It is difficult today to imagine a time
when American
Jewry was not strongly committed
to Israel.
Before 1914, however, many — if not
most — major
American Jewish leaders and organizations
were either lukewarm or openly opposed to
a Jewish state in Palestine. One man – Louis
D. Brandeis — did
more than anyone else to change that attitude.
Following Brandeis’s lead, the majority
of American Jews came to see a future state
of Israel as essential for saving oppressed
Jews abroad. They also came to understand
it as the key to American Jewish renewal.
Opposition to a Jewish homeland
in what was then Palestine came from many
corners. One source was the highly assimilated
American Jews, mostly from German-Jewish
backgrounds, associated with the Reform
movement and the
American Jewish Committee. These individuals
believed that if American Jews called openly
for a homeland in Palestine, they would be
accused of divided loyalty or, even worse, disloyalty to
the United States. American Jewry, they argued,
had found its promised land in the United
States. They rallied to the cry, “America
is our Zion.” One outstanding secular Jewish
leader, Jacob
Schiff, thought Zionism would
foster “a separateness that would be fatal.” Isaac
Mayer Wise, patriarch of American Reform,
observed, “We think it about as well to let
the old Jerusalem rest
under the accretion of ages as it is described
in the Bible and Josephus.
The consequences to mankind cannot be found
under the rubbish of 2,000 years.”
Traditional Orthodox leaders also spoke
out against secular efforts at recreating
a Jewish nation in what had been ancient
Israel. According to historian Melvin Urofsky,
these Jews believed that it was God, not
man, who would have to restore the Jewish
people to Jerusalem. When Zionist advocate
Julius Haber tried to fundraise at a Lower
East Side synagogue, an elderly man told
him, “Young man, you are going against God’s
will. If he wanted us to have Zion again,
He would restore it again without the help
of the so-called Zionists. God doesn’t
need apprentices. Please go schnorr somewhere
else and let us lament in peace, like good
Jews.”
Urofsky indicates that, by 1914, when war broke out in Europe, a silent majority of
American Jews may well have supported the
creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine,
but that these Jews were mostly recent immigrants
from Poland, Russia and elsewhere in Eastern
Europe who had fresh memories of pogroms
and widespread anti-Semitism However, many
of these new Americans could not or did not
vote and had no time for political activity,
caught up as they were in making a living,
raising their children and adapting to American
life.
When Louis Brandeis embraced Zionism, he
legitimized the American call for a Jewish
homeland in Palestine. On the surface, Brandeis
was an unlikely candidate for Zionist leader.
Born into an affluent German-Jewish family
in Louisville, Kentucky in 1865, his parents
were deists and raised him with universalist,
rather than strictly Jewish, values. At age
19, Brandeis enrolled directly in Harvard
Law School without first attending college.
While at Harvard, the young Brandeis met
Emerson, Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Sr. A few years after graduation, Brandeis’s
highly successful Boston law practice afforded
him the income and influence to become the
nation’s leading patrician advocate
for progressive reforms such as public regulation
of utilities, savings bank life insurance
and anti-monopoly legislation. Reserved and
aloof, almost no one suspected he would become
a firebrand for Zionism.
Brandeis’s Jewish involvement began
when he learned, in 1910, that his uncle,
Louis Dembitz, whom he highly admired and
for whom he was named, had been a Zionist.
Intrigued by the news, Brandeis undertook
to read everything he could find on Zionism.
Brandeis’s desire to help Eastern European
Jewry find a safe haven in Palestine was
heightened by his contact in 1910 with Russian
immigrant garment workers, whom he met while
mediating a strike. He saw in these Jews
a democratic spirit and idealism he had not
expected. In 1913, Brandeis agreed to chair
a Zionist meeting in Boston. Not content
to be a mere figurehead, by 1915 Brandeis
became Zionism’s leading public spokesman
in America.
Brandeis believed that Zionism and Americanism
were compatible. “The highest Jewish ideals
are essentially American in a very important
particular,” he proclaimed. “It is Democracy
that Zionism represents. It is Social Justice
which Zionism represents, and every bit of
that is the American ideal of the twentieth
century.” Brandeis often repeated, “Zionism
is the Pilgrim inspiration and impulse all
over again.” He told his audiences, “To be
good Americans, we must be better Jews, and
to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.“
By 1917, the American Zionist movement increased
its membership tenfold to 200,000 members.
The American Provisional Executive Committee
for General Zionist Affairs, which Brandeis
chaired, raised millions to relieve Jews
who were suffering throughout war-torn Europe.
American Jewry thenceforth became the financial
center for the world Zionist movement. In
1916, despite strong opposition to the nomination,
President Wilson appointed Brandeis to the
Supreme Court, affirming Brandeis’s
contention that a Zionist could be a good
American. A year later, Great Britain announced
its intention
to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Zionism, at first only the
dream of a small minority, had moved to the
center of the world stage, and American Jewish
life.