From Brooklyn Housewife To Zionist Lobbyist – The Lid

 “Irish, sympathetic, hates British, will definitely help.”  So read an entry in the diary of Brooklyn housewife Esther Kaplan, after meeting with Rep. John J. Rooney, an Irish-American congressman from New York City, seventy-five years ago this week. The Ben Hecht Mrs. Kaplan had no background in lobbying or political activism, but when her son David was arrested by the British for trying to smuggle Holocaust survivors into Palestine in 1947, she reinvented herself as a Zionist lobbyist and took her case straight to Capitol Hill.