphere and treats "state-linked" diasporas as more or less unitary actors vis-à-vis host and homeland governments.1 The dominant emphasis in this literature has been on diaspora lobbying of host government on behalf of homeland interests.2 A secondary emphasis, largely corrective, highlights the influence of diaspora groups on their homelands, especially their efforts to bring homeland policies into harmony with host country interests.3 Few studies have explored the circumstances under which diaspora political activity becomes partisan and plural—in which diasporas become sites for waging homeland political struggles.4 In contrast, immigration research increasingly emphasizes the diverse ties migrants establish and maintain with their countries of origin. For example, Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc describe the "process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement."5 Dufoix further describes how "transmigrants develop and maintain all sorts of relations—familial, religious, economic, and political—with the place they come from, thereby laying the foundations for non-territorial nations"6 According to this literature, migrants send home remittances, participate in homeland political parties, reproduce homeland cultural practices, and return for frequent visits.7 Although the definitional debate goes far beyond the scope of this article, the substantive overlap between diasporas and transnational immigrant communities is clearly considerable. The fact that many transnational immigrant communities qualify as diasporas is reason enough to extend the typology of diaspora-homeland relationships to include a broader range of possible connections. By distinguishing "mass mobilization" from "direct engagement", I show that there is variability in how diasporas are organized with respect to homelands, and explore the transition from one model to another in a single case. Mass Mobilization The mass mobilization paradigm typified the relationship between American Jews and Israel during the period between the early 1950s and the late 1980s.8 During the earlier years, responsibility for the diaspora-homeland [End Page 174] relationship shifted from Zionist organizations to the large, centralized, core organizations of American Jewry, including the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Council of Jewish Federations, and the CPMAJO. New organizations were also established...

The Holocaust-Era Assets Conference in Prague and Its Outcome

Julius Berman is chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and headed the Claims Conference delegation to the Prague Conference. He is past chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, and the American Zionist Youth Foundation, and past president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Mr. Berman is special counsel to Kaye Scholer LLP, a New York law firm.

From Jerusalem to Baghdad? Israel and the War in Iraq

The prevailing opinion that the Bush administration took the United States to war against Iraq in March 2003 under false pretenses has led many to believe that Israel’s security was the secret rationale for the war. According to this ‘‘war for Israel’’ thesis, neoconservative policymakers in the Bush administration, the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, and Israel’s government all pushed the United States to go to war with Iraq for the sake of Israel’s security. This article critically assesses this controversial claim and examines Israel’s role in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. I argued that while neoconservatives were instrumental in promoting the Iraq war, Israel was not their primary concern and that although American Jewish organizations and the Israeli government did largely support the Iraq war, they did not seek it or actively lobby for it.

“I Don't Know Whom to Thank”: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's Secret Aid to Soviet Jewry

A bstr A ct This article focuses on a little-known episode: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s ( JDC) package program on behalf of Soviet Jewry in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, from its inception through the Six Day War in 1967. The article reveals JDC clandestine activity on behalf of Soviet Jewry, in cooperation with the Israeli government, when the JDC was officially banned from working there. This package pro gram was an expression of Western Cold War policy to support discriminated-against Soviet ethnic and religious minorities. I explore the dimensions and dynamics of the package program, its share of the total JDC East European aid and its unique style of administration, its outreach and impact, and the response of the beneficiaries. Soviet policy regarding Western aid to its citizens was often guided by pragmatic rather than ideological considerations; therefore, the stream of packages was never entirely stopped. This article reveals that both Israeli and “establishment” American Jewish organizations’ activities on behalf of Soviet Jewry were considerably greater than American grassroots organizations claim. The story is also an encouraging example of mutual involvement of the three largest Jewish communities in the world, even when one of them was behind the Iron Curtain.

“Freedom of Choice”: Israeli Efforts to Prevent Soviet Jewish Émigrés to Resettle in the United States

