Join us on 11/3 at 7:00 PM ET for Passports for Palestine: Forged Travel Documents and American Volunteers in Israel's War of Independence with Professor Amy Weiss. Register here: https://uconn-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrc-6prDotE9bzwfOJVhhYjwpUpWYFE_7e
Approximately 1,100 Americans traveled to Palestine, and later Israel, between 1948 and 1949 to volunteer in the nascent Israel Defense Forces. The Nationality Act of 1940, however, had previously declared that Americans could lose their citizenship if they participated in a foreign military without the permission of the United States government. Given the illegality of joining Machal (the Hebrew acronym for the military unit comprised of “volunteers from abroad”), American Jews and a handful of non-Jews devised various clandestine methods to travel to Israel. An analysis of the legal and extra-legal frameworks used by American machalnikim to enter and exit Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War reveals the significance that travel played in these volunteers’ wartime experiences. It also reflects the tenuousness of the early US-Israel alliance, as the US government opposed participation in an overseas war, but the lack of overall prosecution for those that traveled to Israel suggested a more friendly and diplomatic response.
Amy Weiss, PhD, joined The Greenberg Center in January 2021, after completing a Thomas and Elissa Ellant Katz Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, where she began working on a book on American Jewish-evangelical relations. Her research and publications focus on the intersections of American Jewish history, Israel Studies, and Jewish-Christian relations, including her current book manuscript on American Jewish-evangelical interfaith relations and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most recently, Amy’s articles have been published in the journals American Jewish History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Israel Studies, and in the edited volumes Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and Minhagim: Custom and Practice in Jewish Life.
For more information, contact: Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at judaicstudies@uconn.edu