The fall and rise of Jewish American Zionism - opinion

Are Jewish Americans supportive of Israel? Your initial reaction to this question reveals a great deal about your political viewpoints, your age, your upbringing, and your understanding of Israel.

To find a definitive answer to this question, most experts would direct the questioner to polls and surveys of the Jewish American community. The problem with polls, as Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, an international public opinion expert, explained, “Any question that you ask in a survey will not be the full explanation for the responses.”

Scheindlin’s response seems bizarre; if a survey was conducted about American preferences for ice cream flavors and 62% of Americans favored chocolate and 38% favored vanilla, skeptics wouldn’t explain that the survey results aren’t conclusive because the survey didn’t produce the full explanation. Why are Scheindlin and other experts on polling about Jewish American attitudes toward Israel skeptical about the results?

The Jewish American community’s views on Israel aren’t as black and white as chocolate and vanilla. The Jewish American community has very nuanced views on Israel. A Jewish American can express support for the existence of the Jewish State of Israel but be highly critical and describe themselves as not supportive of current Israeli policies. Is a view that supports the existence of Israel but critical of Israeli policy a supportive or opposing view of Israel?

The answer isn’t obvious, and it’s doubtful that Jewish Americans would reach a consensus on the answer. Scheindlin’s view that surveys about Jewish American support of Israel don’t offer a full explanation of Jewish American views isn’t a critique of the surveys but a critique of a survey’s ability to comprehensively cover all the factors involved in support and opposition to Israel, and the lack of consensus among Jewish Americans about the definition of support of Israel.

When limited to the simple question of whether Jewish Americans support the existence of a Jewish state – the very essence of Zionism, Jewish American views have evolved from opposition to support.

American Jews and Zionism

IN A recently published book, The Arc of a Covenant, author Walter Russell Mead wrote, “In 1919, thirty-one of the most influential Jews in America, led by the former ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, presented a petition to Woodrow Wilson as he left for the Paris Peace Conference requesting him to oppose the Balfour Declaration: ‘We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish state.’

“A later edition of the petition signed by almost three hundred prominent American Jews was presented to the American Peace Commission during the postwar negotiations. A leading American Reform rabbi, Emil G. Hirsch, wrote, ‘We, the modern Jews, say that we do not wish to be restored to Palestine. ... The country wherein we live is our Palestine.’”

Jewish American views on a Jewish state would evolve just a few decades later. Mead wrote “In 1946 and 1947, poll after poll showed over 75 percent of the American public supported the right of Jews to a homeland in Palestine. American Jews agreed. By November 1945, according to a Roper poll, 80 percent of American Jews supported Jewish statehood in Palestine.

“Membership in Zionist organizations skyrocketed; hundreds of thousands of American Jews paid dues to organizations ranging from Hadassah to B’nai Brith, and about a million American Jews were by this point paying dues to the World Zionist Organization or its affiliates.”

What caused such a drastic shift in Jewish American opinion about a Jewish state? It doesn’t take an expert or scholar to recognize that the Holocaust was the most likely factor that changed Jewish American opposition to a Jewish state in the 1920s to support in the late 1940s. Arguably, no other event had as much of an impact on 20th-century Jewish American opinions and perspectives as the Holocaust.

THIS ULTIMATE tragedy’s trauma has shaped the views of Jewish Americans for over 80 years. It is only recent surveys among younger Jewish Americans that have demonstrated the Holocaust’s waning influence on Jewish Americans.

Jewish Americans didn’t study Zionism in the late 1940’s and suddenly support the idea that the land of Israel was the Jewish homeland and where the Jewish people should settle. They didn’t become activists who saw their people’s right to self-determination in their historic homeland – as Zionist experts and activists had been preaching for over a century – as an injustice that needed to be corrected.

Jewish Americans realized that although they were safe in a free America, six million of their Jewish brethren hadn’t enjoyed the freedom and protection Jewish Americans took for granted. When they needed a place of refuge from oppression, there was nowhere for them to run. Jewish Americans in the late 1940s saw a Jewish state as the only guarantee that future persecuted Jews would have a place of refuge.

Today’s Jewish Americans, especially younger Jewish Americans, are just as supportive of a Jewish state as Jewish Americans were in the late 1940s. In the fall of 2018, a survey commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute demonstrated that 92% of respondents chose one of the “generally pro-Israel” options offered to them in the survey. In December 2019, a Ruderman Family Foundation poll asked this same question to a larger sample of American Jews, and 80% of the general sample of American Jews chose pro-Israel options.

While Jewish Americans differ greatly in their viewpoints on current Israeli policy – as opposing Jewish protests and rallies surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent travels in America demonstrated – it is clear that Jewish Americans overwhelmingly support the existence of a Jewish State in the land of Israel.

Initially, Jewish Americans didn’t identify as Zionist and didn’t support early Zionist advocacy for a Jewish state in the region then called Palestine, but their viewpoint has evolved and Jewish Americans can accurately be called Zionists.

The writer is a senior educator at numerous educational institutions. He is the author of three books and teaches Torah, Zionism, and Israeli studies around the world.