Now that the primary aim of American Zionism—the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine—has been achieved, it is generally recognized that we enter a new period in the relationship between the Jews of America and the Jews of Israel. It was logical, therefore, that for many delegates at the convention of the Zionist Organization of America in Pittsburgh in July, a leading item on the agenda was the question of the content and direction of future Zionist activity in the united States, especially in its cultural and educational phases. Israel Knox here contributes a discussion article giving his view of the Convention’s deliberations on this problem.

_____________

 

The recent convention of the Zionist Organization of America, coming less than two months after the birth of the Republic of Israel, felt itself obliged to consider seriously the relations between American Jews and the new state. Emanuel Neumann, president of the Zionist Organization, repeatedly gave assurance that American Jews would not interfere in Israel’s sovereignty, not only because it is solely Israel’s prerogative, but also because Jews as American citizens cannot have dual allegiances. Yet on the other hand, Dr. Neumann went on to say that the position of Jews, outside Israel, was still anomalous (“The basic anomaly of the Jews has been ended, but not completely—ninety-three per cent are still in the Diaspora”); and he, and others, did not hesitate to refer to the rest of the world, specifically including the United States, as Galut, the Exile, Diaspora. In this, he was echoing the traditional Zionist viewpoint, which regards countries other than Palestine as inevitably and permanently second-class countries for Jews, and Jews fated forever to be second-class citizens and alienated residents therein.

Dr. Neumann is not one to use words with rhetorical abandon. But other delegates, in less guarded moments, expressed the full and consistent logic of such a view. The director of the Jewish National Fund had said, “Zionism came to give us status and dignity”; a young rabbi from the Far West asserted at a session of the Committee on Education, without meeting challenge or protest, something like the following: “I was born in Palestine; the Jews of Palestine have status and dignity; the Jews of the Galut have no status and no dignity.” And at a banquet in honor of Dr. Silver, a prominent Zionist, whose remarks were praised lavishly by Dr. Neumann, explained—once again without meeting protest and challenge—that “because of the long exile, our parents and grandparents perhaps degenerated into a state of mental and spiritual impotence,” and therefore were incapable (unlike Dr. Silver) of transforming the Messianic dream of national redemption into actual deed.

The Galut as a stigma has sunk so deep into the consciousness of Zionists that even such a man as Dr. Margoshes, who has often declared his belief in the viability of American Jewry, in his daily English column in a Yiddish newspaper, was prompted to repudiate himself exactly one week before the opening of the Convention, writing: “. . . What is there in American Jewish life of today to fire one’s imagination? . . . Time was when the immigrant, arriving at these shores with not a cent in his pocket but a boatload of dreams of the American promise, made excellent copy for sentimental novelists. . . . But those heroic pioneering days are over, and the universal grayness which is the predominant color of the American Jewish scene is very little, indeed, to attract attention. . . . If there is anything in American Jewish reality to strike the fancy of the American Jewish youth, it must have missed it” (Day, June 25).

A brief digression may help us to understand. It was Bergson who said that we laugh at men and women, and not at things, because, presumably, our sense of glory can be inflated only at the expense of our own kind. Dr. Margoshes demotes American Jewry to an inferior status in order to elevate, by sharp contrast, Palestinian Jewry: “Thus far Israel has been the first great burst of light on the dark ocean of our Jewish existence. A Jewish army heroically resisting the onslaught of seven Arab states; a new nation being born on the shores of the Mediterranean; a new social order coming into existence between battles. . . . As far as I know there is nothing in what the five million Jews in the United States have wrought in the last fifty years to match this stirring appeal.”

_____________

 

This attitude is not restricted to the Zionist sector of American Jewry, considerable as that is. It now pervades areas of American Jewry that used to be remote from Zionism.

