Zionist Rabbi
Abba Hillel silver: a profile in American Judaism.
by Marc Lee Raphael.
Introduction by Alexander M. Schindler. Holmes & Meier. 328 pp. $49.50.
Abba Hillel Silver, who died in 1963, occupied a unique place both in American public life and in the public life of the American Jewish community. The long-term rabbi of an imposing Reform synagogue in Cleveland where he preached to thousands every month, Silver played an instrumental role in convincing his colleagues within the Reform movement—most of whom up until 1937 were opposed to the idea of Jewish statehood—that a follower of liberal Judaism could (and should) also be a Zionist. As a Zionist, he helped build that movement into a political force in the United States, and in 1947 argued the case for Israel’s statehood before the UN General Assembly. Finally, as a Republican and a vocal critic of the Roosevelt administration in an era when support for the Democratic party was considered almost synonymous with adherence to Judaism, Silver not only helped to diversify American Jewish political allegiances but eventually found a place for himself within Republican politics at the national level, serving as an adviser to the Eisenhower administration on Israel and Middle East affairs. Yet until now Silver has never been the subject of a book-length biography, which is reason enough to welcome this informative new study by Marc Lee Raphael of Ohio State University.
Following his ordination from Hebrew Union College in 1915 and a brief stint in Wheeling, West Virginia, Silver was called to the pulpit of Congregation Tifereth Israel of Cleveland where he would remain as spiritual leader until his death. Within a decade of his arrival, Tifereth Israel had grown to more than 1,200 members, making it the largest Reform congregation in America. Despite the growing demands and responsibilities of his public career, and a frenetic schedule of travel and speeches, Silver, according to Raphael, always saw “his primary role” as a congregational rabbi—though Raphael also admits that Silver had “a strong disdain for the pastoral work of the rabbi,” and throughout his tenure in Cleveland there were complaints that he did not care much about his congregation or his rabbinic vocation, but merely exploited them as bases from which to pursue his career elsewhere.
Throughout his busy life, Zionism was the cause to which Silver was always most passionately devoted. Raphael analyzes in vivid detail the expanding functions he assumed within the leadership of the American Zionist movement during the 1930’s and 1940’s, including his appointment as chairman of the United Palestine Appeal, the major Zionist fundraising organization in America, his “sensational” appearance at the Biltmore Conference in 1942 at which he made an eloquently militant speech on behalf of Jewish statehood, his wartime work with Stephen S. Wise (another Reform rabbi who was also an early Zionist) in the American Zionist Emergency Council, which they both co-chaired from August 1943 until December 1944, and the events leading up to his appointment as chairman of the American section of the Jewish Agency in 1946 and his crucial appearance at the United Nations as spokesman for world Jewry.
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While Raphael emphasizes Silver’s personal charisma and administrative and organizational genius, he does not ignore the less attractive qualities that marked his public career. His long-time rival Nahum Goldmann characterized Silver as “a foul personality, a nasty character—absolutely ruthless to his opponents”; political invective, to be sure, but containing more than a grain of truth. By all accounts Silver was an unbending autocrat who was personally disliked even by many of his allies and who seemed to have a natural talent for making enemies. Raphael devotes considerable space to Silver’s ongoing conflicts with these enemies within the Zionist leadership, including Goldmann, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and Stephen S. Wise.
The most highly publicized such battle, with Wise, revolved around the latter’s faith in the promises and good intentions of Franklin D. Roosevelt vis-à-vis both the trapped Jews of Europe and the fledgling Jewish national community in Palestine. This faith Silver condemned as illusory. Attacking Wise as a “Court Jew” who had “shielded, defended, and apologized” for a Democratic administration that had done “next to nothing for the Jewish people,” Silver contended that Zionist aims and interests would be better served by support for the GOP. His defeat of Wise for the leadership of the American Zionist movement in 1946 reflected a wider disenchantment with the Democrats which he himself had done much to foster.
Silver’s own disenchantment had begun earlier. His close ties with the Republican party—for many Jews, one of the most controversial and inexplicable aspects of his career—had their genesis during the 1940 election when he publicly urged FDR not to seek a third term and endorsed Wendell Willkie for President. The ties were strengthened through his work with Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey in drafting the Palestine platform for the Republican national convention of 1944. The presidential campaign that year confirmed Silver in his pragmatic belief that Jewish votes should be exchanged only for promises kept: “Silver argued,” writes Raphael, “both that a promise was only a promise, not a fact, and that pressure would be more likely to lead to the fulfillment of such a promise than would the present situation in which the President, certain of the Jewish vote, did not have to do anything concrete to assure it.”
In 1948, Silver publicly praised Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate, for his “sincerity and forthrightness” in supporting the cause of Jewish statehood, and for speaking up “at a time when others were silent.” His political steadfastness was rewarded during the late 1940’s and 50’s when, notes Raphael, “his easy access to Dulles, Dewey, and Eisenhower certainly aided Israel as it struggled for survival during its first decade of existence.” By using his “wider pulpit” to further the contention that support for the Republican party was a legitimate expression of Jewish self-interest, Silver was truly a man ahead of his time.
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Marc Lee Raphael has written a thoughtful and absorbing book, but one that also contains some serious omissions. Although we learn a great deal about Silver’s public career, there is surprisingly little about dimensions of his private and family life that properly belong in a biography. Thus, for example, Silver’s relationship with his two sons, one of whom would succeed him as rabbi in Cleveland, is a subject compressed into two uncritical paragraphs.
But the most glaring omission is Raphael’s failure to discuss at all Silver’s role within the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), whose presidency he assumed in 1945 and whose reorientation toward Zionism he did much to bring about. The CCAR had been on record on this matter at least since 1897 when, just a few weeks before the First Zionist Congress in Basel, it voted its unanimous disapproval of “any attempt for the establishment of a Jewish state.” While a few other prominent American Reform rabbis besides Silver did strongly support Zionism during the 1920’s and 30’s, they were a distinct minority in a movement that until 1937 remained staunchly opposed.
In his introduction to this book, Rabbi Alexander Schindler devotes some attention to a speech by Silver before the CCAR in 1935 in which he cogently attacked the anti- Zionist ideology of classical Reform Judaism and called for a reformulation of the movement’s philosophy. Raphael, however, does not even mention this historic speech, nor does he discuss Silver’s role as a member of the committee drafting the principles that became the basis of the Columbus Platform of 1937, in which the Reform rabbinate for the first time affirmed its commitment to Jewish nationalism. Even more surprisingly, there is absolutely no word about Silver’s subsequent election to the presidency of the CCAR.
Despite its many virtues, then, this book is still not the definitive biography its fascinating subject deserves.
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