“It‘s a boy!” So declared Sir Mark Sykes as came out of the room where the Balfour Declaration had just been approved to congratulate Chaim Weizmann. “A boy” meant Balfour had won; a girl, one assumes, would have conveyed its failure. Proclaimed at the height of British imperialism, the reception of the Balfour Declaration demonstrates that the politics of gender was not simply an undercurrent in Zionism, it was a forthright tool of propaganda, negotiation, and Realpolitik.

 Rarely has a paragraph as brief as the Balfour Declaration – which is a mere sentence – elicited such a vast historiography and produced such enormous international and historic consequences that continue to be debated to this day. My lecture will examine the reception of the Balfour Declaration in the American context, with particular attention to the gender politics in its reception in the US Congress as well as the Jewish community.

Susannah Heschel is Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College