From the margins to the mainstream: Labor Zionism and American Jews, 1919-1945

Abstract

This dissertation stakes a claim for the importance of Labor Zionism in the American Jewish context between 1919 and 1945. It argues that Labor Zionism, with its base in Palestine and satellite organization in the United States, had a profound impact on American Zionism and American Jews.The disjunction between Labor Zionism's relatively small size and disproportionate influence in the United States raises the question why, if the movement was so ideologically important, was it so institutionally and numerically weak? Its core groups were never more than half the size of other Zionist groups. Yet beginning in the middle 1930s, Labor Zionism played an increasingly important role in the development of American Zionism. This was due, in large measure, to Labor's ascendance in the Yishuv and the movement's concomitant rise to hegemony in the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency. As a result, the Labor Zionist movement in the United States profited considerably.During the interwar years American Labor Zionism became a hub of social, cultural and political activity. By the early 1940s it effectively defined American Jewry's emergent post-war agenda. This phenomenon derived from a lengthy process of discussion and debate in the American Zionist arena and the wider American Jewish community. It was influenced by developments in Palestine as well as the tragic situation of European Jewry. Zionists, non-Zionists and sympathetic Jews in the United States all gravitated to the Labor Zionist program of building the Jewish National Home. The Labor movement in Palestine commanded a vast socioeconomic infrastructure that made the establishment of the Jewish state possible. Finally, in 1943 organized American Jewry adopted a public policy that called for the creation of an independent Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brandeis University, 1996.School code: 0021