Essays illustrating the American Jewish experience during World War I.
 
An Equal Share of Freedom sheds new light on several important and interrelated dimensions of American, Jewish, and world history in the World War I era. Paying close attention to the Balfour Declaration as a hub around which to explore the period’s unfolding and turbulent social, cultural, and political developments, this collection of essays covers a diverse range of topics including Jewish doughboys, Zionist women authors, and political elites such as Golda Meir and Woodrow Wilson. The volume demonstrates the complex nature of Jewish ethnonational consciousness in the American setting and the impact of Zionism on US wartime and postwar activity.

The essays in this volume overturn timeworn assumptions that have long shaped the fields of American history and modern Jewish history. Taken as a whole, they demonstrate the war’s profound impact on American Jewish life and the transformation of American Jewry’s relationship with wider American society. These essays also illustrate the centrality of Zionism to the American Jewish experience and the extent to which American Jewry’s national consciousness and the future direction of the Zionist project were forged in the crucible of the Great War. An Equal Share of Freedom is the first volume in the Jacob Rader Marcus Series on the American Jewish Experience.  In this series, Raider, Segev, and Zola highlight the myriad possibilities for expanding and deepening scholarly understanding of American Jews and the shared history of American society and the Jewish people in the twentieth century, starting with a look at World War I.

Mark A. Raider is professor of modern Jewish history in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati. He is coeditor, with Gary Phillip Zola, of New Perspectives in American Jewish History: A Documentary Tribute to Jonathan D. Sarna and author of The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism. Zohar Segev holds the Reuben Hecht Chair in Zionism and History at the University of Haifa. He is the author of From Ethnic Politicians to National Leaders: American Zionist Leadership, the Holocaust, and the Establishment of Israel and The World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust: Between Activism and Restraint. Gary Phillip Zola is the executive director of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives and the Edward M. Ackerman Family Distinguished Professor of the American Jewish Experience and Reform Jewish History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.