20 (pt. 1)
JEWISH INFLUENCE IN POPULAR (AMERICAN) CULTURE
"If anything distinguishes American Jews today within the context of American
society it is the special deference that society accords
-- Charles Liebman/Stephen Cohen, p. 7
being Jewish. I see it in the media, in the newspapers, in the
intonations; I do not see how one can avoid that feeling or
sensibility." -- Michael Novak, [in Stallsworth, p. 71]
"I'm half Jewish and half nothing."
(four-year-old boy in an elevator, to his friend), [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 245]
"I'm half Jewish and half nothing."
(four-year-old boy in an elevator, to his friend), [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 245]
"Too many Jews have turned away from the modern project, from
the Enlightenment and the idea of progress, to barricade
themselves in an angry tribalism." -- Norman Birnbaum, Tikkun,
p. 111
"The Jews in America ... have become very powerful as a lobby and
can afford the luxury of being hypersensitive. Any little thing that
you say in criticism is seen as a criticism against the people. They
seem to want to be seen as infallible."
-- South African Bishop Desmond Tutu,
Nobel Peace Prize Winner
"When Jews see themselves as superior to all other human beings
... they are claiming license to do what is forbidden to others."
-- Yehoshafat Harkabi, former chief of
Israeli military intelligence, p. 180
Israeli military intelligence, p. 180
"I didn't hear that polio was cured today. I heard that a Jewish
doctor cured polio today." -- Godfrey Cambridge, Black comedian,
SIMONS, p. 135-136
"[Black Americans have] an envy of the Jewish position and an
exaggerated notion of their power, which is standard in the
anti-Semitic imagination." -- Henry Feingold, Jewish scholar, p. 77
"American Jews have exerted an extraordinary impact upon the
character of the United States."
-- Stephen Whitfield, Jewish scholar, [AMERICAN
SPACE, p.20]
"It is all very puzzling. Who are these people, Christians wonder,
who have moved so rapidly from obscurity to positions of
prominence, even influence, in American society ... [and] why
do Jews seek to stick together so much?"
-- Charles Silberman, Jewish scholar, p. 26
"The period after World War II, especially, was a time of advance.
Before then Jews had moved into the entertainment field, dominating
Hollywood, and had begun to move into medicine, the sciences,
academia, journalism, and cultural life in general. By the 1960s,
they were disproportionately represented in most professions having to do
with the creation or dissemination of culture."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
1982, p. 96
"The period after World War II, especially, was a time of advance.
Before then Jews had moved into the entertainment field, dominating
Hollywood, and had begun to move into medicine, the sciences,
academia, journalism, and cultural life in general. By the 1960s,
with the creation or dissemination of culture."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
1982, p. 96
"Jews in America are a power group; is it unreasonable for some
people to ask whether Jews have too much power?"
-- Jerome Chanes, Jewish scholar, [in Weiss, p. 32]
"We Jews still prepare ourselves to fight the things the world
plans on doing to us. It ain't true ... Jews are not victims. We are
the players." -- J. J. Goldberg [in Silverstein, B., p. 5]
Transcending religion, race, or any other traditional Judaic reference, modern American Jewry is often described these days as a voluntary (from the perspective of the individual, not the community, which claims Jews by birth to the "community of fate") polity, a secular organizational network with emphasis upon social, educational, economic and political activism. It is an organization that unifies atheists and the religious, rich and the less affluent, Sephardim, Ashkenazi, and any other self-defined "Jew" within a communal solidarity to Jewish "peoplehood" and its four unifying pillars of Jewish identity: 1) belief in a communal identity of historic persecution and victimhood and the uniqueness of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, 2) belief in the omnipresent threat of an irrational anti-Semitism, 3) allegiance to the modern state of Israel, and 4) a dedication to helping others Jews.
The secular Jewish polity is a very adjusted model of the old obsolete "kehillah" self-governing organization that the Jewish community in Europe used to mediate with -- and distance itself from -- the surrounding non-Jewish people and cultures. While today's Jewish polity is world's apart in method and structure from the old institution, its purpose for existence today has moved towards what is was in ancient times: Jewish people distinct from, and often at the expense of, others. (Since the late 1960s, there has been a major shift in fundamental American Jewish attitudes: from helping fellow Jews assimilate fully into American mainstream society, to its polar opposite: massive amounts of money raised to support all aspects of "being Jewish.”) [SINGER, p. 220] The largest and best known expression of this polity is the United Jewish Appeal, an entity that has some 225 "federation'" sub-branches throughout the country. (In 1999, the UJA merged with other groups to form the "United Jewish Communities.") Such organizations claim a supportive base of 95% of all Jews in America. [WOOCHER] (One UJA fundraising brochure summed up its sense of itself by stating that "the programs of [our] agencies ... are not merely organizational endeavors, even 'good works' ... they are expressions of the essential meaning of Jewishness." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 19]) By 1980, 4,600 "key leaders" traveled to Israel that year alone on UJA "missions." [SILBERMAN, p. 198]]
Still other Jewish polity expressions (what Daniel Elazar describes as "government-like institutions" [ELAZAR, p. 217] include B'nai Brith (and its Anti-Defamation League), Haddassah, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the National Council for Jewish Women, and a variety of overtly Zionist organizations, most linked to the American Zion Federation. The central Jewish lobbying organ for Israel is the American Israel Political Action Committee -- AIPAC. By 1982 Jewish Americans had "no less than 340 national organizations." [KREFETZ, p. 71] More than eighty were expressly Zionist or other pro-Israeli groups. [WAXMAN, p. 134]
This modern American Jewish polity is often noted as a quintessential "civil religion," a secular belief system that elicits deeply-felt allegiance of religious depth and proportion. "It has become a commonplace in recent years," notes Peter Novick, "that Israel and the Holocaust are the twin pillars of American Jewish 'civil religion' -- the symbols that bind together Jews in the United States whether they are believers or nonbelievers, on the political right, left, or center." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 147] (The modern Jewish attachment to Judaism as a formal religion in most of the twentieth century has been weak. A 1971 study revealed that only 17% of American Jews attended religious services more than once a month; this was in comparison to 65% of non-Jews who did so). [FORSTER, p. 128] As in any religion, the secular Jewish polity beliefs are articles of faith. They need not make logical sense to an outside observer; even some of its adherents may recognize -- and struggle to resolve -- various incongruencies, paradoxes, and hypocrisies in its central tenets. As the Random House dust jacket blurb noted for James Yaffe's 1968 volume The American Jews: Portrait of a Split Personality, "no people on earth are more riddled by contradictions than the American Jews." [YAFFE, 1968]
These inconsistencies largely stem from Jewish attempts to rationalize their traditional (and current) notions of their exalted selves as the Chosen People in the context of a modern western society that socializes against such chauvinism, a pan-human perspective that most Jews themselves give public lip service. Jewish reluctance to surrender, however, (whatever form of) their self-perceived hereditary specialness as central to Jewish identity has created for some a lingering moral and psychological dilemma, one that the Jewish polity resolves by dissimulation and/or equivocation, by enforcing the preposterous and paradoxical Jewish myth that it is Jewish chauvinistic exceptionality itself that created the notion of pan-human universality. "[The Jewish polity believes that] America is, after all, created in their [Jewish] image," says Jonathan Woocher, "and in pursuing the civil Jewish version of Jewish destiny, they are merely reinforcing the terms of America's own understanding." [WOOCHER, p. 102]
"Whether Jews define themselves as 'just Jewish,' 'ethnic Jews,' 'nonreligious Jews,' or some other phrase that classified them as more assimilated," noted Gary Tobin in 1988, "most know that they are different from other Americans.... [TOBIN, p. 70] ... For most Jews, there continues to be a 'them' and an 'us,' even though the 'us' is in some ways part of the 'them' ... [TOBIN, p. 73] ... The majority of American Jews continue to struggle to maintain their separate identity." [TOBIN, p. 74] "Despite their strong desire for integration into American society," wrote Nathan Glazer in 1972, "Jews do not, on the whole intermarry and do maintain themselves apart. How to resolve this contradiction is one of the major dilemmas of Judaism in America." [GLAZER, p. 10]
This "contradiction" is clearly manifest in the very principles of Jewish identity that are diametrically opposed to the founding principles of Americanism. As Adam Garfinkle observes:
"The principle of individualist equality that flows from American
sacred texts and the American experience cannot be reconciled with
the hierarchical, communal principle that flows from halakhah,
Jewish religious law. Many try and some claim success, but
'success' is mere illusion. Most American Jews have two religions
the way some men have one wife and one mistress, or some women
one husband and one lover. It is a condition that can be managed,
learned from, even enjoyed, some times for long periods. But it can
never be brought to true reconciliation." [GARFINKLE, p. 4]After a 1950s survey of American Jews, researcher Joseph Adelson noted the "confusion" some Jews had in grappling with stereotypes about Jews that seemed to them to be true, all centering on the contradictions of Jewish identity and "self-hatred" (i.e., self-criticism):
"It should be emphasized that the nonauthoritarian [a 1950s-era term for the
non-prejudiced] are not free from conflicts and confusions about being Jewish;
indeed, they frequently seem more disturbed than do the authoritarian [i.e.,
"prejudiced" Jews who put stock in some stereotypes], in part because of a
lesser rigidity of defense and in part because their political beliefs are often at
variance with underlying feelings concerning Jewishness [the human universalist/Jewish
chauvinist tension]. It is doubtful whether many individuals, Jewish or Gentile, can
completely avoid incorporating our society's stereotype of the Jew. The point is
that the authoritarian Jew accepts the stereotype and recasts it to meet the
circumstance of his Jewishness; the nonauthoritarian Jew rejects its validity,
fights its existence within himself, and is sometimes ridden by guilt when he
unable to do so completely." [ADLESON, J., 1960, p. 479]
Zalman Posner, in championing the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitcher religious world view and bemoaning the fact that there are too many secular Jews who have been misguided by concepts of human universalism, addresses the religious root in the conflict between "Christian" identity and Jewry's traditionally separatist, and intolerant, core:
"I suggest that the American Jew conceives of religion and discusses it in
Christian terms. He grapples with religious difficulties, because
a Jew must examine Judaism, but he does so with Christian categories. His conflict
is not necessarily a Jewish one, but one of reconciling divergent viewpoints,
the Jewish and the Christian, that were never intended to be reconciled, for
they represent thoroughly different values." [POSNER, Z., p. 31]
Stephen Steinlight, a former American Jewish Committee official, observes that
"Jews regularly identify with 'belief in social justice' as the second most important
factor in their Jewish identity; it is trumped only by a 'sense of peoplehood.' It also
explains the long Jewish involvement in and flirtation with Marxism. But it is
fair to say that Jewish universalistic tendencies and tribalism have always existed
in an uneasy dialectic. We are at once the most open of peoples and one second
to none in intensity of national feeling. Having made this important distinction, it
must be admitted that the essence of the process of my [Jewish] nationalist training
was to inculcate the belief that the primary division in the world was between 'us'
and 'them.' Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang
those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was
meant to reside." [STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
"The American Jew,"says Charles Liebman, "is torn between two sets of values -- those of integration and acceptance into American society and those of Jewish group survival. Those values appear to me to be incompatible." [LIEBMAN, C., THE AMBIVALENT ..., p. vii; QUOTED IN O'BRIEN, 2000] As Paul Cowan once underscored about his renewed Jewish identity, and the distinctness between that and being American: "Until 1976, when I was thirty-six, I had always identified as an American Jew. Now I am an American and a Jew. I live at once in the years 1982 and 5743, the Jewish year in which I am publishing this book." [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 3]
non-prejudiced] are not free from conflicts and confusions about being Jewish;
indeed, they frequently seem more disturbed than do the authoritarian [i.e.,
"prejudiced" Jews who put stock in some stereotypes], in part because of a
lesser rigidity of defense and in part because their political beliefs are often at
variance with underlying feelings concerning Jewishness [the human universalist/Jewish
chauvinist tension]. It is doubtful whether many individuals, Jewish or Gentile, can
completely avoid incorporating our society's stereotype of the Jew. The point is
that the authoritarian Jew accepts the stereotype and recasts it to meet the
circumstance of his Jewishness; the nonauthoritarian Jew rejects its validity,
fights its existence within himself, and is sometimes ridden by guilt when he
unable to do so completely." [ADLESON, J., 1960, p. 479]
Zalman Posner, in championing the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitcher religious world view and bemoaning the fact that there are too many secular Jews who have been misguided by concepts of human universalism, addresses the religious root in the conflict between "Christian" identity and Jewry's traditionally separatist, and intolerant, core:
"I suggest that the American Jew conceives of religion and discusses it in
Christian terms. He grapples with religious difficulties, because
a Jew must examine Judaism, but he does so with Christian categories. His
is not necessarily a Jewish one, but one of reconciling divergent viewpoints,
the Jewish and the Christian, that were never intended to be reconciled, for
they represent thoroughly different values." [POSNER, Z., p. 31]
Stephen Steinlight, a former American Jewish Committee official, observes that
"Jews regularly identify with 'belief in social justice' as the second most important
factor in their Jewish identity; it is trumped only by a 'sense of peoplehood.' It
explains the long Jewish involvement in and flirtation with Marxism. But it is
fair to say that Jewish universalistic tendencies and tribalism have always existed
in an uneasy dialectic. We are at once the most open of peoples and one second
to none in intensity of national feeling. Having made this important distinction, it
was to inculcate the belief that the primary division in the world was between 'us'
those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was
meant to reside." [STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
"The American Jew,"says Charles Liebman, "is torn between two sets of values -- those of integration and acceptance into American society and those of Jewish group survival. Those values appear to me to be incompatible." [LIEBMAN, C., THE AMBIVALENT ..., p. vii; QUOTED IN O'BRIEN, 2000] As Paul Cowan once underscored about his renewed Jewish identity, and the distinctness between that and being American: "Until 1976, when I was thirty-six, I had always identified as an American Jew. Now I am an American and a Jew. I live at once in the years 1982 and 5743, the Jewish year in which I am publishing this book." [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 3]
"Every prayer and ritual observance in Judaism,” says Arthur Koestler, "proclaims membership to an ancient race, which automatically separates the Jew from the racial and historic past of the people whose midst he lives." [KOESTLER, p. 287] "Above all," says rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "the otherness of Jewish law as something given by God and interpreted by authoritative rabbis runs counter to the fundamental thought of modernity." [SACKS, J. p. 157] "Traditional views of the Gentile and the fear of anti-Semitism persist," wrote Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen in 1990, ".... This sense of estrangement from the non-Jew and fear of the non-Jew remain not only for Israelis and not only for those most deeply committed to the Jewish tradition." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 40]
Edward Bernard Glick notes his people's tradtional identity like this:
"The Jewish people (as the American dictionary calls them), dos yiddische folk
(as Yiddish speakers refer to themselves), and am yisrael or ha'am ha'yehudi
(as Hebrew speakers refer to the concept) denote a transnational, multilingual,
historical, and religious group which professes a oneness, a unity, a whole, a
solidarity, and a partnership that predates by millenia the modern Jewish state.
The concept applies to all Jews in the world, whether they realize it or not,
whether they want it or not, and whether they they like it or not. For Jewish
peoplehood is Judaism, which is a religion in the gentile sense. And the proof
of this is that no other religious group in the world so steadily and so steadfastly
calls itself a people. Do the multifarous denominations of American Protestantism,
concerned as they may be with the fate of foreign Protestants, call themselves the
Methodist people, the Baptist people, the Episcopalian people, or the Presbyterian
people? Do American Catholics ... call themselves the Catholic people, even though
catholic is a synonym for universal? Do American Muslims, American Hindus, and
American Buddhists use the word in reference to their creeds? No." [GLICK, E.,
1982, p. 125]
Edward Bernard Glick notes his people's tradtional identity like this:
"The Jewish people (as the American dictionary calls them), dos yiddische folk
(as Yiddish speakers refer to themselves), and am yisrael or ha'am ha'yehudi
(as Hebrew speakers refer to the concept) denote a transnational, multilingual,
historical, and religious group which professes a oneness, a unity, a whole, a
solidarity, and a partnership that predates by millenia the modern Jewish state.
The concept applies to all Jews in the world, whether they realize it or not,
whether they want it or not, and whether they they like it or not. For Jewish
peoplehood is Judaism, which is a religion in the gentile sense. And the proof
of this is that no other religious group in the world so steadily and so steadfastly
calls itself a people. Do the multifarous denominations of American Protestantism,
Methodist people, the Baptist people, the Episcopalian people, or the Presbyterian
people? Do American Catholics ... call themselves the Catholic people, even though
catholic is a synonym for universal? Do American Muslims, American Hindus, and
American Buddhists use the word in reference to their creeds? No." [GLICK, E.,
1982, p. 125]
As large numbers of Jews left the hearts of big cities over the years, in 1959 Rabbi Albert Gordon's study called Jews in Suburbia noted that "Jews seldom come to know non-Jews any better in suburbia than they did in the big city ... To what extent is this condition the result of Jewish self-segregation? Scrutinizing each of the communities in this study with this question in mind, I discovered first of all that ... their closest friendships are reserved for other Jews who have the same community, class, synagogual and organizational interests. This primary friendship is natural -- and characteristic of every kind of suburb." [GORDON, A., p. 170] Arthur Hertzberg notes that in post-World War II America, "even those Jews who affirmed neither religious nor ethnic identity admitted that they were most comfortable with other Jews. Even the most 'anti-Jewish' Jews reported that at least four out of five of their friends were Jews. This was true even of people of Jewish origin who had converted to one of the branches of Christianity. Jewish businessmen and professionals ... did business much of the time with Americans of all origins and persuasions. They lunched often with their customers or clients, but they went home to have dinner and play cards, or to play golf on weekends, or to go to the theater or symphony, with other Jews." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p. 325]
"In one study," noted Susan Schneider in the 1980s, "78% of the Jews (as compared to 14% of Protestants) say that they have 'regular interactions' with at least five households of [their] relatives. What may be a uniquely Jewish way of keeping the kinship ties is the 'cousins' club,' meeting regularly to create family networks that reinforce every member's sense of belonging, of having a reference group or 'home room' even in adulthood." [SCHNEIDER, p. 265] "Jews appear to be, by origin and authentic nature, a tribe," says Jewish author Eric Kahler, "a primordial social structure and hence, in spite of their dispersion the closest related of historical communities, closer related among each other than the locally associated members of a modern nation." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 10-11]
By scholarly -- or any other -- accounts, the Jewish tradition of a clannish collectivism and communal self-promotive unity -- religiously or otherwise -- endures for most Jews today. "The American Jewish community is cohesive," wrote Alan Zuckerman in 1991, "... Because most American Jews occupy distinctive niches in the general social, economic, and political structure of the United States, each Jew makes decisions about friends, husband or wife, neighbors, workmates, and political associates from a set of persons, most of whom are Jews... [ZUCKERMAN, p. 15] ... The ties of residential concentration and social class place the American Jewish community into a distinctive niche in the general society." [ZUCKERMAN, p. 22] "The community of class and status among Jews," says Calvin Goldscheider, [and] occupational concentration and educational achievement at high levels [results] in [Jewish] social bonds, economic networks, and common lifestyles and interests ... [GOLDSCHEIDER, p. 135].. . The common assumption that increased levels of education and occupation would lead to assimilation of the American Jewish community [into mainstream society] ... seems to be unfounded. An examination of the empirical evidence has pointed to the very opposite conclusion. The uniqueness of the stratification profile and the distinctive social mobility patterns of American Jews mark Jews off from others and binds Jews to each other." [GOLDSCHEIDER, p. 136] "The commonality of class and status among Jews," agrees Esther Wilder, "is distinctive and results in social bonds, economic networks, common lifestyles and interests." [WILDER, 6-96]
"In America as elsewhere," noted Benjamin Ginsberg in 1994, "... Jews are outsiders who are often more successful than their hosts ... And, to make matters worse, Jews often, secretly or not so secretly, conceive themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to their neighbors." [GINZBURG, p. 8] "To be a Jew," wrote Eugene Borowitz in the 1970s," means to have a bond with every other Jew -- and somehow know how to find him." [SILBERMAN, p. 76] "In social intercourse with other Jews," says Theodore Reik, "informality and familiarity form a kind of inner security, a 'we-feeling.' They know each other and there are not many things which need to be explained. Meeting and speaking with other Jews is accompanied by the feeling that they are 'my kind of people.' It is what [Sigmund] Freud calls 'the clear awareness of an inner identity, the secret of the same inner construction.'" [REIK, T., 1962, p. 228-229]
Early in his acting career, Marlon Brando recalls walking with a Jewish friend in New York City:
"There was a woman in front of us with blond hair wearing a mink
coat and we were talking about her, when Caroline said, 'She's
Jewish.' I asked, 'How do you know?' She answered, 'Well, it's
because ... I don't know, she's just Jewish.' I said, 'You mean to
say, just because she has blond hair and a mink --" She interrupted,
'Look, I'm a Jew, and I know what Jews are like from the front,
back, side or top.' 'Well, how can you tell a Jew from a non-Jew?'
She replied, 'Well, you have to be Jewish to know that.' I was
stunned, and I thought Caroline had remarkable powers of
perception." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 75]
Erich Kahler recalls and incident involving a fellow Jew (poet Richard Beer-Hofmann) in Berlin:
"His face was wrapped in a woolen scarf [against the cold] so that
only his eyes could be seen. An old orthodox Jew in his caftan came
down the stairs and stopped him. 'The gentleman is one of us (Der
Herr ist einer von uns),' he said to Beer-Hofmann, 'he will tell me
how I can get to the Nollendorfplatz.' The eyes alone were enough
to reveal a Jew to a Jew." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 6]
Former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel notes the following in his autobiography:
"The best reporters and editors normally have no race, sex, or religion. They
may charm or muscle their way into strange places, but they try not to THINK
male or female, black or Jewish. Still, there always comes a time for exceptions.
I remember reliving the shudders of refugee life at the sight of Hungarians trudging
across a frozen frontier swamp. I never totally banished that twinge of smug American
security when interviewing high-ranking Germans. And there's no denying the
conspiratorial bond that suddenly appeared when an old man on a park bench in Kiev
whispered, BIST AH YID? Are you a Jew? was a question often put to me, and
with decidedly different inflections. In Communist countries, it came from Jews
who meant thereby to ask whether they could trust me with seditious conversation.
In Israel, it was asked to discover whether I would ever put my feelings for the Jewish
state ahead of my journalistic mission. Now that I had charge of editorials at the
Times, the question was usually hurled with contempt; I was obviously a Jew, but
in the eyes of many Jews, an unworthy one for daring to criticize the Israeli
government. So whenever I turned to the subject of Israel, there was no escaping
my skin." [FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 397]
Former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel notes the following in his autobiography:
"The best reporters and editors normally have no race, sex, or religion. They
may charm or muscle their way into strange places, but they try not to THINK
male or female, black or Jewish. Still, there always comes a time for exceptions.
I remember reliving the shudders of refugee life at the sight of Hungarians trudging
across a frozen frontier swamp. I never totally banished that twinge of smug American
security when interviewing high-ranking Germans. And there's no denying the
conspiratorial bond that suddenly appeared when an old man on a park bench in Kiev
whispered, BIST AH YID? Are you a Jew? was a question often put to me, and
with decidedly different inflections. In Communist countries, it came from Jews
who meant thereby to ask whether they could trust me with seditious conversation.
In Israel, it was asked to discover whether I would ever put my feelings for the Jewish
state ahead of my journalistic mission. Now that I had charge of editorials at the
Times, the question was usually hurled with contempt; I was obviously a Jew, but
in the eyes of many Jews, an unworthy one for daring to criticize the Israeli
government. So whenever I turned to the subject of Israel, there was no escaping
my skin." [FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 397]
"Jewish civilization should have vanished a long time ago," says Henry Feingold, "that it did not and does not may also be part of Jewish exceptionalism. It may well be that Judaism is governed by different rules ... Jews are a subgroup in this dynamic society; but they are also more Jewish, as measured by the concern for Jewish people throughout the world." [FEINGOLD, p. 52] "90% [of American Jews] claim to feel 'very close' or 'fairly close' to other Jews," noted Alan Zuckerman in 1991, " ... Even when they select non-Jews [as spouses and friends], most Jews have strong ties which pull them back to the Jewish community." [ZUCKERMAN, p. 27] "The Jews," noted Jonathan Rieder in his study of Jews and Italians in a section of Brooklyn, "had a pronounced feeling of ethnic honor, another sign of their willingness to invest in loyalties beyond the nuclear family. The articulateness of Jewish identity, and the capacity for immersion in the collective experience of Jewish suffering, ran contrary to the muteness of Canarasie Italians about their ethnicity." [REIDER, J., 1985, p. 46]
In 1993 Joel Kotkin noted that "an estimated 50 per cent or more of American Jews send their children to an ethnic school, and over three-quarters of young men undergo the traditional bar mitzvah ceremony. In contrast, counterpart systems promoting specifically Italian or German language, culture, and history largely have disappeared in most major countries of immigration. Even among inter-married couples ... a large majority claim that most of their friends were Jews." [KOTKIN, p. 35] In 1988 eight of ten American Jews still participated in some sort of yearly Passover ritual. [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 6] One study showed that as late as the 1970s, "96% of American Jews only had Jewish relatives, 77% had all their closest friends as Jews, 60% belonged to Jewish community organizations, virtually all of them gave to Jewish charities, and 90% felt a strong attachment to Israel." [FORSTER, p. 129]
In a 1982 study of the American Jewish community, "61% of the respondents reported that 'all,' 'almost all,' or 'most' of their friends were Jewish. "About two-thirds of American Jews still form their closest friendships with other Jews," noted Stephen Whitfield in 1988, "The process of acculturation may have blurred distinctions between Jews and their gentile neighbors, but a sense of peoplehood has not been entirely suppressed." [WHITFIELD, AM, p. 6] In 1988 Gary Tobin could still write that "a study of the Jewish population of New York City found 70% of respondents saying that all of their three close friends are Jewish." [TOBIN, p. 69] In a 1990 survey of American Jews, 60% selected the statement "I see the Jewish people as an extension of my family"; only 23% disagreed. 74% agreed that "As a Jew I have a special responsibility to help other Jews"; only 14% disagreed. [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 18] (Jews in Russia? Jewish scholar Zvi Gitelman in 1994 "found that Jews overwhelmingly reported that their closest friends were Jewish." [SACKS, M., 1998, p. 264]
"No matter where I was," says Ze'ev Chafets, about his travels across America in 1986, "-- in a Jewish farm town in New England or a black synagogue in Queens, in a gay temple in San Francisco or among the Jews of the Louisiana bayou -- I always felt at home. I came to the United States feeling like an Israeli; I left reminded that I am also, as a friend in Detroit put it, an MOT -- a Member of the Tribe." [CHAFETS, MEMBERS, p. 8-9]
Stephen Bloom notes his enduring Jewish identity this way:
"Despite the lack of Jewish worship and observance, and my family's total
assimilation into everything American and secular, we were thoroughly Jewish
as was our very essence. The world was split into two distinct halves: Jews
and gentiles. Jews were always sought in business or social dealings over
gentiles. A common expresion used by Jews to describe a slow, dense
person was -- and still is -- 'He's got a goyisher kop,' which literally means
'He's got a gentile head' but figuratively means 'slow-witted.' First question
when I came home and boasted of making a new friend was 'Is he Jewish?'
'God forbid!' (my father's expression) if I should ever go out with a gentile
girl, and 'Oy vey!' (which literally means 'Oh, pain!') if I ever got serious
with her. All my parents' friends were Jews." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 63]
Stephen Bloom notes his enduring Jewish identity this way:
"Despite the lack of Jewish worship and observance, and my family's total
assimilation into everything American and secular, we were thoroughly Jewish
as was our very essence. The world was split into two distinct halves: Jews
and gentiles. Jews were always sought in business or social dealings over
gentiles. A common expresion used by Jews to describe a slow, dense
'He's got a gentile head' but figuratively means 'slow-witted.' First question
when I came home and boasted of making a new friend was 'Is he Jewish?'
'God forbid!' (my father's expression) if I should ever go out with a gentile
girl, and 'Oy vey!' (which literally means 'Oh, pain!') if I ever got serious
with her. All my parents' friends were Jews." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 63]
"This clannishness, as it appears to others," says Charles Silberman, "is rooted in the sense of destiny that Jews the world over share with one another -- a destiny that has some transcendent (and transcendental) significance." [SILBERMAN, p. 76] ("The destiny of the Jewish people," writes Jean Francois Steiner, " ... no earthly power has ever been able to defeat." [HOWE, p. 445]) This clustering, in the largest sense, has a very geographical flavor; over 95% of American Jews congregate in cities and nearby suburbs; in fact, 80% of them live in only ten population centers -- New York City and Los Angeles are the two largest. [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 6] A third of all American Jews live in the New York-New Jersey area. [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 5] (City-wise, by 1999, the greater Miami Jewish population, about 653,000 people, ranked second only behind New York City). [BELKIN, D., 5-6-99] Linking modern Jewish American geography to their roots in a separatist ghetto past, in 1978 Nachum Goldmann added that "even today Jews have a tendency to live in a neighborhood of their own, in an environment that facilitates the life of their community." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 66][Click here for world geography of the Jews] (American Jews are overwhelmingly of Eastern European background. By the late 1950s, more than four-fifths were estimated to be of Eastern European descent). [GRINSTEIN, H., 1959, p. 73]
In London, England, the Jewish Chronicle noted in 2002 the results of a local survey:
"London Jews also like to be near other Jews. More than 97 per cent in North and North West London say they know of another Jewish resident in the same street, while more than half (two-thirds in the North West) have a next-door Jewish neighbor. More than 80 per cent in the North East, and more than 90 per cent in the North West, have a Jewish neighbour within three doors away." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 12-6-02, p. 31] [Note: South London percentages are much, much smaller -- poorer part of town?]
In
"London Jews also like to be near other Jews. More than 97 per cent in North and North West London say they know of another Jewish resident in the same street, while more than half (two-thirds in the North West) have a next-door Jewish neighbor. More than 80 per cent in the North East, and more than 90 per cent in the North West, have a Jewish neighbour within three doors away." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 12-6-02, p. 31] [Note: South London percentages are much, much smaller -- poorer part of town?]
Decades earlier, the descendants of other peoples who had immigrated to America with the last major Jewish wave had already assimilated into American culture. In 1964, Arthur Hertzberg was noting that "the grandchildren of the Italians, the Slavs and the rest have become completely assimilated culturally ... The ... European immigrants of the last century have failed to provide Jews with a parallel for their devotion to some continuity for their own subculture." [HERTZBERG, p. 287]
James Yaffe notes that
"In 1962 AJC [the American Jewish Committee] studied the Jewish
community in Baltimore and came to these conclusions: Jewish
employees are much more likely to work for Jewish employers;
although most Jews claim they don't care what religion their doctor
or lawyer professes, they nevertheless use Jewish doctors 95 percent
of the time and Jewish lawyers 87 percent of the time; the great majority
of them say that it doesn't matter to them if their children go to a school
that has only Jewish pupils in it -- yet 90 percent send their children to
schools which are predominantly Jewish." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 65]
In 1973, Harry Golden noted that:
"Affluence and the census explain two of the obvious characteristics
of Jewish mobility: when Jews move, they all move at once and they
all want to move to the same place. For Jews want the enclave. They
cluster." [GOLDEN, H., 1973, p. 43]
This clustering has a transnational flavor. As Harold Troper noted about the Jews of Canada in 1999:
"Even today, no other ethnic group in Canada is as institutionally
complete, nor does any other group have a comparable degree of
communal self-awareness, as measured by knowledge of organizations
and leaders, voluntarism and reading of the ethnic press, community
fund raising, and individual self-identification. Compared to most other
groups, and certainly compared to other ethno-European groups, Jews
are a highly identified, unassimilated group ... Many Jews in Canada
demonstrate a deeply held feeling of mutual interdependence and
transnational identification with Jews everywhere that defies any
explanation." [TROPER, H., 1999, p. 228, 232]
This is what the Jewish Chronicle noted about London Jews, as reported by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, in 2002:
"80 per cent had watched a programme of Jewish interest [in the past year], 53 per cent had read a book on a Jewish topic, while just 10 per cent had not participated in any kind Jewish cultural activity or bought a piece of Judaica of any kind. A third had attended a Jewish lecture, and one in five a synagogue adult-education programme; 24 per cent had been to a Jewish film, theatre or music event; and 24 per cent had visited a Jewish museum outside the UK. Around 60 per cent had been to at least one Jewish educational or cultural event ... More than half of those surveyed had done some type of voluntary work for their synagogue or another Jewish organisation in the past year ... As many as 13 per cent had served as a trustee on a Jewish charit ... Forty-six per cent attached highest priority to Jewish causes in the UK; 20 per cent to general British charities; 14 per cent to Israel; and 11 per cent equally to Jewish and Israeli charities [i.e., noted that 71% of Jews placed higher priority on Judeo-centric welfare over pan-British welfare, which received only a 20% priority figure] ... 'What is absolutely apparent,' the report comments, 'is that London Jews have long sinced ceased to comprise a religious group. They are truly an ethnie (ethnic group) within British society, with shared historical memories, a myth of common ancestry ... and an overall sense of solidarity ... More than 90 per cent think it important for their children to mix with in Jewish social groups, and 89 per cent are willing to send their children on an Israel trip -- an "amazingly high" figure, the report notes, given the conflict in the Middle East." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 12-6-2002, p. 31]
This is what the Jewish Chronicle noted about London Jews, as reported by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, in 2002:
"80 per cent had watched a programme of Jewish interest [in the past year], 53 per cent had read a book on a Jewish topic, while just 10 per cent had not participated in any kind Jewish cultural activity or bought a piece of Judaica of any kind. A third had attended a Jewish lecture, and one in five a synagogue adult-education programme; 24 per cent had been to a Jewish film, theatre or music event; and 24 per cent had visited a Jewish museum outside the UK. Around 60 per cent had been to at least one Jewish educational or cultural event ... More than half of those surveyed had done some type of voluntary work for their synagogue or another Jewish organisation in the past year ... As many as 13 per cent had served as a trustee on a Jewish charit ... Forty-six per cent attached highest priority to Jewish causes in the UK; 20 per cent to general British charities; 14 per cent to Israel; and 11 per cent equally to Jewish and Israeli charities [i.e., noted that 71% of Jews placed higher priority on Judeo-centric welfare over pan-British welfare, which received only a 20% priority figure] ... 'What is absolutely apparent,' the report comments, 'is that London Jews have long sinced ceased to comprise a religious group. They are truly an ethnie (ethnic group) within British society, with shared historical memories, a myth of common ancestry ... and an overall sense of solidarity ... More than 90 per cent think it important for their children to mix with in Jewish social groups, and 89 per cent are willing to send their children on an Israel trip -- an "amazingly high" figure, the report notes, given the conflict in the Middle East." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 12-6-2002, p. 31]
Jonathan Woocher, in his volume about the Jewish American polity, notes that: "The civil religion knows that the goals of Jewish group survival and social integration [with mainstream American society] are indeed in tension. Civic Judaism's world view and ethos in fact incorporates a host of assertions which are potentially contradictory." These include the Jewish insistence that they are "under siege" while they enjoy unprecedented freedom, prosperity, and opportunity in America, the notion that all Jews are "one people" when in fact they are -- in modern times -- as diverse as any other group in every possible manner (except perhaps, throughout most of the world, for their usual similarities in relatively high income and social status), the idea that the modern state of Israel is their "home" when they have perfectly fine homes here (indeed, homes that are even "safer" than the Jewish ones overseas), the common secular Jewish belief that Judaism's distinctive ideals are social justice, equality, et al when mainstream American society's ideals are (and have always been since the founding of the nation) no different, and the expending of so much time, energy, and money on themselves as Jews (much of it internationally) when the American social contract expects a foremost Jewish responsibility to their fellow Americans (or simply fellow humans) as equal members of the American polity. "Civic Judaism," notes Woocher, "is ... a religion of thorough-going ambivalence, of paradox, and inconsistency." [WOOCHER, p. 98] We might also add the fact that Jews portray themselves always as victims, when they are in fact the wealthiest and most influential ethnic group in America.
While, David Davis, a Jewish professor at Yale can, like most American Jews, completely mythologize Jewish history as "a testing ground for American ideals, especially the ideal of apportioning rewards according to individual merit as opposed to hereditary privilege or ethnic identity," [DAVIS, D., p. 27] another Jewish professor, Adam Garfinkel, states more honestly, and bluntly, that "the underlying harmony between Jewish and American values vanishes upon close inspection." [GARFINKLE, p 5]
Concerned about his peoples' modern schizophrenic identity, Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner wrote:
"Why American Jews sustain the contradictory position of deeming
the state of Israel to be critical to their own existence as a distinctive,
self-sustaining group in American society, and also insisting that
they and their future find permanent place within American society,
has to be worked out. Here is a strange civil religion ... What is
puzzling is not that political events -- the destruction of a group, the
formation of a national state -- should generate dislocation in society
and so in people's imagination. It is that the state of dislocation
should be made into a permanent and, if truth be told, normative
condition of a group." [NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 3]
Among the most disturbing paradoxes, however (one not lost to many Jews, but rarely addressed publicly) is the one that James Madison foresaw in the very establishing of the American constitution. In a free society of competing ideas and interests, there is always the inevitable danger that a powerful "faction" (or factions) could successfully coagulate to disbalance the fullest expression of pluralistic opinion and subvert the idealized democratic process. The obvious example of this is the innocent "one person, one vote" democratic principle which is a trivial cosmetic to hide the powerful economic interests that function offstage where real political power, influence, and decision-making lies. Ironically, in the honing of the modern liberal American state of multicultural and pluralistic tolerance (which Jews were influential in demanding, to the letter of the law, in recent decades) the conditions were established whereby American Jewry could launch itself as a minority "superpower," to the inevitable detriment of others in the American social experiment, Arabs, and those in other parts of the Third World, and at the expense of the very pluralistic ideals which Jews have exploited to chauvinist ends. In the American cultural tradition of "rugged individualism," the relentless Jewish collectivist entity -- economic, political, and social -- could, and is, vanquishing all foes in its aim of Jewish exclusionist allegiances, an aim that ironically seeks to bend the full American polity to the Jewish exclusionist will. This aim has thus far been successful, especially per American popular views toward the modern state of Israel. Part of the strategy (intentionally or de facto) is to weaken all competing unification efforts by potentially larger non-Jewish polities; numerically weaker ones (i.e., "minorities") have served as Jewish allies in so far as the Jewish polity may lead them to expressly Jewish goals and benefits. In recent history other American ethnic groups -- particularly Blacks -- have rebelled against Jewish hegemony in the modern contesting tribal battles called multiculturalism, which Jews were instrumental in creating to protect their own "particularism."
Indeed, the modern American milieu of "cultural pluralism" (laid bare, the celebration of ethnic ethnocentrism as a foundation of the American cultural milieu) affords the American Jewish community the safest framework for its own expression of global Jewish nationalism. Zionism, the modern secular ideology of transnational Jewish allegiance (a hard-core political creed and not merely a champion of Jewish "culture"), owes much of its success to its careful nurturing amidst America's Jewry and American society at-large. An Israeli professor of history, Allon Gal, notes that
"A major characteristic of American Zionist ideology is its acceptance
of the concept that has become known as 'cultural pluralism' ... This
philosophy ... has typified American Zionist thought since the early
twentieth century ... True, the focus of Zionist interest has been on
building an autonomous Jewish community in Palestine. But the
successful development of the Jewish community in America and its
constructive relationship with the pluralistic society at large have always
loomed large in American Zionist thought and deed. Living in
democratic and pluralistic America, Zionists looked for a general
American rationale for creating the Jewish state against many heavy
odds." [GAL, p. 20]
"Pluralism," remarks Kevin MacDonald, "serves internal Jewish [American] interests because it legitimizes the internal Jewish interests in rationalizing and openly advocating an interest in Jewish group commitments and non-assimilation." [MCDONALD, INVOLVEMENT, p. 296] The Jew in America, warned Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion, "faces death by a kiss -- a slow and imperceptible decline into the abyss of assimilation." [WEYL, N., 1968, p 293-294] "Solomon Schechter," noted Allon Gal, "the chief architect of Conservative Judaism [one of the major branches of the faith today], supported Zionism in 1906 mainly 'as the great bulwark against assimilation.'" [GAL, A., 1986, p. 376]
Jews have been the foremost activists in molding public institutions and opinon towards what is today called "political correctness," intergroup "tolerance," the celebration of ethnic differences, and and multiculturalism. "While the intergroup relations field included representatives of various racial, religious, and ethnic communities," notes Stuart Svonkin,
"Jewish organizations played the leading role indefining the movements tactics and
objectives. Among the Jewish agencies that became involved in intergroup
relations, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith (ADL), and the American Jewish Congress (AJC) were the most
active and influiential. These three national secular agencies aspired to function
as the Jewish community's department of state formulating and implementing
policies to shape American Jewry's relations with other American communities
... The AJCongress explicitly favored cultural pluralism and strongly supported
Jewish nationalism. These two commitments were closely connected; Horace
Kallen, who deveoped the theory of cultural pluralism, was himself an
ardent champion of both the AJCongress and American Zionism."
[SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 1, 23]
This man, Kallen, most credited with the conception and development of cultural pluralism (the ethnocentric vehicle by which Zionism could unobjectionably thrive in the United States) was an American Jewish professor, most active in the teens and 1920s. He argued a sharp distinction between "nationality" (being Jewish) and "citizenship" (being American). [SCHMIDT, p. 38] One author calls Kallen "the grandfather of multiculturalism;" his important collection of essays was entitled Culture and Democracy in the United States. "Although the ideas contained within it had little impact at the time," says John Miller, "they became enormously influential later in the century. Horace Kallen was the first multiculturalist." [MILLER, p. 80]
Kallen was also so great a Zionist that he was the "leader and guiding spirit" of "an elite secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for 'Pharisee' and 'separatist.'" [GROSE, p. 54, 53] "You will be subject," stated the inductor in the Parushim swearing-in ceremony, "to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time, in any place, and at any cost." [SCHMIDT, p. 77] Kallen wrote to the prominent German Zionist, Max Nordeau, in 1914, saying, "[I] t happened to be my turn to lead the secret organization here in America which is aiming to turn the Zionist movement in a political direction, from within. Our order is called Parushim ... Our present purpose is one of quiet propaganda and education in 'the political idea' ... It is our desire and plan to organize brotherhoods all over the world." [SCHMIDT, p. 79] "[A]n organization which has the aims we have," Kallen wrote to a fellow American Zionist leader, "must work silently, and through education and infection rather than through force and noise." [SCHMIDT, p. 83] Under great influence of Kallen's thinking was a Jewish United States Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis (who was also the eventual director of the Federation of American Zionists). "Certainly Kallen wished to 'instruct' Brandeis," notes Sarah Schmidt, "and perhaps, covertly, even to manipulate him. But Kallen's preference was for the role of anonymous, self-effacing string puller." [SCHMIDT, p. 85]
"Against those powerful Jews who argued that a Jewish nationalism was unpatriotic and seditious," notes Kevin Avruch, "Brandeis put forth the contrary notion: 'Zionism is the Pilgrim inspiration and impulse over again.'" [AVRUCH, K., 1981, p. 30]
Using the idea of cultural pluralism to buttress his Zionist arguments, Horace Kallen, notes David Levering Lewis, "rejected assimilation and proposed instead that Jews retain their 'racial' uniqueness, the better to enrich American society." [HERTZBERG, p. 283, LEWIS p. 553] Henry Feingold notes that:
"Writing in the definitive Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic
Groups, Philip Gleason finds a 'racialist' dimension in Kallen's
approach to the pluralism idea and suggests that the number of Jewish
thinkers attracted to the notion -- Franz Boas, Mordecai Kaplan, and
others -- has the earmarks of a Jewish intellectual conspiracy to create
space for a Jewish culture. There may be some truth in that idea ... The
legitimacy of Zionism would not have been established without the
ideological rationale put forward by the cultural pluralists."
[FEINGOLD, p. 54]
Kallen wrote that "[human associations] have constituted communities tending to preserve and to sustain the continuity of the physical stock. Empirically, race is nothing more than this continuity confirmed and enchanneled in basic social inheritances. It is hardly distinguishable from nationality." [in MILLER, J., p. 84] He also asserted that "men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or less extent; they cannot change their grandfathers." [BIALE, D., 1998, p. 25] Elsewhere, Kallen addressed the idea of anti-Semitism as the veritable foundation of Jewish identity: "Anti-Semitism imposes a unity upon Jews whether they like it or not ... Only by working together may each be better defended than if he worked alone. This fact should guide Jewish education ... It has to recognize that Jews are members of one another; that each Jew carries a responsibility, not only as an individual but as a member of a group called Jews." [KALLEN, 1954, p. 188-189]
Working for decades for acceptance in American society at-large, many Jews have even deceptively championed -- for popular consumption -- Judeo-centric Zionism, however incongruously, as a universalistic creed. As Allon Gal observes
"American Zionist thinkers emphasized the non-nationalist or
'higher' social and ethical goals as the fulfillment of Zionism;
the rationale of Zionism was perceived as it service to the
betterment of mankind. In pure form this ideology held that
serving the human race was the only, or the chief test of
Zionism." [GAL, 1986, p. 363]
The notion of a "mission" to serve humanity (although there is absolutely no evidence that Zionism has ever benefited anyone on earth but Jews) blended well with American democratic ideals and self-conceptions. With the acceptance of cultural pluralism and its institution into the American social fabric, notes Peter Grose, "the way lay open ... to link Jewish group identity, through Zionism, to the American Dream." [GROSE, p. 55] "Once Kallen became convinced that the American Zionist movement was developing in accord with his ideas," notes Sarah Schmidt, "he began to use his contacts with the non-Jewish media as 'propagandists' for the Zionist cause." [SCHMIDT, p. 93]
(By World War II, Zionist propagandistic activities had enormously grown and accelerated. As Zionist historian Melvin Urofsky notes: "The Zionists, throughout the war period, carefully cultivated Christian America. From a standpoint of practical politics alone, the Zionists recognized that only if the larger community supported their aims would they be able to influence government policy. A minority, no matter how effacious its propaganda or skillful public relations, no matter how many important contacts it has made, cannot affect American foreign policy unless it either neutralizes the majority or wins it over to active support of its cause." [UROFSKY, 1978, p. 35] )
Yet even an American environment of mutually tolerant ethnicities is not what traditional Jewish identity really seeks. Zionism is not only interested in "foreign policy." As Arthur Hertzberg wrote in a B'nai B'rith publication in 1964:
"[Cultural pluralism] has not ... succeeded in achieving its very patent
'Jewish' purpose, to reorganize America in such a fashion that all of its
various communities would so live their lives that the Jews could, in the
very act of being themselves, be just like everybody else. There are two
keys to this failure: politics and culture. In both dimensions the Jews
have acted uniquely and not like any of the other minorities."
