> ...I hope we are clear
on everything now, you self-hating Jew.
Oy vey!
See Sander Gilman, "Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews."
Torn at the Roots by Michael E. Staub, Columbia University Press, 2002. Quite sympatico w/ Jewish radical New left and left-liberalism, more broadly. http://www.amazon.com/ review
When Bad Analogies happen to Good People, 3.6 stars, June 11, 2003
Reviewer: pnotley at hotmail.com (see more about me) from Edmonton, Alberta Canada Michael Staub has presented a somewhat unusual book at divisions within American Jews from the fifties to the mid-seventies. His book does not possess a formal conclusion, but consists of eight chapters and an introduction. The first looks at the struggle between communists and anti- communists and how they argued over the Holocaust and American racism. The next two discuss the growing divisions within American over civil rights, and the fourth looks at divisions over the Vietnam war. The fifth looks again at civil rights, the sixth looks at the rise of Radical Zionism, the seventh looks at debates over family and sexuality and the eighth looks at the brief life of the pro-peace group Breira. Staub concentrates on especially Jewish movements: non-Jewish organs such as Partisan Review or The New York Review of Books get little or no mention. The participants are often theologians and members of explicitly Jewish groups. Novelists such as Bellow, Malamud, Mailer or Singer get no mention, while Philip Roth is mentioned only in passing. This appears to me as a mistake, since these writers obviously have a lot to say about Jewish-black and Jewish-feminist relationships, the topic of his book. Moreover they strike me as far more influential and important than the theological debates and the small groups such as Jews for Urban Justice, the Radical Jewish Union, the Jewish Liberation Project, or even The Jewish Defence League that Staub concentrates on.
Notwithstanding these eccentricities, Staub has still produced an interesting book. Staub's sympathies are clearly with those who tried to combine their Judaism with support for left-wing activism. He writes of those minority of Jews who were active supporters of civil rights who invoked traditions of "prophetic Judaism" to emphasize justice for all humanity. He is sympathetic to those who seek to support a just peace via a two state solution in Palestine. He points out those Jews who sought to revive Judaism by supporting and incorporating the demands of feminists and homosexuals. He writes of those Radical Zionist groups who also strongly opposed the Vietnamese war and those groups who incorporated the style and arguments of the Black Panthers for Jewish purposes. (He prints a cartoon where a Black Panther is disgusted by one Jew's lack of enthusiasm for Zionism.) He also discusses the widespread spread of Holocaust consciousness among Jewish spokespeople at the time. This is in fact a bit of a problem since the use of Holocaust tropes, such as the "passivity" of the victims, the "passivity" of the outside world, the "treason" of the Judenrat and others by all sides against all sides does have the effect of making the participants look more than a little hysterical and paranoid. Staub produces enough bad Holocaust analogies to drive Peter Novick and Raoul Hilberg to despair. A reform rabbi in the seventies states Hitler will have won if Jewish couples do not have four children each by 2000. Letter writers against integration whine "Where were the Negroes during the Hitler regime?" Nathan Glazer, who should have known better, snarkily commented that the New Left likes "final victories and final solutions." We get to hear the not-exactly innocent Ethel Rosenberg compare the not- exactly honorable Justice Kauffmann to the Judenrat. Radical protesters invoke Auschwitz, Vietnam and the suppression of the Attica prison riot on the same sign. One can go on.
But not everyone is equally foolish. One of the most useful things about the book is the way that it describes the limits of moderate (later conservative) Jewish opinion on civil rights. For decades Commentary has been arguing that Black extremism and anti-Semitism after 1965 was the cause of the Black-Jewish split. Nothing could be further from the truth. Commentary, as Staub shows, was almost always lukewarm towards the cause. He quotes some stunningly complacent, all honey and butter articles by Elliot Cohen in 1952 and James Rorty in 1954. He notes the opposition Southern synagogues expressed to actions by their more forceful Northern cousins. More important, he discusses opposition to "Prophetic Judaism." These relatively conservative Jews argued that liberal activism did not arise from the Torah per se, but instead was simply an internalized liberalism. They also argued that such activism was faddish, ostentatious in its show of guilt and sympathy and not really attuned to the interests of Jews. This not only started Commentary's obnoxious habit of describing every Jew who disagreed with them as deeply neurotic self-hating wimps, inauthentic and insufficiently masculine. It also evaded questions about desegregation in the north. Such arguments wrote of "de facto" segregation in the north as simply a historical accident, a natural reflection of group cohesion, when it would be far more accurate as the systematic effort of both state and society in the North to quarantine blacks into the poorest areas and the least desirable jobs. We get to see such prominent thinkers such as Norman Podheretz, Nathan Glazer, Arthur Hertzberg, Oscar Handlin, Marie Syrikin and Leslie Fielder evade the issue and reject integration before Stokely Carmichael weighed in on the issue. This, along with his discussion of their obtuseness about feminism and how they red-baited Breira out of existence for agreeing to talk with the PLO avant le letter, provides an important perspective for the reader. -- Michael Pugliese