To the Editor:
May a middle-aged German Jew, who spent some of his formative years in what was then called Palestine, offer a few random thoughts on the symposium, “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals,” in your April number?
As a non-combatant member of a now somewhat shrunken army of survivors from Central Europe, I am impressed by the confident manner assumed by the majority of the participants. Doubtless it is well founded. One would not wish to dispute the underlying assumption that American democracy is, and will remain, immune to the particular poisons which helped to wreck large parts of Europe. (In this connection one should always remember that Germany effectively committed suicide as a nation when it elevated Hitler to power.) All the same, it seems a trifle incautious on the part of some of the contributors to take it for granted that the Jewish problem as such has already disappeared, or is on the way to final extinction. These celebrations are premature. “Anti-Semitism”—a polite circumlocution for something that few people care to call by its true name—has older and tougher cultural roots (notably of the theological kind) than modern agnostics are willing to grant. Enlightened themselves, they readily attribute a corresponding degree of enlightenment to others. The German Jews were not guiltless of this fallacy. At the risk of being misunderstood, one feels like uttering a note of caution. It is reasonable to suppose that the residual latent hostility toward Jews will gradually become sufficiently attenuated to count for no more than the slight surviving animosities between the various Christian denominations within the national community. But surely things have not yet quite reached this stage even in the United States? One may applaud the hope without necessarily sharing the belief that its realization is imminent.
This leads me to another, and possibly less important, point: it must be my inherited—though by now rather diluted—pro-Zionism which makes me regret the tone adopted by some of the writers toward Israel. Objectivity and detachment are praiseworthy; callousness and obtuseness are rather less admirable. One or two of the contributors give the impression of being anxious to strike “progressive” poses at the expense of the only Jewish community which has successfully attained sovereign status (and correspondingly incurred the wrath of rival national entities). There is also, in some of these utterances, a hint of the old familiar craving after self-inflicted guilt and punishment. Ethical perfection is demanded from Israel (but not, significantly, from America). There is an assumption that the Israelis are under an obligation to live up to the moral standards of the writers, who for their part are safely ensconced in their various academic jobs. To my mind Mr. Michael Maccoby takes the prize for this kind of pretentious asininity, but some of the others are not far behind. Thus Mr. Ned Polsky, who also advertises a fascinating cocktail of Trotsky, Freud, and Nietzsche—rather reminiscent of my own private Weltanschauung when I was seventeen, but surely at thirty-two he is too old for this kind of thing?—serves warning that unless Israel conforms to his political program of the moment (what will it be next year, or the year after?), it might as well disappear from the map. Aside from being a notable tribute to the enduring strength of infantile leftism, this is a piece of impertinence. The Israelis are under no obligation to commit suicide for Mr. Polsky’s benefit. Regrettably, even Mr. Andrew Hacker—who otherwise sounds sensible—tortures himself quite needlessly with qualms over the damage done to Colonel Nasser’s political ambitions by the existence of the Jewish state. But why should not the Egyptian regime be left to cope with its self-inflicted expansionist problems unaided? And why does Mr. Hacker suppose that letting Nasser loose on Black Africa is going to benefit the local inhabitants?
I have purposely concentrated on one or two matters which happen to be relevant to my own interests. More could be said about other curious features of this symposium—e.g., the surprising worship of the new three-headed deity: Marx-Freud-Einstein. As a German Jew (and a part-time student of Marxism) I feel duly flattered, but also a trifle uneasy at what seems to me a manifestation of collective self-congratulation. The thinkers in question—not that Einstein was much of a thinker outside his specialty—belong to the dead world of German Jewry. It is a mistake to suppose that one can go on warming onself at this fire.
On the whole—if I may be allowed to conclude on a personal note—I rather prefer the women contributors to the men. They seem to write out of a deeper level of concern and emotional awareness. If I had a prize to bestow I should present it to Mrs. Barbara Probst Solomon. One may not quite agree with her belief that Jews are uniquely defined by their religion (and its gradual erosion), but it is impossible not to sense that her kind of seriousness is proper to the subject matter, and that it comes out of something rather more intensely felt than the snap judgments of other writers. Some of them tend to adopt a whimsical tone which (one cannot help feeling) is more appropriate to lectures on English literature. Perhaps it is part of the inevitable process of acculturation. I can only say that I find Mrs. Solomon’s attitude more sympathetic.
George Lightheim
London, England
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To the Editor:
The symposium in the April 1961 issue prompts me to write in dismay and wonderment regarding the editorial policy which sanctioned and, indeed, favored the method of choice of authors.
