Summary
The Split, as Lahav presents it: the June 1921 clash at the American Jewish Congress convention in Cleveland in which Chaim Weizmann defeated Louis D. Brandeis over Keren ha-Yesod and the path of the Zionist Organization, declared “There is no bridge between Washington and Pinsk”, and made American Jews the “Other” of Zionism — the fifteen-year-old Simon Agranat’s first encounter with that dynamic, and a split in his own soul he spent a career trying to heal (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 150-178, 385-450).
Details
- The immediate cause was Keren ha-Yesod, the European leadership’s £25 million fund for the Yishuv, which Brandeis criticised as inflated in budget and American share and fiscally unacceptable in commingling donations and investments (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 390-410).
- Lahav presents Weizmann’s campaign as a revival of the East–West cleavage of 1904: Europeans as vision and yiddishkeit and yiddische herzen (Jewish hearts) against Americans as “plain Americans” with goyische kops (gentile heads); the mostly immigrant Cleveland voters gave Weizmann overwhelming support and the defeated Brandeis camp left the movement (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 395-425).
- Aaron Agranat, a delegate, voted for Weizmann and, Simon said sixty years later, dictated his son’s Herzlite editorial praising Keren ha-Yesod as a “noble institution”; Simon’s second editorial, on Moses counselling patience, is read by Lahav as coded loyalty to Brandeis (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 420-450).
- Lahav closes the arc in 1953: thirty-two years after the no-bridge declaration, Agranat’s Kol ha-Am opinion, built on American First Amendment doctrine, “built a bridge between Washington and Jerusalem” (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1340-1365).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Louis D. Brandeis, Chaim Weizmann, Simon Agranat