In early February 1949, American Jewry’s most popular and powerful leader, Abba Hillel Silver (1893–1963), had summarily resigned from all his official positions within the Zionist movement and had left New York for Cleveland, returning to his post as a Reform rabbi. In the immediate years prior to his resignation, during the second half of the 1940s, Silver was the most outspoken proponent of the founding of a sovereign Jewish state. He was the most instrumental American Jewish leader in the political struggle that led to the foundation of the State of Israel. Paradoxically, this historic victory also heralded Silver’s personal defeat.

Shiff’s book discerns the various aspects of the striking turnabout in Silver’s political fate, describing both the personal tragic story of a leader who was defeated by his own victory and the much broader intra-Zionist battle that erupted in full force immediately after the founding of Israel.

Ofer Shiff is professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University, where he served as director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Studies of Israel and Zionism from 2001 to 2004. He is the author of Survival through Integration: American Reform Jewish Universalism and the Holocaust and is the editor of the Hebrew periodical Iyunim Bitkumat Israel (Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society) Thematic Series.