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Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance 2025
by Amy Kaplan (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars (54)
"Our American Israel is masterful and deserves a larger audience." -Ta-Nehisi Coates
An essential account of America's most controversial alliance, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays our in our own time.
In 1945, it was not inevitable that a global superpower emerging victorious from World War II would come to identify with a small state for Jewish refugees, refugees who at that time were still being turned away from the United States. How, then, did so many in America come to feel that the bond between it and Israel was historically inevitable, morally right, and a matter of common sense. Our American Israel reveals how Israel's identity has long been entangled with America's belief in its own exceptional nature. Beginning at the end of World War II with debates about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and continuing through both the rise of evangelical Christian Zionism and the war on terror, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.
Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations' histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an "invincible victim," a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon; its military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity.
In America today, Israel's political realities pose profoundly difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that threaten to divide them.
Review
What makes Kaplan's book unique is that she is a cultural critic, seeing in the myths and stories disseminated by writers, filmmakers and journalists the enforcement of the peculiar beliefs that sustain the bond between the Zionist state and Washington.--Chris Hedges (5/28/2025 12:00:00 AM)
A perceptive and revealing survey of the elements that have led to widespread popular support for Israel in the United States.--Ian J. Bickerton "Australasian Book Review" (7/1/2019 12:00:00 AM)
Drawing on new archival sources and brilliant analysis, [this book] breaks new scholarly ground...joins a distinguished list of scholarship on the U.S.-Israel relationship.--Alex Lubin "Journal of Palestine Studies" (8/1/2019 12:00:00 AM)
Paints a picture of a United States determined to remain in a highly problematic relationship, periodically struggling to justify its forgiveness of and allegiance to a nation often at odds with their own international policy and philosophy...an exciting, well-written, and insightful study of American cultural perceptions of Israel.--Miriam Eve Mora "Journal of Jewish Identities" (1/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)
The best...of a surprisingly few books that analyze the cultural foundations of the U.S.-Israeli 'special relationship'...an important, well-constructed, and also well-illustrated book.--Walter L. Hixson "Washington Report on Middle East Affairs" (7/30/2019 12:00:00 AM)
Revelatory...Our American Israel is a tour de force......The first work to describe, fully and rigorously, America's relationship with Israel in terms of the profound cultural ties that bind the two countries so closely together and to examine their evolving relationship over several generations.--Rashid Khalidi "The Nation"
Our American Israel is an incisive, urgently necessary excavation of the cultural meanings of the U.S.-Israeli relationship by one of the most perceptive cultural historians of the United States. It sheds powerful light on a troubled past and disturbing present, revealing the ways that narratives of similarity and connection were wielded against the demands of human rights and social justice.--Paul A. Kramer, author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines
Fascinating...could hardly be more timely.--Andrew Bacevich "The Spectator" (12/8/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Kaplan often confronts us with facts of history that are sometimes awkward and uncomfortable...But no American who loves and supports Israel can afford to ignore the arguments that she makes.-- "Jewish Journal" (9/13/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Kaplan's tour of literature and film shows how common understandings of Israel and the U.S. have been shaped--and distorted, as with the Trump administration's relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem. A useful reading of history and politics in the light of mythmaking and media.-- "Kirkus Reviews" (8/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Keen analysis...Kaplan's approach is so fresh, her command of the sources so solid, and her prose so engaging that both casual readers and experts will find new insights in the book.--Walter Russell Mead "Foreign Affairs" (11/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Shows how the special relationship between Israel and the US (or even its Jewish population) was never preordained or inevitable. Rather, like any international relationship, it has been molded by a series of cultural and political mediations. In the tradition of critical scholarship Kaplan uncovers the constructedness of US approaches to the State of Israel and so contributes much to our understanding of it...Kaplan's study is of immense importance to anyone who wishes to study Israel in American culture in the past, present, or future.--David Hadar "American Literary History" (6/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)
About the Author
Amy Kaplan was Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Our American Israel, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, and The Social Construction of American Realism, she was a past president of the American Studies Association and was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
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Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled AllianceProduct details
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Publication date : 26 September 2025
Edition : 1st
Language : English
Print length : 368 pages
Best Sellers Rank: 100,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)74 in Jewish Social Studies
160 in Religion & Sociology
178 in History of Israel & Palestine
Customer Reviews:
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars (54)
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robert jaffe
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent transactionReviewed in the United States on 24 September 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
book was in mint condition, and arrived promptly
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Angelica Sampaio
5.0 out of 5 stars A vaccine against manipulation, great!Reviewed in Germany on 4 September 2025
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
A very important book for those of us who want to learn more about how we got to where we are now.
