Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan Panel Discussion

Join us on Wednesday, April 2 at 7 PM for a panel discussion with Mark Firmani, Judith Frank, and Mary Renda on Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by the late Amy Kaplan. The panel will be moderated by Elizabeth Garland.

"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.

Mary Renda, Emily Dickinson Professor of History at Mount Holyoke, is the author of Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940 (UNC Press, 2001) and most recently, an essay, “Indigenous Women Confront New Formations of State Violence and Global Capital” in Voices of Indigenous Women in North America, American Empire, and the Global South, 1820-2020, A Syllabus with Documents (Alexander Street Press, 2024). Her current book project examines the founding of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as a chapter in the history of North American settler colonialism.

Mark Firmani received his JD from Yale Law School and his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Amy Kaplan chaired his dissertation committee as he completed a project exploring how Iraqi writers have used fiction to critique the international laws that licensed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation. During his time at Penn, he also worked as Amy's research assistant while she finished Our American Israel. He teaches at Amherst College.

Judith Frank is the author of Crybaby Butch (Firebrand Books, 2004), and All I Love and Know (William Morrow, 2014), which explores the Israeli occupation of Palestine through the domestic life of a Jewish-American gay man who inherits two children after his twin brother and sister-in-law are killed in a Jerusalem bombing. They are currently at work on a collection of linked short stories about American and Israeli Jews living their lives during the Palestinian genocide. They teach at Amherst College.

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