[HERTZBERG, p. 284]
In other words, even in a revised American socio-cultural system that been entirely reformed to accommodate "patent Jewish purpose," cultural pluralism is still not enough for those Jews who refuse to completely assimilate, it is merely a means to discretely reach strata even more foreign to the founding principles of America: Jews implicitly demand a special dimension of "uniqueness" -- their own caste -- outside the realm of all others in the American experiment, by which they can connect to their Jewish brethren throughout the world. Even Israel Zangwill, the Jewish writer who is generally credited with popularizing the term "The Melting Pot" (the long-dead concept of America as a kind of homogenized 'soup' of immigrant cultures) to describe American society (via his successful 1908 play of the same name), was eventually a Zionist. "He gave more and more of his energy to this cause as time passed, and retreated from his earlier position of racial and religious mixture." [GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p. 289-290] (This is what Zangwill wrote about the traditions of his own people: "Beware of the goyim, his elders told Jacob ... They are goyim, foes of the faith, beings of darkness ... drunkards and bullies, swift with the fist or bludgeon, many in species, but the worst of the goyim are the creatures called Christians." [GONEN, p. 133]
Nathan Glazer still felt confident in publishing the following in 1972 in his classic volume, American Judaism:
"There are different branches of Judaism today, and they take
somewhat different attitudes to assimilation, but even the most liberal
interpretation of Judaism must fight the assimilation of the Jews ...
Jews have been prominent in the fight to forward the assimilation of
ethnic groups ... [Yet] there comes a time -- and it is just about upon
us -- when American Jews become aware of a contradiction between
the kind of society America wants it to become -- and indeed the kind
of society most Jews want it to be -- and the demands of the Jewish
religion. This religion after all, prohibits inter-marriage, asserts that
Jews are a people apart, and insists that they consider themselves in
exile until God restores them to the land of Israel." [GLAZER, p. 9]
(In a footnote Glazer partially exempts the Reform Judaism
movement who "don't consider themselves in exile; they do
disapprove of intermarriage.")
Richard L. Rubenstein, among many Jewish intellectuals, increasingly echoes such entrenched "particularist" themes (and, hence, Zionism) in the 1990s, arguing that: "The secular humanist is most cognizant of abstract universal values that are shared with other human beings ... [but] one must be a particular kind of person to be a person at all. The conception of humanity in general is a meaningless and tragic abstraction." [RUBENSTEIN, R. p. 238]
"Cultural pluralism," says Henry Feingold, "... became part of a strategy to permit more space for the expression of Jewish particularity ... some argue that, in its unwavering support of Israel, American Jewry had gone beyond its bounds. If that is true, it is a measure of America's extraordinary tolerance of American Jewry's particularity." [FEINGOLD, p. 149] "Legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority's host society," says Howard Sachar, "pluralism functioned as an intellectual anchorage for an educated Jewish second generation ... until the emergence of Zionism in the post-World War II years swept through American Jewry with a climactic redemption fervor of its own." [MCDONALD, p. 299]
Strident activists at all levels in shaping American culture, Jewish organizations have long fought for open and diverse immigration to America, mainly to divert the homogeneity of Christian culture around them. In an increasingly diverse society, Jews are less easily singled out for criticism or attack. "Increasing ethnic heterogeneity," noted Jewish activist Earl Raab, "as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop." [MCDONALD, p. 300] "Jewish influence on immigration policy," observed Kevin McDonald, "was facilitated by Jewish wealth, education, and social status. Reflecting its general disproportionate representation in markers of economic success and political influence ... [Jews] were able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their political aims." [MCDONALD, JEWISH, p. 301]
In the 1920, Horace Kallen's ideological counterpoint, American sociologist Edward Ross, criticized "the endeavor of Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States," [MCDONALD, p. 319] especially in lobbying for more and more Jewish immigrations to America. "The systematic campaign," complained Ross, "in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by one and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications." [MCDONALD, p. 312] (Even today, 300,000 Israeli citizens are living in America; from a total Jewish Israeli population of about four million people, this means that every thirteenth Israeli lives in the United States, extremely favorable American immigration policy towards that country).
Later, as part of a concerted strategy, notes Irving Kristol,
"Ever since the Holocaust and the emergence of the state of Israel,
American Jews have been reaching towards a more explicit and
meaningful Jewish identity, and have been moving away from the
universalist secular humanism that was so prominent a feature in their
prewar thinking. But while American Jews want to become more Jewish,
they do not want American Christians to become more Christian."
[in FEIN, p. 245]
Jewish deconstructive attack upon the Christian world view may be noted more recently in an incident in 1994 when the preeminent Jewish American "defense agency", the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, turned on the conservative Christian community with venom, publishing a report entitled The Religious Right: the Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America. It proclaimed that the conservative Christian movement was an "exclusionist" movement seeking to "restore what it perceived as the ruins of a Christian nation by seeking more closely to unite its version of Christianity with state power." [SILK, p. 296] The ADL attack caught the Christian community by surprise. Outraged, they pointed out that their own struggle for a voice in America was no different than anyone else’s, including Jews.
A major focus of the ADL assault was upon Pat Robertson, a leader of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network, a man who has for years even hired a formal Jewish liaison -- Ben Waldman -- to act on his behalf in the Jewish community. (The head of Robertson's legal center, the American Center for Law and Justice, is Jay Sekulow, a Christian who was born Jewish. Another Christian, Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition, was also born to a Jewish mother). [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 275] Robertson was particularly outraged by the Jewish attack, and noted his stellar record in supporting Jewish and Israeli issues. The Christian Broadcasting Network, for example, had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Jewish Appeal and other Jewish charities; Robertson had also lobbied American politicians against arms sales to Arab adversaries of Israel. He even was involved in supportive activities for convicted Jewish American spy (for Israel), Jonathan Pollard. [SILK, p. 297] The Christian Coalition responded with its own report that documented the inaccuracies and offenses in the ADL's efforts to stifle Christian expressions within the context of religious pluralism, A Campaign of Falsehoods: The Anti-Defamation League's Defamation of Religious Conservatives.
A rare voice of reason in the Jewish community, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, noted publications by both the ADL and the American Jewish Committee (for example, its The Political Activity of the Religious Right: A Critical Analysis) that defamed the Christian community, writing:
"[The ADL] published a book filled with unfair and untrue defamation
of religious conservatives. It contained such unrestrained invective
as, 'The religious Right brings to the debate over moral and social
issues a rhetoric of fear, suspicion and even hatred.' As a rabbi and
a Jew, I was embarrassed at the tone of both of these books. Had any
Christian association published anything comparable about the Jewish
community, cries of anti-Semitism would have rung out far and wide --
and been justified ... [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 40] ... Even a quick glance
at publications and direct-mail appeals from the Anti-Defamation League,
American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress and others,
reveals a level of rhetoric that far exceeds the bounds of civilized
political discourse. Their words demonstrate that many Jewish
organizations do not merely consider devout, politically active
Christians to be misguided -- they consider them evil. I believe that
if the term anti-Semitism is to retain any intellectual and moral
integrity, we must also today admit to the term anti-Christianism. If
one is to be fought, then surely both should be." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p.
41]
(Meanwhile, a Jewish ethnic magazine can feature, merely as a curiosity, a "Modern Orthodox" rabbi, Mayer Schiller, for his championing of "race separation." The magazine explains that the rabbi, a teacher in good standing at the Yeshiva University High School for Boys, doesn't teach "hatred for racial minorities, but a rejection of post-Enlightenment universalism and secularism.") [EDEN, A., 4-13-01]
(Meanwhile, a Jewish ethnic magazine can feature, merely as a curiosity, a "Modern Orthodox" rabbi, Mayer Schiller, for his championing of "race separation." The magazine explains that the rabbi, a teacher in good standing at the Yeshiva University High School for Boys, doesn't teach "hatred for racial minorities, but a rejection of post-Enlightenment universalism and secularism.") [EDEN, A., 4-13-01]
Jewish anti-Christian bashing is expressed in many ways. In 1999, Rabbi Fred Guttman wrote an angry editorial in a Greensboro, North Carolina, newspaper, complaining about an earlier article in the paper about a Christian business directory. "The guide," the directory's publisher had explained, "performs a service for the Christian consumer, enabling him to find and do business with fellow believers." [WILLIS, V., 1999, 11-15-99, p. B1] Incredibly, not only did Rabbi Guttman decide for everyone that the story had no news value, he also had the profound gall to compare the nature of such a directory (that sought merely to network in business with other dedicated Christians) to be parallel to Nazi intent! How so? "As a Jew reading this article," he complained,
"I could not help but recall the Nuremberg laws of 1935 [the Nazi
race laws]. These laws mandated a boycott of all non-Aryan businesses
in Germany ... The guide implies that there should be an economic
boycott of non-Christian businesses. Thus, the parallel to the Nuremberg
laws is certainly fitting. Even more disturbing was the forum that the
News and Record chose to give such free and positive publicity to
such a nonnewsworthy item. It saddened me that a group that
encourages bias and bigotry through de facto economic boycotts
would receive support from the News and Record. At the very least,
the News and Record should consider taking an editorial stance against
this so-called 'Christian' yellow pages." [GUTTMAN, F., 11-26-99, p.
A22]
Rabbi Gutman's outrageous attack upon, and defamation of, a local Christian interest in networking with like-minded people created a stir in the Greensboro area. Gutman's hypocrisy is breath-taking. Throughout multi-cultural America there are Iranian business directories, Arab business directories, Armenian business directories, Muslim business directories, and many others including, of course, Jewish business directories. (See, for example, the national Jewish "yellow pages" by Sharon and Michael Strassfeld. Or the one called The Jewish Yellow Pages: A Directory of Goods and Services by Mae Rockland Tupa. Or note England's Benjamin Cohen who became a millionaire at age 17 for his Jewishnet Internet site. He "started Jewishnet from his bedroom and aimed to provide a business directory for the community.") [DAILY MAIL, 1-6-2000, p. 83] And the intensity of Jewish collective support for each other has few, if any (as we will continue to explore), equals in modern America.
In another version of the usual Jewish double standard and anti-Christian attack, in 2000, Texas governor and presidential candidate George W. Bush, was publicly assailed by the American Jewish Congress for declaring June 10, 2000 as "Jesus Christ Day" in Texas (formal state recognition of the tenth anniversary of a grassroots "March for Jesus" day). The AJC complained that the governor "affixed his signature and the seal of the state of Texas to a proclamation establishing 'Jesus Day' [which] demonstrates the willingness to place the imprimatur of government literally on one faith." Bush's office responded by noting that the AJC never complained when the U.S. Congress had earlier proclaimed a day commemorating ultra-Orthodox Hassidic rabbi Menachem Schneerson. Nor did the AJC complain about Bush's formal Texas proclamations that created an "Honor Israel Day," a "Holocaust Remembrance" day, a day honoring Austin's Orthodox Chabad House, a commemorative day for the Baha'i religion, and a special day of honor for a community of Sikhs. Even Bush's Republican (partisan) colleague, Matt Brooks, head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, observed that "This is again a sad example of the American Jewish Congress and other organizations showing their anti-Christian bias. The Jewish community has to stop beating up on Christians for belief in their faith." [FINGERHUT, E., 7-13-2000]
Four months after Bush's "Jesus Day" proclamation, a New York Times reporter, Laurie Goodsein, still was reporting that
"What seemed purely ceremonial has turned into a controversy for
George Bush. As word of Texas's Jesus Day has spread through
the email, Jewish newspapers and church-state separatists, the
Republican presidential nominee has come under criticism for
insensitivity to people of non-Christian faiths and a disregard for
the First Amendment." [GOODSTEIN, L., 8-6-2000, p. 14]
As scholar Kevin MacDonald writes about the undercurrent at work in such Jewish anti-Christian activism:
"It is not surprising that a powerful strand of Jewish intellectual activity
in the twentieth century has been to pathologize highly cohesive,
collective gentile social structures, gentile nationalism, gentile
authoritarian political groups, and gentile ethnocentrism. It is clearly in
the interests of Jews to advocate the continuation of the quintessential
Western cultural commitment to individualism as the best environment
for the continuation of Jewish collectivism." [MACDONALD, p. 264]
"Nothing is more foreign to the spirit of Judaism," noted influential pre-Zionist author Moses Hess in the 19th century, "than the idea of the egoistic salvation of the isolated individual." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 126]
The implications of Jewish collectivism in capitalist society were addressed by a prominent Jewish socialist, Bernard Lazare, in France, in 1894:
"Bourgeois society is based entirely upon competition between man and
in the field of the daily necessities of life. It affords us the spectacle of
individuals fighting bitterly one against the other ... In this state of society
Darwin's principle of the struggle of life dominates ... If we conceive,
then, in the midst of such a community, based upon egoistic action,
associations of citizens strongly organized and gifted, animated for many
centuries by the spirit of common action, and knowing by instinct and
experience, the advantages which they may derive from union, it is
certain that such organizations by directing their activity towards the
same end as that pursued by the scattered individuals around them will
possess such an advantage in the struggle as to assure them an easy
victory. This is just the role which is being played by the Jews of the
middle class in modern society ... [LAZARE, p. 168] ... The Jew ...
increases his advantage by uniting with his co-religionists possessed of
similar virtues, and thus augments his powers by acting in common with
his brethren; the inevitable result being that they out-distance their rivals
in the pursuit of any common end. In the midst of a disunited middle
class, whose members are engaged in a perpetual struggle against one
another, the Jews stand united as one. This is the secret of their
success." [LAZARE, p. 169]
In our own day, the effect of an economically empowered Jewish "extended family" actually enforcing a disempowered Gentile individualism has profound political implications, grossly advantageous to Jews. Following the classical pattern of Jewish and upper strata Gentile collusion against the non-Jewish masses (as evidenced throughout history with everything from Court Jews in league with absolute monarchs to Jewish communists as an integral part of Russian totalitarian elite), one recent study suggested that, even today, high status non-Jews tended to be individualist in attitude, disinclined to join groups, but were often found in economic and political association with Jews. [MACDONALD, p. 264]
The typical institutionalized Jewish device these days to "pathologize" Gentile group affiliations is to stigmatize them as being anti-Semitic in nature: morally, and -- more importantly -- legally, impermissible in the American universalistic fabric. (Hence, a rabbi can gain public forum and be taken seriously in declaring that local Christian efforts to economically collectivize is a manifestation of Nazi fascism, while, at the same time, a cornerstone of Jewish identity to this day is that very same thing). The Jewish polity (led by its collectivized "defense agency" heads -- the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, over 100 Jewish "community relations councils," et al) functions as a massive, unified "attack dog" to destroy any semblance in others of a solidarity similar to their own, or, rather, any that could pose a power threat to Jewish collectivism. Some Jews believe, says Benedict Viviano, "that Jews ... are safest when Christians are weak ... Thus [such Jews] ... foster publications which blame the Church for all the suffering of the Jews throughout history in an undifferentiated fashion." [VIVIANO, p. 354] In historical overview, as Jewish author Walter Jacob notes,
"The Jewish scholars of the mid-nineteenth century realized that the
Church could now be attacked without fear of retaliation. Its power
had faded, and its influence was constantly diminishing. The decline
of Christianity was a hopeful sign. Jewish scholars saw it as beneficial
for Judaism and mankind, for they believed that Judaism or a new
religion akin to it would eventually become dominant. Although this
optimism is gone, the weakening of Christianity is still welcomed by
many contemporary Jews." [JACOB, W., 1974, p. 230] Jewish-born Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis has come to play a profoundly influential role in modern America. Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note Freud's views of Christianity, at root in this psychological movement:
"Though it is sometimes forgotten today, Freud's work was profoundly
subversive to the cultural underpinnings of European Christian society,
a subversiveness of which he was not unaware. There is evidence that some
of the impetus for the creation of psychoanalysis lay in his hostility to
Christianity." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 125]
These two scholars also note the nature of the widespread modern Jewish leftist/liberal/radical assault upon the Christian world:
"In sum, the aim of the Jewish radical is to estrange the Christian
from society, as he feels estranged from it. The fact that the United
States is no longer 'Christian' in any real sense, or that Jews have
moved to positions of considerable power and influence, is of
little import. Its Christian base is still unconsciously identified
as the decisive oppressive element ... Thus many radical Jews,
even when they do not identify with Judaism, unconsciously
retain a generalized hostility to Christian culture. Again, Portnoy
[the leader character in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint] is a
good example. Only on the analyst's couch is he willing to admit
the hostility he feels." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 125]
Russian-Israeli author Israel Shamir notes that Jewish hatred for Christians and Christianity is a consistent theme to this very day:
"Rami Rozen expressed the Jewish tradition in a long feature in a major Israeli
Israeli newspaper Haaretz: 'Jews feel toward Jesus today what they felt in 4c or
in the Middle Ages ... it is not fear, it is hatred and despise [sic]. For centuries
Jews concealed from Christians their hate to Jesus, and this tradition continues
even now. 'He is revolting and repulsive," said an important modern religious
Jewish thinker. Rozen writes that this 'repulsion passed from observant Jews
to the general Israeli public." [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
Secular Jewish journalist Stephen Bloom was surprised when an ultra-Orthodox Jew reprimanded him for saying hello to a non-Jewish stranger:
"'The goyim,' Lazar told me, as we crossed the street again, three blocks from the
shul, 'will always be goyim, no matter how nice they are to you. So what's the
point?' Lazar's comments underscored the Hasidim's contempt for non-Jews,
which wasn't limited to the Postville [Iowa] gentiles, but to all Christians ... But
if truth be told, Lazar's anti-gentile sentiment wasn't limited to just Hasidic Jews.
The Hasidim put into practice what many Jews just talked about. Lazar's
gentile-bashing reminded me of the Yiddish aphorism Er shmekt nit un er
shtinkt nit ('He doesn't smell and he doesn't stink'), used derisively to describe
non-Jews, who are viewed as inconsequential and unimportant. The maxim
wasn't very different from the expression my own parents used about the
simpleton who's got a goyisher kop [non-Jewish head]."
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 196]
Jewish author Paul Cowan notes what happened when a group of Jews and their Christian spouses all got together in a room to air out their differences:
"In one of our largest, most polarized groups almost all the gentiles perceived
the Jews' responses [to Christianity] as another sign of their clannishness.
'You seem to me like a wall of people,' said a New York-born Catholic who
was married to a Jew from Philadelphia. 'When I'm around Jews, I feel like
a persecuted minority.' 'I was just amazed at all the hostility,' said a woman
from rural Pennsylvania who raised as a Mennonite but now describes herself
as an agnostic. 'None of the Jews here seem able to tolerate religious differences.'
Her husband, who was born into a very prosperous, very assimilated Jewish
family, agreed, 'I'm not used to Jews victimizing other people.'
It wasn't victimization. The exercise had unleashed a powerful tribal memory.
But the words Jews used to describe the cross enraged most Christians. 'I've
been married to you for three years and I didn't realize you had such
disrespectful feelings about my religion,' a Methodist woman said to her
Jewish husband." [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 184]
How deep is modern American Jewry's animosity to others? In one 1988 study, a third of Jewish respondents went so far as to regard "the religious and racial identities" of even Catholic and Black liberal Democrats "as grounds for suspicion." Charles Liebman and Stephen Cohen attribute this paranoia to Jewish beliefs "from their mythic past. Strong nationalist, ethnic, or religious loyalties of Gentiles increase the likelihood of their being anti-Semitic. The safest goy is one devoid of strong group commitments." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 48-48] Jewish suspicion, distrust, and disdain for non-Jews is so great that even converts to Judaism -- those who are incapable of claiming an expressly hereditary lineage to the Jewish Chosen People mythology -- are subject to widespread Jewish rejection and discrimination. "The strong familistic thrust among Jews," remark Liebman and Cohen, "has meant that converts have been treated with some degree of suspicion. At the very least, it has meant that Jews do not relate to converts in the same way they relate to those born Jewish." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 23]
"Though it is sometimes forgotten today, Freud's work was profoundly
subversive to the cultural underpinnings of European Christian society,
a subversiveness of which he was not unaware. There is evidence that some
of the impetus for the creation of psychoanalysis lay in his hostility to
Christianity." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 125]
These two scholars also note the nature of the widespread modern Jewish leftist/liberal/radical assault upon the Christian world:
"In sum, the aim of the Jewish radical is to estrange the Christian
from society, as he feels estranged from it. The fact that the United
States is no longer 'Christian' in any real sense, or that Jews have
moved to positions of considerable power and influence, is of
little import. Its Christian base is still unconsciously identified
as the decisive oppressive element ... Thus many radical Jews,
even when they do not identify with Judaism, unconsciously
retain a generalized hostility to Christian culture. Again, Portnoy
[the leader character in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint] is a
good example. Only on the analyst's couch is he willing to admit
the hostility he feels." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 125]
Russian-Israeli author Israel Shamir notes that Jewish hatred for Christians and Christianity is a consistent theme to this very day:
"Rami Rozen expressed the Jewish tradition in a long feature in a major Israeli
Israeli newspaper Haaretz: 'Jews feel toward Jesus today what they felt in 4c
in the Middle Ages ... it is not fear, it is hatred and despise [sic]. For centuries
Jews concealed from Christians their hate to Jesus, and this tradition continues
even now. 'He is revolting and repulsive," said an important modern religious
Jewish thinker. Rozen writes that this 'repulsion passed from observant Jews
to the general Israeli public." [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
Secular Jewish journalist Stephen Bloom was surprised when an ultra-Orthodox Jew reprimanded him for saying hello to a non-Jewish stranger:
"'The goyim,' Lazar told me, as we crossed the street again, three blocks from the
shul, 'will always be goyim, no matter how nice they are to you. So what's the
point?' Lazar's comments underscored the Hasidim's contempt for non-Jews,
which wasn't limited to the Postville [Iowa] gentiles, but to all Christians ... But
if truth be told, Lazar's anti-gentile sentiment wasn't limited to just Hasidic Jews.
The Hasidim put into practice what many Jews just talked about. Lazar's
gentile-bashing reminded me of the Yiddish aphorism Er shmekt nit un er
shtinkt nit ('He doesn't smell and he doesn't stink'), used derisively to describe
non-Jews, who are viewed as inconsequential and unimportant. The maxim
wasn't very different from the expression my own parents used about the
simpleton who's got a goyisher kop [non-Jewish head]."
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 196]
Jewish author Paul Cowan notes what happened when a group of Jews and their Christian spouses all got together in a room to air out their differences:
"In one of our largest, most polarized groups almost all the gentiles perceived
the Jews' responses [to Christianity] as another sign of their clannishness.
'You seem to me like a wall of people,' said a New York-born Catholic who
was married to a Jew from Philadelphia. 'When I'm around Jews, I feel like
a persecuted minority.' 'I was just amazed at all the hostility,' said a woman
from rural Pennsylvania who raised as a Mennonite but now describes herself
as an agnostic. 'None of the Jews here seem able to tolerate religious differences.'
Her husband, who was born into a very prosperous, very assimilated Jewish
family, agreed, 'I'm not used to Jews victimizing other people.'
It wasn't victimization. The exercise had unleashed a powerful tribal memory.