The Yiddishist schools named after Sholem Aleichem grew out of the very idea, precisely, that the Jews were non-territorial—trans-territorial—people, and living as they did in many countries, were one and indivisible in “historic destiny,” cultural heritage, and contemporary creativity. Yet in recent years the graduation ceremonies of these schools have struck another note. Galut, that is, America, is depicted as a desert in so far as Jewish survival, in the “national” sense, is concerned. And the audience at the graduation this year was addressed in the following manner: (the schools are not parochial, but supplementary to the public schools): “You will be given ‘sweets.’ But you will be made to feel at home as the Cantonists were. It will be a little finer, subtler. Many of you have already felt it.” To get the full impact of the comment, one must recall that the Cantonists were Jewish children seized from their parents in Czarist Russia during the first half of the 19th century, sent to distant places to serve in the army for twenty-five years or longer, and thus weaned away from Judaism.

The students themselves wrote in the foreword of the graduation publication: “We know that by virtue of the cultural flowering of our Galut life in America, together with the flowering of our Yishuv in Palestine, we shall strengthen the existence of our people.” There is nothing wrong with this sentence if one is willing to overlook the linkage of life in America with Galut. From almost every quarter of official Jewish life we hear it reiterated that Jewish culture must be and can be sustained in America. But one is tempted to ask, how can it be sustained by young people who are taught to think of their lives in America as lives in Galut, and who are frightened or persuaded into the belief that their future here is almost as bleak as was that of the Cantonists in Czarist Russia? Obviously, only emotionally and intellectually split personalities can come of this attitude. And yet the raison d’être, first and last, for a specifically Jewish education is to tie together all the different strands of the child’s thoughts and feelings, values and ideals, as Jew and as American, into a fairly coherent pattern and thus enable him to behold his people and the world in perspective.

What “coherent pattern” and what “plausible perspective” is to be discovered in a short story, written by a girl graduating student, whose “hero,” a successful, fully “assimilated” lawyer, wholly estranged from his fellow-Jews, reads of the brave doings in Palestine and is moved to leave America for Eretz Yisrael?

The concluding paragraph of the story reads: “When Jason M. Zarenoff, or, as he now called himself, Yitzchok Zarenofsky (he returned to his old name), left for Eretz Yisrael, his name was mentioned in a short article in an English-language newspaper. When his former secretary read it, she sighed and said, ‘Yes, he was a good man, but he was not all there.’ But Yitzchok, now in Eretz Yisrael, felt that all was well with him, among his own Jews (menshn-Yidn).”

The “aesthetic” truth of the tale, of the sudden change in Zarenoff, need not concern us, nor need we linger over the fact that Zarenofsky with its Slavic suffix is just as “non-Jewish” as Zarenoff. The disturbing question is this: if the young writer means what she says, then what can her notion of American Jews be? Obviously, she means that it is impossible for a conscious Jew to fulfill himself while living in America. And if she does not mean what she says—if it is only a passing fancy or the result of “indoctrination”—then what significance does such a fantasy education have, and how will it enhance this girl’s self-respect and bring her closer to her people?

_____________

 

One can imagine what goes on in the avowedly “nationalist” schools, under the direct tutelage and control of Zionists. Speaking to the youngsters who attend such schools, one gets the impression that for them Palestine coincides with the whole of Jewry, and that American Jews were especially placed on this continent by historic destiny to provide financial means for the up-building of Eretz Yisrael. The Hebrew textbooks used in the New York high schools and colleges give the impression that Jewish life and culture are confined exclusively to modem Palestine. Even more important, they are completely devoid of any sense of those values which Jews and the world (in spite of itself) have regarded as constituting the Jewish heritage, as a spiritual legacy that has been “a light unto the nations.” This millennial religious and cultural continuity is cast aside as of no worth compared to the “pomp and glory” of state and flag. As it happens, the Hebrew textbook published by the Zionist Organization has been severely criticized, on these very grounds, by a Zionist, in a Zionist journal: “After getting through with its forty lessons, the student may confidently enter a restaurant in Tel Aviv and get through ordering with flying conversational Hebrew colors. . . . I entertain no illusions and don’t expect the ZOA to take my unsolicited advice., anyhow: ‘Stop selling Hebrew Self-Taught to Jews, for what it can teach Jews is worse than nothing.‘” (Jewish Spectator, July 1947.)

