Chapter 6 - Cold War Judaism

Summary

This last chapter presents Baeck’s imperial imagination in the postwar era. Baeck developed a bifocal view of Jewish history in this period, describing it as an ellipse circling around two poles. Whereas earlier these were, for example, the Northern and Southern kingdoms or Sepharad and Ashkenaz, in the postwar era Baeck locates the two centers in the United States and Palestine, and later the young state of Israel. In this new constellation, both needed each other. American Jews needed the State of Israel in order to be reminded of their particularity; the State of Israel needed American Jews to serve as a guard against nationalism and deification of the state. The Cold War brought with it new geopolitical constellations. Baeck imagined the United States as Atlas carrying the world. It played an important role not only in fostering Jewish life, but in serving as a bulwark against communism, and leading the United Nations in a more religious direction.