"It is no exaggeration," insisted one veteran of American Zionism, "to say that he reared a whole generation of informed and devoted [American] Zionists and adoring followers." This referred not to Louis Brandeis, Stephen Wise, or any of the other fixtures in the pantheon of American Zionism, but rather to a European Zionist official who spent the World War I years in America, Shemaryahu Levin. Though largely forgotten today, Levin served as one of the most effective propagandists on the early American Zionist scene. Employing an oratorical style that enraptured thousands, Levin advanced a sharp critique of the project of American-Jewish integration, arguing that only in Palestine could Jews achieve completeness. This lecture will explore Levin's celebrity, his views of America, and the degree to which his critique resonated in American Zionists circles. It will argue that a concerted focus on Levin upends long-held assumptions about the formation of Zionism in America in the early twentieth century.

Judah Bernstein is a doctoral student at New York University in the Hebrew-Judaic Studies and History departments. His dissertation studies the origins of Zionism in the United States and its evolution over the first three decades of the twentieth century. He is currently working as an adjunct lecturer at Rutgers University. He also serves as Kogod Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.