Beyond redemption: Postwar America and the question of Palestine

Beyond Redemption is a study of the imagery of redemption that structured American representations of Israel in the decades leading up to and including the 1967 war. In an interdisciplinary set of texts in the postwar decades, Zionism\u27s redemptive mission is represented as being commensurate with a variety of ethnic, moral, and political identities in America. This dissertation argues that these idealized representations of the Jewish state\u27s redemptive project—of modernizing the Holy Land, civilizing and regulating immigrant Jews, strengthening the Jew through physical labor and soldiery, and fulfilling God\u27s covenant after Auschwitz—based on a foundational assumption: the redemptive power of the modern nation-state. As both the agent and the object of this state, the new Jew of Israel appears in these texts as a fetishized figure, reflecting a fascination with Zionism\u27s ability to remake global Jewry. Furthermore, this figure has appeared in the U.S. as the antithesis of the Arab Nazi, as part of worldview that relocates anti-Semitism from the vestiges of European to the radicalized arenas of the Middle East. On the one hand, this dissertation argues, the 1967 war catalyzed a constitutive pairing of the Holocaust with the Israeli army in the United States in ways that represented the Middle East as the site of a re-located war against anti-Semitism. Against this background of America\u27s relationship to the Palestinian Question, Beyond Redemption suggests an alternative framework for conceptualizing the deliverance from oppression: one that centralizes, and contextualizes, power relations rather than identity politics