In his recent book, The Future of the American Jew, Dr. Mordecai Kaplan, himself a Zionist, writes: “The attitude of the sholele hatefuzah (negators of the Diaspora) is not likely to inspire our neighbors with confidence in the Jew, or with respect for Judaism” (page 29). Dr. Kaplan knows that Zionism, whether central or marginal in a philosophy of Judaism, is not, and cannot be equated with, the whole of Jewish life and experience: “Jewish people-hood was never identified exclusively with state or territory, although it availed itself of the state of Eretz Yisrael as an agency of its civilization. Essentially identificatoin with Jewish people-hood meant participation in Jewish civilization, in the Jewish way of life, in Torah” (page 537).

Dr. Kaplan was not present at the convention in Pittsburgh and did not address the delegates at the banquet, but the Zionist who attributed “mental and spiritual impotence” to our ancestors was. Nor indeed were any notable scholars, thinkers, or “intellectuals” present at this convention, one of whose announced major objectives was to turn its face, now that Israel had been won, toward Jewish America, toward Jewish education and culture in America. The fact is that not a single paper was read on this basic issue or on any other aspect of Jewish culture. (Zionists, however, are not the only ones at fault in this, since anti-intellectualism and a general negation of the values of the mind prevail in almost all Jewish organizations—from the Left to the Right, from labor to the Zionists.)

_____________

 

The delegates themselves did not behave as if they were in Galut, and seemed to feel very much at home in the hotels, in the restaurants, in the streets. And the mayor of the city in which they were holding the convention saluted them as fellow-Zionists.

Discussing this with the delegates, I heard what I had already heard from Jews as I travelled in various parts of the country, that America is Galut for two reasons. First, they point to the presence of anti-Semitism, adding, as they remember Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek, “It can happen here too”; and then the more “nationalistic” ones brood over the hardships of bringing up their children as “full,” “integral” Jews.

It would be folly to deny or to explain away the existence of anti-Semitism in America, and it would be more than “bad taste”—nay, an unforgivable sin—to make light of the tragedy that befell the Jews of Europe. Yet these answers are too glib and as often as not “stereotypes,” based upon merely incidental experience, and generalized without much thought.

An acquaintance of mine, a doctor leaving, at considerable cost to himself, for a six-months’ service in Palestine in some scientific capacity, told me the other day: “Well, this much is certain, if a policeman in Tel Aviv hands me a ticket for speeding, it might be because of corruption in the municipal administration or what not, but it won’t be because of anti-Semitism.” Assuming that this was said half-humorously (though that did not appear to be its intent), this remark still has a moral. This man could only justify himself and his departure on a humanitarian mission by negation, by stamping America as Galut.

A delegate at the convention, a sensitive and intelligent individual, told me that when he attended one of the metropolitan colleges, others thought he was German, but on learning that he was Jewish they broke relations with him. Whatever the case may have been—and there was no conscious dishonesty in the remark—it did not occur to him that there might have been an element of “rationalization” in it, or exaggeration, or a misreading of facts, or sheer imagination. Little wonder then that he, and others like him, were attuned to the notion that America was Galut.

“Normalization,” as envisaged by Pinsker and Herzl, required anti-Semitism as a lever, and it could be attained only in a Jewish state. The rest of the planet would remain a kind of limbo, a Diaspora. The experience of the European nightmare has in the minds of many “nationalists” extended this theme, so basic to Zionist thinking, to the implication that if any Gentile is scratched he will turn out to be an anti-Semite. And here too the “dialectic of extremes” meets: for all their wholesale suspicion and rejection of the goy, the delegates rose to their feet again and again when “good Gentiles” addressed them; and the people who introduced these speakers praised them to the skies.

