Between home and homeland: The transformation of American Jewish political identity, 1945-1973

The transformation of Jewish political identity over the three decades following the Second World War can best be understood through an investigation of the complex causal relationships between Jewish Americans, the American political mainstream, and other American political and ethnic groups. Also essential to a complete understanding of the identity transformation is the context of American domestic and foreign policy and the central role that the Holocaust and Israel played in American Jewish consciousness. From an initial, defensive strategy of conformism to the American mainstream, Jewish political identity in America underwent a series of historically conditioned transformations to result eventually in an empowered Jewish identity, a main constitutor of which was the public promotion of particularly Jewish interests. This transition represented not only a political shift in strategy but a fundamental re-definition of American Jewish identity.It was in the context of these relationships that the Jewish communal establishment, laid the foundations for the later development of significant strands of American Jewish political identity tied to shifting definitions of and responses to American democratic liberalism and foreign policy. Through the interconnected story of the Jewish establishment, the New York Intellectuals of Commentary magazine, and the Jewish Radicals, four important trends in the evolution of American Jewish identity can be understood. First, Jewish Americans moved from a position of perceived political and social powerlessness to one of power. Second, as Jewish Americans participated in the framing of democratic liberalism, reciprocally, democratic ideals helped to reshape Jewish communal structure in America, ultimately resulting in the simultaneous democratization and Judaization of the American Jewish communal establishment and political life. Third, as America moved from an isolationist nation to one actively engaged in international politics, Jewish Americans, confronted by the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, developed a political identity that increasingly focused on an internationalist position. Finally, although Jewish Americans were initially extremely divided in regard to Jewish nationalism, Israel became for many American Jews the unifying force that defined identity and community in light of the varied cultural, religious, and political understandings of what it meant to be Jewish in America.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2012.School code: 0330