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America's Two Zionist Traditions:
Brandeis and Weizmann
- Abstract
Feeling the strong pressure of Israel to fulfill their Zionist duty and provide immigrants to Israel in substantial numbers, American Zionists have again come down with a case of aliyah fever. Shlomo Zalman Shragai, former mayor of Jerusalem, and now chief of the Aliyah (Immigration) Department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, arrived here last May and for a fortnight addressed meetings of Orthodox groups, Zionist and non-Zionist, exhorting them in Yiddish to send forth men and women to settle in the land. At the same time, 75,000 American Jews associated with the Labor Zionist movement, many of them perhaps tenuously, had begun receiving questionnaires asking whether they plan, and how soon and under what circumstances, to pull up stakes and settle in Israel. Caught between the forensic Labor Zionists, with their forty-year history of “summoning the masses,” and the dogged, tense Shragai, other Zionist groups have likewise pledged themselves, not without reluctance perhaps, to join in stimulating “immigration from the West.”
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