An Azure Letter-to-the-Editor Reject

Michael Oren was at least as entertaining as the film he reviewed and certainly more intellectually stimulating. Nevertheless, his essay (“Post-Zionism, Hollywood Style”, AZURE No. 34, 2008), springboarded off of Adam Sandler’s “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan”, contained two errors of historical fact.

He asserts, p. 53, that, following the threat of American President Eisenhower to apply sanctions on Israel unless it retreated from the Sinai Peninsula after the 1956 Sinai Campaign, “the Jews of America remained silent”. Not all. The Betar Zionist youth movement attempted to protest what was perceived as unfair American pressure. A demonstration was conducted in the Garment Center district which led to the virtual expulsion of the movement’s Israel emissary. In addition, efforts were made by Betar and former Betar members to mobilize opposition to that administration pressure. Attempted approaches to such personages as Abba Hillel Silver, Henry Morgenthau Jr. , Felix Frankfurter and others were made with the assistance of Rabbi Louis I Newman, Eliyahu Ben Horin and Max Lerner however without success.

On page 54, Oren writes that “the first formal call for Jewish statehood was issued not in London or even Jerusalem, but in 1942 at New York’s Biltmore Hotel”. Not being sure of how “formal” is defined in this instance, I would suggest that at the 17th Zionist Congress of 1931 it was Ze’ev Jabotinsky who issued a formal call for Jewish statehood. His call for Jewish statehood was included in his proposal of an endziel declaration that Zionism meant the establishment of a Jewish state, with a Jewish majority in the original territory of the Jewish National Home as decided by the League of Nations prior to the British initiated partition that established Transjordan. The Congress voted against that suggested decision.

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh