During the 75 years after the creation of the State of Israel, Zionists in the United States achieved hegemony in American Jewry and served as a pillar of support for Israel. During this period of time, antisemitism declined sharply in US society, culture, and politics, although it remained an important concern for liberal thinkers and political actors, and beginning in the 1970s many spoke of a “new antisemitism” that reflected hostility to Jewish power and status.
How did the changing position of Jews in North American society, and shifting ways of talking about Judeophobia, shape the American wing of the transnational Zionist movement? In this seminar, Douglas Rossinow explains these issues by examining themes and events in US Zionism’s history after 1948 in national, transnational, and international contexts.
Douglas Rossinow is Professor of History at Metro State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of books including The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s (Columbia University Press, 2015) and The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (Columbia University Press, 1998), and an editor of several collections including Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of US History (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Religious Left in American History: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is currently writing Promised Land: The Worlds of American Zionism, 1942-2025, which will be published by Oxford University Press.