AbstractBeginning in 1967 the Soviet Union allowed some Jewish citizens to leave for family reunification in Israel (see Appendix). Due to the break in diplomatic relations between Israel and the U.S.S.R., most émigrés traveled to Vienna where they were then flown to Israel. After 1976 the majority of émigrés who left on visas for Israel “dropped out” in Vienna and chose to resettle in the West. Several American Jewish organizations facilitated their obtaining visas and being resettled in the United States and other countries. This article examines efforts by Israel to deny Soviet Jewish émigrés the option of resettling in the United States. Israeli officials pressured American Jewish organizations to desist from aiding Russian Jews who wanted to resettle in the United States. Initially American Jews resisted Israeli efforts. Following Gorbachev's decision in the late 1980s to allow free emigration for Soviet Jews, the American Jewish community agreed to a quota on Soviet Jewish refugees in the United States, which resulted in most Soviet Jewish émigrés to Israel. The article uses the case study to explore efforts by American Jews and Israel to influence American refugee policy in the 1970s and 1980s. It provides insights into ethnic politics as well as “sponsored politics,” whereby Israel used the American Jewish community to further its interests in the making of United States foreign policy. It also deals with the issue of human rights and migration. While no migrant has the right to go to a country of his or her choice, Israel did deny some émigrés the right to exercise freedom of movement to other countries who welcomed them as refugees.

Jews in American politics: Past and present

T response of leaders of the American Jewish Comittee to the crisis of German Jewry in the 1930s found sick and old men, lacking influence in the American political arena, insecure about being Jews and often more busy with business and family than with the plight of German Jewry. In sharp contrast to this period, a very different picture emerges of Jewish leaders and organizations in the 1970s and 1980s. At least four major differences are worth noting. First, a single organization, the American Jewish Committee, had an initial advantage on access and ties to the Roosevelt administration in Washington. It was the major Jewish organization in American politics. There were other establishment organizations on the scene with considerably less influence, including the American Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith (with its AntiDefamation League), and the Jewish Labor Committee. In the 1970s, there were many Jewish organizations, establishment and grassroots, operating actively on local, regional, and national levels in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. Many had influence and access in Washington, D.C. There was active competition between the grassroots and the establishment and within the establishment. For example, the National Conference for Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) competed (and cooperated) on national and local levels with the Council for Jewish Federations (CJF), National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Councils (NJCRAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Coalition for Soviet Jewry as well as with the Union of Councils, representing the grassroots. All of these organizations had varying degrees of access and influence with Congress and the administration. A second significant difference is the quality of leadership. The top echelon of the American Jewish Committee of the 1930s consisted of very wealthy and professionally successful men. Many, however, were older, often sick and over extended; other commitments both professional and personal limited their time and involvement in concerns and activities of the Committee. For example, the Committee failed to find members to represent it "at home and abroad in meetings and conferences on the German Jewish crisis. The wealth and position of its members sometimes enabled contact with Europe and European Jewry, but when business did not permit a trip or vacation, the Committee was not represented." Family concerns also interfered. "In May 1939, realizing that the situation of Jews in Germany was desperate, the Committee wished to schedule additional meetings on Sunday. The plan failed, however, because in the spring so many of the members went to the country for weekends." Most of the organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had an overabundance of qualified and dynamic lay leadership, both men and women, with countless replacements waiting in the wings. Persons active in Jewish organizational life, often persons of means, dominated the lay leadership of the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement in the 1970s. Unlike their counterparts in the 1930s, however, most took leave from their other organizational, professional, and business pursuits and committed themselves full time to the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement. Importantly, tbr many, their personal, peer, and communal status was earned via activism in a particular Jewish organization. Many of these organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had extensive and expanding professional staffs especially in existing and long established organizations like CJF, NJCRAC, American Jewish Committee, American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). In sharp contrast, the ad hoc and newer organizations were hampered by staff shortages reflecting a lack of fiscal stability. The NCSJ, for example, suffered from a shortage of staff throughout which harmed its activities and effectiveness. Third, and most importantly, establishment Jewish leaders during the 1930s were insecure as American Jews. They often refrained from pressing Jewish issues and Jewish causes. They sought Christian allies to fight antiSemitism "without American Jews appearing in...[the struggle])." The American Jewish Committee, for example, adopted "quict diplomacy," "believing it to be

D1. Fourteen U.S. Representatives, Letter to the Slated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Condemning Presbyterian Divestment Resolution, Washington, DC, 13 September 2004 (excerpts)

On 2 July, the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Assembly——the denomination's highest policy-making body, which meets annually——passed the ““Resolution on Israel and Palestine (2004),”” one paragraph of which called upon the church to ““initiate the process”” of selective divestment of stock in corporations within its $$8 billion portfolio that profit from the Israeli occupation. The decision, which in practical terms means only that the church's Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) will begin studying the issue, caused great concern among American Jewish organizations as a possible precedent among mainstream Protestant churches, especially in light of the key role of divestment in the strategy used by U.S. churches in the struggle against South African apartheid in the 1970s and 1980. The 216th General Assembly also voted to condemn Israel's construction of the ““security wall”” in the West Bank and to disavow Christian Zionism as a legitimate theological stance.The following letter deploring the Presbyterian Church's initiative was sent to Rev. Clifton Kirpatrick, head of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, by fourteen congressional representatives led by Howard L. Berman (D-CA). The other signatories are Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Roy Blount (R-MO), Eric Cantor (R-VA), Tom Feeney (R-FL), Barney Frank (D-MA), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Mark Steven Kirk (R-IL), John Lewis (D-GA), John Linder (R-GA), Deborah Pryce (R-OH), Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Lamar Smith (R-TX), and Henry Waxman (D-CA). Their letter is available at www.pcusa.org.

