“Our South Africa Moment”: American Jews’ Struggles with Apartheid, Zionism, and Divestment

Abstract

In the 1980s and the 1990s, though Israel remained the single largest recipient of American foreign aid, many American Jews continued to feel under siege by anti-Zionist rhetoric that they saw sliding into anti-Semitism.1 Mainstream Jewish organizations had by then added their voices to the powerful antiapartheid movement, but they did so with an eye on the movement leaders’ rhetoric and actions with regard to Israel and Israeli policies. This had been their practice since the painful breakup of the New Left, the rise of Cold War alliances, and the Third World/Global South’s mobilization around Palestinian rights. To understand the flashpoints encountered in this study is to engage three interconnected narratives: growing resistance to South African apartheid, rising global attentiveness to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and increasingly tense disputes within American Jewish life over apartheid, Zionism, and Israeli policy.