The question of who should speak for the Jews is not a new one, nor is the question of whether or not Israeli political or religious leaders can or should speak on behalf of American (or other Diaspora) Jews. It dates back to a series letters between Jacob Blaustein, then the head of the American Jewish Committee, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, detailing exactly how America’s Jews can and should support the Jewish State and what that support or allegiance would look like.
It was in those letters that America’s Jews were formally absolved from any allegiance to the Jewish State, and it was promised that America’s Jews would never have to choose between Israel and America. However, this would not be the end of the complicated question of whether or not Israeli political leaders can speak for the world’s Jews. These letters were exchanged in 1950, and, yet, we still conveniently seem to forget that until 1967 and Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, Reform Judaism, was ambiguously Zionist at best when it passed its Columbus Platform in 1937, and was against the notion that the Jews were a nation for a large part of its history. The American Jewish Committee was officially “non-Zionist” until 1967. Indeed, the exchanges between Blaustein and Ben-Gurion were specifically to assuage the fear that American Jews would have to choose between being loyal to Israel and being loyal to America. To be sure, there were Zionist leaders, such as Judge Louis D. Brandies, and poet Emma Lazarus (of “The New Colossus” fame), who called for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine before the term “Zionist” was even coined. Neither Brandeis nor Lazarus, however, could speak for the majority of America’s Jews. And, yet, today’s leaders of the Jewish community in America like to tout Israel as the consensus issue around which American Jews can organize themselves.
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