Responding to momentous global events such as the Holocaust and the birth of Israel, participating in major domestic trends such as suburbanization and the so-called "religious revival," and caught up in the anxious political atmosphere of the Cold War years, American Jews confronted the challenges of postwar life with guarded optimism and a sense of grave responsibility. Shouldering the gargantuan tasks now attendant on them both as citizens of the world's sole democratic superpower and as the thriving remnant of Diaspora Jewry, American Jews sought to gracefully navigate a tangled web of national, religious, and ethnic loyalties---a scenario both enlivened and complicated by the birth of Israel.This dissertation reveals how the emergence of Israel in 1948 set in motion a complex process of cultural adjustment and innovation among American Jews throughout the postwar period. Specifically, it examines how American Jews integrated Israel into American Jewish culture, from literature and the arts to consumer and material culture to education, in both secular and religious settings. It is precisely in these arenas that American Jews fashioned an idealized but multi-hued Israel that, in their estimation, could be all things to all Americans---teenagers and housewives, art lovers and business entrepreneurs, Zionists and non-Zionists, Jews and non-Jews. Israel thus came to be seen as a source of spiritual and communal regeneration, a spur to inter-ethnic and international brotherhood in the age of the atom bomb, an ally in the spread of free-market capitalism, and as a player in the international culture scene. What's more, in propagating the idea that Israel---a new, impoverished Middle Eastern nation of uncertain geopolitical worth to the United States---was a true analogue to postwar America, American Jews positioned Israel as a bridge between Jewish and non-Jewish Americans in the postwar decades. The Israel of the American Jewish imagination thus served as both a means of outreach and a communal cause. As this dissertation argues, postwar American Jews succeeded in domesticating Israel in this period, transforming the Jewish state from terra incognita into a recognizable entity and, they hoped, an admired and treasured American friend.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2008.School code: 0315
