How naïve.
The Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), the first major Zionist organization in America was founded in New York in 1896. It struggled mightily to barely survive. The first president of the Federation was Richard Gottheils, a reluctant leader, an important figurehead, as a respected professor of Semitic Languages at Columbia University. After 13 years of existence, amidst a Jewish population of over 2,000,000 the FAZ could barely count only 10,000 members.
Active Zionist membership was minimal though sympathies might have been much larger. American Jews simply did not want to get involved. The Jews, the vast majority of whom were recent immigrants, unsure of their place in America, were focused not on wishful dreams of a return to Zion. They focused on finding for themselves and their own their personal economic Promised Land. They feared rocking the boat of American toleration, disturbing their unbelievable newfound dream.
Louis Brandeis, an improbable choice, a descendent of Frankists, was an assimilated Jew from Kentucky. He had had little formal association with Jews being more closely identified with the Brahmanism of the Bostonian social elite. Ironically, Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court Justice (1916), became the energetic exponent in word and deed, the legitimizer of American Zionism.
Under Brandeis' leadership, the American Zionist movement grew to over 200,000 members by 1920. Zionism became a respected word, reflecting American ideals, in common households, the halls of Congress and up to the Presidency.
There were a number of factors to explain the rise of American Zionism under Brandeis. World War I was a key factor. Contemporary history is focused on the Holocaust and its aftermath. Forgotten is the reality of the mini – Holocaust of European Jews during World War I. The slaughter of hundreds of thousand of Eastern European Jews for simply being Jews was not lost on the American Jewish community. American Jews were keenly aware that the American escape valve had been nearly sealed. It would soon be fully cut off to Jewish refugees. The recent immigrants anguished over their families' traumas in Europe and were distraught with powerlessness. Zionism was an answer.
The acculturation of American Jewry to America and its values was another reason for the sharp rise of American Zionism. For the first time it was safe, it was o.k., it was responsible to stand up and protest Jewish oppression. It was proper to promote Jewish self-interest, as did many other American immigrant groups such as the Irish, the Germans and the Italians.
Brandeis did something that was unique. He framed Zionism, not as a purely Jewish or European need but as an American ideal.
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Like most young people born into the heady days of the young state of Israel – it seemed like a miracle had taken place. My earliest memories were dancing a hora at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center to the words of Dovid Melech Yisrael, Chai, Chai, V'kayom, - a little paper Israeli styled hat – bouncing on my head - and one hand trying to keep it on. It was cute in 1953. The Yeshivah I attended; Jewish history ended with the destruction of the second Temple and began again with the state of Israel. There was nothing in between.
Growing up a child of survivors you knew that you were different. Your family was small, not many cousins, Aunts or Uncles. I had no grandparents. My parents spoke in a strange language. They had heavy accents that we did not hear but others did. We associated with others who were survivors because they understood what American born and raised Jews could not.
It was at a book fair that I first saw the bright red covered book. That book, I must have read twenty times over and over. "Jews Fight Too," by Mac Davis. The book was something unreal. Jews fight. Jews stood up against evil; Jews defended themselves against hate and death. Jews chose to fight for life against death. As a child of survivors the book was an inspiring ideal. Jewish children whose parents had been soldiers in World War II could not understand; their parents had been soldiers, mine had been slaves. Their parents chose to fight for life, mine… the Nazis and their friends had chosen for death.
Perhaps it was because I was classified as 1-Y at Ft. Holabird in Baltimore, that the need to be part of "never again" took hold. A college sports injury had the American army classify me as unfit for service except in a national emergency. A sense of duty, obligation, honor, dignity, respect, preservation and hope for a better world for all Jews was and all people would be unfulfilled. It was Herzl's vision that the land of Israel would a model. If the world did not want us then we would have our own State and demonstrate to an un-wanting world how Jewish energy unleashed could make the world better for all.
My father had died years earlier, finally succumbing to injuries he had suffered as a slave laborer under the Nazis, eventually developing a melanoma where he was bayoneted and left for dead during the death march to Buchenwald. Someone had picked him up. Someone would not leave him, a fellow Jew, behind. My mother was living in an American Jewish Home for the aged, cared and looked after. She would die in later years believing that the Nazi's were coming to finish the job.
I had made the usual college trips to Israel. I had marched in parades and demonstrations for Civil Rights but I had done nothing for my people, the Jewish people. Simply putting on Teffilin in the morning was not doing enough to preserve my people. A friend, recently returned from Israel, opened a door to opportunity. My friend had been a member of Mahal.
Mahal, Meetnadvim M'Chutz L'Artez, Volunteers from outside of Israel, was formed in 1946-1948. They were a corp of foreign volunteers who came to Israel to help defend her and fight for her freedom. Many returned to their homes after the war of Independence, many are still there sleeping amongst the honored of Israel's fallen.
