8 - The Twisted Road Toward Rapprochement: American Jewry and Germany Until Reunification

Summary

The late 1960s saw major changes on the American and German scene brought about by the growing anti-Vietnam protests and the anti-establishment German student movement. It would take seven more years for the United States to extricate itself from its military involvement in Southeast Asia; meanwhile, the Democrats' electoral debacle in 1968 ushered in a long tenure of Republican administrations, to be interrupted for only a single term by the administration of Jimmy Carter. In West Germany, the student revolt hastened the end of the short-lived “Grand Coalition” and its replacement by a left-of-center social democratic-liberal majority that was to remain in power until 1982. Israel, provoked by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, emerged victorious from the Six Day War, which enhanced its status as a regional power in the Middle East and its role as a de facto ally of the United States in the East-West confrontation. During the short military campaign, Israel enjoyed broad public German support. However, its refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories and its increasing reliance on the United States caused it to lose sympathy among the German and European Left, parts of whom joined the pro-Palestinian anti-Israel camp. The breakup of the Jewish-Black partnership in the United States civil-rights movement, the exaggerated American Jewish anxieties regarding Israel's existence in 1967, and its legitimate fears during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 strengthened Jewish ethnic identity and contributed to the growth of Holocaust consciousness that had started in the wake of the Eichmann trial. The ascent of the survivors and their second generation to influential positions in American Jewish communal life and the rise of the right to power in Israel were other important factors that would affect the American Jewish community’s difficult task of coping with West Germany and its society.