Spokesman?
Being Jewish in America.
by Arthur Hertzberg.
Schocken. 287 pp. $16.95.
The commitment of American Jews to liberal reform became something of a political axiom in the two decades after World War II. Two assumptions in particular brought Jews into the liberal camp and kept them there in large numbers: the assumption that, at home, the Democratic successors to Franklin D. Roosevelt would continue to adhere to the norms of equal opportunity established by the New Deal in order to improve the quality of life for all Americans, and the assumption that, in foreign affairs, American military might and the policy of “containment” initiated by Truman and implemented by his Democratic successors would continue to provide a measure of protection from the Soviet Union for non-Communist nations in the world—including the state of Israel.
By the early 70’s, in the minds of many Jews, liberal ideology and practice, both at home and abroad, had taken an alarming turn. In domestic matters, the semantic euphemisms of “community control” and “affirmative action” were being used as covers for policies that bid fair to destroy the meritocratic norms—and, in some instances, the very institutions—through which the descendants of immigrants had made their way in American society in the immediate post-World War II era. In foreign policy, many American Jews were becoming concerned over the post-Vietnam drift toward isolationism in important segments of the liberal community and, finally, in the Carter administration, a drift which has led our allies in Europe and elsewhere to question America’s resolve and capability to lead and defend the non-Communist world.
It is in this context of a growing disillusionment within the Jewish community with the practices of the “new liberalism”—both at home and abroad—that one should view Being Jewish in America, a collection of essays and lectures written and delivered over the past quarter-century by Arthur Hertzberg, a noted rabbi, scholar, and former president of the American Jewish Congress. For Hertzberg is, somewhat surprisingly, a propagator of the “new liberalism,” albeit one whose Jewish roots are deep, and whose command of Jewish materials and modern history is impressive. As the author of a monograph on anti-Semitism in the French Enlightenment and the editor of an anthology of Zionist thought, Hertzberg writes with familiarity about the European tradition of hatred of Jews, and with perception about the ideological, institutional, and programmatic aspects of both Zionism and the relationship between the state of Israel and the Diaspora. Being Jewish in America is the product of a lively and an inquisitive mind; the author is keenly aware of the ironies and paradoxes—and the spiritual void—brought on by the encounter of many Jews with modernity. In the tradition of the Galician Haskalah that he appears to identify with, and following his Conservative mentors at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hertzberg’s writings articulate a search for a redefinition, largely in sociological and historical terms, of “the peoplehood of the Jews” in the modern age.
Included in Being Jewish in America is Hertzberg’s prescient essay—first published in 1966—on the declining influence of the rabbinate in American Jewish life. Although retracted in part by Hertzberg in a subsequent assessment, his principal thesis remains a valid one: there has been a marked decline in the status of the rabbi in recent decades, particularly evident in the scarcity of men such as Stephen Wise, Abba Hillel Silver, and other singularly gifted pulpiteers who set much of the tone and the agenda for the Jewish community prior to and during World War II.
Another exceptional essay concerns the meaning of the Holocaust. Cutting through the self-serving piety that suffuses much of the literature on this subject, Hertzberg writes from the perspective of one who escaped the Holocaust because his parents exercised the option of their American visa in the very last week of the year it was due to expire, 1926. He is critical of those who would subsume the Holocaust under the emotional rubric of “pride”—as in Janusz Korczak’s decision to go to the crematorium with the children of the orphan home he headed; of “shame”—Europe’s Jews, Hertzberg acerbically notes, had no duty to uphold a sense of honor in the Western sense, their own, or ours; or of “guilt,” for not having been there or for having survived. In place of these emotions, Hertzberg responds to the murder of Europe’s Jews with anger, “anger at the world which let the Holocaust happen . . . at the Western tradition with its pretense of civility and the rotten endemic reality of its Jew-hatred,” and at himself for being so young when it all happened and, hence, so silent.
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The dialectical qualities of Hertz-berg’s thought are clearly evident in his essays on Zionism and on the relation between Israel and the Diaspora. He recognizes that the enfranchisement process of the post-World War II decades made possible the bold response by American Jews to the Israeli crisis of June 1967, yet he fears that this very sense of at-homeness may ultimately erode the depth of American Jewry’s commitments to Israel in the future. A paradoxical relationship obtains between Israel and the Diaspora: Israel looks to the Diaspora for its “survivalist energies,” and the Diaspora looks to an involvement in Israel for its own continuing vitality. And while this internal drama is taking place, ironies of a deeper kind are also to be noted. Rather than quelling worldwide anti-Semitism, as classical Zionism presumed it would, Israel seems to be generating new forms of it, and this in turn places new strains on Israel-Diaspora relations.
