AN EXPLORATION OF THE LONG HISTORY OF AMERICAN
JEWISH OPPOSITION TO ZIONISM
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Issues
Fall 2024
The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism
By Marjorie N. Feld,
New York University Press
288 Pages
$30.00.
In “The Threshold of Dissent,” Marjorie N. Feld, professor of history at Babson
College, shows that today’s vocal debates among Jewish Americans over Israel and
Zionism are simply the latest chapter in a history that stretches to the 19th
century. She brings alive the dissenters of the past who have often been
forgotten—-and now seem increasingly wise in their assessment.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, the organized American Jewish community
projected a unified posi-tion in support of both Israel and Zionism. This public
display of unanimity was, in fact, “a manufactured consensus, as Jewish leaders
increasingly discounted and marginalized dissent,” Feld notes. “They often
punished those who criticized Israel…or who openly rejected Zionism.”
In Feld’s view, “The lack of rigorous and respected scholarship on Jewish critics
of Zionism in the United States has had far-reaching implications…In the last ten
years, shifting sentiments toward Zionism and Israel offer a chilling corrective
to the imposed Zionist consensus that is largely still supported by the
mainstream Jewish communal leaders. There is a growing understanding of the
costs of imposing this consensus, of maintaining a low threshold of tolerance for
intracommunal debate over Israel.”
Israel’s Diminishing Role
Today, Feld points out, “Among younger American Jews, Israel plays a diminishing
role in their Jewish identity. American Jews are more fractured than ever before
about Israel…This evidence suggests that the forced American Jewish consensus on
Zionism actually works against communal interests, as many young Jews no longer
see their worldviews …reflected in mainstream Jewish communal organizations and,
as a result, may choose to leave Jewish belonging behind.”
This book, Feld writes, “documents and analyzes how American Jewish Zionist
leaders attempted to marginalize many voices of Jewish dissent. In our current
political environment, many seek to equate on-the-rise sentiments of anti-Zionism
with antisemitism….these tactics and debates are not new…opening up conversations
on Zionism lends itself to greater pluralism, even democratization, within
American Jewish life.”
Reform Judaism, Feld points out, opposed Jewish nationalism from the beginning.
In Its 1885 Pittsburgh Plat-form, a group of Reform rabbis declared that Judaism
was a religion of universal values, not a nationality. Beyond this, she writes,
these Reform rabbis “recognized both Christianity and Islam as what they called
‘daughter religions of Judaism’ and as sharing a ‘providential mission’ in the
‘spreading of monotheistic and moral truth.’ The document made clear that Reform
Jews in the United States would identify as a religious community only…Reform
lead-ers…insisted that the return to the land of Zion embedded in the Jewish
liturgy was a spiritual and not a literal journey.”
Jewish Opposition To The Balfour Declaration
In March 1919, a group of prominent Jewish Americans presented a petition to
President Woodrow Wilson to protest the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in
Palestine which was called for in the Balfour Declaration. It rejected Jewish
nationalism and held against the founding of any state on the basis of religion
and/or race. Among those signing the petition were New York Times publisher
Adolph Ochs, E.M. Baker, president of the New York Stock Exchange, Henry
Morganthau, Sr., former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, and Rep. Julius Klein of
California. Their views represented the dominant American Jewish view on
Palestine and Zionism.
Later, as antisemitism grew in Eastern Europe and later in Germany, many American
Jews, including Reform Jews, became sympathetic to Zionism. The American Council
for Judaism, Feld shows, was established to keep alive the original Reform Jewish
philosophy and worldview. At the Council’s founding meeting, Feld writes of
Rabbi Morris Lazaron, longtime leader of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation and a
former Zionist: “He identified himself as a former member of the Zionist
Organization of America, who ‘left the Organization because I could not accept
its philosophy, its aims and its methods.’ At this founding meeting on June
1,1942, Rabbi Lazaron read a moving speech. He spoke first of the immediate need
to defeat the Axis powers…He declared, ‘a state based on race or creed was
fundamentally wrong and indeed is the antithesis of one of the principles for why
this war is being fought.”
Writing in Life Magazine (June 28, 1943), Council president Lessing J. Rosenwald
titled his article, “Why Americans of Jewish Faith are Opposed to the
Establishment of a Jewish State.” Feld reports that, Edith G.Rosenwald
“recounted years later that the magazine had ‘carried an article by King Ibn Saud
(first king of Saudi Arabia) and another by Zionist leader Dr. Stephen Wise on
the Palestine problem,’ adding that Lessing ‘wanted to make clear that there was
a third viewpoint.’ She saw this, her husband’s column, as the Council’s first
‘walk on the stage of his-tory.’”
Equal Rights And Responsibilities For All
In 1946, Rosenwald appeared on the popular radio program hosted by journalist Tex
McCrary. He asserted that Palestine should be a “state where Jews, Moslems and
Christians can worship as they see fit and are accorded equal rights and
responsibilities.”
The organized Jewish community, Feld reports, did its best to silence the
Council’s opposition to Zionism and create the false impression that the Jewish
community was united behind Zionist goals: “In 1944, leaders of the Zionist
Organization of America formed a group originally called the Committee to Combat
the American Council for Ju-daism, later the Committee on Unity for Palestine,
with 112 local branches…that wrote ‘hundreds of thousands of pieces of pro-
Zionist literature.’”
Feld highlights other prominent Jewish critics of Zionism such as Yiddish
language journalist William Zukerman, who started the English-language Jewish
Newsletter. Zukerman disputed the central role of Zionism in Jewish life,
insisting that Jews “should remain loyal to their nation of origin, where he
believed their own Jewish future should lie,” she writes.
Organized resistance to the likes of Zukerman and others who challenged Zionism,
or expressed concern for the rights of Palestinians, was fierce. Feld points to
the fact that “in the 1950s, Zionist Jewish leaders in the U.S. joined with
Israeli diplomats to limit public discourse and deny funding and access to
American Jews such as Zukerman.” The attacks on Jewish critics of Zionism became
brutal. In 1951, Shlomo Katz, editor of the Labor Zionist journal Jewish
Frontier attacked Zukerman by suggesting a link between him and the kapos (Jewish
prisoners who supervised forced labor in Nazi concentration camps).
Policing Criticism Of Israel
Feld warns that policing criticism of Israel within the Jewish community has
“ultimately weakened Jewish communal life” and detracted from Jewish efforts to
promote social Justice. “If mainstream Jewish communal or-ganizations continue
to hold fast to unqualified support for Israel…will young American Jews continue
to look at American Jewish life and find it wanting? she asks. “And…how would
future historians assess the impact of this forced consensus on the safety of
Jews and all others.”
How will future generations assess this period in American Jewish life? Feld
concludes this way: “Across the last century, American Jewish Zionist leaders
enforced a threshold of dissent by marginalizing progressive American Jews who
were able to see Palestinian suffering. Theirs is a fraught and difficult
history and one entangled with immense destruction in the name of Jewish safety.
If mainstream Jewish communal organizations continue to hold fast to unqualified
support for Israel, insisting that American Jews and American politicians
subscribe to a forced Zionist consensus, will young American Jews continue to
look at American Jewish life and find it wanting? And, finally, how might future
historians assess the impact of this forced consensus on the safety of Jews and
all others?”
Marjorie Feld has written an important book, properly telling the story of
American Jewish opposition to Zionism which others have largely ignored. It is a
subject to which more and more scholars, fortunately, are beginning, to turn
their attention. *
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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