Only the blind would dance in the streets, singing, “Hallelujah, there are no traces of anti-Semitism in America.” There is anti-Semitism here, and it may even be conceded that the Jew is a special target of the prejudiced, that he is their natural and inevitable scapegoat. But he is not the only one and his plight is not the most unbearable one—surely not in comparison with the Negro’s. And little can be done about anti-Semitism if one adopts the simple premise that it is better to get a ticket for speeding in Tel Aviv than in New York. Are all five million Jews in America to go to Tel Aviv? Where is the Negro to go? (And, for that matter, what is the Italian or Polish pre-medical student to do—even though Italy and Poland are “sovereign” states—about the very vital obstacles to his admission to the medical schools, even granting they are not quite so great as those faced by the Jewish student?) And what are non-national and nonracial minorities to do? Where are such dissidents as Jehovah’s Witnesses to go? Where, in the past, could the Quakers escape to?

But the constant harping upon anti-Semitism is not as dangerous (though it is that too) as the stubborn refusal to understand its nature and see it as one of the shadows in the American picture. Rather than seeking mental flight overseas, surely we might better work together with all the genuine, “non-totalitarian” forces of liberalism and progress, Jews and Gentiles, to perfect American democracy. Admittedly, there is more to anti-Semitism than a social and economic analysis would disclose, and the religious and psychological versions of it must not be ignored, but certainly the fight for integral democracy does provide a reasonable and hopeful program of action.

_____________

 

The second argument—as to the difficulties of bringing children up as “full” Jews—is by far the more insistent and “authentic” one. It comes, with some, from the heart, as is shown by their readiness to go to much expense to send their children to parochial schools and Jewish summer camps. Still, they are troubled because, despite all efforts, the results are not always what they want them to be. And they account for this by the discontinuity between the “cultural climate” at home and in the Jewish school, on one side, and the larger environment of which these are a part, on the other.

Now if by “integral” Jewishness full secular nationalism is meant, the Zionists are correct in asserting that it cannot be fully attained outside a state. The content of secular nationalism coincides at too many points with the content of the larger environment and entails a conflict of loyalties or else the subordination of one loyalty to the other. Assuredly Jewish children in America, even if they should know Hebrew or Yiddish (which is desirable on several counts), will know it as a secondary language, not their primary one; and of course no one (whether Zionist or not) will expect them to divide their allegiance as citizens between the United States and any other country.

At the same time, there is room for cultural democracy in America, or, as it is perhaps inaccurately described, for cultural pluralism. There are many “minorities” in America, and they are bound together by the English language, by law and economics, and (at least constitutionally) by rights and duties. Cultural democracy would not only tolerate diversity and difference within this frame but would encourage them. Such diversity and difference could have endurance and value if they do not duplicate what is accessible to Americans as a whole, but rather foster and preserve what is distinctive about the various groups in language, custom, tradition.

Accordingly, if “integral” Jewishness is subsumed under the aspects of ethics, religion, and intellectual values, it can be achieved with some success in America. But if the content of Jewishness is regarded as being exclusively the fact of national identity and the exhibition of this fact, then America is indeed no place for the “full” Jew. If the conclusions of Herzlian Zionism, or of any type of secular nationalism, continue to be accepted as the core of one’s Jewish Weltanschauung, and if the Jew who adopts them is consistent, he must hold that Am Yisrael (the people of Israel) can perpetuate itself only in Eretz Yisrael, in a state of its own, and all else is Galut.

_____________

 

For those who reject these, there is, however, another alternative—not a compromise between the preceding two, or even a “synthesis.” This alternative holds that not much can be done with the “Jewish problem” unless we are willing to affirm at once the peoplehood of Israel and its religion, and to repeat, with our sages, seriously but not literally, that “Israel and its religion (Torah and God) are inseparable.” The concept of people-hood takes cognizance of our presence all over the world and of our cultural legacy—languages, folkways, art, history, our secular contributions to civilization—and saves us from the error of the sterile creedal stress of the Council of Judaism and the kind of Reform that it represents. The emphasis upon religion, in the broader, fuller sense, that is, upon the ethico-religious basis and character of our culture, and the recognition that there is, in the Jewish tradition and past experience, only a slight, if any, separation between domains of faith and morals, can keep us from yielding to a nationalism that is primarily egocentric and territorial and predicated upon the state.

