Singing the Land

Front matter

Eli Sperling

Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America

Eli Sperling

Introduction

1 Stephen S. Wise, The Jewish Institute of Religion, Abraham Wolf Binder, and New Palestinean Folk Songs in America

2 Solomon Schechter, The Jewish Theological Seminary, the Goldfarbs, and Harry Coopersmith

3 Mordecai and Judith Kaplan, Avraham Zvi Idelsohn, and Moshe Nathanson—Voices of Palestine

4 The Jewish National Fund—Land Purchases in Palestine, Fundraising in America, and Hebrew Music

Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index vii

137 173 183 217

Acknowledgments cS

Since I began to pursue academic research about Israel, the Middle East, and the America-Israel relationship as an undergraduate at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, through today, as an early career scholar at the University of Georgia, I have been the fortunate recipient of invaluable guidance and support from so many. Defining a comprehensive list of those I would like to thank in one page, let alone an order in which I would like to thank them is, indeed, an impossible undertaking. As such, I will begin by apologizing to those many figures in my life and career who I will not be able to thank in this acknowledgement. I sincerely hope I will have the chance to personally thank all of you who are deserving of recognition.

I extend my deepest thanks to: The University of Michigan Press’s staff, readers, Editorial Committee and, most notably, my editor, Sara Cohen. Your professionalism, feedback, and support allowed this book to be possible, in ways I couldnt have imagined prior to our work together. Professor Edwin Seroussi, well beyond agreeing to pen the foreword for this book, has been a defining figure and source of guidance in my academic life since he joined my doctoral committee in 2016. Professor Arieh Saposnik, my doctoral advisor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has proven to be an enduring, irreplaceable well of mentorship and guidance since he took me on as a graduate student and passionately encouraged my quite unique, interdisciplinary research interests from the start. Kenneth W. Stein, Emeritus Professor of History and Political Science and Director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel at Emory University (where I worked and conducted research from 2012- 2020), introduced me to Arieh, supported my research and doctoral studies with him, mentored me as his teaching assistant, and allowed me to continue my work with him at Emory in Atlanta remotely while I wrote my dissertaviii + Acknowledgments tion for one semester a year in the Negev Desert from 2015-2019. Without his continued confidence in my research and career, encouragement, flexibility, and support, none of the research presented in the following would have been possible. Professor Shai Ginsburg, my postdoctoral advisor and department chair at Duke University (2020-2022), encouraged me to embrace the unique beauty and quiet of Duke’s campus during the pandemic and write, as he skillfully mentored me through the arduous process of reimagining and rewriting my doctoral dissertation to be published as a book. His expertise, kindness, generosity with his time, and belief in the value of my work helped me transition from student to scholar, amidst quite uncertain times. Finally, I would like to extend my deepest thank you to my former high school teacher, Eric Hoffman. Without you recognizing something in me, which I didn’t necessarily see myself at the time, I would have never set sail on the enduring- journey which followed your Honors Humanities course with Barbara Hume during my senior year of high school in Bainbridge Island, WA during the early 2000s. You have inspired so many like me to think critically about the world and cherish the pursuit of knowledge.

Foreword coc

Rabbi Louis Werfel (1916-1943), one of the six Jewish chaplains of the USA armed forces stationed in North Africa during WWII and the only Orthodox Rabbi killed in action, spent one Sabbath in Wahran (Oran, Western Algeria). On that occasion he attended an Oneg Shabbat of the local Zionist youth and reported the following: “It was an inspiring sight to watch those French-speaking, Sephardic-familied youngsters, about 200 of them, singing the same Palestinian songs that our youngsters sing back in the United States.” “Palestinian songs” are, as Eli Sperling shows in this monograph, a code for what the Chalutzim (Jewish pioneers) and what eventually Israelis will call Shirei Eretz Yisrael (Songs of the Land of Israel). This vernacular Hebrew song repertoire emerged within the circles of modern Zionists from the 1880s onwards. It became emblematic of the movement’s territorial branch, i.e., those who saw as its aim the constitution of an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. The reception, distribution, and performance of this “Palestinian” Hebrew song repertoire in the USA are addressed for the first time by Sperling in this detailed and well-documented volume.