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Jane Wilson
5.0 out of 5 stars Unread but essentialReviewed in the United States on 25 March 2024
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
I’m sorry Harvard UP has done such a poor job of promoting this essential book, which is needed now more than ever after Oct 7. It should be a key part of the Israel/Palestine conversation, but remains in obscurity.
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Yovanka
4.0 out of 5 stars Font size too smallReviewed in the United States on 25 July 2025
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Great book but font size way too small
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E. Jahneke
5.0 out of 5 stars I learned a lot from this book...Reviewed in the United States on 10 June 2019
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
glad I read about it in The Nation. I didn't know much about Israel, and what I thought I knew was part of many years of image campaigns that Ms. Kaplan explains. Even though I wasn't very knowledgeable at the start, the book has an accessible style that I followed easily and wanted to read(it usually is a pleasure to read an expert on a theme that she has a passion for, as long as she doesn't treat it like a big secret!)
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Randall Wallace
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January 25, 2024
Today we see Facebook and Instagram plastered with Jewish posts claiming, “Never Again!” but do you know where that phrase comes from? “It was invented in 1970 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a right-wing Jewish nationalist who made Netanyahu seem like Gandhi. When Kahane went to Israel, the party he created was banned for being too “Nazi-like” and “racist.” Zionism was a win-win for American racists; it kept Jews away. Most Americans disapproved of admitting Jewish refugees after WWII; when Truman tried to ease refugee quotas, “a poll showed that 72% of [US] respondents disapproved”. But when asked if we could ship them to Palestine, “78% of those polled approved.” Yeah, make ONLY the Palestinians pay for the crimes of the Germans. The kibbutz evoked “idealized images of America’s past”; where settlers and their guns forced natives off their land.
I. F. Stone wanted Jews and Arabs to “live together on an equal basis” which he called a “nobler and politically sounder goal than any narrow Jewish nationalism.” Stone pointed out that “a kindred people was made homeless in the task of finding homes for the remnants for Hitler’s Holocaust.” “One pro-Zionist American journalist wrote, Now, we have a situation in which the Jews have done to others what Hitler, in a sense did to them.” Stuart Alsop called Israel “an atavistic garrison state.”
Exodus: The book and film Exodus was a massive propaganda tool for Zionists – “a militant Israel founded by tough Jewish warriors fighting for a righteous cause.” It Americanized the Zionist narrative of Israel’s origins. It removed the history of Jews wielding guns and dynamite while committing terrorism (by the Zionist Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi) to better make its point by avoiding clear regeneration through violence. The historical ship carried mostly adults, but Uris made it a ship of orphans to get more sympathy. It worked because Americans always cry faster over starving children – just as long as they aren’t Palestinian. Uris wrote his father, “I am writing the book for Americans …Gentiles …not for Jews. This is Israel …the fighter who spits in the eye of the Arab hordes and dares them.” I’ll bet Bill Maher would love such brazen Islamophobia. Exodus insulted Jews from concentration camps by making them helpless and victims while instead the New Jew was a fighter. Uris insulted Palestinians for not defending their homes in 1948. Apparently, shamelessly stealing is NOT wrong, but reflexively pausing to use violence is. Who knew? Uris pretended Palestine was “a land that had lain neglected and UNWANTED for a thousand years in fruitless despair until Jews rebuilt it” by ignoring the fact that by 1870, the Jaffa orange trade was exporting 38 million oranges - a dozen years before the first Zionist settlers showed up – and also Uris hated the “negative portrait of war and military authority” in “The Naked and the Dead”, “The Caine Mutiny”, and “From Here to Eternity”. Who can blame him? I hear that dirty Commie Jesus didn’t like war either. The job of Uris’s Exodus twaddle was to insult the Diaspora Jews, while deifying the fighting New Jew [the terror-inducing racial purist borrowing endlessly from Nazism, but never TOO overtly]. The New Jew was virile - like Rock Hudson when he wasn’t at a gay bar.
Uris Part Two: Otto Preminger and Dalton Trumbo found Uris far too unsympathetic to both the British and the Arabs. “Both the film and the novel effaced the violent dispossession of Palestinians.” “Exodus presents the establishment of Israel as a universal good.” Uris wrote “of the Arab failure to advance culturally, economically, and socially from the Dark Ages.” Who knew Uris was clueless about Arabs giving us mathematics, astronomy, medicine and architecture, while conveniently forgetting the Spanish Inquisition, and the conscious destruction of most pagan knowledge by the Catholic Church which set off those same Dark Ages. Uris framed Deir Yassin Massacre as an exception that comically had nothing at all to do with Palestinians in fear fleeing the Nakba. Even David Ben-Gurion wasn’t fooled by Exodus, and he said of it “As a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing written about Israel.” Yep. Philip Roth criticized Exodus for relinquishing “the moral authority of the Jew” by painting a violent New Jew obsessed with “retribution” in response to Nazism’s crimes.
