2025-10-20
28 分钟This is the Guardian.
Welcome to the Guardian.
Long read showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.
For the text version of this and all our longreads go to theguardian.com longread.
The Origins of Today's Conflict Between American Jews over Israel by Mark Mazauer Read by Kerry Scheel.
Even before it existed, Israel was on American minds.
Colonial preachers called their new land Canaan.
Herman Melville saw Americans as the peculiar chosen people, the Israel of our time.
In the second great awakening of the late 18th and early 19th century,
American Protestants became obsessed with the Holy Land and it was perhaps in response that one Jewish preacher had called in as early as 1818 for Jews to establish themselves in Ottoman Syria.
Christian Zionism flourished, remaining a powerful force in American politics to this day.
But Zionism in the modern sense was largely a product of the mass migration from the Russian Empire.
And even in the interwar years pro Zionist movements in America were still outranked socially by the officially non Zionist American Jewish Committee ajc,
which represented the leadership of the most assimilated section of the Jewish population whose arrival predated the Russians.
Their attitudes were reflected in the 1898 resolution of the American Reform movement which declared itself unalterably opposed to political Zionism on the grounds that the Jews are not a nation but a religious community.
Into the 1930s the AJC opposed the setting up of an international quasi parliamentary Jewish organization,
lest it imply that Jews owed an allegiance to one another that ranked above their allegiance to the political institutions of their own homeland.
When the creation of the World Jewish Congress was mooted,
the AJC objected to the view that the Jewish people was or could ever be regarded as a united national organism.
The wartime AJC President, Judge Joseph Proskower,