What Rabbi Werfel’s anecdote teaches us is a fascinating lesson that Sperling’s text illuminates from the perspective of American Jewish sources. We learn from this fleeting episode about the magnetism that the same repertoire of Hebrew songs stemming from the Yishuv, especially during the British Mandate era (1922-1948), had for significant segments of American Jewry as well as for Zionist-leaning Algerian Jews who were completely separated physically and culturally from their American coreligionists. As Sperling rightly emphasizes once and again, what I would call the “sonic allure” of the modern Hebrew song repertoire relied on an “interactive, communal x + Foreword performance and affirmation of their [the American Jews’] place in Hebrew national culture, ‘all as one,’ in solidarity with Zionists in Palestine and Jews elsewhere, as they practiced their Hebrew.” These two basic tenets, an embodied sense of sharing an imagined Jewish national space and the performance of the Hebrew language through singing (as opposed to actually speaking it), became hallmarks of a de-territorialized modern Jewish identity that ironically stemmed from the novel (and not overwhelmingly accepted) attempt to re-territorialize the Jews in their ancestral land.

Research on the Songs of the Land of Israel is a scholarly enterprise judiciously carried out by Israelis, academics, and more so by enthusiasts who perceive their dedication to this repertoire as a patriotic duty (see their flagship Zemereshet website assiduously consulted by Sperling). Their publications, radio and TV programs, and websites are exclusively in Hebrew, rendering these writings sealed to outside readers. The existence of a vibrant non-Israeli sphere of modern Hebrew song practices is hardly mentioned by them, and naming this revered song repertoire “Palestinian” certainly causes a harsh cognitive dissonance among its Israeli fans. There is therefore a need to de-Israelize the research on the modern Hebrew songs (i.e., texts performed with a melody) by focusing on the repertoire as it was received and performed outside of Palestine/Israel. Sperling’s present work significantly contributes to this much needed corrective. “Palestinian” songs spread through the Jewish world like wildfire soon after they were conceived in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. Through these songs, Sperling argues, American Jews “would internalize a sense that they were all part of a global Jewish nation that included Jews in the Yishuv, Europe, America...”

The “Palestinian” song came to America even before it was called “Palestinian,” in the period that precedes the one this book focuses on (as mentioned above, the British Mandate “interregnum”). Sperling rightly claims that territorial Zionism made its inroads to America since the late nineteenth century via the massive Eastern European Jewish immigration. Networks of ties between the immigrants in the new continent, the Old Country, and the incipient Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine already appeared at the early stages of the modern Hebrew song presence in America. An outstanding agent in this transfer of the incipient lyric Zionist capital was an immigrant from Belarus, Joseph Magil (Magilnitzki, 1871-1945). Magil settled in Philadelphia and opened there a Hebrew/Yiddish printing shop specializing in educational materials and Hebrew tutorials for Jewish schools, prayer books, Passover Haggadot, as well as songsters (the last as early as 1905). These products, among the earliest modern Hebrew songsters overall to include musi-

Foreword + xi cal notations (on in Yiddish, a fact stressed in the titles), included Hibat Ziyon (a proto-Zionist movement) songs and Yiddish lullabies amid newer items emerging from Ottoman Palestine of which Tikvatenu (aka Hatikvah), a song repeatedly addressed by Sperling in different contexts of his book, is one of the most notable ones. This song appears in Magil’s songsters, as Sperling shows in later periods, next to Degel Ha-kokhavim, the Hebrew version of the Star-Spangled Banner, a sign that already then Zionist leanings were not detrimental to or contradicting American patriotism. Magil’s Collection of Zionist and National Songs: The Best and Most Popular Songs of Famous Poets in Hebrew, English and Yiddish (Philadelphia, c. 1914) was his most comprehensive achievement in a field that, as Sperling shows, will burst into a torrent of creativity after the Balfour Declaration and the end of World War I.

