Torn at the Roots- Tracing the History of American Jewish Liberalism

If you've read the brand new issue of Currents, you've probably seen that I've got Ruth Wisse on the brain. (Well, if you tear open your new issue of Currents as soon as it arrives and then flip to the back to devour my column. I'm going to assume this is standard for most of you, but I won't be hurt if you look at Marvin Friedman's cartoon first. It's pretty good.)

The reason I chose to write about Wisse's Jews and Power relates back to my attendance at the recent Nextbook forum on Jews and Power a few weeks ago. It was a pretty fascinating afternoon of panels on topics like the Holocaust and Pornography and Authority and Revolt.

The big draw was the last panel of the day, a moderated conversation with Ruth Wisse and Cynthia Ozick. Alas, Ozick was sick and unable to attend. This was a huge disappointment, both because - wow, what a double bill that would be! - but also, the conversation would have been much different had it been between those two formidable minds. As it turned out, Wisse's interlocutor, Bret Stephens (a Wall Street Journal/Fox News regular and foreign affairs wunderkind) wasn't exactly probing or, indeed, anything less than full on tushy kissing nice.

Again, it's a shame, because Wisse had the stage to herself where she proposed a number of positions which begged to be questioned or even just paused for a moment. For example, Wisse believes that God hasn't retreated from the world, but instead his voice can be heard in the destruction of European Jewry as commanding us "Do it yourselves." 'It' being auto-emancipation. Now, when John Hagee voiced this idea, there was, let's say, less tushy kissing and more shit-storming. But when Wisse said it, the audience just nodded (or perhaps that was just their collective heads drooping into sleep. Were I a more generous observer I would attribute more of the shocking passivity of the audience to senility. But I'm not nice. Not here.)

Let's just say that one remark took a few months off my life. If there is a God, maybe I should be thanking him/her for the grace of having a good friend of mine next to me with whom I could exchange grimaces of disgust and shock.

But it's all part of a horrifying, but internally consistent ideology, one which Wisse shares with her New Republic colleague Leon Wieseltier. (Whom I also saw speak recently, that time at the UJA on the occasion of Israel's birthday.)

Wisse went on to say that she, who had been born in Czernowitz on the eve of World War II, had always hoped that her grandchildren would be born into a safer world than she had. And today, she was sad to say, she could not agree that they were safer than she had been. In 1939. In Europe. I find it hard to believe that she believes all the things she says. But that one was a doozy. It also made me wonder why she doesn't live in the country she believes was purchased with the lives of six million Jews.

The script varies a smidge between Wieseltier and Wisse. Wieseltier is the Yeshiva of Flatbush/Oxford educated epitome of cross-over Jewish genius. He has made a career of showing off his smartness while lamenting the quality of Jewish education in America. Wisse on the otherhand, is a professor of Yiddish literature with a new sideline in political theory, drawing much on her knowledge of Jewish literature and history.

Both Wisse and Wieseltier are extraordinarily well educated in their respective areas of Jewishness. And yet, you don't get the sense that either of them draw much pleasure or personal meaning from it. For them, the most vital, most animating aspects of their Jewish lives is their advocacy for Israel. I saw it at the Wieseltier talk. He has no great passion for Jewish learning or ritual and certainly didn't feel that the future of Jewishness lay in Judaism. Wisse, too, has no use for a living Yiddish language and has but scorn for 'Yiddishists'. Observing the both of them it is clear that the moderated voice, the professorial bloodlessness only falls away when talking about their passion- Israel. And even more than Israel, for both Wisse and Wieseltier, the new Hitler is Iran.

Whether or not Iran is truly the titanic threat Wisse and Wieseltier believe it to be (and I dearly hope it's not), it's important to understand them, and their cohort at the New Republic, as being part of a continuum of Jewish political thought. I've been reading a fantastic new book by Michael Staub called Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Post War America and he traces this complex history as well as its implications for things like the lessons we have drawn from the Holocaust.


In the post-war era, the anti-Communist 'liberals' believed that the Soviet Union was the inheritor of Nazi Germany's mantle of global terror. Fascism resided solely, and snugly, within the boundaries of the Soviet Union. Whatever flaws that might have existed in American style democracy were seen by them to be merely anomalous sparks of resistance to the inevitable triumph of democracy.

This line of thinking, notably promoted in Commentary (which eventually dropped the liberal from its identity in order to invent neo-conservatism), has a certain simplistic political binary built in. The continuity of fascism is always over *there* (pointing to the USSR) and no matter what the US and its allies did (and boy, some of it was awful baaaad) it was always in the service of fighting the baddies over there and that made it ok. Furthermore, the racism and anti-Semitism experienced by blacks and Jews in the US could NOT be institutionally and structurally embedded (and indeed, racism and anti-Semitism couldn't possibly be useful to American democracy, heavens no). In the neo-con analysis our democracy was inherently good, as were the countries which emulated us, like Israel.

When Jewish communities were arguing about what the Jewish communal reaction to post-war racism should be, the Commentary, pre-neo-con crowd developed a theory which served their anti-Communist crusade and laid the ground for a Jewish domestic policy which was unabashedly self-serving. While Communist activists (as well as non-Communists) put forth an analysis which linked the systematic violence of Nazi Germany to the institutional racism found in the US, the staunchly anti-Communist camp fought strenuously against analogizing the Jewish experience of racism in Europe to the black experience of racism in the US. To allow such an analogy to stand would be to weaken the rhetorical 'Nazi Germany ----> USSR' continuity of fascism. When incidents of racism are anomalous instead of systematic, the urgency to fight them is greatly diminished. The strengthening of democracy, at all costs (paradoxically) was the solution to all the problems of democracy. We needn't fight racism but consolidate democratic power. Course, that included diminishing civil liberties (especially the liberties of Communists. The thought didn't make the Commentary crowd lose much sleep.)

Staub spends much time on the Peekskill riots, a topic which will be familiar to many older Currents readers. The Jewish Fraternal People's Order (JFPO) sponsored a number of concerts in Peekskill at the end of the summer 1949. Paul Robeson was a featured performer. The concerts became a flashpoint for anti-Communist violence, but, as Staub points out, the mob anger was not directed at Communists, but at blacks and Jews. Whether or not that was an important distinction came to be hotly contested between the competing ideological analyses, one side of which was represented in Jewish Life (the predecessor to Jewish Currents.) Indeed, Staub draws heavily on the Currents archive for his discussion of the riots and their meaning.

It's a fascinating read and an important history. And even more relevant today, when the meaning of the Holocaust, as we can see, is still so contested and so politicized. The true liberals (those who weren't red baited into silence) persisted in analogizing the racism of the Nazis with the racism that erupted in the United States. For the liberals, the lesson of the Holocaust was that racist violence was a threat to (and responsibility of) the Jews, no matter who the target was. Never again was to mean never again for everybody, not just Jews. The anti-Communists, on the other hand, built an analysis which saw the ultimate lesson of the Holocaust to be the justification for Jewish state (and a Jewish army). Never again could only mean never again for the Jews and the Jewish state.

Giving a glance over the mainstream Jewish ideological landscape, it's not hard to see who has won. But Ruth Wisse doesn't own the Holocaust and she certainly doesn't speak for me. Nor does Yehezkel Dror or Leon Wieseltier. But it's still important to know where they're coming from in order to resist the fear-mongering and scare tactics of the Jewish right.