‘Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). “And Moses said unto the children of Gad
and the children of Reuben: ‘Shall your brethren go to the war, and shall ye sit
here?’” (Numbers 32:6). These should have been the besetting questions for
American- Jewish intellectuals during Hitler’s twelve-year war against European
Jewry; but generally they were not.
They should be the pressing ones for
the learned classes of Diaspora Jewry today, as the international noose grows
ever tighter about Israel’s throat; but they are not.
Long after World
War II had ended, William Phillips, co-founder of
Partisan Review, recalled that
Irving Howe, the most astute political mind among the Jewish intellectuals, “was
haunted by the question of why our [Jewish] intellectual community ... had paid
so little attention to the Holocaust in the early 1940s.... He asked me why we
had written and talked so little about the Holocaust at the time it was taking
place.”
One may, for example, search the pages of
Partisan Review from
1937 through summer 1939 without finding mention of Hitler or Nazism. When Howe
was working on his autobiography, he looked through the old issues of his own
journal
Labor Action to see how, or indeed whether, he and his socialist
comrades had responded to the Holocaust. But he found the experience painful,
and concluded that the Trotskyists, including himself, were only the best of a
bad lot of leftist sects. He told Phillips that this inattention to the
destruction of European Jewry was “a serious instance of moral failure on our
part.”
The leading New York intellectuals had shown appalling
indifference not only to what had been endured by their European brethren, but
to what had been achieved by the Jews of Palestine. Events of biblical magnitude
had occurred within a single decade. A few years after the destruction of
European Jewry, the Jewish people had created the state of Israel. Of this
achievement, Winston Churchill, addressing Parliament in 1949, said: “The coming
into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be
viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the
perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand
years.
“That is a standard of temporal values or time-values which seems
very much out of accord with the perpetual click-clack of our rapidly changing
moods and of the age in which we live. This is an event in world
history.”
The moral failure of ignoring the Holocaust was now compounded
by a related failure: having averted their eyes from the destruction of European
Jewry, the Jewish intellectuals now looked away from one of the most impressive
assertions of the will to live that a martyred people has ever made. The writers
had been immersed in the twists and turns of literary modernism, in the fate of
socialism in the USSR and the US, and most of all in themselves, especially
their “alienation” not only from America but from Judaism, Jewishness, and Jews.
Indeed they defined themselves Jewishly through their alienation from their
Jewishness.
Looking back on this debacle many years later, Saul Bellow
admitted: “It’s perfectly true that ‘Jewish Writers in America’ ... missed what
should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of
European Jewry. I can’t say how our responsibility can be assessed.
We
... should have reckoned more fully, more deeply with it. Nobody in America
seriously took this on and only a few Jews elsewhere (like Primo Levi) were able
to comprehend it all.
“The Jews as a people reacted justly to it. So we
have Israel, but in the matter of higher comprehension ... there were no minds
fit to comprehend.... All parties then are passing the buck and every honest
conscience feels the disgrace of it.... Not a particle of this can be
denied.”
IN ONE sense, Howe and Bellow were the (embarrassed) prototypes,
if not exactly the progenitors, of today’s bumper crop of “anti-Zionist” Jewish
deep thinkers.
Howe, even more contrite than Bellow about his “moral
failure,” was among the first to see what was coming, and by 1970 found the
treachery of the younger generation of Jewish intellectuals literally
unspeakable: “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw
Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as ‘revolutionary’ the Egyptian
dictatorship; ... a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah, which
pledges to take Tel Aviv. About this, I cannot say more; it is simply too
painful.”
Many of these “Jewish boys and girls” are by now
well-established figures in journalism and academia, tenured and heavily-petted,
warming themselves in endowed university chairs, or editorializing from
The New
York Times or
New York Review of Books. But the “alienation” of which the older
New York Jewish intellectuals belatedly grew ashamed became the boast of the
Judts, Kushners, Butlers, Chomskys, and their acolytes.
These are people
who do not merely “sit here” while their brothers go to war. They take the side
of their brothers’ enemies and call their cowardice courage. Others, more
cautious, discover that the Jewish state, which most Europeans now blame for all
the world’s miseries (with the possible exception of global warming,) should
never have come into existence in the first place, and that “the [non-Zionist]
roads not taken” would have brought (and may yet bring) a “new” Diaspora Golden
Age. They are forever organizing kangaroo courts (called “academic conferences”)
to put Israel in the dock; or else they are churning out articles or monographs
or novels celebrating those roads not taken; or they are performing as “public
intellectuals,” breathlessly recommending a one-state solution or a no-state
solution or (this from the tone-deaf George Steiner) “a final
solution.”
Their strategy is at once timely and timeless. By a happy
coincidence, they excavate from relative obscurity long-dead Jewish thinkers who
opposed Zionism altogether or opposed political Zionism (a Jewish state) at the
very time that their liberal, progressive colleagues are discovering that the
nation-state is itself obsolete and that Israel is the most pernicious
nation-state that exists or has ever existed. But in another sense they are
ahistorical and disdainful of time because they write as if there were no
difference between Jewish opposition to a conjectural Jewish state eighty or a
hundred years ago and opposition to a living entity of almost six million souls
under constant siege.
In 1942 a character named Yudka (“little Jew”) in
Haim Hazaz’s famous Hebrew short story The Sermon says that “when a man can no
longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist.” But the unnatural progeny of the New
York Intellectuals embody a new, darker reality: when a man can no longer be a
Jew, he becomes an anti- Zionist, building an “identity” on the very thing he
would destroy. They have turned on its head the old slogan of assimilationism,
which was “Be a Jew at home, but a man in the street.” Their slogan is: “Be a
man at home, but a Jew in public.” By the time Howe and Bellow came to recognize
that their lack of brotherly concern with Jewish survival had indeed been a
“moral failure,” a new generation of Jewish intellectuals was already
proclaiming it as a virtue entitling them to put on the long robes and long
faces of biblical prophets.
Their prodigious work in painting Israel’s
decent society black as Gehenna and the pit of hell has forced a small yet
crucial revision of Orwell’s famous pronouncement about moral obtuseness and the
ignorance of the learned: “Some ideas are so stupid that only [Jewish]
intellectuals could believe them.”
The writer is the author of numerous
books, including Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew,
and (with Paul Bogdanor)
The Jewish divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders.