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Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance

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An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time.

Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.

Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants, the revolt against colonialism. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War, when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation. Israel’s military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity.

In America today, Israel’s political realities pose difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.

ISBN-13: 9780674737624

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Publication Date: 09-17-2018

Pages: 368

Product Dimensions: 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

Amy Kaplan was Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Our American Israel, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, and The Social Construction of American Realism, she was a past president of the American Studies Association and was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Lands of Refuge 10

2 Founding Israel in America 58

3 Invincible Victim 94

4 "Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past" 136

5 The Future Holocaust 178

6 Apocalypse Soon 211

7 Homeland Insecurities 239

Conclusion 274

Notes 283

Acknowledgments 331

Illustration Credits 335

Index 337