As you know, Judaism has never frowned upon the knowledgeable agnostic, but our sages have refused to honor comment from individuals with a weak background in the philosophy of Jewish ethos. Moreover, those who have never participated as adults in ritual or other traditional manifestations of Judaic social and religious structure cannot be called upon to judge the ultimate effect of these customs in home and synagogue. The scrupulous care which the editors of COMMENTARY have taken to avoid (except in one instance) authors who have a moderately satisfactory background in the field that they chose to analyze shows an appalling lack of insight as to who is worthy of criticism and who has not earned that right.
In this period of American Jewish development when so many otherwise gifted adults have only an adolescent’s understanding of their faith, we are blessed with a group of brilliant and unusually young Jewish intellectuals who have both emotional and mental maturity. Not one of these young men of stature was included in your symposium. . . . Apparently the COMMENTARY editorial board felt that they had been contaminated too much by a prolonged and meaningful exposure to positive Jewish values.
Alfred Soffer, M. D.
Rochester, New York
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To the Editor:
I read the symposium of the younger intellectuals with much interest. It seemed to me to reflect a very high order of thoughtfulness; and I was heartened by the tone of idealism that ran through almost all of the contributions. In that respect, these young men are not far removed from their predecessors of ten or twenty years ago. The emphasis upon the ethical and moral values of their tradition rather than upon any narrow traditional or national view of it was most encouraging. And the leaders of our communal organizations might well make the effort to understand the significance of this indication of where the concerns of American Jews really lie.
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
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To the Editor:
The fifty pages which you have devoted to the answers in the symposium were so much wasted space. The reason for this is simply that the men and women to whom you sent the questions are, by their own admission, not competent to answer questions about God, the Jewish people, or Israel. The thirty men and women (one of them does not really belong to that group) know no Hebrew, have studied no Yiddish, have no access to the literatures in these languages, and know nothing of Jewish history. They have not lived with Jewish problems, have not meditated on them, and have not lost a single night’s sleep over them. How can they be considered experts on matters Jewish, and how did the editor of COMMENTARY presume to hear expert opinions from them?
Their views, whether they admit it or not, are exactly the views held by American Jewish upper-middle-class men on whom the intellectuals look down with so much contempt. . . .
I admit that we ought to hang our heads in shame. These are the products of our schools. We had them “Bar Mitzvah’d.” But this does not excuse COMMENTARY from taking their opinions as if they were Torah from Mount Sinai.
Beryl Segal
Providence, Rhode Island
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To the Editor:
The April symposium (which might have been subtitled “Thirty-one couches—No waiting!”) is likely to be a collector’s item. Where but in COMMENTARY is to be found such searching self-examination? Where, I might ask further, but in a religion whose resilience has stood the test of time?
Irving B. Zeichner
Atlantic Highlands, N. J.
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To the Editor:
I found the symposium in your April issue one of the most fascinating pieces ever carried. . . . But what a picture it made. I learned things. I learned that the ivory tower is more inaccessible than I’d thought. The many contributors who are involved in the academic life seem to be living in an America I don’t know. It is an America with hardly any anti-Semitism, where Jews are just like everybody else. . . . It just isn’t my world. No synagogue markings, no job discrimination, no exclusive country clubs, no social exclusion, and no special contributions to America . . . no holidays and family gatherings and feasts, no group dinners and charity theater parties and fund-raising dinners, no pride in Israeli accomplishments, no horror at the greatest and most incredible inhumanity against the Jews in our lifetime.
Are intellectuals supposed to be a mirror of their society? Not these, if they are indeed our intellectuals. Are they leaders? Where will they lead us? To mock the conformity of others? And ignore their own? The contributors were as much in contact with the real world as guests at a cellar Greenwich Village cocktail party in July.
How about a symposium of your non-intellectual readers?
David Grossberg
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . . I am writing because I fear that you must be receiving angered letters on your symposium and I wish to say “Bravo!” and to thank you in my own name and the names of many of my fellow congregants for bringing this challenge before us. . . . You have made a fundamental contribution by stirring your readers and the rabbis to think now, and with a common point of reference, about the problems Jews face today. The reactions of the symposium participants are, I am sure, the reactions of a huge segment of American Jewry. Because of their intellectual background they were able to express their answers dramatically and almost always with clarity.
They represent to me, a concerned layman—and should represent to the rabbinate—a challenge. What are we to do to stop the unconscious assimilation of American Jews today, and how may Judaism realize its potential of relevance and creative power in our lives? . . .