But the words Jews used to describe the cross enraged most Christians. 'I've
been married to you for three years and I didn't realize you had such
disrespectful feelings about my religion,' a Methodist woman said to her
Jewish husband." [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 184]
Even overtly anti-Semitic non-Jewish organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (successfully marginalized from mainstream white society) and the Nation of Islam (unsuccessfully marginalized from mainstream Black society) are -- however condemned and attacked by Jewish strategists -- essentially other peoples' echoes of the genetically-based Chosen People ethos, a Jewish gift to mankind. Why is the idea of American Jewry banding tightly together expressly for their own interests and advancement any less repulsive than "white people" (or anybody else) doing the same, especially when Jews, by all measures of economic and political influence, are as a "special interest" group incomparably far more powerful? The fact that American Jewry can get away with it in the illusory world of "public relations" is due to grand design. The important difference between Jews and others is that the Jewish polity is -- as it has been throughout the centuries --dissimulative in its hostility and suspicion of the non-Jewish Other; the Ku Klux Klan and the Nation of Islam are overt in their animosity to, and "separateness" from, those who are not their racial and ideological kindred.
(Note, for example, the results of a case of a Ku Klux Klan lawsuit in 2000 against the University of Missouri at St. Louis. The Klan sought to purchase a 15-second promotion after National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program at the college radio station. The university refused the Klan air time, claiming that subsequent bad publicity would damage the university economically, and an Appeals court upheld the college's decision. As disreputable as the KKK's overt racism is to most Americans, the Klan's lawyer, Robert Herman (who is Jewish), had a valid point about free speech double standards when he noted that "if the radio decides its listeners don't care for Jews, can they keep Jews off the air too?") [MCMURRAY, J., 2-17, 2000]
In a discussion about left wing Jewish efforts "to change society," Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note that
"The basic thrust is to undermine all aspects of culture which contributed
to his or her own marginality. Thus Jews in the United States and Europe
have been in the forefront of not only political radicalism, but also
various forms of cultural subversion ... Often such subversion involves
an attack upon genuine inequities or irrationalities. However, the attack is
generally not directed at the particular inequity or irrationality per se.
Rather, such inequities or irrationalities are used as a means for achieving
a larger purpose: the general weakening of the social order itself."
[ROTHMAN, p. 130, in Prager, p. 70]
Elsewhere, they note:
"In almost every country about which we have information, a segment of the
Jewish community played a very vital role in movements designed to
undermine the existing order. This was true even in the United States
where Jews have achieved unparalleled economic, cultural, and
social success." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 110]
"Modern political history," notes Jewish author Philip Mendes, "indicates a clear connection between being Jewish and being radical." [MENDES, P., 1993, p. 9]
Elsewhere, they note:
"In almost every country about which we have information, a segment of the
undermine the existing order. This was true even in the United States
where Jews have achieved unparalleled economic, cultural, and
social success." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 110]
"Modern political history," notes Jewish author Philip Mendes, "indicates a clear connection between being Jewish and being radical." [MENDES, P., 1993, p. 9]
Maurice Samuel, a Zionist and popular Jewish American chauvinist in his time, put Jewish radicalism this way, in his confrontational book of 1924, You Gentiles:
"We Jews are the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever,
NOTHING that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will
forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world,
which is not your [Gentile] nature to build ... Those of us who fail to
understand that truth will always be found in alliance with your rebellious
factions until disillusionment comes, the wretched fate which scattered us
through your midst has thrust this unwelcome role upon us."
[BRENNER , ZIONISM, p. 23]
Samuel, a naturalized American citizen and secretary of the Zionist Organization of America, was no marginalized crank. Louis Kaplan notes that he "played a major role in re-Judaizing American Jewry from the 1920s until his death in 1972 ... Samuel reminded the Jewish-born universalist of his day (and ours) that love of humanity is too nebulous and superficial, even mawkish. Concern for all human beings begins with caring for the specific. Let the individual Jew hold dear the Jewish people." Samuel, adds Emmanuel Goldsmith, "played a major role in the emergence of the American Jew's sense of Jewish identity and in the American Jews' definition of Jewishness." And Milton Hindus called Samuel "the most popular platform personality of American Jewry." [KAPLAN, p. 453-465]
"A powerful force driving Jews toward radicalism is their sense of alienation from American society," says Nathaniel Weyl, "... They often espouse values at variance with those of the majority and coalesce in a congregation or political party with the characteristics of a despised elite." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 148-149] Sam Lehman-Wilzig, like many Jews, in the Zionist journal Midstream romanticizes the Jewish deconstruction of the non-Jewish world, asserting that Jews are the essential seed of human progress and enlightenment:
"Whether outside the campus or inside the laboratory, the Jews continue
to heroically challenge the political and intellectual conventional wisdoms
of the age ... By constantly constituting an 'oppositionist' force on the
world scene ... the Jew continually constitutes a mighty thorn in the side
of world society." [LEHMAN-WILZIG, p. 24]
Jewish left-wing radical Saul Alinsky even introduced his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, with this dubious inspiration:
"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first
radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where
mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical
known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that
he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer." [ALINSKY, S., 1971, pre-
table of contents page]
Jewish left-wing radical Saul Alinsky even introduced his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, with this dubious inspiration:
"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first
radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where
mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical
known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that
he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer." [ALINSKY, S., 1971, pre-
table of contents page]
In the religious sphere, Jewish attacks upon Christian collectivism in America, effecting strategies to insure Christian religious marginalization, have gone on for decades now. "In its newly adopted role as a beleaguered minority," notes an unsympathetic David Hollinger, "... the complaint of Christians as the 'newest minority' insists that Christians are discriminated against, and that their opinions are not taken seriously. Everyone but traditional Christians, it seems, gets the chance to speak out." [HOLLINGER, p. 33] Jewish legal lobbyists realize that there is no particular "Christian" polity without religion as its base (and even this is divided along various sectarian lines). While there is certainly residual "Christian" influence in the values and mores of a secularized Christian people, there is no collective, secular, nationalist Christian political entity equivalent to that of the Jews'. The Christian polity dissolves, or is atomized, when secularized; Jewish solidarity endures secularly, transformed along the mythological base of its hereditary line, its historical transnational Jewish patriotism, and its "we-them" principles, whether religious or not. Indeed, Judaism has always been preserved as both a religion and a nationalist entity -- a "nation-religion." Or, as Jewish scholar Nicholas de Lange, observes, "To be a Jew means first and foremost to belong to a group, the Jewish people, and the religious beliefs are secondary, in a sense, to this corporate allegiance." [DE LANGE, N., p. 4] In modern times most Jews have discarded the Judaic religion but renewed the nationalist foundation of their collective self-identity. As such, the American constitutional principle that "separates between Church and state" plays into non-religious Jewish hands; hence, most American Jews understand themselves not fitting into a religious context, but rather as an elite (and usually racial), secular caste in the American system.
Alice Bloch is an activist feminist and lesbian, two identities that are emphatically rejected by traditional Judaism. Yet Bloch remains ardently "Jewish," noting her identity -- that so much mystifies non-Jewish acquaintances -- this way:
"Jewish identity is important to me because being Jewish
is an integral part of myself: it's my inheritance, my roots. Christian
women sometimes have a hard time understanding this, because
Christian identity is so much tied up with religious beliefs. It is
possible to be an ex-Catholic or an ex-Baptist, but it is not possible
to be an ex-Jew." [BLOCH, p. 117]
About 20 gay synagogues have even been created throughout America in the last three decades, places where homosexual men and women assert a Jewish religious identity, despite the fact that mainstream Judaism rejects them. [WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 76]
Sylvia Boorstein, a former psychologist who teaches meditation and Buddhism in northern California's affluent Marin county, has even written a book about how she manages being an "observant Jew" and a Buddhist at the same time, somehow grafting the Buddha onto her root identity. "I am a Jew," she writes, "because my parents were mild-mannered, cheerful best friends who loved me enormously, and they were Jews. I am a prayerful, devout Jew because I am a Buddhist." While visiting Jerusalem, she notes troubles she had with some Israelis, but then reaches back into the Holocaust epic, thinking, 'I'm in the middle of a locker room with naked Jewish women, and we're all safe here.' And I was so happy that these women about who I'd been harboring all these terrible thoughts were alive, I was overwhelmed with love for them. I thought, 'This is wonderful. They can swim however they want. Now I have my values straight.'" [BERSON, M., 4-5-97; TULLER, D., 3-9-97]
"Jewish Buddhists," seemingly a contradiction in terms, are fond of calling themselves JUBUs. [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 6] Roger Kamenetz notes the case of friend Marc Lieberman:
"He married a fellow Buddhist practitioner, Nancy Garfield, in a
Vietnamese Buddhist temple in San Francisco. Not just a phase
anymore. Still, when I visited them in San Francisco, I noted that
he made kiddush on Friday night and sent his son from his first
marriage to a Hebrew school. Even as a Buddhist he seemed a
better Jew than I was." [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 10]
Psychologist Wendy Orange also flirted with Buddhism, but in later years returned full-force to her Jewish identity, even moving to Israel. The beginning of her return to her tribal identity, as she recounts, began with a dream:
"It's the Jewish High Holidays, but I'm at a Buddhist retreat. Meditations
are over; I drift towards a run-down section of town where I enter a
dissolute tavern. That's when I hear Hebrew melodies. They grow louder,
obliterating the Buddhist chants and gongs. When the sad cantorial
fades away, I sidle up to a degenerate guy and am, at the dream's end,
madly trying to kiss him, even though he's more or less drowning in his
beer." [ORANGE, W., 2000, p. 14]
Ms. Orange wondered what this dream meant. Her Jewish therapist had an answer:
"Oh, that's an easy one. This dream points to your neglected Judaism.
It's telling you to search for your ethnic roots .... Your dream shows
that you're 'drunk' on the wrong religious practices. Study the great
Jewish scholars now. One day, with luck, you'll go to Israel."
[ORANGE, W., 2000, p. 15] Alan Lew has written his own book on the Jewish Buddhist theme, with the twist that he followed the universalistic path of Zen to ultimately return to his tribal home as a rabbi:
"[There was] a guru named Rudrananda, or, as he was known, Rudi. Rudi's
real name was Albert Rudolph. He was a Jewish guy who grew up in Brooklyn
... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 51] ... One day Norman [also Jewish] invited me to
come with him to the San Francisco Zen Center to hear a famous Japanese
Zen master talk. At least half the people at the Zen Center were Jewish, but the
Japanese Zen master, thinking that since he was in America everyone was Christian,
based his lecture on a text from the Gospel ... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 60] ... [At the
Berkeley Zen center] Mel Weitsman, the Zen priest, would already be seated ...
There were usually only about four to six people present at any session. Sometimes
we would joke about how there weren't enough for a minyan, realizing most
of us were Jews -- Mel, his wife, Liz Horowitz, Norman, another man named Ron
Nester, and me ... [LEW, A. 1999, p. 63] ... The Zen Center I belonged to was
a strong, positive community, and the connections beteween the people were
deep and real, but it wasn't a blood connection. There was not the essential
and permanent bond that comes with family. I felt this most strongly when I
took [son] Steve with me to holiday gatherings at the zendo [Zen center]. Looking
through the window at this Jewish family across the way, I experienced a profound
and surprising sense of longing ... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 99] [At a Los Padres
mountains Zen monastery] there was a ceremony for the installation of
Steve Weintraub, the new head monk, or shuso ... Like me, Steve Weintraub
had grown up on Brooklyn ... Steve Weintraub was of course Jewish. Whenever
I came into the room, I checked to see who there looked Jewish. I wondered
if anyone knew that I was Jewish, and if they cared. I had been doing
this unconsciously ever since we molved to Pleasantville, but I had just
|recently become conscious of it. The more I meditated, the more aware I
became of the contents of my unconscious mind." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 111]
Lew eventually had an "Orthodox Jewish wedding." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 142] His next wife, Sherril Jaffe, a writer, was also Jewish. [LEW, A., 1999, p. 145] Lew ended up at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan where "JTS required rabbinical students to spend one year in Israel." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 202] In Israel, he notes, "there was a deep joy to being in Israel and studying Torah in Jerusalem. I had the familiar sense of coming home." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 207] At the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Lew is at first intimidated by a black-dressed Chasid leading prayers, but suddenly recognizes him:
"Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that I knew him from Sproul
Plaza in Berkeley [University of California]! The long ponytail that he used to wear
then had migrated around the side of his head and had become sidelocks. He
was a middle-class Jewish kid from New Jersey. Sixteen years ago he had
been pretending to be a native American; now he was pretending to be a
Chasid." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 212]
Lew eventually ended up in the San Francisco area again as a rabbi. "Jews," he says,
"who had been practicing Buddhists started lining up outside my office to speak
to me. Some of them had been practicing Buddhists for twenty or thirty years,
and they were quite happy with it; nevertheless, they felt haunted by their
Jewishness, and they had never been able to shake it. They begged me to suggest
something for them to do about it. I didn't know what to tell them. Norman and I
decided to hold a colloqium, a panel discussion on Judaism and Buddhism. He
and I and several teachers of Jewish meditation would be on the panel. We
expected around fifty people, but hundreds of people showed up. What
did they all want? ... My goal was to help Jews deepen their Jewish practice
with Buddhist-style meditation techniques, and Norman's interest was in
reaching out to Jewish Buddhists who wanted to have some way to express
their Jewishness." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 286]
"It was in a Buddhist monastery, meditating, " concludes Lew near the end of his volume, "that I realized who I really am. I am a Jew. A Jew can use the practice of meditation to illuminate his or her Jewish soul. And meditation can help us slow down enough so that we can once again experience the beauty of the Jewish path." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 306]
Joachim Prinz noted, in 1973 (in his volume about the community of Jews who faked their lives as Christians for centuries in Spain), the "Jewish" Muslims (the jadidim) of the Meshed area of Iran:
"They fast during the holy weeks of Ramadan and also on Yom Kppur, the Jewish
Day of Atonement. They celebrate all the Jewish as well as the Mohammedan holidays,
but economic necessity forces them to keep their shops open on the Jewish Sabbath
... After a hundred years after their incomplete conversion the jadidim retain a
dual allegiance to the law of the Koran and that of the Torah which poses neither
a religious nor a psychological problem for them." [PRINZ, UJ., 1973, p. 7]
Elsewhere Prinz notes the case of Franz von Mendelssohn, of German Jewish descent, whose family was -- for generations -- Christian:
"When Hitler came to powr the head of the banking house, Franz von Mendelssohn ...
was president of the Lutheran Churches in Germany ... [He] announced that he
had resigned from his office in the Church, although, even according to the anti-
Jewish Nuremberg Laws, he was considered an Aryan. 'I feel,' he said with great
emotion, 'that a descendant of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn could
no longer pretend' ... '[It is] too late,' he said, 'Too late for me [to return to Judaism].
I and my ancestors have been brought up as believing Christians for four
generations. I can only return to my people, not to its faith. I identify with their
pain, their fate, their pride.' He did not return to Judaism, but his daughter,
Eleanora von Mendelssoh, a well-known actress, became an Orthodox Jew."
[PRINZ, J., 1973, p. 12-13]
Famed Holocaust guru Elie Wisel describes French Catholic Cardinal (and possibly the next pope) Jean Marie-Lustiger's enduring Jewish identity:
"He insists that having been born a Jew, he will die a Jew ... [WIESEL, E., 1999,
p. 170] ... 'I feel Jewish,' the archbishop responds. 'I refuse to renounce my
roots, my Jewishness' .... He goes on to make the point that his Jewishness
annoys anti-Semites and that this does not displease him. Why should he make
them happy by turning his back on the people they execrate?' [WIESEL, E., 1999,
p. 171] ... [He] is determined to remain a son of the Jewish people ... He
acts accordingly; anyone who requests his assistance in defending a Jewish
cause can count on his support ... During the scandalous affair of the Carmelite
convent a Auschwitz [the 'scandal' was that nuns wanted to keep a cross at their
convent next to the former concentration camp, against international Jewish demands
to take it down] , for example, his interventions [on behalf of Jews] must have raised
a few eyebrows in Rome. As must his sympathy for the State of Israel, of which he
is the most devoted defender inside the Catholic Church." [WIESEL, E., 1999, p.
171-172]
Simon Wisenthal notes the case of prominent Austrian poltician Otto Bauer:
"Jews were the founders of the Social Democatic Party in Austria. Always
the leadership was Jewish -- from Viktor Adler to Otto Bauer. Yes, Adler
became a Protestant but Bauer once said: 'I am a Jew, but for me is the Judaism
not a nation, not a religion, but a shared fate.' And you cannot leave it because
then you are a deserter. This why he remained a Jew.'" [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 345]
Secular Jew Stephen Bloom puts Jewish identity like this:
"I was a Jew through and through, from my curly brown hair and robust nose
to the synapses in my brain and the corpuscles of my blood. A day, an hour, didn't
go by without my reflecting in some way on my culture and my religion. Religious
culture and devotion to faith are two different things, and while I wasn't willing to
to become more attached to the organizational rigors of my faith, I wasn't about
to let go of what I carried inside me every day." [BLOOM S., 2001, p. 21]
Anne Roiphe notes, even in the secular world, the pseudo-religious dimension (the faith) of modern Jewish identity to its tribal foundation, Zionism, and its Israel-centeredness:
"[There was] a guru named Rudrananda, or, as he was known, Rudi. Rudi's
real name was Albert Rudolph. He was a Jewish guy who grew up in Brooklyn
... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 51] ... One day Norman [also Jewish] invited me to
come with him to the San Francisco Zen Center to hear a famous Japanese
Zen master talk. At least half the people at the Zen Center were Jewish, but the
Japanese Zen master, thinking that since he was in America everyone was Christian,
based his lecture on a text from the Gospel ... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 60] ... [At the
Berkeley Zen center] Mel Weitsman, the Zen priest, would already be seated ...
There were usually only about four to six people present at any session. Sometimes
we would joke about how there weren't enough for a minyan, realizing most
of us were Jews -- Mel, his wife, Liz Horowitz, Norman, another man named Ron
Nester, and me ... [LEW, A. 1999, p. 63] ... The Zen Center I belonged to was
a strong, positive community, and the connections beteween the people were
deep and real, but it wasn't a blood connection. There was not the essential
and permanent bond that comes with family. I felt this most strongly when I
took [son] Steve with me to holiday gatherings at the zendo [Zen center]. Looking
through the window at this Jewish family across the way, I experienced a profound
and surprising sense of longing ... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 99] [At a Los Padres
mountains Zen monastery] there was a ceremony for the installation of
Steve Weintraub, the new head monk, or shuso ... Like me, Steve Weintraub
had grown up on Brooklyn ... Steve Weintraub was of course Jewish. Whenever
I came into the room, I checked to see who there looked Jewish. I wondered
if anyone knew that I was Jewish, and if they cared. I had been doing
this unconsciously ever since we molved to Pleasantville, but I had just
|recently become conscious of it. The more I meditated, the more aware I
became of the contents of my unconscious mind." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 111]
Lew eventually had an "Orthodox Jewish wedding." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 142] His next wife, Sherril Jaffe, a writer, was also Jewish. [LEW, A., 1999, p. 145] Lew ended up at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan where "JTS required rabbinical students to spend one year in Israel." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 202] In Israel, he notes, "there was a deep joy to being in Israel and studying Torah in Jerusalem. I had the familiar sense of coming home." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 207] At the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Lew is at first intimidated by a black-dressed Chasid leading prayers, but suddenly recognizes him:
"Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that I knew him from Sproul
Plaza in Berkeley [University of California]! The long ponytail that he used to wear
then had migrated around the side of his head and had become sidelocks. He
was a middle-class Jewish kid from New Jersey. Sixteen years ago he had
been pretending to be a native American; now he was pretending to be a
Chasid." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 212]
Lew eventually ended up in the San Francisco area again as a rabbi. "Jews," he says,
"who had been practicing Buddhists started lining up outside my office to speak
to me. Some of them had been practicing Buddhists for twenty or thirty years,
and they were quite happy with it; nevertheless, they felt haunted by their
Jewishness, and they had never been able to shake it. They begged me to suggest
something for them to do about it. I didn't know what to tell them. Norman and I
decided to hold a colloqium, a panel discussion on Judaism and Buddhism. He
and I and several teachers of Jewish meditation would be on the panel. We
expected around fifty people, but hundreds of people showed up. What
did they all want? ... My goal was to help Jews deepen their Jewish practice
with Buddhist-style meditation techniques, and Norman's interest was in
reaching out to Jewish Buddhists who wanted to have some way to express
their Jewishness." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 286]
"It was in a Buddhist monastery, meditating, " concludes Lew near the end of his volume, "that I realized who I really am. I am a Jew. A Jew can use the practice of meditation to illuminate his or her Jewish soul. And meditation can help us slow down enough so that we can once again experience the beauty of the Jewish path." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 306]
Joachim Prinz noted, in 1973 (in his volume about the community of Jews who faked their lives as Christians for centuries in Spain), the "Jewish" Muslims (the jadidim) of the Meshed area of Iran:
"They fast during the holy weeks of Ramadan and also on Yom Kppur, the Jewish
Day of Atonement. They celebrate all the Jewish as well as the Mohammedan holidays,
but economic necessity forces them to keep their shops open on the Jewish Sabbath
... After a hundred years after their incomplete conversion the jadidim retain a
dual allegiance to the law of the Koran and that of the Torah which poses neither
a religious nor a psychological problem for them." [PRINZ, UJ., 1973, p. 7]
Elsewhere Prinz notes the case of Franz von Mendelssohn, of German Jewish descent, whose family was -- for generations -- Christian:
"When Hitler came to powr the head of the banking house, Franz von Mendelssohn ...
was president of the Lutheran Churches in Germany ... [He] announced that he
had resigned from his office in the Church, although, even according to the anti-
Jewish Nuremberg Laws, he was considered an Aryan. 'I feel,' he said with great
emotion, 'that a descendant of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn could
no longer pretend' ... '[It is] too late,' he said, 'Too late for me [to return to Judaism].
I and my ancestors have been brought up as believing Christians for four
generations. I can only return to my people, not to its faith. I identify with their
pain, their fate, their pride.' He did not return to Judaism, but his daughter,
Eleanora von Mendelssoh, a well-known actress, became an Orthodox Jew."
[PRINZ, J., 1973, p. 12-13]
Famed Holocaust guru Elie Wisel describes French Catholic Cardinal (and possibly the next pope) Jean Marie-Lustiger's enduring Jewish identity:
"He insists that having been born a Jew, he will die a Jew ... [WIESEL, E., 1999,
p. 170] ... 'I feel Jewish,' the archbishop responds. 'I refuse to renounce my
roots, my Jewishness' .... He goes on to make the point that his Jewishness
annoys anti-Semites and that this does not displease him. Why should he make
them happy by turning his back on the people they execrate?' [WIESEL, E., 1999,
p. 171] ... [He] is determined to remain a son of the Jewish people ... He
acts accordingly; anyone who requests his assistance in defending a Jewish
cause can count on his support ... During the scandalous affair of the Carmelite
convent next to the former concentration camp, against international Jewish demands
to take it down] , for example, his interventions [on behalf of Jews] must have raised
a few eyebrows in Rome. As must his sympathy for the State of Israel, of which he
is the most devoted defender inside the Catholic Church." [WIESEL, E., 1999, p.
171-172]
Simon Wisenthal notes the case of prominent Austrian poltician Otto Bauer:
"Jews were the founders of the Social Democatic Party in Austria. Always
the leadership was Jewish -- from Viktor Adler to Otto Bauer. Yes, Adler
became a Protestant but Bauer once said: 'I am a Jew, but for me is the Judaism
not a nation, not a religion, but a shared fate.' And you cannot leave it because
then you are a deserter. This why he remained a Jew.'" [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 345]
Secular Jew Stephen Bloom puts Jewish identity like this:
"I was a Jew through and through, from my curly brown hair and robust nose
go by without my reflecting in some way on my culture and my religion. Religious
culture and devotion to faith are two different things, and while I wasn't willing to
to become more attached to the organizational rigors of my faith, I wasn't about
to let go of what I carried inside me every day." [BLOOM S., 2001, p. 21]
"Zionism, religious or political, is still mystical in nature. It requires a
passionate emotional commitment to the redemption [of Jews] -- it
is not a position for rationalists, for universalists. It requires unthinking
commitment to one side of the story. It grants the rewards of [Jewish]
togetherness." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 31-32]
When professor Blu Greenberg was asked what it meant to her to be a Jew, she replied:
"How can I answer that question? Everything in my life has always been
connected to my Jewishness. For me, being Jewish is the same thing
as being alive. They're inseparable." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 25]
As Jean-Francois Steiner has noted about his Jewish identity: "The Jew, more than any other man, realizes himself within his national community; as a Jew he can exist only insofar as he belongs to it." [STEINER, J., 1967, p. 149]
Meanwhile, the continuing institutionalized efforts of the nationalist Jewish polity to impugn, weaken, and reconstruct non-Jewish organizations to Jewish qualifications is expressed even in continuous attacks upon the Catholic Church. It is another age-old Jewish moral double standard: one application for themselves, and another for others. While unified Jewish lobbying organizations can successfully pressure (using arguments of universalism and ethnic and religious tolerance) even the Vatican to formally excise traditional references to "Jews who killed Christ" in their seminal New Testament literature, (proclaimed by Pope Paul VI in 1965 in a document known as Nostra Aetate), the entire foundation of Jewish Talmudic racism, exclusionism, anti-Christian and anti-Gentile malice and chauvinism can go not only unchallenged, but completely unmentioned. Always. And not only does it go unmentioned, but to dare to raise such pertinent subjects is condemned as Gentile bigotry! Israel Shahak notes the supreme Jewish audacity and hypocrisy in still using the Holocaust to guilt-trip Christians into changing aspects of their very religious doctrine (per perceptions of Jews) without getting good faith Jewish "religious adjustments" (or even secular ones) in return.
Take one of the most aggressive Jewish demands in Christian terrain. Riding Gentile sympathy for Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, Jews have successfully demanded a change in official Catholic (and other Christian) belief; the Church has accordingly excised from its formal teachings the notion that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. Yet, Jewish religious literature itself actually takes full credit for killing Christ. "According to the Talmud," notes Israel Shahak, "Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority. All classical Jewish sources which mention his execution are quite happy to take responsibility for it. In the Talmudic account the Romans are not even mentioned." [SHAHAK, p. ] According to the millennia-old Jewish book about Jesus -- Tol'doth Yeshu, Jewish professor Joseph Klausner notes that "the sages of Israel recognized [Jesus] and arrested him. They took and hanged him on the eve of Passover." [KLAUSNER, p. 54] "Jesus," notes the 1997 Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, "was arrested as a potential revolutionary and executed (by crucifixion) by order of the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, probably at the instigation of Jewish circles who feared the Roman reaction to messianic agitation." [WERBLOWSKY, Z., p. 368]
"Joseph Dan, a professor of Jewish mysticism in Heberew University in
Jerusalem, writing on the death of Jesus stated, 'The modern Jewish apologists,
hesitantly adopted by the church, preferred to put the blame on Romans.
But the medieval Jew did not wish to pass the buck. He tried to prove that
Jesus had to be killed, and he was proud of killing Him. The Jews hated and
despised Christ and Christians.' Actually, adds professor Dan, there is little
place to doubt that the Jewish enemies of Jesus cause his execution."
[SHAMIR, I., 2001]
"Joseph Dan, a professor of Jewish mysticism in Heberew University in
Jerusalem, writing on the death of Jesus stated, 'The modern Jewish apologists,
hesitantly adopted by the church, preferred to put the blame on Romans.
But the medieval Jew did not wish to pass the buck. He tried to prove that
Jesus had to be killed, and he was proud of killing Him. The Jews hated and
despised Christ and Christians.' Actually, adds professor Dan, there is little
place to doubt that the Jewish enemies of Jesus cause his execution."
[SHAMIR, I., 2001]
Typically, Jewish professor Ellis Rivkin proposes that Jews could not be responsible for the death of Christ, because it was, rather, the "system's" fault. "If," he says, "we are to assess responsibility, we once again find ourselves laying it at the feet of the Roman imperial system ... It was not the Jewish people who crucified Jesus, and it was not the Roman people -- it was the imperial system, a system that victimized the Jews, victimized the Romans, and victimized the spirit of God." [author's emphases: RIVKIN, p. 256] By this all-encompassing victimhood logic then, it is abstract ideas (and not people) that bear ultimate responsibility for human crimes, and we may thereby absolve all victims of German fascism, defined in this manner to include even the Nazi perpetrators themselves, who must be understood as mere pawns, caught in the web of social forces greater than them.
In any case, releasing modern Jews from the group responsibility for the historic accusation that they killed Christ has no forgiveness counterpart in the Jewish community where anti-Christian animosity -- and even hatred -- runs deep, so much so that Christians are branded as being generically anti-Semitic. Christianity itself is even repeatedly declared by many as a foundation of German Nazism. And a collective guilt is often demanded upon all of Christian heritage.
"The Catholic Church has certainly gone a long way in transforming its theology of Judaism," liberal rabbi Byron Sherwin noted in 1992, "particularly in comparison to the way things were before the Second Vatican Council. Theological changes have led to changes in relations with Judaism. The Jewish community, I think, has so far not responded." [SHERWIN, p. 154-155] "Since the late 1960's," says J.J. Goldberg, "the [formal] dialogue [between Christian and Jewish organizations] brought extensive changes in Church teachings about Judaism. Oddly, there has been no reciprocation: to the frustration of Catholic participants, Jewish participants have never agreed to an examination of Jewish teaching, because of an Orthodox ban on interreligious 'disputation.'" [GOLDBERG, p. 62]
This is an old and enduring Jewish theme. In fact, such one-sided manipulation is an unshakably endemic part of "being Jewish," as we can see in Karl Marx's critique about the subject 150 years ago:
"When the Jew demands emancipation from the Christian state, he
asks that the Christian state gives up its religious prejudices. Does
he, the Jew, give up his religious prejudice? What right, therefore,
has he to demand of others the abdication of their religion?"
[CRUSE, p. 169]
Jewish myopia on the subject of Christian-Jewish relations is always a given. This is how rabbi Byron Sherwin, vice-president of the Spertus College of Judaism in Chicago and advocate of a "dialogue" with Catholicism in Poland completely neglects the self-enforced nationalist, separatist core of Jewish history and identity (noted throughout scholarship everywhere as the Jewish "nation apart" self-conception), charging that common Polish perceptions of this Jewish fact is a foundation for irrational anti-Semitism:
"When I came here [to Poland] for the first time, I was shocked
by the terminology 'Polish nation' and 'Jewish nation.' This
terminology assumes that, even though they lived in Poland,
the Jews were not part of the Polish nation or people. If you
start with the assumption that someone is an outsider, that
very assumption is the basis for prejudice." [SHERWIN, p. 162]
Sherwin's view, of course, represents the best (most Jews do not even feign a working relationship with the organized Catholic community) the Jewish community has in "dialogue" with Catholicism. Sherwin's view is the usual historical revisionism (via the modern myths of multicultural tolerance) to completely gloss over endemic -- past and enduring -- Jewish ethnocentrism. Jews have always understood themselves everywhere in their diaspora as "outsiders."
In 1976 a Catholic priest, Father Andrew Greeley, wrote with agitation about the ages-old Jewish double moral standard:
"A Jewish leader chided me because Catholics were not vigorous
enough in their support of Israel. It was not, he told me, high enough on
our agenda. I asked him how high Ulster was on his. He told me that
was different. How different?"
After addressing continuous anti-Catholic prejudice in America, Father Greeley then added, "The point is that such attitudes are so unquestionably held by the New York liberal intellectual establishment (and particularly by its Jewish component) that they have become undiscussable assumptions." [GREELEY, p. 75]
The continuous exhortations by Jews to crucify Christianity itself (and particularly the Catholic Church) as innately malevolent is institutionalized in the Jewish community. The Christian faith is relentlessly forced into a defensive posture against an omnipresent Jewish ideological aggression that ceaselessly makes demands from its self-celebrated position of higher moral certitude (per its "unique" Holocaust perch). The Catholic Church is especially badgered and harassed as worldwide Jewry demands a humbling "apology" for not doing more to help the Jews in World War II; some Jews go so far as to insinuate that Catholic church members were somehow active murderers. The Jewish onslaught of Catholicism is so incessant, and accepted by the western mass media so unquestioningly, that in 1997 the New York Times ran a headline proclaiming:
"Apology and the Holocaust. The Pope's In a Confessional and the
Jews are Listening." [BOHLEN, p. 10]
Let us reflect upon the conceptual implications here. The traditional form of a confession is this: the confessor (the Pope) gets on his knees to the listener/pardoner (the Jews) who mediates between confessor and God. In January 1998 theJewish Week interviewed new Anti-Defamation League chairman Howard Berkowitz who -- with nine other audacious associates -- were soon to visit the Pope in the Vatican. What for? Interfaith "dialogue?" Berkowitz said that
"We want to talk to him about opening the Vatican archives as they relate
to World War II ... We want to see baptismal records and other
documents regarding the church's activities during the Holocaust. We
have developed a good relationship with members of his senior staff and
we want to explore these things." [AIN, S., ADL, p. 9]
Here then we have the ADL and the World Jewish Congress, poised as self-appointed police powers, chutzpah-supreme, arrogantly demanding another religious organization's private records, as part of the Grand Jewish Inquisition. If the Jewish Interrogators have only Goodness at heart, let us suggest that, in good faith, they first open their own closets for public scrutiny (as the ADL was so reluctant to do when sued by a host of individuals and organizations for illegal spying upon them in 1993). Especially interesting would be to see how they act in America as foreign agents for Israel. A confessional to kneel down and come clean to the American people is always open to them.
"Deep in the files of the State Department," notes Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley in 1997, "someone found a dispatch from the 1940s reporting a rumor that Nazi money stolen from Jews had ended up in the vaults at the Vatican. B'nai B'rith, adopting the tone of a prosecuting attorney, has demanded access to Vatican archives to determine whether the rumor is true." [GREELEY, 1997, p. B14] Greeley's newspaper editorial was called "Cheap Shots at Catholic Church."
For decades now, since the "Holocaust," Jewish organizations have been aggressively lobbying the Catholic church for religious concessions (and more). In a 1960s case, Jewish commentator James Yaffe suggested concerted Jewish intrigue:
"Much has been written about Jewish influence on Vatican II [changes in
formal Church perspectives about Jews]: how ADL and AJC both sent
lobbyists to Rome; how Cardinal Cushing of Boston set up an audience
with the Pope for Rabbi Heschel and the Jewish Theological Seminary;
how an audience was granted to the wife of a millionaire who had just
given a large endowment to Pro Deo University; how an audience was
granted was to Ambassador Arthur Goldberg; how Rabbi Tanenbaum
was the only Jew left in the Vatican when the statement as finally issued.
It's a good story, a kind of theological James Bond adventure." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 48]
In 1998, concerning another concerted Jewish demand, "in a long awaited apology," the Pope publicly proclaimed regret for the "errors and failures" of Roman Catholics during the Holocaust era. "The apology," noted the Boston Herald, "contained in a 12-page document released in Rome yesterday wasn't good enough for Jewish leaders in Boston and around the world who said the statement was 'too little too late.'" [SULLIVAN, p. 10] "It is ironic," wrote David Novak, himself Jewish, "that the Pope should be the focus of criticism, inasmuch as there has been no other pontiff in modern times, perhaps in all history, who has done more to develop a rapprochement with the Jewish people and Judaism ... My own view is that the Jewish response [to the Pope's "apology"] is largely mistaken, and that it reflects a misunderstanding not only of Catholic theology but of Jewish theology as well. The Jewish leaders' reactions were not just uncharitable, they were also unjust." [NOVAK, 1999]
In 1992, a similar concentrated Jewish attack upon the entire nation of (largely Catholic) France was fielded by President Francois Mitterand. The Jewish community was pressuring the government to issue a public apology for anti-Semitism during World War II. Mitterand refused. "The issue," noted the (Montreal) Gazette," is one of the most emotional in modern France." [GAZETTE, 7-15-92]
In 1999, on the occasion of the Pope's visit to Israel, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz began a story with the following, reflecting the intense Jewish antipathy towards Catholicism:
"It is important to bear in mind that the extermination of the Jews
during the Holocaust was conceived and perpetrated by Hitler,
not by the Catholic Church. For Europeans, this almost goes without
saying. In Israel in recent years however, one might have got a rather
different impression." [CREMONESI, L., 3-22-2000]
In any of a myriad of possible ways the Pope offends the Jewish community. His 1987 crime? He met with Kurt Waldheim, the head of the United Nations who was assailed by Jewish groups for alleged Nazi connections during World War II. When the Pope later visited San Francisco, local Jews found cause to march in street demonstrations against the Catholic leader. The local left-wing Jewish magazine, Tikkun, even took out ads in the local media declaring that "The Catholic Church has been responsible for the deaths of more Jews than the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]." [BIALE/ROSENBAUM, p. 251] The chief rabbi, Robert Kirschner, of San Francisco's oldest synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, took the occasion to preach an especially zealous sermon about the "anti-Judaism" of Catholicism. David Biale and Fred Rosenbaum note the immediate results of his anti-Christian attack in the liberal San Francisco community:
"Kirschner wept when he learned of a specific case in which a
Catholic woman, accompanying her Jewish husband to the temple
for the first time, became distraught upon hearing the sermon and,
convinced that Jews regularly preached hatred of Christianity,
vowed never to return to the synagogue again. Other mixed couples
put letters under his office door, informing him, in several instances,
that his remarks had driven a wedge between husband and wife."
[BIALE/ROSENBAUM, p. 258]
A Jewish folk singer, Hugh Blumenfeld, noted in 1999 American Jewish resistance to even listen to a song of "whimsy" he had written about Jesus:
"It's funny. They had a great time with it all through Israel. But
with an American Jewish audience, sometimes all you have to do
is say the word 'Jesus' and they go ballistic." [KATZ-STONE, 1999, p.
47]
The Jewish resistance to a mutually honest and open dialogue between the two faiths runs deep in the Jewish community; for Jews, "interfaith dialogue" is simply Christian theological concessions demanded by Jewish attackers. Another typical example of Jewish enmity for Christians was Rabbi Barry Cytron's disturbing experience in a Minnesota-area Jewish-Christian interfaith dialogue program he helped to pioneer. The first presentation, by Jewish and Christian religious authorities, was to a mostly Catholic, and a minority Protestant, audience. They, wrote Rabbi Cytron, "welcomed the opportunity to hear our thoughts. The questions they asked were challenging and thought provoking. Most of all, they were gracious and hospitable." The second interfaith presentation was before a Jewish audience whose mood "was not warm and gracious, but cold and angry. [They weren't] particularly interested in dialogue ... Why were they so angry? Why so unrelenting in their view of Christianity? Why so harsh in their judgments?" [CYTRON, p. 11-12]
(Compare this kind of widespread Jewish animosity for Christianity with Stanley Lippman's acceptance as a computer programmer for the Board of Global Ministries of the World Methodist Church. This organization even paid for his further studies -- a master's degree in computer science. Lippman is today the "principal software engineer" at Walt Disney Studios. [SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH, J., 7-20, 98] Can we imagine a comparable openness to Gentile employment in the heart of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is only a few blocks away in Manhattan from the Methodist center?)
As Jewish author James Yaffe noted in 1968:
"The Jew and the Christian enter into dialogue for entirely different
motives. The Christian wants to learn more about Judaism and
Jewish life. His sense of guilt has made him dissatisfied with his
present view of Christianity; he hopes to find values in Judaism
which will help him rethink his Christian ideas. But the Jew's motive
is much simpler. He wants Christian anti-Semitism to come to an
end. He wants the Christian to admit the harm he's done and stop
doing it. He may not be conscious that he has this motive. He may
sincerely believe that he has joined the dialogue in order to
exchange ideas, broaden his horizons, learn more about Christianity.
But once the formalities are over, anti-Semitism is the only subject
he really wants to discuss." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 47]
This is the Jewish polemic Walter Jacob noted about the rival faith in 1974, in his volume "Christianity Through Jewish Eyes":
"Many [Jewish] thinkers, and a host of minor writers, preachers,
and essayists, used the new found freedom from the ghetto as an
opportunity to vent their feelings against the religion of the oppressor
... In Western Europe, after Voltaire, almost anything could be said
with impunity ... The beginnings of this Jewish study of Christianity
were rather angry, as if polemic were necessary to arouse interest in
the problem and the air had to be cleared before a true discussion could
begin ... The complacency of the Christian majority had to be shaken
and Judaism shown to be an equal, if not superior, form of religion."
[JACOB, W., 1974, p. 2]
Such Jewish attitudes are long standing. And "angry" Jewish polemics continues unabated. A sympathetic book (The Nazarene) by prominent Jewish author Sholem Asch in the 1950s about Jesus Christ even caused him to be "isolated from a significant portion of the American Jewish intellectual establishment." The ostracized work's crime, notes Peter Goldsmith, was that it was "an attempt to claim a place for Jesus among figures of Jewish inspiration." [GOLDSMITH, P., p. 88]
In 1997 Oakland, California's Catholic Holy Names College (whose faculty, quite liberally, is about 10% Jewish) faced newsworthy controversy when a number of Jewish faculty members complained about a play being produced on campus about Edith Stein, a Jew who made the decision to become a Catholic nun in 1933 in Poland. Promotional photographs for the play were attacked for making the actress playing Stein look "grim and serious" as a Jew and happier as a Catholic. "The pictures sent a certain feeling through me," said Martin Lampert, a Jewish professor of psychology at the college, they "could be viewed as: Judaism isn't the way to go but Christianity is." [CAPLANE, p. 1a]
"Christmas," says popularly known Jewish polemicist and lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, "the most joyous holiday to Christians, has been among the most dreaded of days throughout Jewish history ... The nativity scene ... is not a religioussymbol ...; it is an insult to the memory of the many Jews for not accepting the divine birth depicted in the 'secular' nativity scene." [DERSHOWITZ, CHUTZPAH, p. 332] The idea that the nativity scene is not a religious symbol is of course strange news to the millions of Christians who had been thinking it was. As we see here, and time and time again, for the many Jews like Dershowitiz (who pride themselves on being "liberal," "open-minded," et al) being a Christian is to be a virtual criminal, a living "insult" to Jews.
Likewise there is deep Jewish contempt for Easter, the day Christians celebrate in commemoration of the resurrection of Christ. When popular Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim thinks of Easter, for instance, he insists upon somehow seeing Jewish dead bodies and Nazi concentration camps; Christianity is equated with German fascism: "[Christianity's] greatest celebration has unhappy memories for Jews -- and, after Auschwitz, for conscientious Christians too." [FACKENHEIM, HOLO, p. 18] "Our [daughter] Kate," adds Jewish author Ann Roiphe, "does not believe in Christian charity (reports of pogroms have caused her to regard Easter as more than a matter of bunnies and jelly beans)." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 13]
In 1999, prominent author Mary McCarthy took offense to depictions of Christianity in Philip Roth's novel The Counterlife. "I'm not a Christian (I don't believe in God)," she wrote to him, "but to the extent that I am and can't help being one (just as a 'nice Jewish boy' can't help being Jewish), I bridle at your picture of Christianity. There's more to Christmas trees, that is, to the idea of Incarnation, than Jew hatred ... I confess that the crib with angels and animals and a star is to me a more sympathetic idea than the Wailing Wall." [MCCARTHY, p. 98]
In 1999, Eugene Fisher, Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote with concern about the continual shrillness of Jewish attack upon the Church:
"Many Catholics are understandably confused as to why some in
the Jewish community feel constrained to second guess so much of what
are, after all, internal matters of the life of the church ... Why beat up
Catholics all the time. Why not go after somebody else once and a
while? ... So how is it that when we recognize our American story in
the Jewish-American story, many Jews seem to miss what is to us
the obvious point, that to attack the papacy is to raise up for us the
specter of the Nativist bigotry we thought we had left behind after
John F. Kennedy's campaign for the Presidency? ... If Jews are to
communicate with American Catholics, there will need to be a
softening of the rhetoric until the volume is turned down enough
so that we Catholics can hear what they are saying. Right now, the
discourse is too loud to be comprehensible." [FISHER, E., 9-11-99]
In 1999 too, the Vatican's liaison to the Jewish community, Edward Cardinal Cassidy, broke off discussions with the Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation, an organization that tended to function as an appendage of the World Jewish Congress (the WJC, as well as the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, and other Jewish organizations, has been consistently publishing critical reports about Vatican policies). [GREENBERG, Dealing, 1999, p. 12] "Those secular organizations that pretended to be the sole representatives of world Jewry, as far as we are concerned, are not valid [interfaith discussion] partners," complained Vatican aide, Father Remi Hoeckman, "They are campaigning against the Church." [GREENBERG, Battle, 1999, p. 13] A special problem too is that Orthodox Jewish organizations are never part of the "interfaith dialogue" process. As the Jewish Week notes, traditional elitist Jewish thinking holds that Jews "should not engage in theological discussions with gentiles." [GREENBERG, Battle, 1999, p. 13]
Christians are everywhere bullied by demanding Jewish accusers. Rabbi Daniel Lapin has expressed concern about Jewish bigotry towards the Christian faith:
"To attempt to intimidate people of other faiths into being afraid
to speak openly of their beliefs is, in my mind, one of the most
foolhardy things the Jewish community has ever done. It is wrong.
It is immoral. It is hypocritical. And it is dreadfully unwise politics.
Let us pray that it doesn't come back to haunt us." [LAPIN, D., 1999,
p. 289]
In 1998 Jewish scholar Susannah Heschel openly explained the concerted Jewish effort to reconstruct Christianity to Jewish wishes in today's academe, a formidable base for attack in American society at-large:
"Jewish studies [at universities] emerged not as a politically neutral field
concerned with describing the history of the Jews but as a politically
charged effort to reconceive Christian history as well ... Telling the story
of Christ's origins from a Jewish perspective was an act of Jewish self-
empowerment ... Jewish theologians initiated an effort to destroy the
image of Judaism in Christian theology as part of their project of self-
definition ... Modern Jewish thought has been formed not simply by
creating a Jewish historical narrative but by attempting a rebirth of the
Christian mythic potential under Jewish auspices ... The modern Jewish
retelling of Christian origins is not merely a matter of Jews wishing to 'set
the record straight.' Rather, it demonstrates Jewish desire to enter the
Christian myth, become its hero, and claim the power inherent in
it." [HERSCHEL, S., p. 107, 109, 110]
This -- which is based upon the Jewish creation, enforcement, and exploitation of Christian "guilt" for the Holocaust, politically melded to the myths of the state of Israel -- is evidenced popularly in the following Businesses Week news item in 1998 :
"Organizers of the Israel Jubilee Conference, scheduled for April 29
through May 3 in Orlando, Florida, today announced a massive effort
to mobilize America's estimated 15 million pro-active, pro-Israel
Christians to strike a blow against anti-Semitism in the United States
and around the world. During the coming weeks, 50,000-100,000
Christians are expected to sign a pledge of solidarity with Israel,
making a 'personal commitment to view any anti-Semitic act against
a Jewish individual, family, business, or synagogue as an act against
one's own church, and to oppose it by every means possible."