Moshe Dayan wrote “without the steel helmet and the cannon’s mouth, we cannot plant a tree nor build a house.” Ah, the beauty of settler-colonial poetry by Moshe himself! Perfect for embroidering on a Zionist’s pillow.
In 1967, equal opportunity thief Israel steals the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Or as Noam has said, Israel intentionally chose expansion over security. This brought 1,000,000 Palestinians under Israeli military rule; and what could go wrong? Who consciously desires to have an “army of occupation” up against one million occupied who have a legal right [under international law] to resistance and armed struggle?
In 1982, The Los Angeles Times ran this headline: “War has Cost Israel its Underdog Image.” In 1982 Israel loots the PLO Research Center of all of its Palestinian memorabilia. If you want to push the narrative that Palestinians don’t exist, first remove the evidence. Zionists remove the Palestinian towns during the Nakba, and in 1982, Israel at the Research Center removed the land deeds, photos, and especially all the maps. David Shipler called this theft an effort to “steal the Palestinians past and identity.” If a bully stole all your family photos and documents, would you be unhappy or fight back? In a textbook case of projection, Menachem Begin said, that the goal of the Palestinians was “to destroy a people. The method: genocide – to kill, woman, and child.” [I know you are but what am I?] In 1979, after Israel attacks an Iraqi nuclear reactor [a war crime] Begin said that if Israel hadn’t bombed the plant, nothing less than “another Holocaust would have happened to Israel and her people.” What? An Iraqi nuclear plant was somehow going to kill six million Jews? Standup comedian Begin then doubled down and actually said “Israelis ALWAYS mourned the killing of children.” Anyone spending ten minutes of Instagram today watching IDF soldiers laughing about killing children, and Zionist rabbis saying killing Palestinian infants is both moral and just – would find Begin’s comments crazy.
Elie Wiesel learned from the Holocaust to not be silent about those who are suffering [unless of course the suffering were Palestinians]. Note that Russians liberated Auschwitz and Madjanek “months” before the US reached Buchenwald and Dachau. “The US Army command initially had no plans to free camp inmates, and soldiers who stumbled across the death camps reported feeling overcome, dazed, and even repulsed by the survivors they saw there. [p.201]” Isn’t learning real history fun?
The biblical names for the West Bank are Judea and Samaria [remember The People’s Front of Judea in the Life of Brian, and the good Samaritan]. In 2002, US military observers in the West Bank watched “the Israeli army bulldoze a 40,000-square-meter area in the center of the Jenin refugee camp, an operation that killed an estimated fifty-two Palestinians. Marines showed a special interest in learning about urban warfare.” Who doesn’t want to calmly watch 52 humans crushed to death – a war crime – while you stand like a coward with your thumb in your ass? The most “moral” army in the world, folks! When fascism comes to the US, such knowledge gleaned by Marines will be invaluable, because resisting Americans in the future aren’t probably going to commit collective suicide.
Come to Israel R Us – we’ve got the fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems developed over decades of brutal occupation to make your next dictatorship go off without a hitch! Take it from someone who just doesn’t care, trust our systems for urban pacifications and management. Don’t delay, turn endless war into a brand asset! Call 1-800-GEN-OCIDE today!
This book was good; I’ve read dozens on Israel Palestine and by far the best of those so far was “Palestine Hijacked” by Thomas Suarez. The best book focusing just on the US & Israel though, is “The Israel Lobby” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
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Kai
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March 7, 2024
absolutely stunning. Kaplan, one of the fixtures of American studies' turn towards the international context of US Empire, turns her eye on the history of US pop culture and media interpretations of Israel. if you are as confused as me as to how so many in the general public here ended up in clear and unconditional support of the Israeli project, here is your book. the chapters discuss settler analogies in the establishment of Israel, the shifting image of Israel as "invincible victim" or renewed masculine hero, or the apocalyptic visions of the evangelical right. these themes are examined through texts like Exodus (both book and film), PBS documentaries, the establishment of the US holocaust museum, the Left Behind book series, and a variety of news media reporting (and controversies and contexts, such as the establishment of ADL and AIPAC). the text itself is completely lucid writing...yeah, the book is really essential and eye-opening stuff.
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David Curry
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September 7, 2019
Kudos to Harvard University Press for making available to us Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, an important contribution to rational discourse with regard to Israel. I read it recalling that a few years ago a professor at a major university three blocks from our home was denied tenure ostensibly because he published articles critical of Israel.