Agents involved in the transmission of the modern Hebrew song repertoire in America were human and material, as one can learn from this monograph. Occasional American visitors to Palestine brought back with them oral knowledge and at times, notated songsters (in manuscript or printed). Such was the case of the Yiddish folk singer, composer, and author Anna Shomer Rothenberg (1885-1960), whose Songs Heard in Palestine (1928) stem from her field trip to Eretz Yisrael in 1927 and from the connections she established there with those involved in the creation and circulation of new Hebrew songs. On the other hand, “Palestinian Jews” visited America on fundraising missions while sharing songs from the Land of Israel with their audiences. And there were also those agents born or established in Palestine who immigrated to America for good, eventually called yordim (those who “descended” from the Promised Land) by the Yishuv’s zealous territorialists. Two towering figures exemplifying this type of agent, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn and Moshe Nathanson, are extensively addressed by Sperling and for very good reasons. They were not only authors of new Hebrew songs themselves (as were eventually local American-born Jewish composers), but were also deeply involved in the distribution of their songs and of the songs by others through the publication of songsters, recordings, and educational endeavors. In their turn, songsters acquired their own agency, detached from their creators and distributors. Once they stood on the shelves of libraries and Hebrew schools in America they could be accessed by educators or youth movement leaders unrelated to the agents who were involved in the conception of these song collections.

These movements of humans and objects that circulated over distances a song repertoire in constant flux were not exclusive to the Palestine-USA axis. The networks generated by these movements included many Jewish centers xii + Foreword in Europe, most especially in Germany and Poland, countries that hosted the largest Jewish communities outside the Russian Empire/Soviet Union and the Americas. Anneliese Landau, for example, reports from Germany the following: “In 1934, [Jakob] Schoenberg took advantage of the presence of a group of Palestinians in Germany to note down their folk songs and dance tunes when they sang for him at his special request. The following year he published a selection of these songs in the form of a handy little song-book [Shirei Eretz Yisrael, 1935] . . .”?

One can see in this German case the same patterns described and analyzed by Sperling for the USA. Migrations, unexpected encounters, ethnographic initiatives, and printing technologies all converge to produce a pocket-size songster destined to reach an audience eager to reenact through song and dance the “spirit” of the Yishwv in Palestine in a “foreign” land (from the Palestinian Jewish perspective). This malleable artifact containing music notations, Hebrew poetry and language (the “difficult” words of each song were translated by Schoenberg into German) could be easily carried by members of German Zionist-leaning youth movements, taken out on the spot and activated at any campfire or hike in the woods. As we know now looking back, however, the life span of this important 1935 Hebrew songster was a very short one, as its users found themselves displaced in the best of cases or perished in the worst. After the Holocaust this same artifact would offer us scholars a muted picture of the Palestinian Hebrew song as it was transmitted from Eretz Yisrael outwards by wandering Cha/utzim to the “diaspora” (from a Zionist perspective) or just to another Jewish “center” (from a German Jewish perspective) on the brink of catastrophe.

This center/diaspora fluidity evokes a poignant paradox rooted in the instrumentalization of the Palestinian song among the Zionist-leaning strands of American Jewry appropriately described by Sperling. The ethos of the Palestinian song (and dancing) repertoire that was dearly embraced by American Zionist Jews was deeply anchored in the eyes of its creators in the “negation of the diaspora” (sh/ilat ha-galut) concept.’ Put differently, there was a subtext in the Hebrew song that negated, among other real or imagined aspects of Jewish life in the “debased” diaspora, the model of a non-territorial Hebrew culture that developed on American soil.* This disavowal of the very possibility of an alternative “Promised Land” by most (but not all) Yishuvbased ideologues was embedded in some of the same songs warmly embraced by the agents analyzed by Sperling in this monograph.