Fortunately this ethico-religious alternative fits with the American scene. Religious freedom has been realized here, and the separation of church and state, as guaranteed in the First Amendment, has made of America a land where religion is not a function of power but an expression of conscience. The prophetic heritage which is ours has played its part in America’s inception and has been a dimension of its civilization. As we teach this tradition to our children and pass it on to them, it is ascertainable as distinctively ours because it is linked up with our career and “destiny” as a people, because it is born of our suffering and hope, and because of the peculiar ethical interpretation that we give it. And yet it does not stand as antipodal to the heritage and civilization of the land we live in. And while the prophetic heritage is the foundation and the summit of our culture as a people, it is not all. What is commonly designated as “secular” culture could be easily included in our educational curricula and in our communal enterprises, and would expand in meaning as related to this heritage.

Much has been said of the “alienation” of the modern Jew, and his lot has been compared to that of the intellectual, the artist, and the non-conformist. In a measure this is true. But the Jew, like the artist and non-conformist, is also at home in the world, or else, like the Babylonian and the Assyrian, he would have vanished long ago (even as the artist and the non-conformist would be ineffectual in a world they totally disowned). The poignant tale of the eternal and wandering Jew may have its roots in hostility, but it is also evidence that the nations have recognized the deathlessness of Israel; thus, even in alienation, the world is yet “Israel’s home.” And of all the lands in our long itinerary, none has been as much home as is America, and our sojourn here can be as “normal” as that of anyone else if we relinquish the delusion that normality (either for Jews or for anybody) is as smooth as velvet.

_____________

 

The slogan at the moment in Zionism, as put forward by Dr. Neumann and apparently approved by the delegates, is cultural activity among the Jews of America. There was warmth and a ring of sincerity in Dr. Neumann’s speech; he said: “We must be honest with ourselves and with our children. We must decide whether we really mean to perpetuate Jewish life in the Diaspora and if so, how. . . . It will not do to depend upon the automatic radiations and reverberations of the pulsating life in Israel. It will not do for the Jews of the Diaspora to live on spiritual and cultural importations. We must be producers as well as consumers. Jewish life here and elsewhere must become vital by becoming creative or it may not survive at all. The task will be much easier and immeasurably facilitated by the Hebraic renaissance in Palestine. But there must be forces actively at work here that will build an authentic and indigenous Jewish life, interacting creatively with the life of Israel.”

Yet the final formula intoned by Dr. Neumann, and caught up by many of the delegates, still leaves causes for anxiety. The speech was applauded, and then in subsequent discussion Palestine again became all, while America—Diaspora in the speech—remained an outlying province. And Jewish culture was once more interpreted in terms of Zionism. So much so that even Dr. Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, though deploring, at the meeting of the Committee on Education, the tendency to “disregard the creation of Jewish culture in the Galut,” went on to say, “but Jewish culture has found its only expression through Zionism.” And Dr. Margoshes entitled a column on Dr. Neumann’s speech “Zionizing American Jewry” (Day, July 10).

Dr. Neumann’s final formula says that “we shall make use of the literary, artistic, musical and religious resources of the Jewish state,” and has little to say about making full use of our own resources here in the United States, about developing and enriching them and affecting, in reciprocal relationship, those of the new state. What it amounts to after all, Dr. Neumann’s plea notwithstanding, is that American Zionists visualize themselves as engaging in an enormous business—export and import. We shall see the exportation—in addition to funds—of halutzim (“where once hundreds have gone, now thousands will go”) and in return the importation of Israel’s “literary, artistic, musical, and religious” products. We shall be in for a series of exhibitions, sales, tours, and “days” or “weeks” set aside for Palestinian music, art, and what not. And that, together with an expenditure of several million dollars on the “Hebraization” of American Jews, will be advertised as culture, as the “enriching and deepening” of Jewish life in America.