For Hertzberg, the symbiosis between American Jewry and the state of Israel cannot be defended any longer in terms of the dictum formulated by Louis D. Brandeis earlier in the century, that to be a good Zionist is to be a good American. Hertzberg posits the notion that Jewish “peoplehood” is of a different order and “that it ought to be possible . . . to suggest to America and to the world that . . asymmetrical identities, identities which are not species of the same genus, identities which don’t operate in the same way, . . . nonetheless . . . have a right to exist.” He argues for a degree of exceptional-ism, both for Israel and for American Jewry, that goes against not only classical Zionist conceptions but present-day realities as well. In the case of American Jewry, Hertzberg proposes that the Jewish community of this country should have an equal voice in the political decisions to be made by the state of Israel—including Israel’s foreign policy—on the grounds that “Israel lives on behalf of and through world Jewry as surely as it does for itself. . . .”
This kind of political parity between Israel and the Diaspora is of course an impossibility. While the two communities share much and owe much to each other, the crucial decisions—the decisions of war and peace—will be made, for better or for worse, by the community that possesses national sovereignty. To seek to resolve the tension that inheres in the commitment of the American Jew to the survival of Israel by declaring that “Israel is not a state among the states, and . . . the American Jewish Diaspora is unabashedly a group not analogous to any other” is to posit a definition of Zionism that defeats the relationship between these two communities.
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Hertzberg’s efforts to redefine the Zionist experience, and particularly the relationship between the Jews of America and of Israel, seem to bespeak a new attitude on his part toward the Jews in general. They are, it appears, no longer to be trusted to know what is in their own best interests, but are in need of enlightened mentors to guide their ideas and actions. Hence his urging upon the state of Israel the good offices of American Jewry—i.e., of certain American Jewish leaders. Hence, too, his urging upon American Jews the program of the “new liberalism.” Outlining his position on the major issues confronting American Jewry in the introduction to this volume, Hertzberg exchanges reason for an ideological temper tantrum against those who do not share his views. What emerges is a father-knows-best prescription that incongruously combines the optimism of Stephen Wise’s interwar progressivism, the “new politics” of the 70’s, and the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. With much ill temper—and with much moral superiority, in contrast to the dulcet tones of his “Letter to an Arab Friend” (1978)—Hertzberg denounces both the Old Left of the 30’s and the “new conservatism” of the 70’s and then draws a causal, and invidious, connection between the two.
There are inconsistencies and contradictions here. In a revision of his earlier views, Hertzberg suggests that Jews should abandon the public schools for an “elite” form of “private [Jewish] schooling,” but fails to note that the decimation of public education over the last decade is in a significant degree the result of the “new liberalism” he now preaches. Having come out against affirmative-action programs in 1973, Hertzberg finds that he favors them in 1978, unearthing an ideological pretext for this “advanced” position in the Zionist thought of Vladimir Jabotinsky. As a spokesman for the interests of Jews, Hertzberg can appear to be little concerned with their immediate problems. He attacks those who opposed the building of low-income housing in the Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, or who argue against quotas in job training, but the fact is—as Hertzberg himself notes elsewhere in this volume—that the victims of the programs of the “new liberals” are still making their way out of the proletariat.
In his introductory polemic, Hertzberg is also critical of the Jewish community for rejecting “the good offices” of Kissinger and Nixon when it came to dealing with the Soviet Union, and for supporting the Jackson-Vanik amendment that tied Soviet trade with the United States to the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union. He criticizes Israel for failing to come to some “agreement” with its Arab neighbors prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. “Accommodations were possible,” he asserts, “at political prices that reasonable men ought to be willing to pay.”
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In short, in both domestic and foreign policy, the man who portrays himself as a distinguished spokesman of the Zionist cause, the central tenet of which is self-determination—the need for Jews to take responsibility for their own destiny—now advises the Jewish community to accept at face value the promises made to it by men in high places. In the context of Hertzberg’s “new liberalism,” similarly, it is Israel rather than the Arab countries surrounding it that has to prove its benign intentions to the world. The new Hertzberg takes a more sanguine view of the intentions of the enemies of the United States and of world Jewry than the Hertzberg of yesteryear would have permitted himself. Why? Surely not on the basis of the evidence, all of which would seem to point in the other direction. Whatever the cause for Hertzberg’s about-face, it is an exceedingly strange—and disappointing—posture for a survivalist Jew to have assumed.
