Zionism's Frontier Legacies: Colonial Masculinity and the American Council for Judaism in San Francisco

In 2011, San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum curated an exhibit called California Dreaming: Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present. The ambitious exhibit illustrated the specific regional history of San Francisco's Jewish community. Arranged chronologically, most of the exhibit focused on the successes of Jewish families in San Francisco and the origin of major Jewish organizations until the exhibit reached the end of World War II. Instead of celebrating the end of the Holocaust, the exhibit instead needed to contend with the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) a Jewish anti Zionist organization whose strongest chapter was in San Francisco. The wall text of the exhibit explains the ACJ's popularity as a reflection of "local comfort," in that "the Jewish elite of San Francisco, who experienced very little anti Semitism and held many public offices, found it difficult to imagine the dangers encountered by Jews in Europe or even in American cities that were less welcoming toward Jews."1 The strength of San Francisco's anti Zionism was glossed over as a temporary aberration:With news of the Holocaust, the tenor of the local conversation changed. By the time the state of Israel was established in 1948, many ACJ leaders had come to regret their earlier positions, recognizing that the situation in the Bay Area was like no other community and that there was an urgent need for a Jewish state, especially for the Jewish refugees of Europe.2The museum's analysis of Jewish anti Zionism in 1940s San Francisco assumes several things about the relationship between Zionism, Jewish identity, and assimilation, namely, that Zionism is a global, populist movement, responding to an "urgent need for a Jewish state," and that anti Zionism must therefore be a result of assimilation, "comfort," financial success, and a kind of provincialism an inability to see beyond the success of Jews in the San Francisco Bay area.This article pushes against the assumption that American Zionism and American anti Zionism are mutually exclusive political ideologies and, particularly, that Zionism emerged in the United States as an alternative to Jewish assimilation. Rather, by examining the public statements of the San Francisco chapter of the American Council for Judaism, it argues that both Zionism and anti Zionism in the United States took up the project of assimilation and Jewish normalcy. As uniquely American political movements, both worked to situate American Jews within US racial liberal capitalism. In 1940s California, American Zionism and American Jewish anti Zionism shared similar ideals and discursive formulations, albeit while arguing for radically different positions regarding the role of the state of Israel in American Jewish life.The American Council for Judaism was founded in 1942 and quickly became the largest Jewish anti Zionist organization in the United States. Rather than see the ACJ as a precursor to the present day anti Zionist movements, I analyze the organization's attempts to resist Zionism by defining Jewish American identity through normative discourses of proper American colonial masculinity. The political project of the ACJ did not contest the dominant racialcapitalist order and in fact explicitly supported the supremacy of the United States. The ACJ touted Jewish capitalist success as evidence of US democracy and advocated for a uniquely American Judaism. Rather than dismiss the ACJ as assimilationist, however, I will situate their political position in the context of American Zionism's dominance and, in doing so, question the grounds for "assimilation" itself. The interplay between Zionism and the arguments of the ACJ reveals much about the complexity of belonging or assimilating in the postwar US urban landscape. Both the ACJ and the dominant Zionist organizations of the time were preoccupied with what made a "normal" Jewish life. As David Biale, Daniel Boyarin, Raz Yosef, and Todd Samuel Presner note, the boundaries of Jewish normalcy at this time were intimately connected to properly embodied masculinity.