(Mrs.) Josephine Killman
White Plains, N. Y.
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To the Editor:
The symposium is an enlightening self-dissection by thirty-one individuals who happen to be Jewish—but I can’t convince myself that the end result is anything like an accurate barometer of what young Jewish intellectuals think about their Jewishness.
For one thing, of course, you chose not to include religious Jews, and thereby produced a horribly distorted image of the group I think you were attempting to portray. There is certainly no dearth of “successful” young intellectuals, in many fields, who are observant Jews and who could still give stimulating answers to your questions. . . . .
You also neglect the large middle group for whom Judaism is not a matter of “either ritual or moral principle” (a view common to many of your writers) but rather a more realistic and historically true amalgam of both—and more. The people I speak of are aware that “the conventional groupings are on the way out”—but they don’t view this as a signal to loose all religious, national, and cultural ties, be they American, Jewish, or anything else. This group, in short, does not believe that the last-act curtain has been rung down—and is willing to grapple with the problems faced in learning to live as a good Jew, a good American, and a good citizen of the world, 1961. . . .
Ruth Routtenberg
Rockville Centre, N. Y.
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To the Editor:
I don’t think you quite realize what you have served up in your symposium on “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals.” I find the stench sickening. . . . Surely, it takes a much stronger stomach than mine to appraise this mess with such optimism as you expressed in your Introduction.
It could, at least, be said for most of the inverted snobs who participated in the 1944 symposium that they were subsequently affected enough by the experience of the extermination camps and the birth of the State of Israel in agonizing labor pains to reaffirm their identity as Jews. This was, after all, a stunning reversal for consecrated assimilationists of a bygone innocent era. With our new generation of intellectual leaders, however, we are back where we started seventeen years and more ago, except that now we have a bunch of passive assimilationists who find cover under the old “universal” ideals, which are safely and comfortably bourgeois today. . . . Characteristically, I find one chicken-soup writer badgering me with the question of why I insist on claiming to be his close relation. To this I can only reply that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s time already to stop with the same question. Nu, so we’re not related, and I don’t have to read what you write about my contemptible kind. . . . .
I could go down a list of twenty-four of the symposium participants to enumerate statements of shock and insult to me, which suggest that the same measure of self-hatred and impotence motivates the emancipated and accepted young Jewish intellectual today as was operative among his rebellious elders in the radical 30’s. However, while I think you are very wrong in your assessment of the nature and portent of the current situation, I do applaud you for having done the good service of bringing it to light.
Murray J. Fink
San Fernando, California
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To the Editor:
The symposium was fascinating reading and promises to be one of the most provocative and controversial issues to hit the American Jewish community in 1961.
The participants are to be commended for their frankness. Their flight from Jewish values will give secular and religious leaders of our Jewish communal organizations much to reflect on in the days ahead as to their failure to attract so many of our creative young people.
In all fairness, however, it must be pointed out that in many respects the replies were predictable in view of the weighted sampling utilized in the symposium. Writers and university faculty members generally do not belong to any community, Jewish or non-Jewish, other than their own narrow group. The wall between “town and gown” is still impregnable, and writers who are not affiliated with universities all too often isolate themselves both physically and spiritually from the rest of their ordinary brothers. . . .
Irving Bernstein
Beverly Hills, California
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To the Editor:
The symposium will serve for a long time as material for the study of the typology of the intellectual, his function in the Jewish community, and his role as spokesman for a Jewish point of view—because regardless of his own stand he is identified as a Jew by non-Jews.
True, some of the contributors could well fit into the much needed counterpart of the psychiatric classic, Der Juedische Selbsthass, by the martyr Theodore Lessing. The repetition of what has become a standard anti-Semitic intellectual accusation against Judaism as the source of racism, and the obvious ignoring of the problem of genocide in the Arab-Israeli relations, are clear indications of ignorance of Jewish history. . . .
The alienated and the hostile have always been with us since the Emancipation. It is nevertheless difficult not to challenge the right of intellectuals to give opinions in fields where their education has been neglected, and where their only competence is an emotional attitude, surely no criterion for molding intelligent public opinion.
Abraham G. Duker
President, The College of Jewish Studies
Chicago, Illinois
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To the Editor:
If only you could find five more young intellectuals of the same caliber, we would have a brand new modern version of the Lamed Vov (the legendary thirty-six saints upon whom the world rests).
As it is, thirty-one is highly significant. In Hebrew, this number is represented by Lamed Alef, which may constitute the words Lo and El—no God.