Henry Kissinger's Prescription for Suppressing the First Intifada, 31 January 1988

In June 1988, under the title "Kissinger Behind Closed Doors," Harper's Magazine published an extraordinary confidential memorandum describing a breakfast meeting held by American Jewish leaders with Henry Kissinger on 31 January 1988 to discuss the Palestinian uprising that had broken out almost two months earlier. The memorandum, written by Julius Berman, the former chair of the Conference ofPresidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and sent to a group of friends, was leaked to the press in March 1988. According to Harper's, "Kissinger reacted angrily to the leaking of the memo, but did not dispute its accuracy. "JPS finds it appropriate to republish the memorandum, leaving it to the reader to ponder its relevance to Israel's conduct during Operation Defensive Shield and to the current talk of convening a peace conference.

Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945 Jeffry M. Diefendorf Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945, by Shlomo Shafir. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 508pp. $44.95. The title of the book summarizes the author’s argument quite well. From the moment that Americans began to discuss postwar policy toward Germany through the unification of West and East Germany in 1990, most American Jews, whether American or European born, were loath to have friendly or cooperative relations with postwar Germany. However, since the United States, pursuing what it considered its own national and strategic interests, rather quickly became set on first the economic recovery and then political and military rehabilitation of West Germany, neither organized nor individual Jews were able to mount effective resistance. Furthermore, in order to solve pressing problems that were of specific interest to Jews, such as reparations, the restitution of property, or the resettlement of Jewish refugees, the American Jewish commun ity had to deal directly with German authorities and not get hung up on the continued existence of German antisemitism or the presence of former Nazis in the German government or in German business. Such key figures as German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and American occupation chiefs Lucius Clay and John McCloy, not to mention the political and diplomatic representatives of the new Israeli state, were all hard-nosed realists, and if Israel could negotiate directly with the Adenauer government, how could American Jews contend that Germany should be shunned? Any improvement in German-Jewish relations and German-Israeli relations would facilitate German-American relations and further the foreign policy aims of all parties. Whatever the American Jewish community thought, it had little choice but to fall in line, and usually it could exert but marginal influence around the edges of larger policy questions. Naturally, since the United States had no formal relations with East Germany until the 1970s, and since even then relations with West Germany remained of primary importance, Shafir devotes only one chapter to the contacts between organized American Jewry and the East German state. Shafir’s study is based on exhaustive research in many archives and a thorough reading of the secondary literature. His approach is encyclopedic in nature, and readers may want to flag for quick reference the three pages of abbreviations liberally used in the text. American Jewish organizations and influential individual American Jews seldom, if ever, spoke with one voice, and Shafir is very good at clarifying the differences between, for example, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Conference, the American Jewish Congress, and the World Jewish Congress. Whatever the issue, such as the Morgenthau Plan, German reparations, or the trials of Nazi perpetrators, Shafir discusses the varied views of organized Jewry and of Jews speaking on their own behalf. Over and over again he shows that where Jewish organizations agreed with broader American policy—examples are the need for German reeducation for democracy and the importance of extending the German statute of limitations law [End Page 148] to make possible the continued prosecution of Nazi criminals—they could exert some influence. But when those organizations were bucking the trend, such as the acceptance of West Germany as an ally and bulwark against Communism, they had little influence. This is no surprise. The American Jewish community may have been prosperous, well-educated, and articulate, but it was a small minority. Readers should not pick up this book expecting to find an analysis of how American Jews responded over time to the Holocaust. This is not Shafir’s main concern. Nevertheless, there is an interesting, if brief, treatment of the American response to the Eichmann trial and to Hannah Arendt’s controversial book on that trial. On several occasions Shafir mentions the outcry against Ronald Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg mili tary cemetery, perhaps because the symbolism of the event and the protests against it were so clear, but Shafir’s overall portrait of relations between Germany and the Ameri can Jewish community suggests that, in fact, Bitburg should not be given too prominent a place. It is too bad that Shafir’s book was completed before the...

