Our American Israel

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.