Yad Chaim Weizmann and the Westernness of Israel*
Zionist historical narratives and commemorative practices have focused to a great extent on articulating and endorsing the Jewish nation’s individuality, its unique bond with the Land of Israel and need for existential and territo- rial separation from the wider world.1 Certainly, the complex connections between Zionism and the Middle East and the West have been important aspects of Zionist culture since the inception of the movement.2 For the most part, however, these wider spheres of belonging have not featured in mainstream Zionist celebrations of the past, and appear to have been secondary to the chief concern of historicizing the Jews as a nation and their claim to the land.
An important exception to this picture, however, is to be found in the early years of the State of Israel, when the relationship between Zionism and the West became a key focus of Zionist public history. In the 1950s the Government
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Other articles within the volume
- Jewish personnel at Bletchley Park
- Reseach note on Dr Hector Nunes, Spanish agent
- George Berthold Samuelson (1889-1947): Britain’s Jewish film pioneer*
- Dr Joseph Hart Myers (1758-1823) and his family: public prominence and private losses
- The Bevin enigma: what motivated Ernest Bevin’s opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine
- Books and bookmen: the Cambridge teachers of Rabbinics 1 866-1 971
- Hybridity in a medieval key: the paradox of Jewish participation in self-representative political processes
- Anglo-Jewry in 1851: the Great Exhibition and political emancipation*
- “A Menace to Jews Seen If Hitler Wins”: British and American press comment on German antisemitism 1918-1933
- Berlin and Popper between nation and empire: diaspora, cosmopolitanism and Jewish life*
- Yad Chaim Weizmann and the Westernness of Israel*
- Sport or Shul? Physical recreation, Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish Sabbath, ca. 1890-1939
- In Memoriam: Raphael James Loewe 1919-2011
- Introducing the new edition of Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
- Preface
- The Institution of halukkah: a historical review
- Health and medical care of the Jewish poor in the East End of London, 1880-1914
- The Zion Muleteers of Gallipoli, March 1915—May 1916
