The American Council For Judaism At 80: A History Of Advancing Prophetic Judaism, Free Of Nationalism

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the American Council for Judaism. Since 1942, the Council has advanced the philosophy of Judaism as a religion of universal values, not a nationality, and has maintained that Americans of Jewish faith are American by nationality, and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim. The Council has challenged the Zionist philosophy which holds that Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews, and that all Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile.” In doing so, it has contended that its philosophy represents the thinking of the majority of Jewish Americans, a largely silent―but, in recent days, increasingly vocal―majority, which is not represented by the organizations which presume to speak in their name. Clearly, the homeland of American Jews is the United States. The Council’s philosophy is much older than the 80 years in which the organization has been in existence. In 1841, at the dedication of Temple Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski declared: “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.”

The Hopes of Jews Emigrating to the U.S. Rabbi Wolfgang Hamburger, for many years a leading member of the Council, explained the hopes of Jews who emigrated to the U.S., as he had: “They wanted to sink roots here because here they were not ‘at best tolerated guests in someone else’s home.’ This was to be their home and their children’s home; it was only natural that their Judaism would be no more than the faith of a religious community…And just as they had to adjust themselves to life in the New World, so their Judaism had to be adapted to the mores of a free society. Such were the dynamics of Reform Judaism. There was simply no other way to endow Judaism with meaning and vitality on these shores. The reformers…sloughed off all traditions which did not fit naturally and harmoniously into their existential consciousness. They saw no reason for imbuing an outdated hope with spiritual or symbolic meaning, and therefore created a prayerbook without any reference to the ancient Temple ritual and Jerusalem. Memories of a national past failed to sustain their devotion to Judaism, and dreams of a resurrected Jewish nation, understandable in the oppressive atmosphere of the ghetto, no longer exemplified the ties which Jews as members of a free society could have to the faith of their fathers. Jewish particularism and Jewish nationalism simply could not offer a valid identification for the Jewish citizen of the United States.” As a result, notes Hamburger, “Classical Reform Judaism emerged as the inevitable expression of the religious lifestyle of those who chose to be Americans of Jewish faith. Of necessity, the reformers’ outlook was universalistic; and having come to a land of promise, their outlook was optimistic. They looked forward not to the wondrous appearance of a personal Messiah but to the dawn of the Messianic age when humanity’s hope for truth, justice and peace would be fulfilled. To their Judaism they ascribed the ‘sacred task to toil for the speedy dawn’ of the Messianic age, a task that could be met by applying the ethical lessons of Prophetic Judaism to the conduct of their daily existence. This universal outlook was clearly mirrored in the Reform service. The prayers were in harmony with the concerns and aspirations of a Jewish citizen, at home in the land of the free. And for the sake of clarity and immediacy, they were recited in the vernacular. The few symbols and rituals which were retained appealed to heart and mind; the old synagogue tunes, rearranged in the style of the great masters, inspired those who came to pray. The service was distinguished for its clear structure, a tranquil atmosphere and the absence of emotionalism.”

1885 Platform Rejects Nationalism In 1885, a group of Reform rabbis met in Pittsburgh and adopted a platform which emphasized that Reform Judaism rejected the idea of Jewish “peoplehood” and nationalism in any variety. It stated, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” In 1898, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution declared: “Zion was a precious possession of the past…as such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion.” The issuance of the Balfour Declaration convinced many Reform rabbis of the necessity to take strong measures to fight Zionism. Rabbi Louis Grossman, the president of the CCAR, reacted to this document by reaffirming the standard Reform viewpoint and by reiterating Reform’s opposition “to the idea that Palestine should be considered the homeland of the Jews,” because “Jews in the U.S. were an integral part of the American Nation.”

