CHAPTER ONE

From Moment to Movement

Jewish-American Immigration to the Occupied Territories

“LET ME PUT IT this way,” Dr. Jay Shapiro resolved of his life decision to immigrate to Israel in the midst of the Six Day War, “the first thing I said to myself is what … if 30 years from now, my children said to me, where were you when the State of Israel was in danger? At the time I was on a path or trajectory that was very common for young America Jews.… I could say to them I had a great position and a good salary. And somehow that wouldn’t cut it.… In the final analysis you have to answer to yourself: God forbid the State of Israel was destroyed, thirty years later, I look in the mirror and say, ‘Why wasn’t I involved somehow?’ ”1
For a generation of Jewish-American activists like Jay Shapiro, the 1967 war “moment” was the genesis of a transformative journey that has mobilized the participation of over 60,000 American-Israelis within the Israeli settler movement over the past five decades. As a demographic profile reveals, many of his peers were just like him: highly educated, upwardly mobile young professionals who strongly identified with both their Jewish heritage and the liberal social movements of the heady 1960s and 1970s. As Jay Shapiro articulated, this background was bolstered by their lived experience of the 1967 war and its aftermath in America, which foregrounded six frantic days of unprecedented activism against a backdrop of concurrent trends including a Holocaust reckoning, ethnic revival, and the changing role of Jews within the New Left in 1960s and 1970s. For many men and women like Jay Shapiro, a comfortable life of career success in America was no longer an option with the fate of the State of Israel and the occupied territories at stake.
While Jay Shapiro immigrated to Israel in 1969, later moving to the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron where he became a spokesperson for the Israeli settler lobby, the path from moment to movement was more commonly one of circular routes and historical detours. In many cases, it was initial contacts as tourists, volunteers, and students with Israel and the occupied territories after the 1967 war that inspired some to join the incipient Israeli settler movement. Although there was limited settlement activity before the 1973 war, a few intrepid American-Israelis joined the nascent Israeli settler enterprise in its major projects of the period at Kibbutz Kfar Etzion and Hebron in the West Bank. There were also those “who had a dream” of larger-scale settlement of Jewish-American immigrants beyond the Green Line, including the short-lived plan for “Shalom City, Israel.”
For early American-Israeli settler activists like Jay Shapiro, the interwar period provided both a framework for future activities and models for later collective immigration projects. It also introduced a unique rights-based discourse combining biblical imperatives with modern-day pioneering and utopian promise that would come to define the American-Israeli city on a hilltop in the occupied territories. In less than a decade, a moment would truly become a movement for a cohort of Jewish-American immigrants at the center of this highly contested enterprise.

From Data to Destiny? A Statistical and Demographic Profile of Jewish-American Settlers

