Summary
Rabbi who led the Zionist maximalists to leadership of U.S. Zionism in the early 1940s and built the American Zionist Emergency Council into an aggressive grass-roots campaign, in Perceptions of Palestine (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 620-626).
Details
- Silver pushed openly for Jewish statehood in Palestine and wrested the leadership of U.S. Zionism from the moderates; the maximalist view carried the day when his group won the support of the May 1942 Biltmore Hotel convention in New York for the plan presented by David Ben-Gurion to establish a Jewish state — the Biltmore Program, the first time U.S. Zionism had formally taken a unified position in favour of full statehood (lines 620-626).
- In 1943 Silver formed the American Zionist Emergency Council, organising local chapters in every community with a Jewish population and in the hometown of every influential member of Congress; within little more than a year it had four hundred local committees, and in 1944 it generated pro-Zionist resolutions and telegrams to Congress from as many as three thousand organisations (lines 628-636).
- Silver so enraged Harry Truman at a meeting in mid-1946, by shouting at the president and pounding on his desk, that Truman banned him from the White House and for some time refused to see any other Zionist leader (lines 776-778).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, American Zionist Emergency Council, Harry Truman, David Ben-Gurion