Rising Anti-Semitism in Europe In the wake of growing anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century and the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the nineteen thirties, many Jews began to look positively upon the idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine as a refuge for those being persecuted. Jewish organizations in the U.S. which had always opposed Zionism began to view it more favorably. In February 1942, the CCAR, the Reform rabbinical group, reversed its position and called for a “Jewish army” in Palestine, a direct violation of its 1935 resolution calling for “neutrality” when it came to Zionism. The American Council for Judaism was created in 1942 to maintain the traditional philosophy of a universal Judaism free of nationalism and politicization. In his keynote address to the June 1942 meeting in Atlantic City, Rabbi David Philipson declared that Reform Judaism and Zionism were incompatible: “Reform Judaism is spiritual, Zionism is political. The outlook of Reform Judaism is the world. The outlook of Zionism is a corner of Eastern Asia.” The first pledge of major financial backing was made by Aaron Strauss, a nephew and heir of Levi Strauss of blue jeans fame. Attending this meeting were six former presidents of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the president of Hebrew Union College and a former president of B’nai B’rith. Prominent laypersons joining the Council included Rear Admiral Louis Strauss, Marcus C. Sloss, Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, former congresswoman Florence P. Kahn, Herbert and Stanley Marcus of the Nieman-Marcus Co., James D. Zellerbach, president of the Crown Zellerbach Corp., Sidney Weinberg, senior partner of Goldman Sachs and Monroe E. Deutsch, Provost of the University of California. It was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, who introduced the phrase “Americans of the Jewish faith” into the Council’s statement of principles. The first president of the Council was Lessing J. Rosenwald, who had retired as chairman of Sears Roebuck and Co., which was founded by his father, the respected philanthropist Julian Rosenwald, who, among many other things, worked with Booker T. Washington to build schools for black children in the South after the Civil War.

Continuity Of Jewish Opposition to Zionism The continuity of American Jewish opposition to Zionism was reflected in the membership in the Council of more than twenty of the original signers of the petition Rep. Julius Klein presented to President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 in opposition to the Balfour Declaration and to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Fourteen of the rabbis who had signed the petition also joined the Council, including William Rosenau, David Philipson, William Fineshriber, Samuel Goldenson, David Lefkowitz, Henry Cohen and Henry Barnston. Two lay endorsers of the petition, Ralph W. Mack and Milton S. Binswanger, became ACJ Vice Presidents. Many non-Jewish leaders, academics and journalists found the Council’s arguments compelling, and worked closely with the organization. Among these were Barnard College President Virginia Gildersleeve, British historian Arnold Toynbee, journalist Dorothy Thompson, an early opponent of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, author Freda Utley and socialist leader Norman Thomas. Thomas praised the Council as early as 1949 in a syndicated column on the Arab refugee crisis and spoke frequently at Council functions. The Council was incorporated in December 1942 and Rabbi Elmer Berger was named executive director. Judah Magnes, chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote a letter endorsing the Council’s statement of principles: “It is true that Jewish nationalism tends to confuse people not because it is secular and not religious, but because this nationalism is unhappily chauvinistic and narrow and terroristic in the best style of Eastern European nationalism.”

“We Have Belonged to Every Nation” In 1943, Elmer Berger participated in a public debate in Richmond, Virginia with Maurice Samuel, who had published an article attacking the Council at its formation. Berger stated the fundamental position he would champion throughout his life: “I oppose Zionism because I deny that Jews are a nation. We were a nation for perhaps 200 years in a history of four thousand years. Before that we were a group of Semitic tribes whose only tenuous bond of unity was a national deity―a religious unity. After Solomon, we were never better than two nations, frequently at war with one another, disappearing at different times, leaving discernibly different cultures and even religions recorded in the Biblical record. Certainly, since the Dispersion, we have not been a nation. We have belonged to every nation in the world. We have mixed our blood with all peoples. Jewish nationalism is a fabrication woven from the thinnest kinds of threads and strengthened only in those eras of human history in which reaction has been dominant and anti-Semitism in full cry.” In his book “The Jewish Dilemma: The Case Against Zionist Nationalism” (1946), Berger argued that the Western world in general and Jews in particular were confused about the status of Jews. On the one hand, Jews and others condemned the Nazi ideas on race; on the other, some Jews were claiming to be a separate people or race. “Isn’t it a curious thing,” he wrote, “and tragically ironic that Zionists and extreme anti-Semites agree on the same solution―isolate the Jews in a country of their own.” Expanding on themes of emancipation and integration, Berger observed that, “Where men are free, Jews live in security, and where they are not free, Jews and others know no freedom.” To him, the German experience did not prove the failure of his ideas about the nature of emancipation. On the contrary, it actually proved his thesis. In Germany, according to Berger, emancipation did not fail―it was never real. What failed in Germany was democracy, and that affected Jews just as it had affected all other Germans.

