In the second half of the twentieth century, three Jewish men were stripped of their American citizenship after spending significant time in Palestine/Israel and engaging in statutorily defined “expatriating acts.” Integral to the doctrine of liberal citizenship, in fact, were illiberal mechanisms of individual and categorical exclusion from citizenship intended to protect the sovereignty of the nation-state. These mechanisms gained particular expression in state agents’ deliberations about the citizenship status of Jews, especially after the establishment of Israel. The emergence of dual citizenship as a legal possibility—the result of a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the expatriation of one of the men considered here—reveals the shifting ambitions of American state power, while also exposing the enduring ways in which U.S. government entities, from Congress to administrative agencies to the courts, justified the state's power to transform citizens into aliens.

This article proposes a new set of critical historical practices, with the aim of constructing Jewishness into an interpretive historical mode. Jewish history is most commonly understood as the history of the Jewish people and its territories. In setting this as the foundation of Jewish history, scholars have allowed empirical evaluation of the Jewishness of a person or place to precede analysis. Two basic approaches, clearly foundational and tied to personalist and nationalist conceptions of Jewishness, have guided the field of Jewish history: the conjunctive and contingent. A third method—termed here a critical constructive approach—offers a nonfoundational vision for freeing Jewishness and Jewish history from tests of individual, group, or nationalist verifiability and, instead, reconceiving Jewishness as a structuring mode that can affect how a broad range of subjects have operated within history.

In 1938, Jerome Folkman, a Reform rabbi from Grand Rapids, Michigan, attended a dinner party hosted by one of his congregants. The guests had finished eating and were settling into typical after-dinner chatter, when the audacious “Mr. R.” broke the rhythm and declared, “We should send missionaries to the gentiles and try to win converts to Judaism.” Side conversations halted and the guests, all Jewish, curiously peered at Mr. R. as he continued: “Why aren't we more aggressive? Why don't we ask others to join our ranks?” The guests tittered. Some giggled nervously, others muttered that Jews just don't do that. A pragmatist interrupted—the suggestion, in his mind, was only as good as its actual consequences. “Do you think we would get any converts?” he asked. Rabbi Folkman, who later divulged he, too, had toyed with the idea of Jews becoming missionaries in America, tried to clarify the kernel of wisdom behind Mr. R.'s shocking statement.