Pioneers, prophets, and pragmatists: American images of Israel and Jews, 1947-1960

The dissertation examines the changing image of Israel from just before the modern nation's founding in 1948 to the eve of the American-Israeli strategic alliance in 1960. The sample of images includes popular novels and films about Israel and American Jews, the public views of government policymakers towards the Middle Eastern country, and a selection of periodicals on the subject.;The dissertation illuminates links between the development of foreign policy towards Israel and Americans' popular ideology about their own identity and the evolving place of Jews in American society. The study outlines the cultural antecedants of the U.S.-Israeli alliance and suggests that the close relationship between the two countries would not have been possible outside of this cultural context. Unlike previous assumptions about American images of Israel and Jews, the dissertation argues that the images were transformed from 1947-1960 and that the most significant characteristic of those images was not whether they could be classified as "positive" or "negative," but that they depicted Israelis and Jews who were embraced as "insiders" in the Western and, therefore, American family.;The dissertation is divided into seven chapters, plus a preface and a conclusion. The preface discusses the methodology and purposes of the dissertation. The first two chapters discuss the development of the political discourse about Israel in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Chapter Three examines the themes of anti-Semitism and universalism found in the fiction about Jews in the late 1940s. Chapter Four looks at the fictional accounts of the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, and examines the resemblance between American and Jewish heroes. Chapter Five discusses 1950s biblical fiction, and finds parallels between the images of ancient and modern Israel. Chapter six looks at the 1950s fictional image of American Jews whose ethnic and religious identity is barely distinguishable from that of other Americans. Chapter Seven discusses the construction of an Arab "other" in American fictional and political discourse in a symbiotic relationship with the construction of a familiar, insider image of Israelis and Jews. The conclusion reiterates arguments from previous chapters and finds a culmination of the new image of Israelis and Jews in Leon Uris' Exodus.