Bringing Zion Home

Emily Alice Katz

Description

Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel's "natural" place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America's relationship with Israel today.

Katz shows that American Jews' promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned "culture" as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel's American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America's interests in the Middle East and helped spread the "American way" in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Postwar American Jewry Reconsidered

2. Before Exodus: Writing Israel for an American Audience

3. Hora Hootenannies and Yemenite Hoedowns: Israeli Folk Dance in America

4. A Consuming Passion: Israeli Goods in American Jewish Culture

5. Cultural Emissaries and the Culture Explosion: Introducing Israeli Art and Music

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• 20th century
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438454665
• Langue: English

Extrait

BRINGING ZION HOME
BRINGING ZION HOME
Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967

EMILY ALICE KATZ
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
Cover photograph: Gimbels department store window, Philadelphia, 1950. Courtesy of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc.
Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Katz, Emily Alice, 1975– author.
Bringing Zion home : Israel in American Jewish culture, 1948-1967 / Emily Alice Katz.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5465-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5466-5 (ebook)
1. Jews—United States—Attitudes toward Israel. 2. Israel and the diaspora. 3. Jews—United States—Social life and customs—20th century. 4. Israel—Public opinion. 5. Public opinion—United States. I. Title. DS132.K38 2015 956.9405′2—dc23 2014007253
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Thad
CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Postwar American Jewry Reconsidered
CHAPTER TWO
Before Exodus : Writing Israel for an American Audience
CHAPTER THREE
Hora Hootenannies and Yemenite Hoedowns: Israeli Folk Dance in America
CHAPTER FOUR
A Consuming Passion: Israeli Goods in American Jewish Culture
CHAPTER FIVE
Cultural Emissaries and the Culture Explosion: Introducing Israeli Art and Music
CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1 Cover, An American Housewife in Israel, by Shula Hirsch
Figure 3.1 Cover, Dances of the Jewish People, by Dvora Lapson
Figure 4.1 Israeli fashion window display, Gimbels, Philadelphia (1950)
Figure 5.1 The Adas Israel Israeli Art Exhibition, Washington, D.C. (1964)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to a host of individuals and institutions for helping to bring this project to fruition.
I undertook the labor of transforming my dissertation into this book while teaching at the University of California, Irvine, where I have benefited from conversations with colleagues and have been inspired by the intellectual curiosity of my students. As a faculty advisor for the UC-Irvine branch of the Olive Tree Initiative, I have developed rewarding intellectual partnerships and friendships with Daniel Wehrenfennig, Daniel Brunstetter, Arturo Jimenez, Paula Garb, and Susan Seely. Their support has been essential.
Thanks are due to archivists, librarians, and staff at several institutions, including the American Jewish Archives, American Jewish Historical Society, the University of California-Irvine, Hadassah, the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, Yeshiva University Museum, and the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. I am particularly grateful to Susan Woodland, senior archivist at the American Jewish Historical Society (formerly of the Hadassah Archives); Barbara Simon (formerly of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation); Kevin Proffitt and Gary P. Zola of the American Jewish Archives; Ruth Goodman and Ruth Schoenberg of the Israeli Dance Institute; and Rhoda Seidenberg and Bonni-Dara Michaels of Yeshiva University Museum for their expert advice and enthusiastic assistance.
This project has been enriched by formal interviews and informal conversations with a number of individuals. I would like to thank the following people for sharing their thoughts and their time with me: Clara Frieder, Barry and Irene Friedman, Ayalah Goren, Judith Brin Ingber, Gila Zalon, and Gideon Paz.
