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Jewish Power in America: Myth and Reality. By Henry L. Feingold. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008. xiv + 164 pp.
In 2007, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer published The Israel Lobby, claiming that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its neoconservative allies were misshaping American foreign policy in accordance with Israeli interests. In Jewish Power in America, Henry L. Feingold, an elder statesman among historians of the American Jewish experience, offers a counter-polemic. He identifies the belief in American Jews' outsized influence with the age-old antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews constitute a demonic cabal. Through case studies of American Jews' historical attempts to exercise political power, Feingold demonstrates that the conspiracy theory misunderstands the nature of Jews' power and the extent of their influence. He argues that American Jews have been able, to a limited extent, to exercise "ideational" or "soft" power-basically, moral suasion carried out through effective organization and public relations campaigns. Yet their soft power has succeeded only when there has been a "confluence of interests" between Jewish goals and American national priorities (36). Where such a confluence did not exist, American Jews' best efforts have failed to gain their political ends.
American Jews have succeeded at times in influencing the political process, he argues, because they have mastered the skills of democratic organizing, training generations of activists coming up through the intricate system of communal affairs. Groups like the National Conference for Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) were successful, for example, in convincing the American people that the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate would be a key sign of the success of American Cold War politics, consonant with the nation's values and interests. This public...