My course was set. My direction was determined. I volunteered for what was at the time a residual of Israel's past and kept quiet – I became a private in the Israeli army. My unit was comprised of other members of Mahal – Argentineans, South Africans, Brits, Poles, and me. All of us were alone, no family, except all of Israel. We had a sense of being one people – strangers, living at the pleasure and toleration of others in far lands, no longer.
A story my mother told me played in my mind. In Lodz, she had been beaten up and called a Jew whore by local boys who stole her sweater. I was part of something that would never let that happen again.
We were proud in our uniforms and others were proud to see us. On a training march from Machaneh Shmonim, three hundred of us, Israelis and my small Mahal contingent, marched out across the hills. It was a stunning scene not for the Israelis for whom soldiers marching were nothing new, a necessity. Three tour buses, filled with American Federation Mission tourists, stopped on the road to gawk at us. They piled out taking our pictures. Their breasts visibly swelled with pride as we three hundred marched by.
My first station was Machaneh Dotan near Nablus in the West Bank. We lived in a captured Jordanian military camp next to the unexcavated Tel Dotan. In the valley before us was where Joseph's brothers had thrown him into a pit. He was sold to a passing caravan and carried away to become a slave in Egypt. Here I was, a soldier in a Jewish army, the first in two thousand years and I was not a slave. Further training sent me to the coast near Caesarea. It was there that the terrible news came. We were standing in a tent in the middle of nothing but sand, the hills of Sharon stood behind us and the Mediterranean lapped the shores to our front. The radio solemnly read the horrifying news of the Munich massacre. One guy wanted to do down to the main road and kill Arabs in revenge. We all stopped him, the reason, I have never forgotten. "That is what the Nazis would do,' we hollered. 'We are Jews. We are not Nazis. We cannot do that." The pain settled in. We quietly sat down and cleaned the sand from our guns.
I was transferred to Nahal Yam on the North coast of the Sinai not far from the Suez Canal. To this day, I remember seeing the huge berms being built on the Egyptian side of the canal. Behind the berms they prepared for the coming sudden attack across the canal, the Yom Kippur War. To this day, it has been hard to understand why Golda Meir's government could not see the war preparations of the Egyptians. I saw them in front of me. It may have been a cynical but realistic decision; if Israel had preemptively attacked Egypt the Americans could not or would not support us in the ensuing war. We had to take the Egyptian's first strike. We did. Tiny Israel lost over 2,000 dead and the world still hated us. The United States did support Israel after the attack that almost broke Israel. In Nahal Yam, I sat over a heavy gun staring into the darkness of the Sinai hoping that what my active imagination thought it saw was not there. What in the hell was I doing here? The answer was obvious. I was here because Egypt was in front of me and Tel Aviv was behind me.
Nahal Yam is gone now. Israel transferred the buffer zone of the Sinai for a piece of paper and a promise from the Egyptians for peace. Remarkably, it has been almost thirty years and a cold peace has held.
As with many of the Mahalniks, I returned to the U.S. and began a new life. My mother was still living and she needed additional attention and care. My world and relation to Israel became, as it was for most American Jews, one of cultural and spiritual affiliation.
I married and had three sons. My sons have never understood the meaning of the Jewish Problem. They have never understood, except intellectually, the normality they enjoy is the gift of Herzl.
Henry Wickham Steed, a non-Jew, wrote in 1913:
"Zionism came with the force of an evangel. To be a Jew and to be proud of it; to glory in the power and pertinacity of the race, its traditions, its triumphs, its sufferings its resistance to persecution; to look the world frankly in the face and to enjoy the luxury of moral and intellectual honesty; to feel pride in belonging to the people that gave Christendom its divinities, that taught half the world monotheism, whose ideas have permeated civilization as never the ideas of a race before it, whose genius fashioned the whole mechanism of modern commerce, and whose artists, actors, singers and writers have filled a larger place in the cultured universe than those of any other people. This, or something like this, was the train of thought fired in youthful Jewish minds by the Zionist spark.
Its effect upon the Jewish students of Austrian universities was immediate and striking. Until then they had been despised and often ill-treated. They had wormed their way into appointments and into the free professions by dint of pliancy, mock humility, mental acuteness, and clandestine protection. If struck or spat upon by 'Aryan' students, they rarely ventured to return the blow or the insult. But Zionism gave them courage. They formed associations, and learned athletic drill and fencing. Insult was requited with insult, and presently the best fencers of the fighting German corps found that Zionist students could gash cheeks quite as effectually as any Teuton, and that the Jews were in a fair way to become the best swordsmen of the university. Today the purple cap of the Zionist is as respected as that of any academical association.