"There are Times When Silence is a Sin": The Women's Division of the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement

From 1933 to 1941 the American Jewish Congress helped lead a consumer boycott of German-made goods in the United States in an effort to undermine the Hitler regime and alleviate the crisis of German Jews. While failing to bring an end to Hitler's antisemitic campaign, the anti-Nazi boycott movement—and the Congress's participation therein— is still regarded as one of the most significant examples of American Jewish mobilization on behalf of European Jewry. Scholarly accounts of the boycott effort, most notably Morris Frommer's American Jewish Congress: A History, 1914-1950 and Moshe Gottlieb's Ameri can Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-1941, illuminate the central role of the American Jewish Congress in organizing the boycott effort as well as the tensions within and between American Jewish organizations that inhib ited a united protest front.1 These assessments, though, have neglected one of the boycott movement's essential features: from 1934 to 1941 the Women's Division of the American Jewish Congress assumed a pivotal role in the day-to day operation and local supervision of boycott work. Reflecting a gendered distribution of activist labor, division members took on the jobs of neighborhood organization, consumer mobilization, and storefront picketing. Their work was critical to the functioning of the protest effort through the early years of World War II and thus vital to understanding the complex dynamics and mechanics of the boycott movement. Historians' neglect of the Women's Division part in boycott work is not anomalous. The historiography of American Jewry and the Holo caust speaks little of Jewish women. Landmark studies of American Jewish mobilization during World War II focus primarily on the leadership of major American Jewish defense organizations, such as the

Ethnic cohesion and division among American Jews: The role of mass‐level and organizational politics

Mass‐level and organizational politics contribute both to ethnic cohesion and division among American Jews. Political cohesion at the mass level, measured by location on the liberal side of the mass political structure, serves as a structural source of ethnic cohesion for many American Jews who are not characterized by alternative structural and cultural sources of ethnic cohesion, as measured by embeddedness in structural and cultural networks of interaction. However, political divisions among American jews converge with religious divisions and with variations in structural and cultural cohesion and assimilation; consequently, politics provides one of several reinforcing cleavages in the American Jewish community. Individual‐level data from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey are used to support these claims. A strong linkage exists between patterns of ethnic cohesion and division and the role of politics at the mass and organizational levels. Jewish organizations involved in politics share consensus across a wide range of political issues, contributing to political cohesion. However, political conflicts emerge among organizations representing different Jewish denominations, leading again to reinforcing religious and political divisions. These claims are supported by data collected from the published reports of an umbrella agency which seeks to coordinate political positions among American Jewish organizations

AIPAC 1995: Politics and Priorities

On the opening day of the thirty-sixth annual AIPAC conference held in Washington, D.C., 7-9 May, Lester Pollack, chairman of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, addressed headon recently voiced concerns that AIPAC has lost its sense of purpose since the signing of the Oslo agreement. Mr. Pollack's response was unequivocal: The naysayers are dead wrong! he declared. However wellfounded the concerns about the pro-Israeli lobby (based on the decline in fundraising in 1994, staff cuts, and so on), from the evidence of this conference alone, Mr. Pollack would appear to be on the money.

Stalin's War Against the Jews: The Doctor's Plot and the Soviet Solution (review)

