Our America: Jewish Americans and the Dream of Israel after the Six-Day War
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2014
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Haverford College. Department of History
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eng
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Abstract
On the eve of the Israeli conquests in the 1967 Six-Day War, many Jewish American leaders were gravely concerned about the cultural survival of American Jewishness. Their fears responded to the perceived toll the post-WWII social changes of rising affluence, suburbanization, and declining antisemitism had taken on their Jewishness. In the spring of 1967, Jewish leaders mapped their domestically-inspired feeling of vulnerability onto Israel's geopolitical condition. When the Israeli army rapidly defeated its Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian opponents and conquered vast swaths of territory, Jewish elites proclaimed that the survival of American Jewishness had been decided on the battlefields of the Middle East. This initial projection of domestic anxiety and frustration onto Israel structured how Zionism became the most important feature of post-1967 Jewish American ethnicity, culture, politics, and corporeality. In light of the spectacle of Israeli power, many Jewish Americans domesticated Zionism as a metaphor that addressed the concerns they had about their ethnicity, alienation, commitment to the civil rights movement, and masculinity. Zionism became the solution to the problems Jewish Americans faced as a result of the political and cultural forces of the late 1960s. Fantasies of Israel, informed by American frustrations, became the dominant way that Jewish Americans related to the Jewish State as the new keystone of their Jewishness. Jewish Americans in search of ethnic pride responded to the Israeli victory by rhetorically importing the virile Jewishness and bodies of the Israeli soldiers. Concomitant with the rejuvenation of Jewishness by its association with military power was the imagined extension of Jewish American ethics to the battlefield and the projection of Jewish characteristics onto the Israelis. Other Jewish Americans, mired in malaise and alienation, turned to Zionism as an ethnic nationalist counterculture that could solve their crises of meaning. Thousands immigrated to Israel after the Six-Day War in search of a more fulfilled life; to the Israeli government, this represented the promise of a massive influx of Jewish Americans that would give them the Jewish population necessary to annex the West Bank. Following the Six-Day War, Jewish liberals and former New Left members also turned to Zionism by imagining it as a Jewish civil rights struggle. As they estranged themselves from the US late civil rights movement, they transferred to Zionism the morality they associated with their former activism or support. Lastly, Jewish Americans began fantasizing about serving in the Israeli army, inspired by their desire for an American imperial or pioneer masculinity. The very imperial connections denied by civil rights liberals and radicals animated these Jewish American boys and men to romanticize Israeli masculinity. After the Six-Day War, Jewish Americans made Israel the foundation of their domestic identities because they perceived it as ameliorating the tensions and challenges of the 1960s. In so doing, they made fantasies of the foreign space of the Jewish State much more meaningful than the more complicated and troubling realities of Israel's militarism and occupation of the Palestinians.