President Truman Meets with Lessing Rosenwald On Dec. 4, 1945, hours after the first meeting with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, President Harry S. Truman received Lessing Rosenwald in the Oval Office. He called for the admission of both Jewish and non-Jewish displaced persons to Palestine, and urged that, “Palestine shall not be a Muslim, Christian or Jewish state but a country in which people of all faiths can play their full and equal part,” and that, “the U.S. take the lead in coordinating with the U.N. a cooperative policy of many nations in absorbing Jewish refugees.” Rosenwald testified before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Jan. 10, 1946 and urged that large numbers of Jews be admitted into Palestine on the condition that “the claim that Jews possess unlimited national rights to the land, and that the country shall take the form of a racial or theocratic state, were denounced once and for all.” From 1943 to 1948, the Council conducted a public campaign against Zionism. One of the speakers at its 1945 conference was Hans Kohn, a one-time German Zionist associated with the University in Exile in New York. He declared: “The Jewish nationalist philosophy has developed entirely under German influence, the German romantic nationalism with the emphasis on blood, race and descent as the most determining factor in human life, its historicizing attempt to connect with a legendary past 2,000 or so years ago, its emphasis on folk as a mythical body, the source of civilization.”

“Spurious Nationhood Imposed Upon Jews” At this same 1945 conference, Rabbi Berger noted that the program of Jewish nationalism had never expressed the real aspirations of Jews in America or elsewhere. “Spurious nationhood,” he argued, “had been imposed upon Jews by reactionary societies in the Middle Ages and this could not provide a solution to reactionary forces in the modern world.” He maintained that “Jewish nationalists wanted to maintain a medieval type of control over a so-called worldwide Jewish people and to prevent emancipation of individual Jews.” This process, in his view, reached alarming proportions in 1897 at the first Zionist Congress, where 197 men “arrogated to themselves the title ‘the Jewish nation.’ Proceeding to create a worldwide political movement, they proclaimed that the medieval collectivism of the ‘Jewish people’ wanted to realize its political destiny ‘by creating a sovereign state in Palestine.’” Berger pointed to the fact that Jewish emancipation had frequently been attacked during the preceding century and a half by the “official Jews” who controlled the community while it was imprisoned behind ghetto walls. With the collapse of the ghetto, the leaders of the Jewish community were weakened. Threatened by the prospect of integration and emancipation, they condemned it as “assimilation” and did their best to impede it. The connection between Zionism and the nationalism of Nazi Germany had been made in 1938 when Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state.” Another renowned German Jew, the philosopher Martin Buber, spoke out in 1942 against “the aim of the minority to ‘conquer’ territory by means of international maneuvers.” In the midst of hostilities that broke out after Israel unilaterally declared independence, Buber cited with despair, “This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion; it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.”

