‘And Mordecai Bowed Not Down’ Abba Hillel Silver’s Complex Zionist Struggle against Nazism

Abstract

The article deals with the early coping patterns of the activist American Zionist leader, Abba Hillel Silver, in his struggle against anti-Semitism and Nazism in the 1930s and early 1940s. It focuses on two seemingly contradicting strategies – a militant-particularistic pattern and a universalistic one – arguing that both were part of a single complex pattern that characterized Silver’s activity throughout the entire period. 

After Hitler’s rise to power, Silver headed a non-sectarian, anti-Nazi movement that boycotted German goods. In the late 1930s he gradually became one of the leading activists in American Zionist leadership. He saw his mission as galvanizing an assertive Jewish response to Nazism and anti-Semitism instead of stressing Jewish victimhood and self-segregation. Activism, he believed, would reinforce the group’s status as an integral part of its non-Jewish surroundings. 

In Silver’s view, and that of his large American Jewish following, Zionism was the movement that would turn the collective Jewish quest into an American patriotic assertion. The article examines the early expressions of this ambitious endeavor, noting its inherent weakness and strengths just before it became the most popular movement in the American Jewish community in the late 1940s.