First, it must be noted just how exceptional Jay Shapiro and his colleagues are: less than 5 percent of Jewish-Americans have immigrated to the State of Israel since its founding.2 American-Israeli migrants—and the even smaller group that have settled beyond the Green Line—are only a minuscule proportion of American Jewry, who themselves are a small minority in the United States.3 Nonetheless, they have played an outsized role in the occupied territories over the past fifty years.
The two decades between the 1967 war and the first intifada witnessed the highest number of Jewish-Americans decamping from the United States to fulfill their Zionist dreams. Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, a mere trickle of 6,000 American Jewish immigrants moved to Palestine, constituting only 1.5 percent of new migrants in the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community under the British mandate).4 To put these numbers in some perspective, nearly 6,000 immigrants transplanted themselves to Israel in 1969 alone.5 Jay Shapiro joined more than 30,000 potential and actual immigrants from the United States who journeyed to Israel between 1967 and 1973.6 Since the 1970s the rate of immigration decelerated dramatically, dropping below the annual average of the pre-state period. However, in recent years, the rate of Jewish-American immigration has started to accelerate again and a steady stream of these new arrivals have joined earlier generations in settling beyond the Green Line.7
Of the approximately 400,000 settlers who live beyond the Green Line today, a statistically significant percentage—which I estimate at 15 percent—are of Jewish-American origin and hold citizenship in the United States.8 While it must be acknowledged that the available data sources are limited and possibly politically tainted—I call upon statisticians to conduct a comprehensive, objective, and accessible survey for scholars—this figure indicates that Jewish-American immigrants are a large and overrepresented cohort both within the general settler population and among American-Israeli citizens in Israel / Palestine.
Even though numbers alone convey their significant historical contribution to the Israeli settler movement, this cohort’s demographic profile illuminates some of the forces that put them on a path from moment to movement. In his study of Jewish-American migrants to Israel after 1967, Gerald Berman surmised that “[the] question of why people migrate is not so easily distinguishable from the question of who migrates.”9 If the central question for these men and women was “Given who I am, where do I belong?,” a closer examination of their backgrounds and lived experiences helps clarify why the answer for many of these Jewish-American activists could be found over the Green Line.10 Gary Mazal described the group he joined to settle the Sinai as “We were all different, we came from different states. Most were married, about half had kids, and two of us were single guys. We ranged from secular to very observant. We had different levels of education and divergent interests, except when it came to Yamit. There we were all united.” Yet this diversity belied the larger congruities among his cohort.11 In fact, looking more closely, Mazal’s generation over the Green Line had much in common.
Perhaps predictably, the vast majority of Jewish-American migrants to Israel came from major urban population centers with large concentrations of American Jews on the East Coast (66.2 percent), the Midwest (12.8 percent), and California and the West (11.3 percent).12 Many of the Jewish-American settlers profiled in this book hailed from the New York City area, although some had moved to Israel from places as far-flung as Cincinnati, Ohio, San Antonio, Texas, and Miramar, Florida. Certainly the surroundings in which they were reared in the United States shaped the kind of communities they hoped to create in the settlements. Settlement founders like Shlomo Riskin and Bobby Brown, residents of Manhattan, were eager to escape urban life for “religious pioneering on the suburban frontier” in the occupied territories.13 Others, like Malka Chaiken from Philadelphia, and David Wilder from Paterson, New Jersey, had grown up in American cities that had experienced ethnic friction, which was formative to their understanding of the conflict at Hebron. Others hoped to replicate relished attributes of their upbringing in the United States, as Robert Smallman from California and Carole Rosenblatt from Florida continued to enjoy the coastal lifestyle at Yamit.
It seems probable that the geographic dimension of immigration was a self-reinforcing trend. Individuals were more likely to move if they had migration infrastructure (such as Israel Aliya offices or branches of an immigration-promotion movement) in their cities, an American social network in Israel, and the promise of a lifestyle that comported with what they had in the United States. More than half of the subjects of scholar Chaim I. Waxman’s small study of Jewish-American settlers in the 1980s cited “associational” considerations, not just ideological convictions, in their choice to migrate. This group who moved over the Green Line tended to “like [the] type of community” (35%) especially if it resembled their lifestyle back home, explained it was “convenient, had friends here, it was available” (18%), and established new settlements as they “wanted to be a pioneer and wanted [the] challenge of starting a new community” (5%). Sharon Katz expressed how she was drawn to the settlement of Efrat not only out of deeply-held religious principles but the dream of a suburban paradise where she could still eat a New York–style bagel on a Sunday morning.14 For Shmuel Sackett, the proximity to friends, family, and an English-speaking community in the tony residential neighborhood of Neve Aliza of Karnei Shomron was part of what convinced him to settle beyond the Green Line.15 In contrast, for native New Yorker Bobby Brown, both his adherence to notions of Greater Israel and the desire to escape the American suburban experience of having his neighbors tell him “how high his grass could grow” inspired him to found the counter-cultural township of Tekoa in a far corner of the Gush Etzion bloc.16 Drawn to antiestablishment enclave cultures, suburban communities, and upstart settlements that desperately required both manpower and capital, many American-Israelis mobilized both the literal and metaphysical geography of their lives in the United States in moving beyond the Green Line.
There is currently some evidence that the cost of living for Jews in America’s major urban centers has encouraged a new wave of economic migration to Israel and the West Bank.17 Although some settlements do offer the possibility of putting a higher quality of life within middle-class financial reach, most Jewish-American settlers today are not prompted to immigrate solely for financial reasons.18 Further, the price of real estate in many of the most popular settlements with Jewish-American immigrants is competitive with urban parts of the United States—for example, housing values in the West Bank settlement of Efrat often exceed $1 million for an average single-family home. Rather, Jewish-Americans are propelled to the occupied territories by a complex interplay of ideological, associational, and lifestyle factors, which they import to Israel / Palestine.
In fact, most of the 1967 war cohort of U.S. migrants to Israel (70 percent) were born in the United States and were second- or even third-generation Americans.19 These idealists were young—nearly half were under age twenty-five and more than two-thirds were below age thirty-five at the time of immigration.20 Many, including more than half of female immigrants to Israel, were single and transplanted themselves, at least in part, to seek a Jewish spouse.21 Jewish-American settlers were more likely to come as married couples than were their migrant peers, but young bachelors like Gary Mazal and Yisrael Medad and divorcees like Robert Smallman and Carole Rosenblatt saw the settlements as sites of both ideological and social opportunity.
Since the 1970s the generational data on Jewish-American immigrants to Israel and the occupied territories has changed dramatically. Today’s migrant is older, with a mean age of thirty-seven, and almost a quarter of individuals moving to Israel are now over the age of forty-five. Most immigrants (73 percent) are attached to a family unit.22 Israelis have recorded the highest rates of child-bearing within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)23 and Jewish-American residents beyond the Green Line tend to have very large families that surpass these statistics. Several individuals I interviewed had six to ten children including many who were born in Israel and constitute successive generations of American-Israeli settlers.
What is particularly striking about this data is that even as second- and third-generation Americans, these settlers seemingly felt far less socially rooted in the United States than their contemporaries. However, other elements of this profile explain why they were restless to fulfill their Jewish destinies—even at an older age with more family obligations as the years went on—than many of their peers in the United States.
Although the stereotype of Jewish-American settlers as ne’er-do-well wanderers persists, their migration was not for want of economic opportunity in the United States. Goldscheider found that 84 percent of Jewish-American immigrants had some college education in the United States and at least 80 percent of those who entered the workforce in Israel were employed in the white-collar sector. These qualifications vastly exceeded those of their contemporaries in the United States and especially in Israel in this era.24 While the educational an...