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Avukah's Call to Action Avukah diverged from the much larger B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation in its socialist orientation and in its support for a binational state. Chomsky describes the positions of the two groups: Avukah proposed "a binational state that is not a Jewish state," while B'nai B'rith was in favor of "a Jewish state," period (18 May 1995). On 27 June 1942, Avukah rejected Abram Sachar's proposal that Avukah affiliate nationally with the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation in order to maintain its independence. In a summer 1942 article in Avukah Student Action called "Front II: Jewish Organizations Don't Meet Real Needs," Milton Shapiro claimed that B'nai B'rith, like the American Jewish Committee, represented the upper-class and upper-middle-class Jews who were fighting anti-Semitism "from behind cloaks" and failing to address the needs of the majority of Jews. By this point, the early 1940s, Chomsky was still a high-school student and Avukah was growing into an important organization that had chapters on at least sixty North American university campuses. In 1943, Avukah published another pamphlet, this one probably written by Zellig Harris, called An Approach to Action: Facing the Social Insecurities Affecting the Jewish Position. It discusses the Jewish situation against the backdrop of World War II and the problems that "victory alone cannot solve." The author assumes that two million Jews had perished in Europe thus far, and that eight million more had been taken prisoner. Furthermore, in the United States there was discrimination against Jews and "a great social distance and frequent mutual suspicion between Jews and non-Jews, which makes the Jews, whether `Jewish financier' or `Jewish Communist,' ideal scapegoats onto which mass resentment may be deflected." At the time the pamphlet was published, many feared that not only Europe but also the United States would become fascist. An Approach to Action sounded a warning: "the society in which we live becomes more authoritarian, more intolerant of minority differences, more regimented and militarized, with the freedom of individuals more limited." Its author declared that "the more democratic the society in which we live, the safer we are," because fascism is intrinsic to any society in which underprivilege, poverty, working-class discontent, and monopoly capitalism are permitted to thrive. The pamphlet is a call to social action, to resistance, to Jewish participation in all organizations committed to social libertarianism. Despite its cautionary tone, however, An Approach to Action does not explicitly equate the fascism of Nazi Germany with that detected in the United States; such an equation would require huge qualifications. But Epstein does note that both Avukah and the Council Communists (e.g. in Living Marxism) and, at times, Dwight MacDonald (in Politics) predicted fascism ahead in the U.S. proper (we're not talking about countries dominated by the U.S.), and they were all dead wrong. Fascism involves domestic militarism, dictatorship, negation of civil liberties, suppression of unions, suppression of all political opposition, and not simply "underprivilege, poverty, discontent of the working people, and the growth of monopoly," which has almost always been endemic to capitalism. As Chomsky has so well described, control of the American population by techniques involving the "manufacture of consent" has been more effective than outright repression. (20 Apr. 1995) Believing that it was vital to establish in Palestine a viable and secure alternative society in case the struggle against fascism failed, Avukah encouraged Jews to buy land, settle, develop agriculture and industry, and maintain "an economically planned and progressive social structure and cooperative relations with a large part of the Arab population" in that country. This two-tiered approach ­ promoting social change in America and preparing Palestine for Jewish immigration ­ was compatible and desirable because both tiers addressed, to quote An Approach to Action, "the actual condition of the people and pose[d] the fundamental question[s]: How can we improve the situation of the people? How can we prevent it from becoming worse?" Chomsky shared the growing desire among young North American Jews, awakened and fueled by the efforts of organizations such as Avukah, to settle in Israel. So did his girlfriend, Carol Schatz.