Zionist Organization of America

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) (

Today, the ZOA claims to have 25,000 members,[2] down from its 1939 peak of 165,000.^[3]

The ZOA opposes Palestinian statehood^[4] and advocated for the Trump travel ban.^[5]

History

Founding

The ZOA was initially founded in 1897 as the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ),

In 1917, the FAZ was renamed as the ZOA.^[citation needed]

Louis Brandeis

When the secular "people's lawyer" Louis Brandeis became involved in the movement in 1912, just before World War I, Zionism started gaining significant support.^[8] By 1917, Brandeis' leadership had increased American Zionist membership ten times to 200,000 members, and "American Jewry thenceforth became the financial center for the world Zionist movement,"^[9] greatly surpassing its previous European base of support. In addition, during the early years of World War I, he and others established the American Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs to run Zionist affairs on behalf of the worldwide Zionist Organization, which had been rendered largely impotent because its members were divided by allegiance to the different sides in the conflict.^[10]

Connections to the state of Israel

In 1949, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the ZOA under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act after the organization solicited supporters to accelerate technology transfers to Jews in Palestine. On February 25, 1948, the ZOA was ordered to register as a foreign agent. After a series of conferences with the US Attorney General, the ZOA changed its constitution and "affected a change in the constitution of the World Zionist Organization in an effort to remove itself from agency status. As a result, all attempts to procure the registration of the subject organization were dropped."^[11]

Following the founding of Israel, and to unify Jewish representation with the executive branch of US government, the ZOA became a charter member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.^[12] ZOA was historically a liberal Zionist group, though it has since become right-wing.^[13]

The ZOA helped mobilized political support in the United States for Israel, with large scale funding and pressure on Washington and on public opinion.

In 1994, Morton Klein became president.^[15]

In 2005, the Los Angeles branch of ZOA elected former actor and singer Ed Ames as president.^[16] Tom Tugend of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles noted that Ames' career was far behind him and made particular note of his role as an actor on the Daniel Boone TV series, before going on to say, "Founded in 1896, ZOA had been in decline from its heyday under the leadership of Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, but has regained some prominence since the energetic and vocal Klein assumed the presidency 10 years ago," having been elected in 1993 and assuming office in 1994.^[16]

The ZOA was strongly opposed to

In 2012 ZOA lost its charitable status in the United States, having failed to provide the Internal Revenue Service with tax returns for three consecutive years.^[20][21] The tax-exempt status was restored by the IRS in 2013.^[22]

In 2020, the ZOA supported

In January 2018, ZOA president Mort Klein went on a paid trip to Qatar to meet with the Emir, at his invitation; he also met with a number of senior officials. The visit was strongly criticized by some supporters of Israel,[25]^[26] and according to Mother Jones magazine, the trip coincided with a softening of the ZOA's stance regarding that country.^[27] Shortly after Klein's trip to Qatar, he expressed to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz a new attitude about dialogue with Qatar.^[28] In a subsequent March 2018 interview, Klein praised Qatar for flying an Israeli flag at a recent handball tournament and said the Emir told him that "last summer they stopped funding terrorist groups."^[27]

On June 19, 2018, Mother Jones reported that Qatar had donated $100,000 to the ZOA through lobbyist

The ZOA today works to strengthen U.S.-Israel relations through educational activities,[37] by combating what it perceives as anti-Israel bias in the media, textbooks, travel guides, and on college campuses. The ZOA also sponsors educational and cultural programs in Israel. The "ZOA House" is a cultural center in Tel Aviv.^[38] The ZOA is responsible for founding the Kfar Silver school, which provides education and vocational training for new Jewish immigrants and others on a 500-acre (2.0 km²) campus near Ashkelon. The ZOA's youth division sponsors one of the largest programs for sending young Jews to visit Israel.

The Brandeis Award is given annually to a prominent national or international figure. Recipients include

On January 8, 2019, The Times of Israel report that the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations reprimanded the ZOA for insulting other members. The report continued that ZOA resorted to making "insults, ad hominem attacks and name-calling." It further stated that "ZOA knew, or should have known, that its repeated, patterned public criticisms of two of the complainants were unnecessarily shrill and personally directed, and that they would be seen as personal or organizational insults as much, or more, than they would be seen as substantive criticisms".^[42]

On February 26, 2019, the ZOA was quoted in a Jewish News Syndicate reported amid American Jewish criticism over the Otzma Yehudit Party. The ZOA quote in the story states: "It's strange, troubling and hypocritical that the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee and the Israel Policy Forum condemned the technical merger of two small right-wing pro-Israeli political parties, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Strength) and Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home), but remained silent about mergers of anti-Israel Arab parties led by Arab Knesset members who oppose the Jewish state's existence and engage in outright treacherous conduct, including assisting Palestinian Arab terrorists and inciting anti-Jewish terror."^[43]

See also

References

Notes