1968_4_arabisraelwar

204 / AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK, 1968
dience to unjust laws and superior orders, as well as the cooperation of Jewish
leadership with the Germans and the alleged passivity of the Jewish victims.
The publication in 1963 of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem
made exploration of these questions both more painful and disputatious.
That discussion, especially on the morality of "obedience to superior orders,"
in turn was applied, especially by young people who had not themselves experienced
the period of the Holocaust, to American involvement in the war
in Vietnam.
American Jews surprised even themselves by their intense response to the
six-day war. Yet the surprise itself was a phenomenon of that response. Previous
studies have shown a near-universal sentiment for Israel among American
Jews. A 1948 survey of Baltimore Jews showed an extraordinary sense
of Jewish solidarity: 95 per cent felt that American Jews should help the
Jews in Palestine, "even if the United States does not help" them. 5 A survey
conducted ten years later among Jews living in a highly acculturated Midwestern
suburb showed that 65 per cent of the respondents would feel a
"very deep" sense of loss "if the Arab nations succeed in carrying out their
threat to destroy Israel," 25 per cent would experience "some" sense of loss;
only 10 per cent said they would feel no sense of loss. About 70 per cent
explained that sense of loss as an expression of their feeling of Jewish
identity. 6
As the Arabs began to close in on Israel in the second half of May, American
Jews, so frequently accused of indifference and passivity, turned into a
passionate, turbulent, clamorous multitude, affirming in unprecedented fashion
that they were part of the Jewish people and that Israel's survival was
their survival. The Arabs had pledged Israel's destruction. Ahmed Shukairy,
leader of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army, had declared on June 1, in
Amman, Jordan: "When the Arabs take Israel, the surviving Jews will be
helped to return to their native countries; but I figure there will be very few
survivors." For the second time in a quarter of a century the Jewish people
was facing annihilation. But this time, somehow, things would be different.
There would be no passivity, no timidity. That was the mood of American
Jews.
Moods and Feelings
The moods, feelings, and spontaneous and organized actions of American
Jews testified to their sense of Jewish solidarity and their commitment to
Jewish survival. At first, anxiety and tension were commonplace reactions.
As the crisis deepened, irritability and nervousness became more marked.
5 Marshall Sklare and Benjamin B. Ringer, "A Study of Jewish Attitudes Toward the State
of Israel," in Marshall Sklare, ed., The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group (Glencoe,
111.: Free Press, 1958), p. 440.
6 Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenblum, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier (New
York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 215-216.