144 SHOFAR Stalin's War Against the Jews: The Doctor's Plot and the Soviet Solution, by Louis Rapoport. New York: The Free Press, 1990. 318 pp. $22.95. Only a few years after the Nazi holocaust of European Jewry, the Soviet government announced to the world, in January 1953, that nine Kremlin doctors, six with identifiably Jewish names, had murdered two of Stalin's closest aides after World War II. These men were now involved, it was alleged, in a secret plot devised by Western imperialists and Zionists to kill top Soviet political and military leaders. The revelation that Jewish doctors were at the center of a sinister international conspiracy to undermine Soviet security touched off a Soviet press campaign about a supposed fifth column in the USSR and stirred popular antisemitism. Many prominent Soviet Jews were arrested, deported, or dismissed from their posts; many more lived in fear and anxiety. A plan was put in motion to ship Jews in cattle cars to concentration camps east of the Urals. Louis Rapoport, news editor for thejerusalem Post, borrowing Lucy Dawidowicz 's title, suggests that, during his last days, Stalin, like Hitler, developed a maniacal plan to deport and kill Jews. The anticipated show trial and execution of the doctors, foreshadowed by similar trials in Eastern Europe, was not merely an instrument of Stalin's renewed determination to purge the Soviet state. The use ofJewish doctors, the orchestrated campaign, and the preparations for mass deportation reflected also Stalin's fIXation on the Jews, which reached immense proportions during the Cold War. Drawing on research in Israeli, American, British, and private Soviet archives as well as on interviews with relatives of central figures in the story, Rapoport tells of Stalin's Judaeophobia , Soviet Jewish policy, and the events leading to the doctors' plot. His thesis is that Stalin was a paranoid antisemite, whose anti-Jewish hatred was planted in a Georgian seminary and nourished in the history of the Bolshevik movement, particularly in his struggle with Trotsky, developed during the Great Purge of the 1930s, and became dominant in the period from 1948 to 1953. Stalin succumbed openly and uncontrollably to the passion in his last days. Inspired by domestic and foreign policy considerations, Stalin's regime did not hesitate to use nationaVethnic politicS for its ends. During World War II, Stalin created a Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee OAC) to help mobilize world Jewish opinion on behalf of the USSR. JAC leaders Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer visited the US in 1943 and made contacts with American Jewish organizations. JAC leaders published a Vol. 10, No. 3 Spring 1992 145 newspaper, documented the Jewish tragedy in Nazi Europe, even came to believe that Stalin might approve a massive postwar settlement ofJews in the Crimea. After World War II, Stalin sharply reversed policy, launched new· and intensified campaigns against cosmopolitan and nationalist influences, and sharply curtailed Jewish organizations. The JAC was disbanded in 1948 along with other institutions of Jewish history and culture; its efforts to document the Nazi holocaust were suppressed. Its leadership was liquidated during 1948 to 1952, charged with espionage and efforts to make the Crimea an outpost of Western imperialism. A particularly absorbing chapter details the murder in 1948 of Solomon Mikhoels and implicates Itzik Feffer as a security agent. Historians like Benjamin Pinkus interpret such policy changes and suppression ofJewish institutions in the context of the growing Cold War, the rise of Israel, and Stalin's pathological suspicion; Rapoport stresses Stalin's obsessive antisemitism. The doctors' plot tied Jewish doctor-poisoners with Jewish and Zionist spies, named Solomon Mikhoels as the alleged mastermind, identified American Jewish organizations with American imperialists, and was part of 'a "secret terror in the making." Equally true, Rapoport avows, it was a scheme aimed at "genocide." The arrested doctors, who were brutally tortured, confessed. The Soviet media whipped up "hysterical antiSemitism ." Prominent Jews were compelled to sign an appeal to Stalin to save the Jews by deporting them to the east. The show trial and execution were timed to coincide with Easter. Trains were readied to carry the Jews to camps in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Birobidzhan. Then Stalin suffered a stroke...

Institutions and Politics: American Jewish Organizations and Israel, by Lee O'Brien

Institutions and Politics: American Jewish Organizations and Israel, by Lee O'Brien

Institutions and Politics: American Jewish Organizations and Israel. . Lee O'Brien.

Institutions and Politics: American Jewish Organizations and Israel. . Lee O'Brien.

The Polls: Attitudes Toward American Jews

CONGRESSIONAL debate in the fall of 1981 over the sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia evoked heated public discussion, including some highly critical remarks in the media about the lobby and Israel's veto over American foreign policy. Coupled with news coverage of increasing vandalism of Jewish institutions, such stories have led some observers to conclude that there is resurgence of antisemitism in the United Is there resurgence? What do studies about the attitudes of Americans toward Jewish fellow Americans tell us? Surveying attitudes toward Jews in the United States started in the 1930s, with the triumph of the Nazis in Germany and their vigorous propaganda abroad. American Jewish organizations and individuals wanted to learn the extent of antisemitism in this country and to develop ways to counteract it. By the early 1960s over hundred surveys of attitudes toward American Jews had been conducted. These were compiled and analyzed in Jews in the Mind of America.I Charles Herbert Stember, the editor, concluded that antisemitism was a disappearing problem in the United States. But to this day is has not disappeared entirely. In October 1964 the Survey Research Center of the University of California at Berkeley conducted the first national survey to assess the extent and nature of contemporary antisemitism. The results were published as The Tenacity of Prejudice2 and dealt with attitudes toward discrimination in its various forms, social distance, and traditional antisemitic beliefs. Gertrude Selznick and Stephen Steinberg, who edited the volume, developed an index of 11 antisemitic beliefs which has served as point of re-