If the “negation of the diaspora” ethos of Shirei Eretz Yisrael created a paradox once Palestinian Hebrew songs were increasingly adopted, in spite

Foreword + xiii of this negative substratum, by Jewish educators and Zionist activist as an ideal tool for the creation and maintenance of a Hebrew-based American Jewish option, American “diaspora nationalism” offered an alternative paradigm for the American Jewish self. For American non- or anti- Zionists, ‘Jewish music,” i.e., Yiddish songs, cantorial music, and klezmer, offered an alternative sonic venue, one rooted on the Eastern European imaginary, on the Brave Old World as center of authentic Jewish culture that was lost and reconstituted in the go/dene medine, rather than on a Palestine-centered one. Here, however, the fluidity of music as a system of signification clearly comes to the forefront when a same tune could have been deployed by different sectors of American Jewry as both “Palestinian” and “diasporic.” For the “Palestinian song” relied as much on tunes of Yiddish folksongs and Hassidic nigunim as it did on Russian marches and romances, as well as on Orientalist musicalizations of the “Orient” (generally disguised under the “Yemenite” label as Sperling stresses more than once in his text). These melodic resources were similar to those recruited by “diaspora nationalists” with the only exception being that their texts in modern Hebrew chanted the praises of the “New Jew” returning to the ancestral land as well as of the Land itself. We learn therefore that the same music could have been instrumentalized by the advocates of very different conceptions of American Jewishness. These conceptions though shared a common denominator: Palestine/Israel was not a destination but rather an ideal to be adopted or rejected.

Eli Sperling’s pioneering monograph opens unexpected new vistas for the understanding of contemporary American Jewry during its critical formative stages in the period between the two World Wars and expands the study of the modern Hebrew song beyond the borderlines of Israel. He has judiciously selected a group of key figures from Reform and Conservative institutional backgrounds who engaged with the “Palestinian song” as an indispensable tool for “musicking” a modern sense of Jewish peoplehood without forsaking American loyalty. Zionism, however, was a disruptive force within Jewish modernity in the sense that it polarized Jews who found themselves in increasingly diverse existential situations and divisive political camps. ‘These splits and contradictions embedded in the DNA of the Zionist cause, namely its transformational vision of territorial independence mixed with redemptive messianism, are coming to the forefront as these lines are being written. They surface not only in the rifts between American and Israeli Jews or between the American Jewry and the Israeli state, but also within the Israeli Jewish society itself.

Sperling concludes his study with the sound claim that today American xiv + Foreword

Jews (i.e., those who still have sympathies towards Israel and its culture) lean towards the most contemporary Israeli pop with no intermediaries, gatekeepers, and editors involved in the process of constituting the chosen repertoire or consuming it. One could add though that even the most current trends of Israeli pop carry at times the themes and sounds (and certainly the Hebrew language) of those Palestinian songs from a long-gone era of American Jewish history that Sperling captivatingly addresses in this monograph.

Edwin Seroussi

Bethlehem, New Hampshire, August 2023

Preface col

While beginning the research for this study in 2015 as a doctoral student at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, my initial intent was to investigate Hebrew music culture in the Yishuv (Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine) with a more peripheral focus on diasporic contexts. I commenced my archival work by collecting a variety of Zionist Hebrew song publications from the Yishuv and similar publications produced during this period in the US and Europe. To my surprise, I uncovered troves of Zionist-themed-Hebrew musical works from pre-1948 America, which often shared content and contributors. Previously unaware that such a body of music existed, I sought to contextualize these pieces from the US—many of which were produced during embryonic stages of American Zionism’s evolution in the early decades of the twentieth century. In doing so, I quickly learned there were limited numbers of scholarly sources that analyzed or mentioned this extensive body of publications. With ample literature on Hebrew music culture’s evolution in Palestine, Zionism’s broader evolution in America, and an abundance of understudied musical sources, it seemed natural to me, my doctoral committee, and my colleagues at the Emory University Institute for the Study of Modern Israel that the focus of my dissertation should be on novel aspects of American Hebrew song’s unique evolution. The research quickly uncovered a series of rich, illustrative Zionist songbooks, Hebrew musical curricular materials used in Jewish education, many Hebrew musical performances and recordings, as well as an often-overlapping assemblage of contributing characters and institutions integrally involved with proliferating aspects of Zionism and Hebrew national culture amongst American Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century.

