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Jewish Identity In America, Part Two
| Article
# : |
14395 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
4,992 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
All definitions of Jewish identity in the twentieth century inevitably have had to confront Zionism and, after 1948, the Jewish state of Israel. American Zionists preferred to develop a Zionism that was appropriate both for Americans who had no plans to emigrate to the Holy Land and for America, a country that frowns upon permanent national divisions.
The major figure in "Americanizing" Zionism was Louis D. Brandeis, a progressive reformer, an advisor to Woodrow Wilson, and the first Jew to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. The great mystery surrounding Brandeis is why he ever became a Zionist in the first place. There was little in his life that suggested such a possibility when in 1914 he became a leader of the American Zionist movement at the age of fifty-eight.
A descendant of German Jews who had settled in Louisville, Kentucky, in the mid-nineteenth century, Brandeis had previously exhibited little interest in things Jewish. He was not a member of a synagogue or a Jewish fraternal group, he did not observe Jewish religious rituals, and he opposed the retention of ethnic differences. In 1910, for example, he stated, "Habits of living or of thought which tend to keep alive differences of origin or classify men according to their religious beliefs are inconsistent with the American ideal of brotherhood and are disloyal." Yet, two years later he joined the Federation of American Zionists and became an advocate of cultural pluralism. Various interpretations ranging from the influence of Horace Kallen to Brandeis' political ambitions have been offered to explain such seemingly inconsistent behavior.
There is, however, no confusion about the impact of Brandeis on American Zionism. He helped transform American Zionism from a plaything of unassimilated Jewish nationalists into a movement that could attract acculturated American Jews. Under his influence, American Zionism was shorn of both its nationalistic thrust and its underlying assumption that the essence of Zionism was aliyah, a Hebrew term signifying immigration to the land of Zion. Brandeisian Zionism resulted in the metamorphosis of a nationalistic movement into a philanthropy to provide a refuge for persecuted Jews of other lands.
American Jews had already migrated to the promised land of America, and they had no intention of migrating once more. Brandeisian Zionism, one humorous definition put it, was a movement wherein one person gave money to a second person so that a third person could reach Palestine. As a result, American Zionism has been most popular when the needs
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