Crucial financial support for the dissertation came from several institutions. A Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program provided funding in the last phase of dissertation writing and first phase of revisions toward the book manuscript. Support for dissertation writing was also provided by the Foundation for Jewish Culture’s Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. I am also grateful to have received a Loewenstein-Wiener Fellowship from the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives. The Charles H. Revson Fellowship in Advanced Jewish Studies provided financial assistance at several points during my graduate studies; I thank the Graduate School of JTS for designating me the recipient of that and other fellowships throughout my time as a graduate student.
A section of chapter 4 was published in my article, “It’s The Real World After All: The American-Israel Pavilion–Jordan Pavilion Controversy at the New York World’s Fair, 1964–1965,” in American Jewish History 91, no. 1 (March 2003), and appears here with permission from Johns Hopkins University Press. A portion of chapter 5 first appeared as “Introducing Israeli Art: Communal and Critical Encounters in Postwar America,” in Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 3, no. 1 (2009). It is reprinted here with the permission of Brill.
My heartfelt thanks to Professor Jack Wertheimer, my dissertation advisor, whose careful reading, incisive critiques, and refreshing insights—well beyond graduate school—have strengthened this book in innumerable ways. David Roskies, Alan Mintz, Shuly Rubin Schwartz, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett served, along with Jack, as dissertation committee members, and it was their thoughtful comments that provided a first, crucial bridge from dissertation to book. I am indebted to BKG, too, for including me in the Working Group in Jews, Media, and Religion of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, where fellow members exemplified the rigorous, creative study of Jewish culture in its myriad forms.
Over the years, I have benefited from the questions and comments of colleagues who encountered my work as panel chairs and audience members at various conferences. I would like to extend a special thank you, however, to Riv-Ellen Prell, Ari Y. Kelman, and Jenna Weissman Joselit, who went above and beyond the call of duty, reading portions of this book along the way and providing helpful comments. Jenna not only offered an in-depth critique of chapter 3 , on Israeli folk dance in America, but also pointed me toward the Hadassah fashion shows as a worthy subject. I thank Margaret Olin and Steven Fine for helping to refine my thinking on the material about Israeli art in America.
I am grateful to SUNY Press, and particularly to James Peltz, for extending me this opportunity and expertly shepherding the project through to publication. Jessica Kirschner and Rafael Chaiken provided excellent editorial support. I am indebted to my anonymous reviewers, whose insights and critiques helped me to see my work with fresh eyes and (I hope) to sharpen the manuscript in important ways. It was a pleasure working with Laurie Searl, production editor at SUNY Press; thank you to Alan V. Hewat for his careful copy editing.
The love and support of my parents, Lenore and Joel Katz, have allowed me every opportunity. They have been eager, thoughtful readers of mine for as long as I can remember, and I treasure their continuing interest in my work. My sister Marisa, intelligent, witty, and encouraging, is also a beloved friend, and reminds me by example that the work we do matters.
My children Lincoln and Willa have enlivened my world immeasurably; I love them beyond reason. I look forward to reading, thinking, talking, debating, and laughing with them both as they grow up.
Thad, my collaborator in all things for twenty years now, has made everything in this life richer, deeper, and brighter. I cannot imagine my life without him and I am boundlessly grateful for his love and support. This book is dedicated to him.
ONE
INTRODUCTION

Postwar American Jewry Reconsidered
In the fall of 1962, a contributor to Women’s League Outlook, the magazine of the women’s branch of the Conservative movement in American Judaism, rhapsodized about the wide adoption of Israeli folk dance among American Jewish youth. She wrote:

Visit any group of young Jewish girls and boys, from Bangor, Maine to Corpus Christi, Texas, from Vancouver, Canada to San Diego, California—the length and breadth of the country, and see how those children dance a hora and sing Israeli songs. … We, the middle aged folk of today, had nothing like it in our youth. As Jews, we lost our identity in … the jitterbug. A special Jewish dance for the young? Unthinkable, when we were young, except at Jewish weddings. 1
To the author, American Jewish youth’s championing of Israeli folk dance signaled a willingness to appear different from the surrounding American culture. She chided those nostalgic for the immigrant Jewish culture of yesteryear, writing, “We don’t have to feel sorry for our children. … [T]hey are building up a much richer