[BUSINESS WEEK]
Meanwhile, Jews relentlessly subvert, attack, and deconstruct whatever might be defined as a "Christian" world view (and never the Jewish one) throughout American culture. In the academic world of art, for example, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton admitted in 1996 that
"There is a relentless subversion of Christian art that proceeds in the
work of many Jewish art historians." [LIPTON, p. 288]
In an article that notes widespread Gentile avoidance of saying anything that could be remotely construed as even slightly offensive to Jewry, Jewish professor Nancy Jo Silberman-Federman closes her article about humorous Hanukkah cards by describing this one, a put-down of Christian tradition:
"Cha*nu*kah (Kha'noo'ka), n: 1. Festive holiday when people of Jewish
ancestry joyously celebrate not having to put a large dead pine in their
living room." [SILBERMAN-FEDERMAN, p. 227]
When in recent years Stephen Dubner rejected his parents' conversion from Judaism to Christianity, he gravitated towards Jewish Orthodoxy and an old theme. "The more vigorously I embraced Judaism," he said, "the more vigorously I was inclined to assail Catholicism." [ELIE, p. 19] ("On what grounds had [my father] so grossly obliterated my birthright?" proclaimed Dubner, "What kind of Jew would do that to a son?"[DUBNER, p. 228] ) The influential late 19th century Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz, once even wrote his friend Moses Hess (early theorist of what became Zionism), saying, "We must above all work to shatter Christianity." [LINDEMANN, ESAU'S, p. 91] Animosity towards Catholicism and betraying Jewish "self-haters" is so great among Jews that in Argentina, Orthodox Jews even "boycotted the 1985 [Catholic-Jewish relations] conference because of the presence of Bishop Jean Lustiger of Paris, a converted Jew." [SINGER, D., 1989, p. 289]
"It may be the effect of working on this book for many months now," wrote author Ann Roiphe about her project on the Jewish persecution tradition and Jewish identity in America, "it may be the result of constant reading of Jewish history, but I am feeling a new and peculiar irrational hostility to my Christian neighbors ... The Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John works as well as reciting the story of the little pigs to Jack the Ripper as he is about to go out into the London night." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 121]
In Israel, the ancient Jewish contempt and hatred for -- and discrimination against -- Christianity is institutionalized. The former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadiah Yosef, when asked what a Jew should do when he comes across a Bible that contains both the Old and New Testaments, advised that the Christian part should be torn out and burned. [SHULWEISS, p. 56-57] (In 2000, Ovadia's grandson, Yonatan Yosef made the international Jewish news when he "was accused of stockpiling weapons for a right-wing organization that attacks Arabs.") [GLEIT/HAUSMAN, 2-18-00] The popular American musical play, Jesus Christ Superstar, was banned in Israel. [AVISHAI, B., p. 301]
Also in the Jewish state, Yeshofat Harakabi noted with dismay in 1989 that "two young men exhumed the body of a Christian woman who had not converted to Judaism from her grave in a Jewish cemetery, even though she had lived for many years as a member of the secular Jewish community, and her son had served in the Israeli army and regarded himself as a Jew. The two were tried and convicted but, as was reported in the press, the local religious court and the Israeli Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem expressed support for the deed." [HARKABI, p. 180-181] Such Orthodox defilation and grave-robbing was against the Anghelevici family, whose matriarch, a Gentile, born a Christian, had married a Jew. After repeated insistence by the family that she be buried next to her daughter in a Jewish cemetery, "the body was found one morning flung on the outskirts of a nearby Moslem cemetery." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 176]
Georges Tamarin noted in 1973 that "the Hebrew University decided to remove a group of statues representing Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed donated by a famous sculptor, because of the angry reaction of some Orthodox professors. The trustees of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv refused to accept the donation of an organ, since some of the spectators might be reminded of a church; the directors of Kol Yisrael felt obliged to explain why it permitted Prof. Flusser to mention the life of Jesus (which might have a missionary influence!) in a talk about the significance of the Galilee." [TAMARIN, p. 59]
"According to a recent report in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz," noted Rabbi Harold Schulweiss in 1989, "Rabbi Eliezer Waldenburg, the winner of the Israeli prize in Judaica, stated that he supported 'the application of the halacha that a Gentile should not live in Jerusalem.' According to Rabbi Waldenburg, 'in order to apply the halacha correctly, we should have to expel all Gentiles from Jerusalem and purify it completely.' Another Ha'aretz report tells us that the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu, interprets halacha as forbidding Jews in Israel from selling apartments -- 'not even one' -- to Gentiles." [SCHULWEISS, p. 57] Earlier, noted Michael Jansen, "there has been violence against Gentile places of worship and two Russian nuns living in the Ein Karem suburb of Jerusalem were murdered." [JANSEN, p. 17] In 1983, a group of students from a Jewish religious school disrupted a classical music concert in Jerusalem featuring Handel's "Messiah" (which is based on a Christian theme). [JANSEN, p. 16] "It was learned afterward that Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapiro had sanctioned a nonviolent demonstration [against the Handel concert]." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 59] And Uri Huppert reports that in 1984
"a Jerusalem church was damaged in an attack similar to the torching
of a Baptist Church in the summer of 1983. That attack was reminiscent
of an attack on a much wider scale twenty years earlier, when one
thousand yeshiva students went on a wild rampage against Catholic
churches in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, pl. 109-
110]
In 2000, notes the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz,
"[A U.S. State Department report gives] special emphasis to the plight
of Jehovah's Witnesses [in Israel] ... This year's report says that 120
complaints [about Jewish harassment] submitted to the police by members
of this sect in 1998 and 1999 went unanswered." [RATNER, D., 9-21-
2000]
In 1997, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported that
"Two weeks ago on Saturday night hundreds of Orthodox Jews broke
into the community's place of worship, totally demolished it and
stole the public address equipment. The books and pamphlets were
piled in the yard and a large bonfire was lit. While the books were
burning, Orthodox Jews danced around the bonfire. Alvin Neuport,
a veteran member of the Jehovah's Witnesses community said,
'... Although the destruction and arson took place on the main street,
a short distance from the home of Member of the Knesset Maxim
Levy, who is also Lydda's mayor, and hundreds of people danced
around the bonfire, no one stopped them. Only when the onwer of an
adjacent shop feared that the fire would spread, were the police called
in.'" [KOREN, 3-30-97]
In 1997, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported that
"Two weeks ago on Saturday night hundreds of Orthodox Jews broke
into the community's place of worship, totally demolished it and
stole the public address equipment. The books and pamphlets were
piled in the yard and a large bonfire was lit. While the books were
burning, Orthodox Jews danced around the bonfire. Alvin Neuport,
a veteran member of the Jehovah's Witnesses community said,
'... Although the destruction and arson took place on the main street,
a short distance from the home of Member of the Knesset Maxim
Levy, who is also Lydda's mayor, and hundreds of people danced
around the bonfire, no one stopped them. Only when the onwer of an
adjacent shop feared that the fire would spread, were the police called
in.'" [KOREN, 3-30-97]
In 1997, a news report noted the horrible case of a Jew in New Jersey:
"A jury recommended a life sentence on Monday for a Jewish man who
said he drugged and suffocated his children because he could not allow
his ex-wife to raise them as Christians. Attorneys for Avi Kostner, 52,
argued that mental illness had warped his sense of reality, and pushed
him to kill his children." [SUN-SENTINEL, p. 3A]
In 1990, 150 Jewish nationalist zealots aggravated religious tensions during Easter week in the Old City of Jerusalem by moving into a 72-room building, St. John's Hospice, in the center of the Christian quarter, "only yards" from the Holy Sepulcher, the reputed site of the tomb of Jesus in Christian tradition. The intention was to establish a strong Jewish presence towards eventual expansion throughout all non-Jewish sectors of the Old City. The unspoken long-term intention is to make the whole area Jewish. "Armed Jewish settlers," notes Glenn Frankel, "escorted by Israeli police, had occupied the site in the middle of the night ... , a move that caused howls of protests from Christian leaders in the United States and Europe and deeply embarrassed American Jewish leaders." [FRANKEL, p. 232] "For ten days," says Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, "the Israeli government denied any role in the event. Finally it admitted that it had secretly funneled $1.8 million to the group, 40% of the cost of subletting the complex." [OSTROVSKY, p. 334]
Six years earlier, Israeli journalist Lesley Hazeleton noted an incident involving an American Jew in the Holy City:
"Only a few months in Israel, [he] had joined a yeshiva provocatively
set up in the Moslem Quarter of the Old City, and rented a room in
the Christian Quarter nearby. On Easter Saturday that year, which
was also Shabbat, a Syrian Orthodox procession returning from
services at the Holy Sepulcher had paused beneath his window,
headed by a troop of boy scouts playing drums. The drums drove
him mad with anger; they were an intolerable desecration of the
holiness of his Sabbath day. So he had poured a cauldron of
boiling water onto the boys in the street below. Five were taken
to the hospital for treatment of burns." [HAZELETON, L., 1984,
p. 109]
In 2001, The Jewish Week noted:
"Violence against Christians in Jerusalem appears to be rising as concerns
increase over the millenium and its affect on fervent cult groups making
pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Israeli officials said this week. Jerusalem
police said they are investigating a recent wave of threats and assaults
against Christian organizations in Jeruslalem. In one incident, vandals
hurled stones at Jerusalem's St. Andrew's Church of Scotland two
weeks ago, breaking several of its stained-glass windows. In another
wave of incidents, photographs of a bullet shot through the forehead of
of one of the Swiss Catholic women whose apartment in the ultra-Orthodox
neighborhood of Mea She'arim was burned down last November were
plastered outsdie two churches and a Bible bookstore on New Year's
Eve, police said ... The bookstore, a non-denominational organization,
publishes Bibles in different languages. [Owner Judy] McClean believes
the incident was the result of [Jewish ultra-Orthodox] haredi violence
against Christian organizations." [GREENBERG, E., 1-22-99, p. 45]
In 2001, Russian/Israeli Israel Shamir noted that:
"On Christmas Eve, according to a report in the Jerusalem local paper, Kol
Ha-lr, Hassids customarily do not read holy books, as it could save Jesus
from eternal punishment (the Talmud teaches that Jesus boils in hell). This
custom was dying out, but Hassids, the fervent nationalists, brought it
back to life. I still remember old Jews spitting while passing by a church,
and cursing the dead, while passing by a Christian cemetery. Last
year in Jerusalem, a Jew decided to refresh the tradition. He spat at [the]
Holy Cross, carried in the procession along the city. Police saved him
from further trouble, but the court fined him $50, despite his claim that
he just fulfilled his religious duty. " [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
In 2001, The Jewish Week noted:
"Violence against Christians in Jerusalem appears to be rising as concerns
increase over the millenium and its affect on fervent cult groups making
pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Israeli officials said this week. Jerusalem
police said they are investigating a recent wave of threats and assaults
against Christian organizations in Jeruslalem. In one incident, vandals
hurled stones at Jerusalem's St. Andrew's Church of Scotland two
weeks ago, breaking several of its stained-glass windows. In another
wave of incidents, photographs of a bullet shot through the forehead of
of one of the Swiss Catholic women whose apartment in the ultra-Orthodox
neighborhood of Mea She'arim was burned down last November were
plastered outsdie two churches and a Bible bookstore on New Year's
Eve, police said ... The bookstore, a non-denominational organization,
publishes Bibles in different languages. [Owner Judy] McClean believes
the incident was the result of [Jewish ultra-Orthodox] haredi violence
against Christian organizations." [GREENBERG, E., 1-22-99, p. 45]
In 2001, Russian/Israeli Israel Shamir noted that:
"On Christmas Eve, according to a report in the Jerusalem local paper, Kol
Ha-lr, Hassids customarily do not read holy books, as it could save Jesus
from eternal punishment (the Talmud teaches that Jesus boils in hell). This
custom was dying out, but Hassids, the fervent nationalists, brought it
back to life. I still remember old Jews spitting while passing by a church,
and cursing the dead, while passing by a Christian cemetery. Last
year in Jerusalem, a Jew decided to refresh the tradition. He spat at [the]
Holy Cross, carried in the procession along the city. Police saved him
from further trouble, but the court fined him $50, despite his claim that
he just fulfilled his religious duty. " [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
In 1999, in a clear policy to politically "divide and conquer" Arabs of Christian and Muslim faith in Israel, the Israeli government allowed a mosque to built in Jesus Christ's hometown, Nazareth, next to a hallowed Christian shrine. Israeli policy on the matter, noted the Los Angeles Times, "set off bitter recriminations between the Vatican and Israel ... The Vatican said Israel bore the responsibility for 'creating the basis for instigating divisions." "The decision of the Israeli government," noted a Vatican spokesman, "seems to lay the foundation for future conflicts and tensions between the two communities, Christian and Islam." [LA TIMES, 11-24-99]
In 1997 a proposed bill was even sent to the Israeli Knesset [parliament] to make mere possession of [Christian] "missionary" literature in the Jewish state a criminal offense. "Will it be illegal," wondered a Christian observer in Israel, "to possess a New Testament?" [HALEVI, Y, p. 17-18] Also in Israel, in recent history the messianic Gush Emunim organization has revitalized a Middle-Ages Jewish prayer requesting God to see to it that Christians, Jewish apostates, and heretics "may perish instantly." "This process of reversion," noted Israel Shahak, "happened in the period when the Catholic Church ... removed from its Good Friday service a prayer which asked the Lord to have mercy on Jews, heretics, etc. Thisprayer was thought by most Jewish leaders to be offensive and even anti-Semitic." [SHAHAK, p. 93]
"Even today," notes another Israeli author, Israel Shamir,
"Jews in Israel refer to Jesus by the demeaning word Yeshu (instead of Yeshua),
meaning 'Perish his name.' There is an ongoing argument, whether His name was
turned into a swear word, or [the] other way around. In a similar pun, the Gospel
is called 'Avon Gilaion,' the booklet of Sin." [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
"The majority of the Christian Zionists are simple misled souls, people of good intentions but little knowledge. They think they 'support Jews,' but they promote the Christ-hating spirit among the Jews. It was not in vain that a hero of the Zionist Bible, Leon Uris
[author of Exodus], kept a poster in his room saying 'We crucified Christ.' It was
not in vain that an Israeli soldier on the roadblock to Bethlehem told me yesterday,
'We starve the beasts. It was not in vain that the Gospel was burned on a stake
Israel, while anti-Gospel literature is widely spread; that new immigrant Jews
embracing Christianity are persecuted and deported; that every preacher of the
Christian faith in Israel can be sent to jail according to new anti-Christian laws;
that Israeli archeologists erase the Christian holy sites and memories off the face of
the Holy Land.") [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
"Even today," notes another Israeli author, Israel Shamir,
"Jews in Israel refer to Jesus by the demeaning word Yeshu (instead of Yeshua),
meaning 'Perish his name.' There is an ongoing argument, whether His name was
turned into a swear word, or [the] other way around. In a similar pun, the Gospel
is called 'Avon Gilaion,' the booklet of Sin." [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
"The majority of the Christian Zionists are simple misled souls, people of good intentions but little knowledge. They think they 'support Jews,' but they promote the Christ-hating spirit among the Jews. It was not in vain that a hero of the Zionist Bible, Leon Uris
[author of Exodus], kept a poster in his room saying 'We crucified Christ.' It was
not in vain that an Israeli soldier on the roadblock to Bethlehem told me yesterday,
'We starve the beasts. It was not in vain that the Gospel was burned on a stake
Israel, while anti-Gospel literature is widely spread; that new immigrant Jews
embracing Christianity are persecuted and deported; that every preacher of the
Christian faith in Israel can be sent to jail according to new anti-Christian laws;
that Israeli archeologists erase the Christian holy sites and memories off the face of
the Holy Land.") [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
Conversely, while Israelis know nothing about Christianity but disdain, a massive pro-Israel lobby does a virtually air-tight job in socializing Christian tourists in Israel to one-sided Jewish propaganda: particularly emphasizing the theme of noble Jewish defense against hostile, antisemitic Arabs. As James Wall, former editor of The Christian Century and a visitor to Israel nearly twenty times, noted in 2000:
"Another brick in the passionate firewall that defends Israel from criticism
is less well known but no less effective -- the systematic development
and control of the tourist trade among American Christian church pastors
and laity. In controlling its Bible land tourism, Israel can insure that tour
members hear only good things about Israel and can make it difficult
for tourists to have any sort of meaningful discourse with Palestinians."
[WALL, J., 2000, p. 9]
Dominated by Jewish tour guides, few Christian tourists ever get to even see Christian Palestinians, let alone hear their version of the Israel-Arab conflict. Many American pastors are even provided free trips to Israel by tour agencies as bait to bring paying parishioners later. "The pastors are nominal tour leaders under the Israeli-approved guides," says Wall, "... These experiences are almost always devoid of any interaction with Palestinian Christian organizations." [WALL, J., 2000, p. 10]
Back in America, meanwhile, Jewish lobbying organizations continue to intrude upon and disrupt Christian affairs -- local or international -- with impunity. In 2001, the Simon Wiesenthal Center embarked on a campaign to economically boycott the international YMCA center in Geneva because the Jewish lobbying group didn't like a YMCA report that criticized Israel's abuse of Palestinians. The Wiesenthal organization also had the gall to lodge a formal protest in 1993 with the Vatican for its consideration of the sainthood of Pope Pius XII. His alleged crime? Doing nothing to save the Jews during World War II. "While it is normally not the practice of non-Catholics to comment on the worthiness of the Church's candidates for sainthood," wrote the Center's Rabbi Marvin Hier, "Pope Pius XII must surely qualify as an exception to the rules." [RESPONSE, p. 10, Spring 1993] (Likewise, Jewish lobbying groups -- ever meddling in Christian internal affairs -- found "insult" and "mischief" with the Russian Orthodox Church's decision to canonize the last of Russian's Romanov tsars, Nicholas II). [FORWARD, 8-25-00, p. 8]
In 1999, a controversial book by non-Jewish author John Cornwell rode the wave of popular Jewish hostility towards the much maligned Pope. Sensationally entitled "Hitler's Pope," the essence of this hack-job volume may be gleaned by this extraordinary editorial comment from Commonweal magazine: "Once again, the conventional wisdom seems to treat Catholicism and fascism as synonyms." [COMMONWEAL, 11-5-99]
Cornwell condemns Pope Pius XII as an anti-Semite; his main piece of evidence is a single letter he found in which the Pope speaks harshly about his own experience with Jewish communists who headed a violent coup in post-World War I Germany. "Pacelli's [the Pope's] constant harping on the Jewishness of this party of power usurpers [Bolsheviks]," asserts Cornwell, "is consistent with the growing and widespread belief among Germans that the Jews were the instigators of the Bolshevik revolution, their principal aim was the destruction of Christian civilization. But there is something about the passage that is repugnant and ominous. The repeated references to the Jewishness of these [communist] individuals, amid the catalogue of epithets describing their physical and moral repulsiveness, gives an impression of stereotypical anti-Semitic contempt." [CORNWELL, p. 75]
Among the critical responses to Cornwell's book was that of Ronald Rychlak, who argues that Cornwell's book was "not a work of honest scholarship, and was written to justify a conclusion that had been reached in advance." [RYCHLAK, R., 4-2000] Rychlak attacks Cornwell's theses from the very start of the book -- its cover:
"[The book] carried a picture of Pacelli dressed in formal diplomatic
regalia as he leaves a reception given for German President Hindenburg
in 1927. Beside him stands a soldier of the Weimer republic. Those who
do not recognize the differences in uniform details could easily confuse
the Weimer soldier with a Nazi soldier because their distinctive and
similar helmets. Use of this photograph, especially when coupled with
such a provocative title as Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII,
gives the impression that Pope Pius XII is leaving a meeting with Hitler.
Unfortunately, this is not the only dishonest aspect of the book."
[RYCHLAK, R., 4-2000]
The Jewish attack on Pope Pius XII had become a crusade. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen had joined in with his own syndicated column, proclaiming that "Pius XII is unsuited for sainthood." [COHEN, R., p. 11A] For Rabbi Hier's part, he later added that "there is no denying that Pius XII did wonderful work to rescue the Jews of Rome in late '43 and '44. But where was he when he could have made a difference in saving the lives of six million Jews?" [SULLIVAN, p. 10]
Hier refers to the fact that the Pope, even according to Jewish researcher Picas Lipid, was instrumental in saving as many as 800,000 Jewish lives. [WENISCH, p. 7D] In 1958, at Pope Pius Ixia’s death, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Emir stated that "we share in the grief of humanity when fearful martyrdom came to our people, the Pope's voice was raised for its victims ... We mourn a great servant of peace." [WENISCH, p. 7D]
In broader perspective, Rabbi Hier's moral chauvinism and chutzpah in meddling in Church business is mind-boggling. While the Pope is condemned for the crime of "silence," in June 1994 the Chicago Tribune noted that another rabbi (Orthodox, just like Hier) had something very public to say. Rabbi Shlomo Goren made a public call for all Jews to commit murder. In the midst of the painstaking peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, Rabbi Goren declared that "as long as [Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat] declares jihad against the Jews and works to wrest Jerusalem from our hands, his status is that of one who intends to kill, and every Jew is commanded to kill him." [HUNDLEY, p 1, 6]
Is Rabbi Goren a nut? A madman convinced that his religion tells its followers to kill people? An obscure fanatic that no one would ever take seriously? Rabbi Goren was the closest thing to a Pope a Jew can be. From 1973 to 1983 he was the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel. The public call for Arafat's murder also came from a Jerusalem City Councilman, Shmuel Meir (who was not reprimanded by the mayor), and Knesset member Hanan Porat. Can we imagine in the 1990s a Pope or a priest publicly announcing that all Christians should join in murder, as religious policy, like the Jews? (This commandment to kill [called a din rodef] is sanctioned by Jewish tradition. In 1999, the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Jerusalem, Shalom Masbash, even issued such a death sentence against two Jewish members of his own congregation. [WORLD PRESS REVIEW, 7-99] )
Rest assured no Wiesenthal letters of complaint headed out to Israel in protest of a living former Jewish "Pope," or any other rabbi, commanding murder. Rather, they would turn to assail some imagined Christian slight against Jews, like for instance, the formal Simon Wiesenthal Center complaint against a Memphis-area intra-Christian organization of sixty Black and White churches organized to fight racism along Christian tenets. Their crime? They didn't invite Jews to a Christian organization. [RESPONSE, p. 11, WINTER 1992] (What intra-Jewish religious aggregation -- encompassing Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Falasha, Sephardim, or any other conceivable expressly Jewish conglomeration -- has, for any purpose, ever included Christians?)
"Israel's practice of killing Palestinian militants has the full backing of Jewish
religious law, according to a statement made yesterday by Chief Rabbi Israel
Meir Lau. Quoting ancient sages and Biblical passages, Lau explained that
Israel is now fighting a war of commandment, mandated by God. Lau referred
to an oft-quoted Jewish precept, He who comes to kill you, rise up and kill
him first." [HAARETZ, 7-27-01]
"Israel's practice of killing Palestinian militants has the full backing of Jewish
religious law, according to a statement made yesterday by Chief Rabbi Israel
Meir Lau. Quoting ancient sages and Biblical passages, Lau explained that
Israel is now fighting a war of commandment, mandated by God. Lau referred
to an oft-quoted Jewish precept, He who comes to kill you, rise up and kill
him first." [HAARETZ, 7-27-01]
The Jewish strategy to propel Jewish chauvinism under the shield of the values of pluralistic tolerance in the lands in which they live, and at the same time attack parallel expressions of Christian solidarity, is not new. The respected historian, D. W. Brogan, noted its existence, for example, in France of the 1880s:
"In certain parts of the [French] administration, it was rare to find a
practicing Catholic in a position of power. A Jewish prefect could, with
impunity, observe Passover, but a prefect who was openly zealous in the
observance of Easter might find himself under violent attack from a paper
like the Lauterne, whose main stock in trade was anti-clerical scurrility,
and whose editor was a Jew, the great 'priest-eater,' Eugene Mayer."
