Louis D. Brandeis

Summary

Louis D. Brandeis, as Lahav presents him: leader of both the Progressive and the Zionist movements in America and the first Jewish justice of the United States Supreme Court, whose formula reconciling American and Zionist loyalty formed the young Simon Agranat, and whose defeat by Chaim Weizmann in the 1921 Split (see Brandeis-Weizmann Split) split Agranat’s loyalties for life (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 368-450).

By 1919 Brandeis had transformed American Zionism from a 12,000-person movement into an organisation with 176,000 members, against a Reform establishment that held Judaism a religion, not a nationality: “To be better Americans we must become better Jews, and to be better Jews we must become better Zionists” (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 368-385).
His objections to Keren ha-Yesod (an inflated £25 million budget, too large an American share, commingled donations and investments) precipitated the Split; Weizmann ridiculed his Jewishness as “Yankee Doodle Judaism” (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 385-420).
Agranat, who adored Brandeis the Progressivist and was proud of his elevation to the highest court, is read by Lahav as encoding loyalty to him in a Herzlite Passover editorial on Moses, the prophet raised as an Egyptian prince, counselling patience (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 420-450).
In Kol ha-Am (1953) Brandeis stands first among the American authorities (with Chafee, Hand, Holmes and Jefferson) whose influence Lahav says Agranat brought into Israeli law (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1330-1365).