Ideology or Philanthropy? the Politics of Zionist Fund-Raising

N 1930, organized American Zionism stood on the brink of complete collapse. Leaders and followers alike had generally ceased talking of the near-term prospects for a sovereign State. As a world-wide political movement, Zionism no longer quested immediately for statehood; Palestine was instead to be developed gradually. Far from being the potent political lobby described by many journalists a decade later, Zionism was largely a fund-raising movement dedicated to the economic reclamation and colonization of Palestine. In the words of one contemporary wag, a Zionist was a person who schnorred (Yiddish for begged) money from a second person in order to send a third person to Palestine. But even in this regard, Zionist success was feeble at best. Hampered by a crippling organizational deficit, the Great Depression, and a membership that had fallen to less than one-fourth of the 1918 high of 200,000, Zionist remissions to Palestine averaged only a million dollars annually. Little over a decade later, however, memberships in the American Zionist movement rose to almost 600,000 while funds raised for Palestine exceeded $100 million per year. Drawing upon a public of only five million persons, organized Zionist fund-raising in America far surpassed the drives of such well-established national philanthropies as the American Red Cross and the American Cancer Society. Indeed, it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that, measured by fundraising, American Zionism was the most successful political interest group in our nation's history. Behind this dramatic rise of American Zionist fortunes were, of course, various threats to Jewish interests: Hitler's extermination of European Jewry, the plight of the surviving Jewish refugees, indigenous American expressions of antiSemitism, Arab riots, and a growing hostility on the part of British officialdom toward Zionist colonization in Palestine. Although such attacks undoubtedly contributed to the success of American Zionists in activating their latent public, they alone cannot fully account for it. At best, such events provide only the backdrop for a bitter clash of interests in the American Jewish community between the Zionist proponents of a sovereign State and a variety of nonor anti-Zionist American Jews. It is still necessary to demonstrate how and to what degree American Zionists were able to exploit these historical events to realize their claims from a public which, perhaps in large measure latently sympathetic to Zionist aspirations, had hitherto defied all efforts at being placed in the practical service of a Jewish Palestine. This study concentrates on a vital yet scarcely studied dimension of interest group politics: the techniques of financing political action. Specifically, it tests an hypothesis implicit in many studies of interest groups and social reform movements, namely, that the concreteness and specificity of an interest group's

Fund raising · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Raising (metalworking) · Sociology · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Law · Public Administration

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