William Zuckerman was born in 1885 in the Pale of Settlement, that part of the Russian empire to which Jews were largely confined, a place of poverty and pogroms. His family managed to escape, emigrating to America in 1900.
During the First World War, Zuckerman returned to Europe to work with a charity aiding American Jewish soldiers. Later, he settled in London, establishing the European bureau of Der Morgen zshurnal, an influential American Yiddish newspaper. In 1948, having returned to America, he founded the Jewish Newsletter, just as the new state of Israel was born. Zuckerman’s columns were syndicated in dozens of Jewish newspapers and he became the New York correspondent of the British Jewish Chronicle.
Zuckerman might have been embraced by the Jewish establishment as a model public figure but for one problem. He was critical of the policies of the newly created Jewish state, especially towards Palestinian refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom had fled or been driven out and were now barred from returning. “The land now called Israel,” Zuckerman wrote, “belongs to the Arab refugees no less than to any Israeli.”
Zuckerman’s advocacy for Palestinian refugees alarmed Israeli diplomats who successfully organised a behind-the-scenes campaign to prevent his work from being published in the Jewish press. “To have induced the Jewish Chronicle to dispense with the services of Mr Zuckerman is to have performed a real mitzvah,” rejoiced one official.
The story of Zuckerman and his erasure is one of many told by Geoffrey Levin in his new book Our Palestine Question, on the forgotten history of Jewish dissent in America in the decades following the founding of Israel. It is one of several accounts that will be published........