Much has been written on American Jewish views on Palestinian rights since 1967, yet few scholars have ever explored how American Jews engaged with Palestinian affairs in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian minority and the Palestinian refugee question was not something that liberal American Jewish groups could simply ignore, however. In fact, one of the most prominent American Jewish organizations even hired one an expert on Palestinian affairs to help it figure out how to best address the Palestinian refugee plight. That expert was Don Peretz, the first American to ever write a dissertation on the Palestinian refugee question. Peretz (1922-2017), is already known to MESA, not as a historical actor, but as a longtime professor of Middle East studies at SUNY-Binghamton who was among MESA’s founding members. As the paper shows, Peretz’s scholarly interest in the refugees stemmed from both his family background and his experience as an American Friends Service Committee volunteer to aid displaced Palestinians in 1949. In the 1950s, Peretz wrote his dissertation “Israel and the Palestine Arabs” at Columbia before being hired by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in 1956. There, Peretz helped the AJC prepare a new initiative to aid Palestinian refugees, which was quietly tabled amidst Israeli complaints. Israeli officials also pressured the AJC to fire Peretz; the organization eventually demoted Peretz and he subsequently left. This paper uses Peretz’s personal papers, Israeli diplomatic files, and AJC archives to outline Peretz’s trajectory and the AJC’s complicated relationship with the Palestinian refugee issue, which left it caught between Israeli pressure and a commitment to liberal universalist ideals that stood at the center of the AJC’s mission. While Peretz is just one individual, his story sheds light on the much broader Jewish political universe in which he operated. It shows how one American Jew understood the Palestinian refugee issue, how the American Jewish community responded to his attempts to objectively study and address the question, and how Israeli authorities, in turn, reacted to even limited American Jewish engagement with this sensitive matter. Though Peretz was never particularly well known within Israel or the American Jewish community, the way in which Peretz and his work was received unveils crucial dimensions of the Israeli-American Jewish relationship never before explored by historians.