Chapter 10: Havens and National Home
Study Questions
1) What impact did the immigration law of 1921 and 1929 (Johnson Act) in the United States have on Jewish immigration in particular?
2) What were the main branches of Judaism as it developed in twentieth century America and how did they differ?
3) Why does Gartner describe the Roman Catholic priest Charles Coughlin as “the most dangerous anti-Semite” of the Depression years in the U.S.? Was his agitation in any way successful?
4) What strategy did such U.S. Jewish organizations as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League employ for battling anti-Semitism?
5) Why did Zionism, in your opinion, manage to win over “only a minority of the Jewish people” in the U.S. and Europe prior to World War II despite a general sentimental attachment to Palestine?
6) By the early 1920s, Gartner observes that Jews in Palestine – despite the recently promulgated Balfour Declaration – began to feel that British support had begun to shift in favor of the Arabs. Why?
7) How did Louis Brandeis’ conception of Zionism differ from that of Chaim Weizmann?
8) How did the Histadrut (General Federation of Jewish Labor) in Palestine, later Israel, differ from its American counterparts of the 1920s?
9) What does Gartner mean when he says that political party membership in the new national Jewish homeland was “not a simple political affiliation but a way of life”?
10) Of what did the recommendations of the British Peel Commission of 1937
consist and why did they fail to lessen the conflict between Arabs and Jews
in Palestine? Do contemporary proposals for an independent Palestinian state
in the occupied territories in any way reflect this early attempt at a settlement?