It was not surprising therefore, and almost amusing, to see how rapidly the session of the Committee on Education veered from the essential to the trivial. And the climax was reached when one delegate, out of an egregious lack of historical reverence, said something like this: “We are facing possibly the greatest Renaissance in the last two thousand years of our life, and so . . . must be up-to-date in utilizing the very latest techniques and the most progressive methods, such as the screen, radio, and other devices.” And why not? It will keep people busy, will entertain them, will make them “culture-conscious”—and it will promote business.

_____________

 

According to the manual of information handed out to delegates and the press, the membership of the Zionist Organization of America is a quarter of a million. Together with the Hadassah and the younger groups (leaving out the Labor Zionists, the Mizrachi, and the Revisionists) it probably approximates half a million. That is a sizable slice of our Jewish community. The enthusiasm and devotion of many Zionists are indisputable, and those of the older generation, with their East European background, are “Jewish” to the marrow of their bones. As I write these lines, several women of the Hadassah, within sight of my window, are soliciting funds for the purchase of medical supplies for the wounded in Israel, and I am moved, as all of us would be.

But now that the political aim of Zionism is clothed with flesh and sinew, and the passion for propaganda must subside (since almost all endorse partition), it is quite likely that Zionists will become eager to take over Jewish institutions—centers, temples, synagogues, Y’s, fraternal orders welfare agencies, and above all, schools. They have participated actively in these, and that they are entitled to share in their administration and in the shaping of their policies is unquestionable. But hegemony—that is something else. Jewish education in the United States would then become (or continue to be) what Hebrew text-books now are, a footnote on “modern” Palestine, and a confirmation speech, the ability to say “hello,” “goodbye” and a few other phrases in Hebrew, would constitute the end and consummation of Jewish education.

Neither the theory nor the practice of Zionists has prepared them for the role they may now wish to play in this country. Their convention revealed that the culture they boast of is impoverished in content and, where not purely “formal,” banal and crude. For from beginning to end of its sessions not a gleam of Jewish “style” was discernible—whether in the opening invocations which were improvised by rabbis in grandiloquent phrases; or in the noisy and ugly march of the banners at the first session; or in the cult of leadership invoked by the two tremendous portraits of Silver and Neumann on the stage; or at the banquet in honor of Dr. Silver and in the excessive eulogies attendant upon it. Here the convention became “American”; here was assimilation to the environment; and at its most vulgar. With ease it forsook hallowed Jewish customs and traditions, clearly corroborating Oscar Handlin’s shrewd observation that cultural nostalgia—and escapism—is characteristic of America, that in us, as in other groups, there is the inclination to invest the “foreign” culture we originally brought with us with our highest values, but to live in the here and now of America on a lower plane, as proste menshn.

Now Jewish life in America requires not only a way but a “style” (nusach)—not as opposed to, but within the larger environment. Jewish education, and hence creativity, are doomed from the start unless we have communal experiences of our own. A history cannot be borrowed; it must be “lived,” experienced. At the moment interest in Israel, as it fights heroically, is bright and steady. But when peace returns or we grow accustomed to the happenings there, our aid to Israel, too, will falter, unless we possess “status and dignity” and “spiritual resources.” The Jews of Israel and the Jews of America and the remnants in Europe are equal in “dignity and status,” and, though in their different circumstances, they must “enrich and deepen” their own and each other’s lives out of their various communal experiences.

There is much shouting now in the Jewish community (and little tolerance for dissidence); a “sweet unanimity” has descended upon us in the support of partition. But the “shouting and. tumult” will die down and, like Elijah on the mount, we shall hear the “still, small voice,” and shall settle down to the stupendous task of establishing Jewish education and culture in America, our home, on a firm foundation. Despite the convention’s resolution on Jewish culture in America—perhaps because of it—the task cannot be left solely or largely to Zionists. It belongs to all American Jews.

_____________

 

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link