Since none seems to find value in the Jewish concept of God, logic is on the side of those respondents who are not waiting for their children to convert, but disclaim any connection with Jews themselves.
(Rabbi) Solomon Weinberger
Passaic, N. J.
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To the Editor:
I was disturbed by most of the responses to the symposium—their shallowness and cool and detached posture. I found particularly disturbing, as you did in your Introduction, the fact that for the contributors there were no or few “areas that are sacred,” and so few “demands before which the only proper attitude is piety or reverence.”
I found missing from the contributions a recognition of what seems to me the important truth: that perhaps the most genuine path to the universality of spirit to which the “Younger Intellectuals” seem so strongly to aspire, is a deep commitment to a concrete and even parochial set of ennobling values and beliefs. . . .
A man’s spirit (I am speaking here not of Man, but of Unamuno’s “man of flesh and blood”) always has a historical context. A man’s identity always grows out of concrete experiences and heritages. It does not develop in the emotional vacuum of detached critical analysis and ratiocination. Perhaps the “Younger Intellectuals” cannot affirm Judaism, but they must, I believe, affirm something of great depth of spirit. Being good liberals for minority groups and the underprivileged is not, I am afraid, going to be enough for the largeness of their own spirits.
Morris Eagle
Department of Psychology
New York University
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . . We are sure that this disturbing and challenging symposium will provoke considerable and widespread comment and discussion. This is a genuine contribution to American Jewish thought.
Lewis Coren
Chairman, Adult Jewish Education Committee
Temple Sinai
Philadelphia, Pa.
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To the Editor:
. . . . To say that I am not surprised at the answers in the symposium would be an understatement. Anyone interested in Jewish life has been saddened by the alienation of the Jewish intellectual—or more correctly—the intellectual who happens to be Jewish. . . . Are there no Jewish intellectuals at all who are happy with their Judaism and who take a positive attitude to things Jewish and who are active in the Jewish community? I know a number of such, who teach in universities and who write books and who are on a par with the ones you have chosen. Furthermore, if one is a rabbi or a teacher in a Jewish institution, but has never published in Partisan Review or the New Yorker, does he thereby cease to be a young Jewish intellectual? Where, in the name of heaven, is the distinction?
I believe that your choice is blatantly biased and gives a false picture of the real situation. . . . There is one consolation—these are not the people to whom we are looking for the future of the Jewish community. Like Mordecei, I say, “Relief and deliverance will arise to the Jews from another place” (Est. 4:19).
(Rabbi) Isaac Klein
Temple Emanu-El
Buffalo, N. Y.
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To the Editor:
Your symposium confirms what I have always suspected. The insolence of ignorance is far better than the arrogance of intellect. To me, the innocence of belief is still the essence of creation.
Daniel Spicehandler
New York, N. Y.
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To the Editor:
Let me congratulate you on your “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals.” If I find this symposium truly challenging, and indeed a veritable document, it is because it is composed of forthright statements made by gifted, reflective, and sensitive people. True, one is depressed because so few of the contributors have found it necessary to seek any real knowledge of Judaism; one is disturbed because so many—capable of deep probing into other aspects of existence—seem incapable of deep probing into their Jewishness, the kind which might have aroused a desire for knowledge of Judaism; and one is positively exasperated to find that some (such as Judith Jarvis) should, lack of knowledge of, or acquaintance with Judaism notwithstanding, presume to make ex-cathedra pronouncements on Judaism.
But it would be the gravest mistake for committed Jews simply to dismiss the symposium for these reasons, and smugly to assume that it presents no challenge. If in our time sensitive and gifted intellectuals, caring enough about their Jewishness to reply to your query, do not or cannot probe deeply enough into their Jewishness to come anywhere and in any way face to face with Judaism, this is itself something to be faced and thought about. And if some of their number—people who would never dream of making ex-cathedra judgments on philosophy or American literature without a thorough knowledge of the subject—do not hesitate to make such judgments on Judaism, then this too is something to be faced and thought about. In short, by virtue of their forthrightness even those contributors who speak from outside of Judaism have managed to hold up some kind of mirror before American Judaism.
What is more, some of the contributors probe very deeply indeed into their Jewishness; and not all speak from outside Judaism. Contributors such as Hugh Nissenson and Malcolm Diamond have raised some of the central questions with which modern Judaism must cope, if it is not to degenerate into either mere middle-class smugness or escapist romanticism.
Emil L. Fackenheim
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada
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[A second group of letters on the symposium will appear next month—Ed.]
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