Zionism’s Challenge to American Jews In the face of the 1947 partition of Palestine, the Council wished the new state well and declared its determination to resist Zionist efforts to dominate Jewish life in America. Rabbi Berger published an essay that outlined “the challenge to all Americans who are Jews by religion presented by Zionist plans to foster an ‘Israel-centered’ Jewish life in the U.S.”. He wrote: “The creation of a sovereign state embodying the principles of Zionism, far from relieving American Jews of the urgency of making that choice, makes it more compelling.” Early in 1953, Berger and Rosenwald met in the White House with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The president accepted their memorandum, which discussed the “confusion of Judaism with the nationalism of Israel,” such as Israel’s “Law of Return,” enacted in 1951, which could be interpreted as granting de facto Israeli citizenship to all the world’s Jews. The new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, took the memorandum with him on his first trip to the Middle East and echoed many of its points in a radio address at the end of his trip. Dulles urged that Israel become part of the Near East community and cease to look upon itself as alien to that community. Zionists obstructed refugee assistance for Jews in countries other than Palestine in the interests of its grand design to nationalize Palestine for all Jews. Indeed, as early as 1938, David Ben-Gurion had proclaimed his readiness to abandon thousands of Jewish children in exchange for a Jewish state: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the Jewish children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz Israel I would choose the latter―because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historic accounting of the Jewish people.”

Address By FDR Aide Morris Ernst One specific example was offered in 1950 by the distinguished American liberal and fighter for civil liberties Morris Ernst. He was a close friend and adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was an early leader of the American Civil Liberties Union. In an address to the annual conference of the American Council for Judaism in Cincinnati on April 22, 1950, Ernst said: “Roosevelt had an idea that what we ought to do with the people pushed around in Europe was to set up what he called a World Budget and let all the free nations of the world agree as to how many people they would take in as immigrants, irrespective of race, creed, color or political belief. The president told me that he was sure that he could get so many into Canada, so many into Australia, so many in each South American country―and then he said, ‘You know we in the U.S. will be the last to open our doors, because we are going back on our historic position of political asylum.’ This was before the labor unions had taken their shift on the Immigration Bill. This was before the manufacturers had gotten a little wisdom on the subject.” Ernst went to England in the midst of the blitz, and they agreed to take 150,000 refugees from the Nazis. He reported that, Roosevelt said, ‘We can’t put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.’ And I said, ‘It’s impossible, why?’ He said, ‘Well, they’re right from their point of view. The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘there is no other place this poor Jew can go.’ But, said Roosevelt, ‘if there’s a world political asylum for all people, irrespective of race, creed or color, they can’t raise their money. Because the people who don’t want to give the money will have an excuse and say, ‘What do you mean there’s no place they can go but Palestine? They are the preferred wards of the world.’” Ernst told the audience, “I could hardly believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. That a bit of chauvinism and nationalism among a few leaders of the Jewish organizations of America could defeat an overall haven for the oppressed of Europe. I said, ‘Let me test it out.’ I went to friends of mine, without mentioning the British people I had spoken to, without mentioning Roosevelt―I laid down this grand dream, this great plan―of the world joining together to give relief to the people pushed around by Hitler. I assure you that I was thrown out of parlors of friends of mine. And they said very frankly, and they were right from their point of view, ‘Morris, this is treason―you’re undermining the Zionist movement.’ I’d say, ‘Yes, maybe I am. But I’m much more interested in a haven for half a million or a million people―oppressed throughout the world.’”

Religious Schools to Advance Judaism Free of Nationalism The Council engaged in a variety of activities to promote its vision of Judaism free of nationalism. It ran religious schools, published children’s textbooks and established a philanthropic foundation. Among the books it published were Samuel Baron’s “Children’s Devotions,”. Abraham Cronbach’s “Judaism for Today,” and “Not By Power,” by Allan Tarshish, who was rabbi of the first Reform congregation in Charleston, South Carolina. Rabbi David Goldberg, who served as the first Jewish chaplain in the U.S. Navy during World War 1, was the Council’s research director. He wrote three books, among them “Meet The Prophets.” For a number of years, the Council published a children’s magazine called “Growing Up.” The curriculum was designed by Leonard R. Sussman, who served for many years as the Council’s Executive director and later distinguished himself as the executive director of Freedom House. In “Meet The Prophets,” Rabbi Goldberg writes: “It was the Prophets who possessed the courage and the conscience to stress the universal, ethical values that have become Judaism’s contribution to the world…Despite the exclusiveness of the Covenant with Yahweh, we can see in it the first glimmer of the great religion that was to be known as Judaism. More and more, this relationship came to differ from the usual tribal god covenants. For one thing, Yahweh, as Moses introduced Him, was an invisible spirit that liberates people from the shackles of slavery: and who orders one to honor his parents, not to murder or cheat or steal or lie―and so with the other of the Ten Commandments. Yahweh, then, is a moral God who demands of his follower's moral behavior…. In the course of time, as the people’s understanding of Yahweh increased, the scope of the covenant also increased and was to be extended to other people.” The earliest pre -literary prophets, Goldberg points out, believed that Yahweh was the God of Israel and Judah only, “But to the Literary Prophets, He was the God of all humanity―indeed, of all creation…They have become not only the Prophets of Judaism but also the Prophets of Christianity and Islam, the two great daughter-religions of Judaism.” The Prophet Amos made clear that Yahweh is the God of all people. In Amos 9:7 we read, “Are you not like the Ethiopians to Me, O Children of Israel?” Says the Lord. “Did I not bring up Israel from Egypt, as I did the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?”

The Common Possession of Humanity Amos and the other Prophets, Goldberg shows, “laid the foundation of a Judaism that no longer was to remain the cult of a mere clan or tribe or even a nation, but which was to become the common possession of all civilized humanity…He is the God of all countries ―He addresses his prophecies to other people who are not of Israel or Judah. They are directed to the people of Damascus in Syria, to the people of Gaza in Philistia, of Tyre in Phoenicia. He tells his countrymen that they shouldn’t expect to be favored by God above all other people because all people are alike in the eye of God.” It is this Prophetic vision of a universal Judaism which the American Council for Judaism has advanced. It understood that the great contribution of Jews and Judaism to the world is something far different from the narrow goals sought by those who would set Jews apart, either in a state of their own or in narrow religious ghettos of the spirit, which would make of Jews what Herzl called a “normal” people. To become “normal” is, of course, to abandon the unique Jewish role set forth by the Prophets and by the architects of Reform Judaism. In his book “The Gifts of The Jews,” Thomas Cahill provides this assessment of the Jewish contribution: “Because of their unique belief―monotheism―the Jews were able to give us the Great Whole, a unified universe that makes sense and that, because of its evident superiority as a worldview, completely overwhelms the warring and contradictory phenomenon of polytheism. They gave us the Conscience of the West, and the belief that this God who is One is not the God of outward show but the still, small voice of conscience, the God of compassion, the God ‘who will be there,’ the God who cares about each of his creatures, especially the human beings he created ‘in his own image,’ and that he insists we do the same. Even the gradual universalization of Jewish ideas, hinted at in the story of Ruth…was foreseen by Joel, the late prophet who probably rose after the return from Babylon: ‘And it shall come to pass afterward that I shall pour out my spirit on all humanity. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old people shall dream dreams, and your young people see visions. Even on slaves, men and women, shall I pour out my spirit.’” “We Dream Jewish Dreams” Cahill declares that “The Jews gave us the Outside and the Inside―our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact——adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, progress, spirit, faith, hope and justice―are gifts of the Jews.” In his biography of Rabbi Elmer Berger, “Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism,” Jack Ross shows how Berger worked closely with U.S. Government officials to oppose any idea that Israel could speak in the name of the “Jewish people,” rather than its own citizens. He also worked with, among others, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to have Zionist groups register as foreign agents of Israel. He wrote and spoke frequently about the dispossession and mistreatment of Palestine’s indigenous population and about the plight of Palestinian refugees. Ross provides this assessment of the Classical Reform Judaism in which Berger believed: “It involved the centrality of the biblical prophets. That is that the essence of Judaism is not the ‘national narrative that ostensibly constitutes the Old Testament but rather in the example of those, namely the prophets, who spoke out against the Kings and priests who corrupted the nation and the people. It has been said by many that there is no greater power in all of human literature than the warning of the Prophet Samuel against the Israelites’ desire for a king. Implicit in all of this is the overarching premise that the downfall of Biblical Israel was its eagerness to define itself as a temporal kingdom, in other words a state with all its trappings of power.”

