Overview
If Israel was born through the blood and determination if it pioneers and soldiers, its creation also marked the triumphant achievement of decades of American Zionist persistence. But the creation of the Jewish State did not mark the end of American Jewish involvement; rather it was the beginning of a new and unique bond between Israel and American Jews, a relationship movingly chronicled and analyzed by Melvin I. Urofsky.
With the decimation of European Jewry in the Holocaust, the American Jewish community, led by the Zionists, mobilized to bring an independent Jewish homeland existence. An influential group of American Jews worked secretly to prepare Israel for her War of Independence by securing desperately needed supplies and raising millions of dollars for the purchase of arms. Zionists perseverance was such that minutes after Israel declared its statehood, President Harry Truman extended American recognition to the world's newest democracy.
Being midwife to Israel's birth was for America only a step in forging a relationship unique not only in American history, but in twenty-five centuries of Jewish history. There has never been free Diaspora community such as American Jewry, one so accepted, so influential in the tolerant pluralistic American milieu. Nor has there ever been a country like Israel-idealistic, energetic, creative, yet beseiged for thirty years by hostile neighbors.
The two communities have supported, loved and fought with each other. The inseparable bonds that unite them are the focus of this book. -on back flap