Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions About Israel by Shalom Goldman (review)

Abstract

This excellent cultural history of the special evolving relationship between the arts in the US and Israel, including music, theatre, dance, film, literature, and television is a tour de force. It shows how the role of artists’ relationships to Israel has influenced how Americans often perceive Israel. These intertwined cultural histories of the US and Israel have shaped one another and destined Israel’s image. Books, films, TV, and music have played a significant role in forming American public views of Israel by depictions with subthemes of socialism, imperialism, racial justice, and Christian missionary efforts. A strength of the book is that Goldman, in the process of writing an outstanding cultural history, reveals much knowledge in areas of political science, historical background of the Middle East, foreign policy and diplomacy, Israeli public relations, Israel’s perceived international image, and world religious history. The book superbly shows how American cultural forces in the performing arts are part of the process of the American-Israeli story that is the most consequential international alliance. While much has been written about the diplomatic, military, and religious aspects of the relationship between the US and Israel, Goldman reveals that the mediating role of the power of the arts has shaped and destined the US-Israeli special relationship of the world stage. Goldman demonstrates how American artists who have journeyed to Israel to perform, lecture, and rivet fans have not only expressed but influenced the American special relationship with Israel. The wide scope, not only chronologically but for its far-ranging noetic ken, that incorporates a wide net to help understanding of the special relationship Israel has with the US, is refreshing to see in an age of narrow academic specialization. While containing many important details, it does not lose sight of the forest for the trees and traces broad general trends. A second strength is Goldman’s piercing analytic penetration that brings to light the leftright political divisions that form a subconscious background to historical unfoldings since the foundation of the United States. With this analytical penetration, Goldman is able to demonstrate that Christian support for Israel—primarily amongst Protestants, and to a lesser degree amongst Catholics—was and remains the central and determining part of Israel’s establishment, support, and growth, founded on the central place of reading the world’s destiny and fate into the Bible through Christian interpretation of Biblical prophecy. Recently this Christian Right has played a role in support of moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, scrapping the Obama-era US-Iran Deal, and recognizing that Judea and Samaria are not illegal but the rightful borders of Israel as described in the reigns of King David and Solomon. Thirdly, Goldman is able to focus and identify clear turning points in US-Israeli relations through the political sea changes of alliances. For example, Goldman traces, charts, and maps