xvi + Preface

Renowned Israeli musicologist Edwin Seroussi learned about the project early on in 2016 and connected with me through my doctoral advisor at Ben- Gurion University, Arieh Saposnik. Edwin was at the University of Chicago that year teaching courses and conducting research and had stumbled upon a series of American Zionist songsters from the pre-1948 period, like those I discovered during my own archival work. He was intrigued by these publications and wrote a course about them, which he taught in Chicago (in fact, one undergraduate student from that course wrote a wonderful and rich seminar paper about a particular source that I cite below). Edwin was pleased that I was working to uncover new elements of this unique story and joined my doctoral committee as an outside advisor. His early interest and guidance were crucial to the study’s development and in determining its importance as a novel and significant inquiry in the project’s early stages—which indeed helped concretize and narrow the focus of the work from the start. And as the project has continued to evolve and unfold past my doctoral studies into my early career as a scholar, the research and the insights I have gleaned from it have proven to possess interdisciplinary intrigue and value amongst a diverse range of audiences.

In 2020, historian Avi Shilon recounted that “in a meeting of the Forum for Young Scholars of Zionism at Tel Aviv University . . . [prominent historian] Anita Shapira, expressed sorrow for the young researchers, in light of the fact that the ‘big’ archival discoveries relating to the history of Zionism and its leading figures had already been made. What is left for historians to do, Shapira said, is to search for unique and more limited angles of research.” Shilon generally agreed with Shapira’s assessment, adding—amongst other clarifications and additions—that the resultant scholarship in the field often “employs a new, transnational perspective and . . . new methodologies and comparative research.”’ Shapira and Shilon are both correct. Yet, as a young researcher, the challenge of finding new methodologies and angles to pursue answers to novel questions in the field is not something I feel sorrow over, quite to the contrary.

Of course, key biographies of Zionist and Israeli leaders—like Shilon and Shapira’s respectively insightful biographies of David Ben-Gurion—as well as works that continue to unpack Israel’s complicated foreign relations, wars, domestic politics, society, demography, religious issues, leaders, and a variety of traditionally-pursued inquiries are and will remain to be of great value to the field of Israel studies, its many sub-fields and other disciplines. Yet, continuing to evolve and broaden the study of modern Israel and Zionism to include new modes of inquiry, comparative analyses, transnational angles,

Preface + xvii and subjects of focus that may not have been significant in the past—beyond providing novel research areas for a new generation of scholars—is quite a positive evolution in the field (a notion echoed by Shilon). New, innovative directions in research, even if narrower in scope, or studies that are not focused on well-known or central Zionist figures hold power to illuminate many important and possibly understudied aspects of and figures within Israeli and global Zionist history.

My intention for this book is to provide an accessible analysis of Hebrew music culture and Zionism’s parallel development in pre-1948 America to readers across the multiple fields within which I teach and within which I situate my scholarship—these include international affairs, Israel studies, Middle East studies, history, Jewish studies, and music. Further, the insights and historic context that this interdisciplinary study offers about the roots of American Zionism have proven to be useful and intriguing to certain nonacademic audiences with whom I interact as a public scholar. As such, it was a toilsome balancing act deciding which pieces of context and background information to include or omit without rendering the book either unsophisticated or indecipherable to any given reader. As such, I endeavored to include historic and other relevant contextual background in a way that would help the book be most useful to those diverse readers I wrote it for. What may seem familiar or contextually unnecessary to readers in one field or geographic area could be critical to those in another having the ability to fully understand the nuances of the arguments and analyses contained within the following. My hope is that such items that may seem redundant or superfluous to certain readers are clearly understood to be part of an effort to make the book as widely accessible as possible.

