This monograph sets out to examine a topic that appears to have fallen through the gaps between three overlapping historiographies. Though there are notable exceptions, the turn of British Jews toward Zionism over the course of the late 1930s and 1940s has not figured prominently in studies of the transnational Zionist movement; has been taken as given in most histories of the Jews of Britain; and has hardly merited mention in works on British interwar politics. Wendehorst's study is therefore, of necessity, a work of recovery, and he painstakingly reconstructs British-Jewish politics over the two decades surrounding the Second World War. The resulting book, while relatively narrow in focus, will appeal to specialists because of its depth. Wendehorst presents archival research that is both rich and complex; it is for future scholars to integrate these findings into broader narratives and to draw wider conclusions about what this narrative means for our understanding of nationalism, Zionism, and British-Jewish political history.

The central task of Wendehorst's book is straightforward: he seeks to uncover how and why Zionism rose to prominence in the British Jewish community between 1936 and 1956, that is, in a period that saw significant development of Jewish institutions in British-mandated Palestine, the unfolding of the Holocaust, and the formation of the State of Israel. British Jews found themselves in a unique position with relation to these three formative events: they were nationals of the country that held the mandate for Palestine until the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, and they were also nationals of the one country in Europe to completely withstand the Nazi onslaught. Wendehorst takes great pains to highlight the specificity of the British Jewish experience, and this pays dividends in two regards. First, it suggests that there was nothing inevitable about the general Jewish turn to Zionism, because the British Jewish experience was so different from that of the Jews in the rest of Europe. Second, it reveals that the adoption of Zionism by large numbers of British Jews was as much a function of their Britishness as it was of their Jewishness.

The book is divided into four parts: the first part traces the rise of Zionism among British Jews from the 1930s; the second part details how British Jews became involved with and reacted to the institutional structures and explicit actions of Zionism, such as fundraising, lobbying, and emigrating to Palestine/Israel; the third part in effect combines the themes of the first two by charting the increased dominance of Zionist Jews in British Jewish institutional and organizational life; and the fourth part focuses on Zionism as it plays out in British political and cultural life, particularly in Parliament and in education. Across these four parts, Wendehorst conceptualizes overlapping arenas in which the state- and nation-building project of Zionism plays out: the transnational arena of Jewish Zionist politics, what Wendehorst terms “British-Jewish” politics, and British politics. As a result, even parts that are more focused on domestic politics evince a strong awareness of the interplay between the transnational and the national.

By far the strongest part of the book is the first, in which Wendehorst charts the rise of Zionism among British Jews. Wendehorst's view appears to be that British Jews were driven to Zionism by a series of antagonists and won over by Zionism's proposed response. Among the factors that he suggests influenced the Zionist turn were British anti-Semitism; knowledge of Nazi oppression and extermination of Jews; perceived British obstruction of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, especially with the 1939 White Paper and its enforcement after the Second World War; and more generally, pessimism about the ability of liberal democracies to live up to their ideals. Wendehorst suggests that in the contest of ideologies, Zionism won because it enjoyed a triple threat: a compelling analysis of the “Jewish problem” (which was becoming ever more evident by the late 1930s), an optimistic and concrete goal for the future (in the form of a Jewish state), and a series of institutions through which to practically realize that program. Much of parts 2 and 3 of the book document the variety of ways in which British Jews became involved in all levels of Zionist political life, from lobbying Whitehall and Westminster, to becoming involved in international, national, and local Zionist groups, to fundraising. Few competing ideologies could offer such a clear goal or so many possible avenues toward it. Wendehorst quotes Lord Bearsted, of the anti-Zionist Jewish Fellowship, analyzing the situation: “Anti anything never got anyone anywhere, and I fear that any movement which has not a concrete objective would be doomed to failure” (81).

An additional contribution of this work is that Wendehorst recovers a multitude of voices along the spectrum of political views and outlooks on the Zionist project, as well as on Jewish life in Britain and in Palestine. Rather than classifying individuals into oversimplified Zionist/anti-Zionist camps, Wendehorst presents political thinkers and actors whose views are complex and often changing. In one of the richest explorations of tensions within a liberal assimilationist “anti-Zionist” group, Wendehorst presents members of the informal New Court circle (among whose influential members were Lord Rothschild, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, and Leonard Montefiore) struggling to put together a coherent response to overtures by Chaim Weizmann in 1941. The immense variety of British Jewish responses to Zionism in the earlier part of the period under consideration only makes the convergence behind the Zionist project by the late 1940s all the more striking.

In many respects, Wendehorst is his own best critic. After pointing out that this work is the published version of a doctoral dissertation submitted in 1997 (though it is clear that the bibliography has been brought up to date), Wendehorst suggests the ways in which he might have revised. The book's temporal scope, he notes, could profitably be extended back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and forward to the Six-Day War of 1967, a chronological widening that would help us trace both the roots and the results of the British Jewish community's interaction with Zionism. He also notes the comparative work left to be done, for instance, between Zionism and the various British subnationalisms. Such revisions would have strengthened the analytical and argumentative aspects of the work and made it more accessible to nonspecialists. Similarly, the work would have benefited from a structural revision. Multiple chapters out of a total of sixteen (including introduction and conclusion) are either extraordinarily long or unusually short. For instance, part 1 comprises one chapter of three pages, one of one hundred pages, and one of fifty-eight pages. Parts 3 and 4 are composed entirely of chapters ranging between eight and sixteen pages. The result is an uneven narrative that obscures rather than clarifies the argument. It is to Wendehorst's credit that despite this structural impediment, his work paints a rich and detailed picture of two crucial decades of British Jewish political life.