In Israel’s war of independence in 1948,
American Communists were
deeply involved in the covert shipment of arms to the new state
of Israel, and Communists were prominent among those Americans
wounded or killed in battles protecting Israel from Arab attack.
How do we know this? It says so in a standard reference book
found in hundreds of American libraries. The Encyclopedia of
the American Left, published by Oxford University Press, was
selected by Choice and Library Journal as one of the ten
best reference books published in 1990. It sold so well that a
second edition appeared in 1998. Reference books are expected to
summarize the scholarly consensus and to present reliable
information. In fact these claims about the role of American
Communists in Israel’s founding, made in the second edition, have
no basis whatsoever in any historical literature. Yet this and
other distortions in this reference work have gone unchallenged
by the historical profession.
This last year has not been good for the reputation of American
historians. The first exhibit: Joseph Ellis, a professor at
Mount Holyoke College, winner of a National Book Award for his
biography of Thomas Jefferson and the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers. The Boston Globe discovered
that, contrary to what he told his classes and claimed in
interviews, Ellis had never fought in Vietnam, worked in the