As I have pursued this research over the years, amongst my greatest surprises is the sheer numbers of Israelis and Americans that are not familiar with the complex origins of the American Jewish-Israel relationship during the pre-1948 period; something I hope to rectify in some way through the following. In service of this goal, and my hope that the work will resound with a variety of Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, I labored to avoid taking positions on Israeli-Palestinian national contests and intercommunal violence as part of the following. A variety of arguments can be made about the ways in which events and figures analyzed in the following impacted the Palestinian national movement and aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict before and after 1948. Yet, making those arguments is not my intention. Rather, in telling this story, I see my role as scholar to be that of an informant, offering an accessible analysis of the unique events and novel sources I uncovered in my archival xviii + Preface work. My deepest hope is that Singing the Land offers historic context and insights to readers across diverse ideological spectrums and backgrounds and helps inform their understanding of, and positions on, the implications and outcomes of Hebrew national culture’s evolution in Palestine and America prior to Israel’s establishment as a state.

Introduction oc

One afternoon in September 1947, forty-eight young demonstrators invaded the British Admiralty’s administrative offices, housed on the thirteenth floor of a Manhattan office building. The American Jewish students and their two leaders—both Jewish veterans of World War II—were protesting Britain’s recent refusal to allow entry to the Exodus ship full of European Jewish Holocaust survivors seeking safe harbor in British Mandatory Palestine and denounced the British Admiralty as “pirates” for returning “to Germany the passengers of the Exodus.” As the impassioned, mostly high school-aged protestors exited the building’s stairwells and piled into the office space, something quite distinctive occurred. Their voices joined in singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which they followed with Zionist Hebrew songs. Whereas the “Star-Spangled Banner” served as a performative affirmation of their American patriotism, the Hebrew songs enmeshed it with support for Zionist national aspirations to bring more Jews to Palestine and a sense of comradery with “those [Jewish] fighters for Israel”! clashing with the British colonial administration and Arab populations amidst political chaos in Palestine.

In 1947, American Jewish demonstrations against the British government and its immigration policies in Palestine were common. Likewise, American Jews expressing American patriotism astride pro-Zionist sentiments in the late 1940s is unremarkable and a well-studied aspect of American Jewish history. What is quite significant about this protest and indeed representative of an underexplored yet ubiquitous phenomenon in American Jewish and Zionist history is the distinct, central role those Zionist songs played in it. Why is it that the American national anthem and Zionist songs were the means through which these young Jews chose to express their sense of

American patriotism alongside their support for the Zionist national movement in Palestine? Further, how might Zionist songs have played a broader role in shaping American Jewish connections to and expressions of Zionism and Hebrew national culture in the years prior to this 1947 protest?

Through analyzing a selection of American Zionist song publications, curricular materials, performances, public programs containing Hebrew songs, journalistic coverage of Hebrew music culture, as well as other sources from the first half of the twentieth century,’ the following book demonstrates that Hebrew music culture was central to the processes that comprised what might be called the “Zionization” of American Jewry prior to Israel’s declaration of Independence in May 1948. Few American Jews during the period had been to Palestine and seldom did they interact with Zionists there prior to Israeli statehood. Considering this physical distance and the limitations of communications technologies, fostering an enduring sense of inclusion in the emergent Zionist national movement and its claims to land in Palestine amongst American Jewry required mechanisms for active participation in Zionist activities and Hebrew national culture from afar. Moreover, many Zionist activists and Jewish communal professionals integrated such Zionist engagements into already established Jewish settings, institutions, and contexts. Indeed, Hebrew national culture—including Zionist Hebrew songs— emerged as significant tools used to this end. Interdenominational Jewish educators, clergy, and Zionist activists successfully evolved Zionism’s presence in American Jewish life pre-1948, making it mainstream, and Hebrew songs were a common thread amongst their efforts.

