As the American Left finds itself increasingly alienated from Israel, this article supplements the rich historical narrative regarding U.S.–Israel relations by highlighting the important—albeit mostly forgotten—contribution of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to forging the so-called “special relationship” from the onset. This transnational study transcends prevailing focus on Jewish-American and Christian-Zionist lobbying operations by weaving together the history of U.S.–Israel relations with that of organized labor in the United States and demonstrating how they mutually reinforced each other. The article makes a two-part argument: first, that the AFL-CIO's embrace of Israel and Histadrut, Israel's general federation of labor, proved instrumental in establishing American popular support for Israel in the 1950s and cementing it as a leading liberal cause; second, that such support was not merely rooted in Cold War exigencies, but also served domestic purposes by offering American labor officials an inspiring—yet romanticized—model for social democracy onto which they could project their own aspirations and grievances.

This article uses a 1958–1962 strike at the Peyton Packing Company in El Paso, Texas, to examine how labor unions in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands used racial stereotypes and Cold War paranoia to influence the adoption of a more rigorous labor certification standard for those applying for a visa to enter the United State. Ultimately, labor unions and Mexican American workers sought to end the practice of border commuting by adopting and advancing the language of immigration restriction deployed by many Mexican American civil rights leaders of the era. This rhetoric ignored pleas for improving the minimum wage laws and protections and overlooked the fact that many border commuters wanted to migrate to the United States, but were often prevented from doing so by existing immigration laws. This case study forces historians of immigration and labor to reassess the role that labor unions played in helping to make the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act more exclusionary than previously thought.

Over the course of the twentieth century, American conceptions of rights became more global. This development—usually described as a move from “civil rights” to “human rights”—was especially acute in American Christian communities. The role of Christianity deserves our attention because of the religion's important role in the conceptualization, popularization, and practice of human rights in the United States and, thanks to Christians’ overseas networks, to every corner of the world.1 The increasingly global understanding of rights, however, did not lead to the liberalization of rights for American Christians. True, human rights talk contributed to important milestones in religious pluralism and the Civil Rights movement, and often served as a gateway to democratic liberalism for some groups resistant to the American liberal tradition. Human rights, however, were not only a liberal project. Conservatives also embraced human rights but in starkly different ways. The divergent interpretations of human rights were not merely a reflection of the growing political divide in the second half of the twentieth century. Christian activists’ adoption of human rights helped forge new alliances and exacerbated the divide between liberal and conservative Christianity, and between political liberalism and political conservatism.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a set of liberal intellectuals promoted a vision of liberal renewal at home and abroad, hoping to create a new political and foreign policy paradigm. They sought to revive a form of early Cold War “Vital Center” liberalism by supporting democratization and human rights, designing a liberal version of patriotism, and supporting confrontations with illiberal autocracies and radical Islamists. They hoped to reverse decades of liberal decline in domestic politics, to distance themselves from the political left, and to critique President George Bush's response to 9/11, which they viewed as unilateralist, militaristic, and intellectually vapid. This revival of optimistic, universalist liberalism represents the peak of liberals’ post–Cold War belief in the ability of U.S. power to spread presumably universal values. The failure of the Iraq War, which many of these thinkers supported, undermined this brief project and returned liberals to a more cautious, defensive mindset.

In the early 1970s, the African American divestment and boycott campaign against Gulf Oil's operations in colonial Angola bridged the gap between Black Power and anti-apartheid, two movements generally viewed separately. The success of the Boston-based activist couple Randall and Brenda Robinson in educating and mobilizing African Americans against investment in colonialism—first with the Southern Africa Relief Fund (SARF) and later with the Pan-African Liberation Committee (PALC)—reveals how a leftist anti-imperial ideology linked the domestic concerns of black Americans with African revolutions. At the same time, the Gulf campaign's participatory tactics, moral appeals, and critique of the global economic system proved attractive beyond radical Black Power advocates, allowing the PALC to cultivate relationships with African American politicians and build alliances across racial divides. Randall Robinson later replicated this organizing model as the founding director of TransAfrica, which became the most prominent African American organization opposing apartheid in the 1980s.