Amy Kaplan's Our American Israel

"Our American Israel is masterful and deserves a larger audience." --Ta-Nehisi Coates
An essential account of America's most controversial alliance, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays our in our own time.

In 1945, it was not inevitable that a global superpower emerging victorious from World War II would come to identify with a small state for Jewish refugees, refugees who at that time were still being turned away from the United States. How, then, did so many in America come to feel that the bond between it and Israel was historically inevitable, morally right, and a matter of common sense. Our American Israel reveals how Israel's identity has long been entangled with America's belief in its own exceptional nature. Beginning at the end of World War II with debates about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and continuing through both the rise of evangelical Christian Zionism and the war on terror, 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. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an "invincible victim," a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon; its 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 profoundly difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that threaten to divide them.

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.

Review Quotes:
Fascinating...could hardly be more timely.--Andrew Bacevich "The Spectator"

Keen analysis...Kaplan's approach is so fresh, her command of the sources so solid, and her prose so engaging that both casual readers and experts will find new insights in the book.--Walter Russell Mead "Foreign Affairs"
Our American Israel is an incisive, urgently necessary excavation of the cultural meanings of the U.S.-Israeli relationship by one of the most perceptive cultural historians of the United States. It sheds powerful light on a troubled past and disturbing present, revealing the ways that narratives of similarity and connection were wielded against the demands of human rights and social justice.--Paul A. Kramer, author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines
Kaplan's tour of literature and film shows how common understandings of Israel and the U.S. have been shaped--and distorted, as with the Trump administration's relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem. A useful reading of history and politics in the light of mythmaking and media.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
Kaplan often confronts us with facts of history that are sometimes awkward and uncomfortable...But no American who loves and supports Israel can afford to ignore the arguments that she makes.-- "Jewish Journal"
Shows how the special relationship between Israel and the US (or even its Jewish population) was never preordained or inevitable. Rather, like any international relationship, it has been molded by a series of cultural and political mediations. In the tradition of critical scholarship Kaplan uncovers the constructedness of US approaches to the State of Israel and so contributes much to our understanding of it...Kaplan's study is of immense importance to anyone who wishes to study Israel in American culture in the past, present, or future.--David Hadar "American Literary History"
Revelatory... Our American Israel is a tour de force......The first work to describe, fully and rigorously, America's relationship with Israel in terms of the profound cultural ties that bind the two countries so closely together and to examine their evolving relationship over several generations.--Rashid Khalidi "The Nation"
A perceptive and revealing survey of the elements that have led to widespread popular support for Israel in the United States.--Ian J. Bickerton "Australasian Book Review"
Paints a picture of a United States determined to remain in a highly problematic relationship, periodically struggling to justify its forgiveness of and allegiance to a nation often at odds with their own international policy and philosophy...an exciting, well-written, and insightful study of American cultural perceptions of Israel.--Miriam Eve Mora "Journal of Jewish Identities"
Drawing on new archival sources and brilliant analysis, [this book] breaks new scholarly ground...joins a distinguished list of scholarship on the U.S.-Israel relationship.--Alex Lubin "Journal of Palestine Studies"
The best...of a surprisingly few books that analyze the cultural foundations of the U.S.-Israeli 'special relationship'...an important, well-constructed, and also well-illustrated book.--Walter L. Hixson "Washington Report on Middle East Affairs"

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