Nations Divided ― American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid

Historian Marjorie N. Feld chronicles American Jewish involvement in the global movement to end the system of racial injustice in South Africa. Many American Jews saw the fight against apartheid as a natural extension of their American Civil Rights activism. But others worried that critiques of South African apartheid would threaten the pursuit of post-Holocaust Jewish unity, diminishing Zionist loyalties along with Jewish visibility and difference. Even as the immorality of apartheid grew to be universally accepted, American Jews continued to struggle over persistent analogies between South African apartheid and Israel's policies in the Occupied Palestinian territories. This pioneering analysis of the long historical encounter between American Jews and systems of apartheid argues that as American Jews worked through their attitudes toward South Africa, they also began the contested work of defining their positions on Israel and Palestine. Ultimately, Feld concludes that American Jews' commitments to global justice reflect conflicting definitions of Jewishness itself.

Marjorie N. Feld, Ph. D., is Associate Professor of History and Faculty Director of the Center for Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership at Babson College, US. She teaches courses on US labor, gender, and social history. Feld is the author of Lillian Wald: A Biography, which won the Saul Viener Book Prize of the American Jewish Historical Society. She lives with her family in Watertown, Massachusetts.