Symposium on the U.S. - Israel Relationship November 9, 2011

"The Past and Present of American Zionism"

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Peter Beinart is a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at The City University of New York. He is also Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast, and a Contributor to Time. His first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals--And Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, was published by HarperCollins in 2006. His second book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, was published by HarperCollins in June 2010.

Beinart has written for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek,Slate, Reader's Digest, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Polity: the Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Studies Association. The Week magazine named him columnist of the year for 2004. In 2005, he delivered the Theodore H. White Lecture at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

He has appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," "Charlie Rose," "The McLaughlin Group," "The Colbert Report," MTV, CNN, Fox, MSNBC and many other television and radio programs. Beinart graduated from Yale University in 1993, winning a Rhodes scholarship for graduate study at Oxford University. After graduating from University College, Oxford with an M.Phil in International Relations, Beinart became The New Republic's managing editor in 1995. He became senior editor in 1997, and from 1999 to 2006 served as the magazine's Editor. Beinart was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2007 to 2009.