American Hebrew national culture and music were shaped by diverse American Jewish tastes, needs, outlooks, and priorities as much as they were by cultural and national developments in Palestine, all of which were in active flux throughout the pre-1948 period. Likewise in flux were America’s diverse Jewish communities’ priorities in establishing minority religious communities across the US. American Jews were a socioeconomically, culturally, and religiously diverse population in the first half of the twentieth century. Further, different American Jewish sects and communities related to Zionism in diverse ways and on different timelines throughout the pre-1948 period. Yet, shared among most was the eventual integration of Zionist activism and Hebrew songs into their communal and religious activities by 1948. In the decades leading to 1948, growing numbers of American Jews sought and found outlets to learn about, develop a sense of inclusion in, and even “perform” aspects of Zionism and Hebrew national culture from afar as part of American-Jewish identity. As what follows demonstrates, Hebrew song helped bridge linguistic, cultural, and geographic gaps between the US and Palestine as many American Jews became Zionists, all while striving to climb the American socioeconomic ladder and build diverse, enduring Jewish religious and communal institutions prior to 1948.

This American Hebrew musical phenomenon did not come to fruition without the concerted efforts of many during the first half of the twentieth century to popularize Hebrew national culture, music, and Zionist engagement in the US, across denominational lines. One example of these efforts occurred in March ro1g. Henrietta Szold, American Zionist activist and founder of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization of America (established in 1912), wrote a letter to prominent musicologist, educator, and composer Avraham Zvi Idelsohn. At the time, Szold, amongst her numerous endeavors, served as Secretary of Education for the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA, established in 1897), an interdenominational Zionist association. Idelsohn was living and working in Palestine, seeking to uncover, recreate, and proliferate what he deemed to be an authentic Jewish national music. “The Department of Education of the Zionist Organization of America . . . desires to foster a love of Jewish music among its members . . . namely to unite the American diaspora through song with the Palestinian centre,” Szold wrote. She continued by requesting that Idelsohn keep her “informed of whatever may be produced in the way of Palestinian songs.” And since few in the US had much experience teaching the types of Hebrew songs which she anticipated that he may send to her, Szold further requested that Idelsohn share his methods in teaching those songs in “schools and other institutions” in Palestine so she could more impactfully use them as pedagogical tools to achieve her stated goal of uniting American Jews with those in the Yishuv.*

Szold’s early interest in utilizing Hebrew music as part of her Zionist activism went well beyond her correspondence with Idelsohn and work as the Secretary of Education for the ZOA. Szold was an outlier amongst leaders of American Jewish institutions and religious organizations—most of whom were men, educated and/or ordained at Jewish seminaries. Women were not ordained as Jewish clergy in America until the early 1970s,‘ and, more broadly, women in America had limited options to pursue professional careers or participate in social activism in the pre-1948 period. In her book, Hadassah and the Zionist Project, political scientist Erica B. Simmons argues that “Hadassah’s successful battle for autonomy [from the ZOA], especially fiscal autonomy,” achieved in 1933, “bolstered the organizations credibility amongst American Jewish women.” Such developments, combined with “Hadassah’s skillful propaganda, made Hadassah the largest American Zionist Organization during the interwar period.” Noting the importance of Hadassah to American Jewish women in the pre-1948 period, Simmons argues that “many were profoundly affected by their involvement in Hadassah.” Beyond providing social networks and access to activist outlets, Hadassah “became a training ground for learning new skills.” Hadassah’s work gave “women confidence in themselves as political activists and organizers and opened the way for them to find a public voice not only in the Jewish community but in the larger American community.” Simmons’s assessment of Hadassah’s role in creating unique activist and professional opportunities for women in the American Jewish community, as well as their impact on raising substantial contributions to Zionist fundraising goals in pre-1948 America are indeed reflected by my archival findings.