Majority of Jewish Americans Share Council’s Views In today’s America, in Ross’s view, the majority of Jewish Americans really share the philosophy enunciated by the Council: “…the majority of American Jews today would be completely baffled by the suggestion that they were anything but completely emancipated and integrated Americans whose Judaism is primarily if not solely a matter of confession…Berger…must be given credit for recognizing the underlying essential sociological truth of American Jewish life―that regardless of the theological and even sociological merits of the question of Jewish peoplehood, the concept could not withstand the reality of U.S. society.” Largely in response to the implications of the case of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, in which Israel justified its capture of Eichmann in Argentina in behalf of “the Jewish people,” the Council felt it was necessary to seek a formal declaration from the U.S. government as to whether or not it accepted the claims made by Israel and for the U.S. to declare whether or not it recognized the existence of “the Jewish people” as a matter of international law. The Council enlisted Professor William Thomas Mallison, Jr., who held chairs at both George Washington University and the Naval War College, to review the question. In 1964, Mallison completed his brief that would be known as “The Jewish People Study,” and would be published in the George Washington University Law Review. A copy was sent to Assistant Secretary of State Philips Talbot. On April 20, 1964, Talbot formally replied. He wrote: “The Department of State recognizes the State of Israel as a sovereign state and citizenship in the state of Israel. It recognizes no other sovereignty or citizenship in connection therewith. It does not recognize a legal-political relationship based upon the religious identification of American citizens. It does not in any way discriminate among American citizens upon the basis of their religion. Accordingly, it should be clear that the Department of State does not regard the ‘Jewish people’ concept as a concept of international law.”

State Department Rejects Legal Concept of Jewish “Nationhood” Israel had indeed claimed the force of law in the name of the “Jewish people in the Eichmann case, and with the Talbot letter the State Department formally rejected the premise of a legal Jewish “nationhood” which underlined both the Balfour Declaration and the 1947 partition. Jewish criticism of Zionism throughout the world continued long after Israel’s creation. When Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion called for “complete solidarity with the State of Israel” on the part of all Jews, Denmark’s chief rabbi, Marcus Melchior, responded: “We Danish Jews do not usually air our patriotism. Why on earth should we shout ‘hurrah’ more loudly than all the other Danes? But we take an opportunity like this to state that no one, however big he may be or from wherever he may come, has the right or is able to change even one jot of what for 150 years has been the status of Danish Jews under which there has been established a relationship in Denmark of which we are all just as happy on the Christian side as on the Jewish side. If Premier Ben-Gurion really claimed that in order to be a Jew every minute of one’s life, one has to live in Israel, then according to my view two questions arise. The first is whether to be a Jew every minute is of imperative necessity and whether Jewishness and being a general human being did not equate each other so completely that one at the same time could be Jewish and a human being in other places than in the few square kilometers which form the territory of Israel.” In his history of the early years of the American Council for Judaism, “Jews Against Zionism” (Temple University Press), Professor Thomas Kolsky pointed to the fact that the Council was maintaining the tradition of Reform Judaism’s founders. The warnings which the Council expressed during its early years, he concluded, have been prophetic: “…many of its predictions about the establishment of a Jewish state did come true. As the ACJ had foreseen, the birth of the state created numerous problems―problems the Zionists had minimized. For example, Israel became highly dependent on support from American Jews. Moreover, the creation of the state directly contributed to undermining Jewish communities in Arab countries and to precipitating protracted conflict between Israel and the Arabs. Indeed, as the Council had often warned, and contrary to Zionist expectations, Israel did not become a normal state. Nor did it become a light to the nations. Ironically, created presumably to free Jews from anti-Semitism and ghetto-like existence as well as provide them with abiding peace, Israel became, in effect, a garrison state, a nation resembling a large territorial ghetto besieged by hostile neighbors…The ominous predictions of the ACJ are still haunting the Zionists.”

