American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust

Theodore Herzl, a Vienna journalist, realized that anti-Semitism, dramatically illustrated by the Dreyfus Affair in 1890s France, would never be stemmed by the attempts of Jews to assimilate. The publication of his Der Judenstaat in 1896 began the political movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It caught on in Europe but was moribund in the United States until World War I. Melvin I. Urofsky shows how the Zionist movement was Americanized by Louis D. Brandeis and other reformers. He portrays the disputes between assimilationist and conservative Jews and the difficulties impeding the movement until Arab riots, British treachery, and the Nazi horrors of World War II reunited American Jewry.