Kaplan presents the bond between the U.S. and Israel as gestating in and frequently returning to a shared sense of exceptionalism and entitlement, with both nations seeing themselves as rescuing territory from backward savages. She discusses Leon Uris’s popular mid-century novel Exodus and compares the film adaptation, which at the time fueled support for Zionism, to American westerns or “cowboys and Indians” films. (I still haven’t managed to erase the memory of Robert Frost during John Kennedy’s presidential inauguration reciting his embarrassing poem “The Gift Outright,” which is a pretty bald celebration of Manifest Destiny. Opening line: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”)
Kaplan is particularly keen in delineating Israel’s Soviet-like proclivity to censor and defame detractors. This proclivity increased after international reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and brutal massacre of civilian refugees there.
The chapter tracing Christian evangelical support for Israel is mind-boggling.
U.N. resolutions condemning Israel’s policies and actions have routinely been blocked by the two nations in the “entangled alliance” this book explores. How likely is it that the rest of the world is wrong and the U. S. and Israel are right? Au fond, a U.N. resolution condemning Israel is no more likely to survive than a U.N. resolution condemning Russia.
In her conclusion, Kaplan refers to “the darker shadows of shared exceptionalism: the fusion of moral value with military force, the defiance of international law, the rejection of refugees and immigrants in countries that were once known as havens.”
She ends with this: “ ‘No daylight between the United States and Israel’ is a phrase that has recently joined ‘special relationship’ and ‘unbreakable bond’ in the lexicon of U.S.-Israel relations. The metaphor of ‘no daylight’ implies that the two nations’ interests are so closely knit together that nothing and no one can come between them. To see daylight between the two countries would suggest separation and betrayal. But ‘no daylight’ also means darkness, a fitting metaphor for the blindness that has characterized the special relationship between the United States and Israel. We must let in daylight if Americans are to understand why and how this bond has come to be unbreakable.”
I appreciated this note in Kaplan”s acknowledgments after the text and notes: “My father, Solomon Kaplan, passed away while I was writing this book. He would have disagreed with much of it, but he would have fiercely defended my right to have my say.”
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sorrowmancer
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July 26, 2025
really good at what it does
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Eli Kaufman
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April 5, 2021
Amy Kaplan's Our American Israel is a crucial read for anyone who asks themselves why the US has an "unbreakable bond" with Israel. By charting the history of this relationship, from Mandate Palestine to the War on Terror, Amy Kaplan finds the cracks, and fissures of this bond, unsettling the notion that that "there is no daylight" between the US and Israel. But this book is about more than just the relationship between the US and Israel in any strict international relations sense. It also shows how the US relates to itself and the way it projects an idealized version of itself onto an imagined Israel, a projection that adapts to the changing domestic and global conditions through time. In light of this, she shows how this relationship is not purely strategic or rational, focusing primarily on literature and media to show the many ways that Americans, across the political spectrum of Liberal and Conservative both see themselves, and therefore see Israel and what it represents.
To me, the most crucial and interesting conclusion of this book is the idea of the invincible victim, constantly under existential threat, yet somehow strong beyond imagination. This exceptionalism and paradoxical belief is what allows Israel, and later the US, to have their cake and eat it too. It allows them to do heinous, inexcusable acts, because the cause is seemingly just and the end justifies the means. They literally can do no wrong as the ultimate victims, a view that Israel has of itself as a nation founded by Holocaust survivors and under constant threat by Arabs, and a view the US has of itself as a freedom loving country "destined" to spread democracy across the world.
While not necessary, a general knowledge of the history of modern Palestine is useful when reading this book, especially because she mostly uses literature and media to trace this history. That being said, she does a good job of explaining enough history to understand the sources she uses. If this is your first encounter with the history of modern Palestine, this book will surely lead you to more research and knowledge with its extensive notes and works cited.
I would highly recommend this book!
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Kyle Neff
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August 22, 2025
If you want to begin to understand our government's complicity in the atrocity currently unfolding in Gaza, this book is a good place to start.
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Khan
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July 15, 2025
4.2
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ida
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February 24, 2026
4.5,
for class - some chapters better than others but convincing cultural argument to what i normally interpret as a geopolitical issue
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Matthew Christopher
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February 7, 2020
This is an excellent survey of the relationship between the United States and Israel. It definitely makes one question how justifiable such a relationship is, considering the United States usually attempts to portray itself as a moral force in the world. (Then again, who could be surprised that US foreign policy is hypocritical?) Kaplan delves into the political and cultural forces that drove the United States to this point, and while she does not give any advice for extricating the country from this toxic relationship, its clear that she is firmly against the actions of the Israeli government when it hurts innocent people. Israel is an apartheid state. This cannot possibly be argued. This book does a good job of examining exactly how the Unted States helped that state to develop, and how it assists it today. Shame on this country for what it has done. FREE PALEST