“Everything they (the ACJ) prophesied…has come to pass.” Jonathan Sarna, Brandeis University historian and author of the book “American Judaism,” says that “Everything they (the American Council for Judaism) prophesied ―dual loyalty, nationalism being evil―has come to pass.” He states that, “It’s certainly the case that if the Holocaust underscored the problems of Jewish life in the Diaspora, recent years have highlighted that Zionism is no panacea.” Samuel Freedman devoted his “On Religion” column in The New York Times (June 26, 2010) to the Council. He pointed out that, “…the intense criticism of Israel now growing among a number of American Jews has made the group look significant, even prophetic…The arguments that the Council has levied against Zionism and Israel have shot back into prominence…The rejection of Zionism …goes back to the Torah itself. Until Theodor Herzl created the modern Zionist movement…the Biblical injunction to return to Israel was widely understood as a theological construct rather than a pragmatic instruction…The Reform movement maintained that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality.” Since that was written, it has become increasingly clear that Israel has turned its back on traditional Jewish moral and ethical values. It has denied equal rights to Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and has provided no rights to Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories. While Jewish Americans believe in religious freedom and separation of church and state, Israel is a theocracy with a state-supported ultra-Orthodox religious establishment. Non- Orthodox rabbis cannot perform weddings, conduct funerals or have their conversions recognized. Israel has no civil marriage. For a Jewish Israeli to marry someone who is not Jewish, it is necessary to leave the country to do so. Many Israelis, such as the human rights group B’tselem, have characterized Israel’s system as one of “apartheid,” as have Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Israel’s values and those of the overwhelming majority of American Jews have less and less in common with each passing year.

“age of…unquestioning…support for Israel is over” In his book “Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel,” Professor Dov Waxman of Northeastern University reports that, “A historic change has been taking place in the American Jewish relationship with Israel. The age of unquestioning and unstinting support for Israel is over. The pro-Israel consensus that once united American Jews is eroding, and Israel is fast becoming a source of division rather than unity for American Jewry…The current debate echoes earlier debates about Zionism that occurred before 1948. Then, as now, there were fierce disagreements among American Jews and the American Jewish establishment... from a historical perspective, the pro-Israel consensus that once reigned within the American Jewish community is the aberration, rather than the rule. Jewish division on Israel is historically the norm.” The vast majority of Jewish Americans, Waxman writes, were never really Zionists: “Classical Zionism has never had much relevance or appeal to American Jewry. Indeed, the vast majority of American Jews reject the basic elements of classical Zionism―that Diaspora Jews live in exile, that Jewish life in Israel is superior to life in the Diaspora, and that Diaspora Jewish life is doomed to eventually disappear. American Jews do not think that they live in exile, and they do not regard Israel as their homeland. For many American Jews, America is more than just home; it is itself a kind of Zion, an ‘almost promised land.’ Zionism has never succeeded in winning over the majority of American Jews.” Ignoring the history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, in an effort to silence criticism of Israel, challenges to Zionism have been equated to anti-Semitism. On May 1, 2022, in a recorded speech at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) leadership summit, ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt declared that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” He equated groups calling for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel with white nationalist extremists. Such a statement is, of course, completely ahistorical. Rabbi Brant Rosen notes that his Congregation Tzedek Chicago “recently amended its core values statement to say that we are ‘anti-Zionist,’ openly acknowledging that the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation in historic Palestine resulted in an injustice against the Palestinian people. It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the fundamental injustice at the core of Zionism.”

Maintaining Its Vision For 80 Years For 80 years, the American Council for Judaism has never abandoned its vision of a universal faith of moral and ethical values for men and women of every race and nation which the Prophets preached and in which generations of Jews believed. The Council’s early leaders recognized how narrow nationalism would corrupt the humane Jewish tradition. For the past 80 years, the Council has kept that tradition alive. That more and more men and women, particularly in the younger generation, are returning to that faith at the present time is a vindication of their vision. It seems, indeed, to have been truly prophetic. *