[LINDEMANN, p. 69]
In 1995 a Polish priest, and a pastor of the successful anti-communist Solidarity movement, Henryk Jankowski, came under attack as an anti-Semite for his public comments about Jews, particularly those about Jerzy Urban who, the reverend said, "publicly declares he is a Jew, and who insults [our] national feelings, our president, and the Polish-born pope, the church, and its primate." [JER POST, 6-28-95] "Urban," noted the Jerusalem Post, "the widely despised communist government spokesman during Poland's martial law crackdown in the early 1980s, is now the editor and owner of a strongly anti-Catholic weekly publication, known for obscenity." [JER POST, p6-28-95]
Over the centuries and with the recent self-promotive tool of American cultural pluralism, the traditional Jewish moral worldview has largely overtaken traditional Christian values. This is far from an irrational "anti-Semitic canard," but a self-evident truth. One need only look to what Christian and Jewish values were in the Middle Ages. Christianity sanctified human universality, humility, poverty, and non-materialism. The ideals of the Chosen People were "particularist," usurious, exploitive, and materialist. Even stripped of its religious base, which value system today is pre-eminent? Which looks more familiar to us?
In the mid-1800s, Karl Marx, had a sharply caustic view of Jewish economic and materialist influence in Europe, arguing that
"The Jews have emancipated themselves to the extent that Christians
have become Jews ... Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside
which no other God may stand. Money degraded all the gods of
mankind, therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man,
of its original value. Money is the essence of man's life and work,
which has become alienated from him. This alien monster rules him
and he worships it. The God of the Jews has become secularized and
is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jews' real God."
[MARX, K., 1959, p. 38, p. 40]
As Jewish scholar Gordon Lafar notes about the different moral emphases of Judaism (particularist) and Christianity (universalist):
"The debate between universalism and particularism is thus partly also a
debate between self-interest and self-sacrifice, between the selfish and
selfless. Part of the rationale for universalism is that it embodied a
rejection, or at least a suppression, of self-interest. To advocate a
particularist position is, at least to some extent, to accept an ethic that is
comfortable with self-interested behavior." [LAFAR, p. 201]
As Lafar also notes, "Neither poverty nor humility are Jewish virtues, and the tradition is largely devoid of stories glorifying the virtuous poor man." Poverty and humility were virtues of Christianity; self-sacrifice was central to the moral code of the human family concept, central teachings of the Christ who is anathema to the traditional Jewish world view. Christ taught that the poor and the dispossessed were blessed; he reportedly knocked over in disgust the money changing tables in the Jewish temple, after all. However one looks at it, whether Christ was the son of God, a man, or merely a legend, the ultimate sacrifice of his life for all human beings is -- on compassionate, pan-human, universalistic terms -- a very noble story. This sacrifice is, of course, in sharp distinction to Jewish "particularist" tenets whereby Christ's sacrifice for everyone is regarded solely as the ultimate act of a Jewish betrayer.
In 2000, an upstate New York newspaper highlighted the problems the Catholic Church was having nationwide in finding young men interested in careers as priests:
"[The Church] blame a modern society that glorifies young millionaires
who make their fortunes on the Internet and Wall Street -- but not priests
who must take a vow of poverty." [NOGAS, C., 2000, p. 4A]
"One of the great intellectual champions of human universalism, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant," notes Lafar, "explicitly equates morality with self-denial and immorality with self-interest." [LAFAR, p. 200] In this vein, notes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "twentieth century Jewish history seemed conclusively to refute the universalism of the Enlightenment. Particularism had returned to Jewish thought." [SACKS, J., ONE, p. 11
In 1937, with the rise of Nazi fascism in Europe, an editorial in the liberal Protestant Christian Century poignantly confronted (in a way that is forbidden today) some of the obvious reasons for anti-Semitism, underscoring the tenets of traditional Judaism:
"Any group in the cultural life of the community which deliberately
insulates itself by nondemocratic barriers against the free movement
of the democratic process is inevitably in for bad treatment ... Everyone
knows that the psychology of society is such that any group is a
social irritant if it insists upon being a permanent minority, and utilizes
undemocratic means to maintain itself as such.
The only religion compatible with democracy is one which
conceives of itself as universal, and offers itself to all men and all
races, and cultures. The Jewish religion, or any other religion, is an
alien element in American democracy unless it proclaims itself as
a universal faith, and proceeds upon such a conviction to persuade
us all to be Jews ... Judaism ... has been racial, in the sense of
hereditary, culture sanctions by its religion. It has been such through
the ages ... Does Christianity submit any more readily to the democratic
process than Judaism and Jews? The answer ... is a positive yes.
Christianity is not and never has been a racial faith." [MORRISSON, p.
862-863]
In the religious context, how about yet another Jewish double standard? While modern Jewry obsessively calls to task -- morally, politically, legally, and every other way -- even the slightest evidence of negative opinion about Jews by others (all lumped by Jews under the generic heading of "anti-Semitism"), and Christian theologians have been "reworking and emending various passages from the New Testament thought to be anti-Judaic in teaching," [WILSON, p. 33] Liebman and Cohen remark that "it is remarkable how traditional negative images [about Gentiles by Jews] are sustained despite their tenuous relation to the objective conditions and experience of American Jews. We suspect that these images have retained their resonance because they remain central to the conceptions of Judaism and what it means to be a Jew. One cannot choose to remain Jewish, least of all in a society that offers the option of not remaining Jewish, unless one has a positive conception of the Jewish self as opposed to the Gentile other. One way to sustain such a conception is by maintaining an image of the anti-Semitic Gentile." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 55] (The classical Jewish stereotype of a non-Jew -- still widely maintained -- includes the presumption that Gentiles are uncontrollable anti-Semites, primitive in nature and unrefined, brutish, uninterested and unable to perform conceptually, unable to have loving families, are untrustworthy in business with Jews, and are veritable alcoholics.) [LEIBMAN/COHEN p. 51]
As we have repeatedly seen, Jewry's double standards are continuous through history. As Franz Mehring notes about European Jewry in the Enlightenment's early years:
"The Jews were delighted when enlightened criticism took the Christian
religion to task, for they had themselves always cursed it, but when the
same criticism turned its attention to the Jewish religion they howled
aloud as though humanity itself was betrayed." [MEHRING, p. 97]
************************************
A civic religion has, like any religion, specific rituals. Perhaps not surprisingly, Jonathan Woocher notes that the most important ritual in the modern Jewish polity that has survived Orthodox synagogue culture is fundraising. "The elements [of the fundraising ritual]," he says, "have often been criticized and satirized for their shallowness and ostentatiousness on the one hand, and their over-heated rhetoric and pretentiousness on the other ... Despite this, the ritual [of the fundraising] campaign has been a singularly effective instrument for mobilizing Jews and producing a sense of communal solidarity." [WOOCHER, p. 151] By 1973 the United Jewish Appeal system alone collected $600 million a year. "The UJA campaigns," notes Israeli critic Matti Golan, "have become the focus of Jewish activity. In fact, they're the glue that holds Jewish life in America together." [GOLAN, p. 104] By the 1980s at least half of UJA money was yearly going to Israel. "Over 50 percent of the UJA's allocations," notes Edward Shapiro, "support social, welfare, educational and economic development projects in Israel. And the importance of Israel and the UJA defined status within the Jewish community." [SHAPIRO, Jewish Americans, p. 170] "The UJA is not just a service organization and its federations," notes Israeli professor Menachem Kaufman, "Since 1948 it has been a living link between the American Jewish community and Israel." [KAUFMAN, M., p. 219]
In 1960, one Jewish commentator, James Warburg, ran into trouble when he questioned whether donations to the UJA should continue to be tax-deductible. As Melvin Urofsky notes:
"Why should donations to the UJA be tax-deductible, he asked,
'when so large a proportion of them flow directly or indirectly into
the hands of a foreign government which openly engages in propaganda
attempting to influence the policy of the government of the
United States?'" [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 341]
Israeli universities raise another $100 million a year from diaspora sources for the Jewish state; the Hadassah organizations raise another $50 million a year for their own projects in Israel. [ELAZAR, p. 230] The Israel Bond organization also each year "sells about half a billion dollars in Israeli bonds to American Jews and their friends." [SHAPIRO, Jewish Americans, p. 170] "Thirty-five of the largest and most active of the national organizations," notes Chaim Waxman, "are affiliated with the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, for which Zionist and pro-Israel activity is the major emphasis." [ZWEIGENHAFT, p. 103] "Secrecy is, perhaps, the most outstanding characteristic of the conference's activities," says David Whalen, "While hardly the proverbial 'Learned Elders of Zion,' the Conference seems to believe that it can advocate Jewish causes most effectively from behind a veil of sorts ... The Conference's charter is not public ... The Conference seeks to discourage internal discord from translating into uncoordinated or ambiguous support for Israel. To this end a formal yet mysterious relationship has been developed with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)." [WHALEN, p. 78-79] "In the early 1950s, with Israel having consolidated its statehood," notes Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, "all the major American Jewish groups turned Zionist." [RAVIV, p. 55]
"Virtually all the great names of Jewish business," notes Joel Kotkin, "-- Rothschild, Kadoorie, and Warburg among them -- contributed to the building of the state [of Israel]. " [KOTKIN, p. 33] By 1991, Israel had still remained a giant welfare state. Thanks to Jewish international philanthropy and Jewish lobbying for American government largesse, "Israel had emerged as the single largest recipient of charity, grants, and assistance per capita in the world, the bulk of it from America." [KOTKIN, p. 66]
By 1985, that year's gifts and endowments to the Federation/UJA totaled $1.128 billion [KOSMIM, p. 20], and it has averaged nearly a billion dollars each year ever since. [HALBERSTAM, p. 41] Total Jewish philanthropy through various agencies to a realm of causes in 1985 was estimated by one researcher to be $3.1 billion, more money than the Gross National Product of some Third world countries, and more than the military budgets of nations like Cuba and Turkey. [KOSMIM, p. 28] Looked at another way, the United Jewish Appeal raises yearly more money than the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the March of Dimes, and the National Easter Seal Society, combined. [WHITFIELD, AM, p. 14] Of all Jewish charity, by the 1970s two-thirds were believed to be to expressly Jewish causes, the rest to hospitals, museums, colleges, and other such institutions in which Jews usually also had a stake. [KOSSIM, p. 20]
Jewish money, wherever it went, had enormous effect. "Around the turn of the present century," notes David Dalin, "a handful of Jews, mostly of German origin, came to exercise a profound influence on American philanhtropy, creating a multiplicity of charitable institutions that continue to shape our world. It was an impressive group, including in its ranks the banker Jacob Schiff, the financier Felix Warburg, the industrialists Daniel and Simon Guggenheim, the merchant Nathan Straus, and the jurists Julian Mack and Mayer Sulzberger. But its foremost member was surely [Sear-Roebuck magnate] Julius Rosenwald." [DALIN, D., 1998]
Jewish money, wherever it went, had enormous effect. "Around the turn of the present century," notes David Dalin, "a handful of Jews, mostly of German origin, came to exercise a profound influence on American philanhtropy, creating a multiplicity of charitable institutions that continue to shape our world. It was an impressive group, including in its ranks the banker Jacob Schiff, the financier Felix Warburg, the industrialists Daniel and Simon Guggenheim, the merchant Nathan Straus, and the jurists Julian Mack and Mayer Sulzberger. But its foremost member was surely [Sear-Roebuck magnate] Julius Rosenwald." [DALIN, D., 1998]
Generalized philanthropy is of course also valuable for tax write-offs. Take the case of the Jewish chief of the Walt Disney corporation, Michael Eisner. He "put Disney [stock] shares into his personal foundation. For Mr. Eisner, as for any donor in his situation, the donation had two tax advantages: it reduced his taxable income, perhaps by the full $116 million, and he did not have to pay capital gains taxes on the donated shares." [NY TIMES, 12-20-98, p. 10] Forbes magazine notes the case of wealthy elderly Jewish real estate developer Robert R. Riser, who was angered that, at his (and his wife's) death, some $40 million of his fortune would probably go to inheritance taxes. By creating a private foundation, notesForbes, "if all goes according to plan ... the family's medical and Jewish charities will get tens of millions; the IRS, nothing." [NOVACK, J., 11-10-99]
"Jews are twenty-three times as likely to establish foundations for Jewish causes than Catholic are for Catholic causes, or Protestant for Protestant causes." [HALBERSTAM, p. 41] In the 1987 edition of the Foundation Directory, country-based grant programs included 75 for Israel, 13 for the entirety of all the countries of Africa, 4 for Italy, 3 for Poland, 6 for France, and 2 for Scotland. [KOSMIN, p. 24] In one 1978-80 survey of American Jews in a leadership development programs, notes Kevin MacDonald, "51% agreed that providing social and legal services for Jews was a high priority, and only 2% viewed it as a low priority. However, only 4% agreed that providing social and welfare services for anyone in need was a high priority, compared to 7% who viewed it as a low priority." [MACDONALD, p. 102] By 1993, a variety of Jewish private money sources, like the Charles H. Revson and Wexner foundations (distinct from the UJA and other Jewish "club" organizations), were estimated to have a total "financial giving capacity of $350-500 million, "oriented toward the collective well-being of the Jewish people." [ISRAEL, R. p. 1]
The largest Jewish philanthropy organization in America -- with assets of $1.8 billion -- is the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation. It is estimated that about two-thirds of its funding goes to Jewish causes. [MOMENT, 12-31-98, p. 57] From Italy, the $50 million heading to Israel at the death of Aladar Fleischman was "one of the largest bequests by an individual to Israeli organizations." [PERRY, V., 6-10-99] From Canada, the ultra-Orthodox Reichmann family "ranked among the most munificent philanthropists of this century, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars, almost all of it to narrowly benefit their coreligionists. At the peak of [the Reichmann's] Olympia and York's prosperity, the family supported a thousand schools and other religious institutions scattered around the world but concentrated in Israel." [BIANCO, p. xvi] Jewish organization studies determined in 1996 that there were about 3,500 foundations that provided money to "something Jewish." By 1999, according to the Jewish Funders Network, this figure was 5,500. [GOLDMAN, J., 4-29-99] In 2001 Jewish business writer Steven Silbiger wrote that "there are now more than seven thousand indpendent Jewish foundations funded by individuals or families with total assets estimated at $10 billion ot $15 billion." [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 47]
Jews are also adept at getting huge sums from non-Jewish foundations. In 2000, for example, five Philadelphia-area Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Philadelphia, landed $4.65 million from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Three of the four grant recipients were linked to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. [SILVERSTEIN, M., 1-13-2000, p. 11]
In 1998, Newsday noted that
"This year, for the first time, United Jewish Appeal's gift of $300 million
to Israel is likely to be eclipsed by philanthropic aid sent there by family
foundations and tax-exempt 'American Friends of ... ' organizations. And
that does not take into account additional uncounted millions that flow
from Jews in the United States directly to religious institutions in Israel."
[FRIEDMAN, J., p. A7] (Nor does this include the yearly billions of
dollars effectively lobbied from unknowing American taxpayers for Israel
-- see later chapter)
A Jewish American journalist, Glenn Frankel, writes that some Israelis are not always thankful for the huge sums of money coming their way:
"[Israelis] saw American Jewish money increasingly was going to the
most entrenched, reactionary and corrupt elements of their society --
the political machines and small party interests that sustained Israel's
social and political paralysis ... [Israeli author Mati] Golan defines the
relationship between American Jews and Israeli Jews as corrupt,
superficial, and deceitful. He finds repugnant the UJA fundraising
campaigns that exploit and distort Israel's problems in order to raise
money. He mocks the hypocrisy of American Jews who ... assuage
their guilty consciences and their insecurities by donating money to
Israel ... Many Israelis believed that diaspora Jews were moral cowards;
still, both sides needed one another." [FRANKEL, G., p. 215, 216, 218]
American Jews also send millions of dollars to Israel for its presidential and other political campaigns. The Jerusalem Post wrote that "American Jews contributed $6 million to $8 million to Israeli campaigns in the 1996 elections, despite the 1994 [Israeli] law barring foreign donations [to political campaigns]." [COHLER-ESSES, L., 2-19-99, p. 1]
J. Bruce Nichols, an official at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, also notes the maverick political complexion of the major Jewish organization involved in international Jewish immigration, refugee, and resettlement issues. "The AJDC [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]," he notes, "to this day has always received the bulk of its [economic and other] support from the Jewish community. This fact has at times encouraged an almost brash sense of independence of Jewish philanthropy from the aims of [the American government]." [NICHOLS, p. 40]
In 1984 Carl Levin, a Jewish Congressman from Michigan, publicly complained about American Jewry's lack of commitment to the universalist fabric of America and their non-Jewish neighbors. The Jewish Week noted that Levin believed
"Jews as individuals and groups lag behind other religious groups in
lobbying their Congressmen on issues of universal concern, and their
activity makes conspicuous the lesser lobbying of Jewish groups for
such concerns ... He said he received and welcomed many visits and
calls and mail from Jewish groups ' about Israel, about Soviet Jewry and
about Ethiopian Jews.' But he felt he was 'not lobbied enough by many
of the groups and individuals about concerns that are not, strictly
speaking, Jewish." [GOLLAB, 10-19-84, p. 10]
Beyond "general considerations" about themselves, notes Jewish scholar Gordon Lafar, "lies a deeper commitment that extends only to fellow Jews: the obligation to actively promote their welfare and the acceptance of an ongoing responsibility to guarantee their well-being." [LAFAR, p. 195] "The organized Jewish community," notes Irving Howe, "... favors in-group solidarity above all." [HOWE, 1982, p. 259]
In 1961 Jewish sociologist Daniel Bell wrote:
"One is a Jew, discharging one's obligation as a Jew, through
membership in Jewish organizations. In the embourgeoisement of
Jewish life in America, the community has become institutionalized
around fund raising, and the index of an individual's importance too
often is the amount of money he donates to hospitals, defense
agencies, philanthropic groups, and the like. The manifest ends are the
community functions being served, but frequently the latent end is the
personal prestige -- yichus. This kind of institutional life may even lend
itself to historic forms of corruption: of simony, when those who have
risen high in Jewish organizations receive their rewards in appointive
office in Jewish life; and of indulgences, when leadership is simply the
reward of wealth. And in performance of charity as a way of Jewish
life, self-satisfaction may take on the face of righteousness. The most
sensitive of the Jewish agency professionals, lawyers, and businessmen
have often deplored this situation, yet are trapped in the system."
[BELL, REFLECTIONS, p. 319]
"How can a community such as this," complained William Zukerman, editor of the Jewish Newsletter,
"whose highest ideal is mechanical fund-raising, be a source of
nobility and greatness? Can the interminable big-and-even-bigger
Bond and UJA drives, the Hadassah teas, the gaudy banquets,
the garish publicity and appalling bad taste, be the soil from which
greatness will spring? Can salesmanship, even when clothed with
the mantle of philanthropy, be anything but shallow and sterile?"
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 226]
"In most communities," notes Stephen Isaacs, "if a Jew fails to make a name professionally or politically, being a big giver to federation is usually the principal route to his becoming a member of a Jewish country club." [ISAACS, p. 19] "With fundraising the major priority," said Edward Shapiro in 1992, "the emphasis in contemporary Jewish life is on philanthropy rather than Jewish learning or piety. The local Jewish federations, rather than the synagogue or the yeshiva, has become the major point of Jewish life and the major dispenser of prestige ... Many observers have severely criticized this 'check book' Judaism, but they have been unable to suggest any alternative to even this attenuated Jewish identity that would appeal to acculturated and sophisticated Jews." [SHAPIRO, E., Jewish Americans, p. 170]
As former World Zionist Organization president Nahum Goldmann noted in 1978: "Another feature characteristic of Americans in general, and therefore Jews in particular, is the influence wielded by finance in the United States ... In America Jewish life is dominated by the rich ... The 'money men' concentrate on consolidating their social position: it costs money to become president of a big community organization." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 152] (This focus on money to Jewish causes is so intense that in 2000 a Pittsburgh synagogue even made the news for suing a member of its congregation who reneged on a pledge; the $900 he ultimately gave was deemed too far short of an earlier $25,000 promise. Legal proceedings against him were soon instituted.) [GRAHAM, J., 7-31-2000, p. 6]
In 1998, in an article entitled "Titans of Industry Join Forces for Jewish Philanthropy," the Wall Street Journal noted the existence of a "Mega Group" of about twenty extremely powerful Jewish businessmen whose meetings were exclusively, and entirely, about "being Jewish." Formal members included Leslie Wexner (chairman of The Limited, Inc.), Edgar and Charles Bronfman (of Seagram's/PolyGram/Universal Studios, et al), Charles Schusterman of Samson Investment Company, Baltimore real estate tycoon Harvey Meyeroff, Leonard Abramson (the founder of U.S. Healthcare), Lester Crown (who, among other things, is a military defense mogul), Laurence Tisch (chairman of Loew's and former chairman of CBS), financier Michael Steinhardt, Max Fisher (a Detroit area tycoon), and Marvin Lender (a bagel mogul). The Journal wrote:
"'We want to make it cool to be Jewish,' says Edgar Bronfman, whose
company's keen sense of image has made it one of the world's most
successful marketers." [MILLER, L., 5-4-98, p. B1]
By 2000, Jewish organizations had committed $210 million in its "Birthright Israel" program to give young American Jews (ages 18-26) round-trip airfare to Israel and 10 days of "educational programming" about Jewish identity and its links to modern Israel. [PR NEWSWIRE, 6-15-2000] From Palm Beach, Florida, in an unrelated program to connect Jews to a Zionist root, the Commission of Jewish Education's "Newlywed Israel Incentive" program even pays local Jews who get married $2000 to take their honeymoon in Israel. [HAYES, R., p. 1B]
"American Jews are obsessed with their own perpetuation," noted Jonathan Rosenblum in a 1998 issue of the Jerusalem Post, "Millions of dollars of federation money are earmarked every year for projects in Jewish continuity, and a group of 11 Jewish millionaires recently committed $18 million to the creation of Jewish day schools across denominational lines. One finds no comparable level of concern among any other ethnic group." [ROSENBLUM, p. 8]
The central icon of allegiance for Jewish transnational solidarity and the major object of Jewish money rites is the modern state of Israel, the country which, says Nathan Glazer, "after 1967 ... became the religion of American Jews." [LIPSET, p. 157] "Nobody can deny the intensity of the American Jew's feelings about the state of Israel," noted James Yaffe in 1968, "Polls taken in 1967 during the six-day war showed that 99 percent of all American Jews supported Israel wholeheartedly against the Arab nations. Hardly any Jews who lived through those days didn't feel a weight of anxiety on his spirits -- and a wild elation when the weight was finally lifted." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 181] "The [1967] war," says Jack Wertheimer, "... converted American Jewry to Zionism. Whereas American Jews had demonstrated sympathy in the past, Israel was now incorporated into the very structure of American Jewish identity." [WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 30] Even earlier though, "today all Jews are Zionists," noted a Buffalo (New York) rabbi as early as 1936, "That is as true as any statement so brief can be in so controversial a field as Jewish life." [ADLER/CONNOLLY, 1960, p. 390, 460] "American Jewry is deeply committed to the state of Israel," wrote Monford Harris in 1965, "of this there can be no doubt." [HARRIS, M., 1965, p. 80]
As Milton Plesur noted in 1982:
"Another issue that concerned postwar American Jewish community was that of
Zionism and the special relationship between American Jews and the state of
Israel. Zionism had come to influence the organizational structure of Jewish life
on both the national and local levels. Mosts synagogues, Jewish community
centers, religious schools, and virtually all the organizational societies that
composed the American Jewish community espoused the Zionist cause."
[PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 194]
In 1981, a World Jewish Congress report noted
"In the past three decades, Israel has served most Western Jews as a
surrogate for the traditional Judaism from which they had strayed. Concern
and support for Israel increasingly became the chief source and expression
of their sense of Jewish identity. Fund raising, chiefly for Israel, and political
activity to ensure the security and survival of Israel, have been the major
activities of Jewish organizations during this period, especially in the United
States [WALINSKY, L., 1981, p. 61] ... There can be no doubt that Israel
will continue to play the central role in Jewish life." [WALINSKY, L., 1981,
p. 69]
As Milton Plesur noted in 1982:
"Another issue that concerned postwar American Jewish community was that of
Zionism and the special relationship between American Jews and the state of
Israel. Zionism had come to influence the organizational structure of Jewish life
on both the national and local levels. Mosts synagogues, Jewish community
centers, religious schools, and virtually all the organizational societies that
composed the American Jewish community espoused the Zionist cause."
[PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 194]
In 1981, a World Jewish Congress report noted
"In the past three decades, Israel has served most Western Jews as a
surrogate for the traditional Judaism from which they had strayed. Concern
and support for Israel increasingly became the chief source and expression
of their sense of Jewish identity. Fund raising, chiefly for Israel, and political
activity to ensure the security and survival of Israel, have been the major
activities of Jewish organizations during this period, especially in the United
States [WALINSKY, L., 1981, p. 61] ... There can be no doubt that Israel
will continue to play the central role in Jewish life." [WALINSKY, L., 1981,
p. 69]
"Solidarity between the Jews of the west, Israel, the Soviet Union, and threatened diaspora communities has become more than the object of activism," says British rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "it has become a carrier of identity." [SACKS, J., One, p. 11] "I speak to many Jewish communities around the world," says Yitzhak Herzog, "and what strikes me is that each community is of a different nature than the other. The common denominator that I find in all is Israel. They are obsessed with Israel and you can say that Israel, in effect, has become their religion, as well as a social and political idea which they are involved." [HERZOG, p. 20] "Jewish communities throughout the world," noted Irving Louis Horowitz in 1976, "have increased their 'particularistic' interests in Israel, often at the expense of their 'universalistic' concerns for others. Israel unifies the Jewish community worldwide, giving it a sense of solidarity that transcends psychological anxieties and geographical differences, however sharp or obscure." [HOROWITZ, I., 1976, p. 361]
Even in Costa Rica, for example, a Jewish scholar noted in 1987 that "today, as in the past, Costa Rican Jewry has tended to adopt a unified political stance only vis-a-vis the question of the state of Israel." [GUDMUNDSON, p. 229] Venezuela? "Nearly a thousand Venezuelan Jews have settled in Israel," noted Howard Sachar in 1985, "Zionism is also the principal motif of Venezuelan Jewish education." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 266] Brazil? "It seems," says Henrique Rattner, "that the main objective of Jewish politics in Brazil today concern the defense of specifically Jewish interests in the fight against anti-Semitism and the preservation of the state of Israel and of the Brazilian Jewish community's identification with it." [RATTNER, p. 199]
France? "No other western Jewish community has been as passionately pro-Israel as French Jewry," noted the Jerusalem Post in 1997, "--defying media charges of dual loyalty ... More than 30,000 French Jews visit Israel each year and over a thousand are currently studying at Israeli universities." [PICKETT, W., p. 7] The Jews of Brussels, in Belgium? "An affluent community, the 24,000 Jews of Brussels have developed their own version of a United Jewish Appeal. Contributions are generous and the lion's share goes to Israel. If Brussels Jewry evinces a distinguishing feature, it is its Zionism and secular character." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 46]
South Africa? "South Africa's small but influential Jewish population of 118,000," wrote Seymour Hersh about the late 1970s and early 1980s, "were always large contributors to Israeli bond drives and charities; now [with the 1977 election of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin] they became more vocal in their support for Israel's more conservative political parties, including Menachem Begin's Likud Party." [HERSH, S., p. 264] "Zionism had from its beginnings cast a spell upon the Jews of South Africa," adds Barnet Litvinoff. [LITVINOFF, B., p. 184] "Nowhere else in the Jewish world, conceivably," observes Howard Sachar, "was Zionism so integral a feature of Jewishness as South Africa ... South African Jewry has not rested in its exertions on Israel's behalf. The Zionist Federation remains by far the most important organization in Jewish life." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 187, 190]
Canada? In 1999, in Montreal, the Quebec prime minister's brother, Gerard Bouchard, "initiated a conference for French and Jewish Quebecers because he wanted to know why, as a minority, Jews are not more sensitive to French Quebecers fears for the survival of their culture [in English-dominated Canada] and why they seem to focus on anti-Semitism in Quebec and not in English Canada and why they do not have more sympathy for Quebec sovereignty when they themselves had such an attraction to Israel." [ARNOLD, J., p. 3, 25] "American Jews automatically think of themselves as Americans," noted Jewish commentator Barnet Litvinoff in 1969, "but in Canada they are primarily Jews. Hence Zionism makes much more headway in Canada than the U.S.A. ... In Canada, as in Britain, there exists a comprehensive Jewish representative organization making for tribal unity and discipline." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 172] "Montreal Jews," noted Erna Paris in 1980, "are notably dedicated to Israel and observably generous in their contributions to the United Jewish Appeal." [PARIS, E., p. 102] "Among the priorities of the Canadian Jewish polity," noted Harold Troper in 1999, "is defining and promoting the relationship between Jews in Canada, Jews in Israel, and Jews in other parts of the diaspora." [TROPER, H., 1999, p. 230]
Russia? American Jewish efforts to Zionize the Jews of former communist Russia was noted in a 1999 article in the Baltimore Jewish Times: "United States Jewish groups have contributed heavily to building synagogues, community centers, and schools in Russia ... Privately, many Jewish leaders say that community building encourages many [Russian] Jews to make aliyah [emigration to Israel] by building a sense of Jewish identity that will be Israel-centered." [BESSER, 4-30-99, p. 30] And as Irving Horowitz noted as early as 1979, "The fact that Israel can call upon a hidden Jewish constituency overt in the United States and covert in the Soviet Union does indeed give weight and substance to the Israeli claim that it is not simply a small power which can be regulated or mortgaged at the behest of the major powers, but a force of international socio-economic weight as well as national interests." [HOROTWITZ, I., 1979, p. 104]
Argentina? Like many -- probably most -- Jews, news mogul Jacobo Timerman equates raising verifiably troubling questions about Jewish collectivist behavior the world over as tantamount to expressions of Nazism:
"In Argentina, in 1980, thirty-five years after Hitler's defeat, on the
army-controlled television channel in Buenos Aires, one heard the
following questions voiced by a journalist who has practiced his
profession for twenty years and is not naive, the brother of a general
who heads the press services of the military government: Why aren't
there any poor Jews? Why do Jews give so much money to Israel?
Why don't Jews marry Catholics? Why do Jews consider themselves
superior? A repetition of the insults and defamations of Nazi rulers,
stemming from one of the most powerful forces in Argentine life,
the army. It's easy enough to react to this anti-Semitic campaign, to
feel offended." [TIMERMAN, J., 1981, p. 144]
In 2001, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles featured an article about the immigrant Jewish Iranian community in that city, based on a familiar theme:
"Persian Jews are facing challenges familiar to previous generations of Jewish
immigrants; among them, dilution of traditional values and assimilation. 'There
is no question there is an influence of materialism,' [Sam] Kermanian [head of
the Iranian-American Jewish Federation] said. 'Some of the old values are still
holding the community together, but, obviously, this is something that will not
last forever. We know that within a generation or two, we will assimilate into
a larger landsape. Our goal is to make sure that we assimilate into the American
Jewish community rather than the secular American landscape." [AUSHENKER,
M., 6-20-01]
In 2001, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles featured an article about the immigrant Jewish Iranian community in that city, based on a familiar theme:
"Persian Jews are facing challenges familiar to previous generations of Jewish
immigrants; among them, dilution of traditional values and assimilation. 'There
is no question there is an influence of materialism,' [Sam] Kermanian [head of
the Iranian-American Jewish Federation] said. 'Some of the old values are still
holding the community together, but, obviously, this is something that will not
last forever. We know that within a generation or two, we will assimilate into
a larger landsape. Our goal is to make sure that we assimilate into the American
Jewish community rather than the secular American landscape." [AUSHENKER,
M., 6-20-01]
Incredibly, of all the cultural, ethnic, and religious aspects of being Jewish, in a 1988 Los Angeles Times national survey 17% of American Jews believed that support for the state of Israel was the most important part of their Jewish identity. [WAXMAN, p. 137] Even more startling, a 1990 American Jewish Committee survey of "American Jewish leaders" across the country found that 81% listed the "safety of Israel as the most important item on the Jewish agenda today." Nearly half of the leaders were under fifty years old, 94% were married to fellow Jews (plus 3% to spouses who had converted to Judaism), a quarter of them had a household income between $200,000 and $499,000, and another third between $100,000-$199,000. [AIN, SURVEY, p. 28]
A 1983 poll of American Jews at-large found that 20% had even written to an elected official on behalf of Israel. [BRENNER, p. 123] The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey found that 76% of American Jews described themselves at least "somewhat attached to Israel." [HALBERSTAM, p. 188] Of high importance to an overwhelming number of those who call themselves Jews, 85% of Jewish respondents in the 1983 poll favored strong United States support for Israel, a figure that is consistent with other surveys. [WAXMAN, p. 136-137] (Meanwhile, says Jewish critic Lenni Brenner, "American Jewry has one of the weakest military traditions in America. Many Jewish immigrants came here to get away from conscription." [BRENNER, p. 131]
In 2001, a survey of American Jews by the Israel Policy Forum, the Jewish Week, and the Wilstein Institute of Jewish PolicyStudies found that 89% of respondents felt "strongly favorable" or "somewhat favorable" toward Israel. (Only 3% felt "somewhat unfavorable" and 2% "strongly unfavorable" toward the Jewish state. 5% ventured no opinion and 1% didn't answer). 59% also felt "strongly" or "somewhat favorable" to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who at the time was facing a possible trial in Belgium for war crimes in Lebanon. The top five "most important issues or problems facing the Jewish community in the United States" were not considered to be poverty, urban blight, health care, pollution, etc. They were 1) Anti-Semitism, 2) Peace and Security for Israel, 3) Terrorism, 4) Intermarriage (marriage to non-Jews), and 5) U.S.-Israeli relations. [JEWISH WEEK, 11-20-01]
In 2001, a survey of American Jews by the Israel Policy Forum, the Jewish Week, and the Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy
A 1998 national poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times and Newsday found that 43% of American Jewish respondents had donated money to Israel in the past year; 60% of those over 65 years of age said they had given money in the same time period to the Jewish state. [FRIEDMAN, J., p. A7] "For me to be a Jew today," said Canadian Sarah Tobin in 1990 (she had lived in Israel for a few years),
"means having a personal relationship with Israel. This is my bottom
line, my definition of Judaism. Israel is the overriding reality in Jewish
life today. It tempers, it touches, it colors every aspect of our Jewish
behavior and thoughts ... Most of the Americans who support Israel
don't know any Israelis at all ... What is my connectedness? My
connectedness is the concept, the mythology. Reality is secondary.
It can't change my connectedness." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 148-149]
"For tens of thousands of Jewish Americans," says Joyce Starr,
"Israel has become so central to their lives that dedication to 'the
country' has become a religion unto itself, without religiosity. Deeply
committed American Jews spend the better part of their working
and/or leisure hours thinking about, working on behalf of, and
worrying about the State of Israel ... The centrality of Israel to the
lives of committed American Jews is all but impossible for Israelis
to fathom. Israel has become the anchor of life, the psychological
spring of renewal, the singular rationale for feelings of self-worth
for hundreds of thousands of American Jews." [STARR, 1990, p.
159]
"The image of Israel," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "so central to the lives of American Jews, is projected as that of a country surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction ... And the Holocaust itself, which along with Israel has assumed central symbolic importance in American Jewish life, reminds Jews above all of their precarious status among the hostile Gentiles. These themes tend to be combined in appeals by Jewish organizations for funds." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 32] "American Jewish life," wrote Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab in 1995, "embodies a kind of 'cultural Zionism,' which recognizes Israel as its spiritual center, inspiring rather than assembling the Jews of the world." [LIPSET/RAAB, p. 130] Since 1967, notes Allon Gal, "virtually all American Jewish community organizations have become supporters of the Jewish state and have developed some variation of 'a vision of Israel.' [GAL, p. 13] Since 1967 too, notes Theodore Solotaroff, "the survival of Israel has been the paramount concern of organized Jewish life and probably the paramount source of Jewish identity." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 279]
"The oneness that holds Jews together," says Edward Shapiro, "is no longer Judaism or anti-Semitism but Israel ... Israel provides the link that bonds Jews together, no matter how remote they might be from any involvement in Jewish society or religious life. The Jewish thing most Jews have in common [is] ... contributing at least a nominal sum to the United Jewish Appeal." [SHAPIRO, E., Jewish American, p. 169] "Central to the understanding of American Jewish identity," notes Marla Brettschneider," is this idea of being pro-Israel ... By the 1970s, as the [Jewish] mainstream organizations began to wield unprecedented power in Washington D.C., the litmus test for the stance constituting such an attitude reached hegemonic proportions ... Many had come to feel that on issues relating to Israel, the American Jewish community had become a closed political space, an area where neither dissent, nor even debate, is tolerated." [BRETTSCHNEIDER, M.,Cornerstone, p. 1-2]
Research studies by the American Jewish Committee, noted David Schnall in 1987,
"indicate that U. S. Jews overwhelmingly support Israel by every
standard definition of the term. Over 90 per cent said they paid special
attention to media reports about Israel, and a similar proportion
declared themselves 'pro-Israeli' or 'very pro-Israeli.' In addition,
about three-quarters said that caring about Israel was a very important
part of their Jewish identity and that they frequently talked about Israel
with friends and relatives." [SCHNALL, p. 122]
In 2001, the United Jewish Communities (formerly the United Jewish Appeal)-- the foremost Jewish solidarity organization -- announced its new "$4 million solidarity campaign titled 'Israel Now'" to propagandize for the Jewish state and sanitize its miserable human rights record towards the Palestinians. "Campaign highlights" included:
* "Heavy promotion of solidarity missions to Israel."
* "Advocacy- and media-training for campus and community activists ... 'to train
their leadership to become strong advocates on behalf of Israel.'"
* "A 'media tour' that will take Israeli spokesmen and U. S. Middle East
experts -- scholars, journalists and other opinion-shapers -- into key communities
across North America to meet with local media."
* "A Solidarity Shabbat on Sept. 22-23 that will reach out to synagogues,
churches and university campuses to show that 'support for Israel extends
beyond the Jewish community.'" [JORDAN, M., 6-19-01]
In 2001, the United Jewish Communities (formerly the United Jewish Appeal)-- the foremost Jewish solidarity organization -- announced its new "$4 million solidarity campaign titled 'Israel Now'" to propagandize for the Jewish state and sanitize its miserable human rights record towards the Palestinians. "Campaign highlights" included:
* "Heavy promotion of solidarity missions to Israel."
* "Advocacy- and media-training for campus and community activists ... 'to train
* "A 'media tour' that will take Israeli spokesmen and U. S. Middle East
experts -- scholars, journalists and other opinion-shapers -- into key communities
* "A Solidarity Shabbat on Sept. 22-23 that will reach out to synagogues,
churches and university campuses to show that 'support for Israel extends
beyond the Jewish community.'" [JORDAN, M., 6-19-01]
Ironically, and astoundingly, few Jews have firsthand knowledge of the object of their intense allegiance and dedication --- Israel. 85% of all American Jews have never visited Israel (1989); this even included Ivan Boesky, then chairman of the New York City-UJA Federation. [GOLDIN, p. 8] (A 1990 survey suggested 75% of American Jews between the ages of 26-44 had never visited Israel). [WAXMAN, C., Weakening, p. 383] "Not one percent, not even .001 percent of American Jews," complained Israeli scholar Etan Levine, "come to settle here; not one in 10,000 join our ranks. More German Christians than American Jews come here as tourists." [LEVINE, E., p. 208-223]
The relatively few Americans who do go to Israel tend to visit under the auspices of various propagandizing tour packages. "Most American Jews," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "are ignorant of even the most rudimentary features of Israeli life. For example, fewer than a third of our sample of American Jews in 1986 knew (or guessed) that Menachem Begin (a former prime minister and veteran of the right-wing Likud bloc) and Shimon Peres (then Prime Minister and head of the Labour alignment) were members of different parties." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 83-84]
A long term Jewish-American resident in Israel, Ze'ev Chafets, noted that
"I was visiting Rachel's Tomb, near Bethelehem, when a tour bus full of
American Jews arrived. They were straight out of central casting,
dressed in bermudas and sports shirts with little alligators over the
pockets, weighted down by expensive cameras and souvenirs of the
Holy Land. As they crowded into the tiny building that housed the
tomb, an old Yemenite Jew dressed in a dirty robe and wearing
long side curls hung on the fringe of the group. He held out his hand,
palms up, in the universal posture of supplication, mumbling Hebrew
psalms as he approached one of the tourists. "Beat it," the American
said roughly. "I'm not giving any money to an Arab." "He's not an
Arab," the tour guide explained, 'He's a Jew.'" [CHAFETS, p. 221]
Ann Roiphe notes her Jewish American psychoanalyst friend Anna Ornstein "who says that nothing destroys her more than a threat to Israeli safety ... It is possible to be connected to the events in Israel without ever having set foot on the soil or having made plans to move. That is one of the contradictions and complications of being Jewish." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 187]
Of those few American Jews who have seen up close the day to day realities of the Israeli state, other than as a tourist, most are disillusioned. From 1948-68 for example, of the 20,000 American Jews who immigrated to Israel, nine out of ten came back to live in the States. [ZWEIGENHAFT, p. 83-84] Overall, since 1948, about half of the Jews who moved to Israel returned to America. [STARR, J., 1990, p. 179] In fact, "Israelis emigrating to the United States, yordim, have far outnumbered American Jews moving to Israel." [LIPSET/RAAB, p. 131] [For that matter, in 1985 more New York Jews went to Israel dead (387), to be buried, than to live (76)]. [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 14] In a 1963 investigation of immigration to Israel, "in some cases," said Harold Isaacs, the reasons American Jews moved to Israel "had to do not with being an American or a Jew but being one's own peculiar and troubled self with problems that they were trying to solve by running off from one place to another. Many people mentioned this as a factor, but almost always, of course, in talking about somebody else." [ISAACS, H, p. 71] ("I was told," added Isaacs, "that there had been eleven cases the previous year of mentally ill people who had been shipped off to Israel by relatives in America and who had been shipped right back to America by health officials." [ISAACS, H, p. 72]
Melvin Urofsky notes another problem for those who decide to move to Israel, that even among a nation of Jews, the sense of "Otherness" endured:
"The novelty of living in an entirely Jewish surrounding, of no longer
feeling unique because of one's Jewishness, soon wore off, only to
be replaced by a sense of being different because one was an American."
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 272]
And what exactly is Israel? What are its tenets towards other people? How does it compare to the democratic and universalist principles of America? What kind of country does world Jewry so emphatically support? A later chapter will address this issue at length, but for now, here's what Jewish reporter Leon Hadar, a former correspondent for Israel's Jerusalem Post, observes about the double standards of Jewish political allegiance, and its consequent mythmaking:
"Members of the American Jewish community have been in the
forefront of the struggle for civil and human rights, separation of
church and state and for free immigration to the United States.
They would have been the first to protest any attempt to impose
Christianity as a state religion in America, to pass a "law of return"
limiting immigration to white Christians, or to force citizens to
carry identity cards indicating their religion or ethnic origin. But
those same American Jews do not question their support for a
state [Israel] which applies these and other discriminatory policies
in its treatment of its Christian and Muslim minorities." [HADAR, p. 27]
A survey of 443 Jews in a "leadership training" program (1978-80) at the United Jewish Appeal revealed a range of disturbing attitudes among leadership in the American Jewish polity. Every single one of them agreed with the statement "When the state of Israel is threatened, all Jews are threatened." From there, 70% of the respondents stated that they were more emotionally moved by listening to Israel's nation anthem (the Hatikvah) than the Star-Spangled Banner. (Another 7% of the total "weren't sure" about it.) 97% of these people even believed that the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors was the most important problem facing American Jews. Yet by almost a two to one margin these future Jewish leaders rejected the notion that Jews are "overly concerned with Israel." 95% even declared that "I'm happy to be an American." Not surprisingly, over 60% agreed with the assertion (even in this non-religious context) that "The Jewish people is the Chosen People." Another 15% claimed they "weren't sure" if they were the Chosen People or not, leaving only the remaining 15% to outright reject this age-old source of Jewish racism and chauvinism, and inevitable Gentile hostility. "Perhaps ... the most important [myth of civil Judaism]," says Jonathan Woocher, "[is] the barely distinguished reaffirmation of the myth of Jews as a chosen people ... In short, the myths of civil Judaism are the myths of a modern messianic religion." [WOOCHER, p. 131-132] "A secular holiness," notes Emil Fackenheim," side by side with the religious, is becoming manifest in contemporary Jewish existence." [SACKS, J., p. 136]
Particularly noteworthy in the UJA survey was the Jewish leadership response to the statement "The primary loyalty of American Jews must be to the United States and their fellow Americans." Over 50% (58, 52, and 56 per cent in three distinct groups) disagreed. Coupled with the "not sure" response, 77, 67, and 71% of these future Jewish polity leaders did not agree with this statement of loyalty to their fellow Americans.
In this context, it is certainly legitimate to wonder about the implications of the well known statement by the prominent 20th century American rabbi, Stephen Wise: "I may have been an American for sixty-four years, but I have been a Jew for four thousand years." [HERTZLER, p. 76]
Such clues to American Jewish nationalist sentiments -- certainly among the UJA leadership -- have been a continuous public relations problem throughout their history around the world: the issue of "dual Jewish loyalty," one primary loyalty to international Jewry as a transnational brotherhood, and a second loyalty to the non-Jewish societies in which they live. This second loyalty has existed only since the Enlightenment. Before that Jews harbored no pretense of loyalty to the non-Jewish societies in which they lived. "The Jewish case [in Europe]," says Jacob Katz, "has often been compared with that of other religious minorities, such as the Catholics in England or the Protestants in Austria. As opposed to these minorities, however, who in all respects were regarded as part of the local population, Jews perceived themselves, and were perceived by others, as belonging to another country." [KATZ, J. J. Jew, p.
In 1942, before modern Israel was even founded, J.O. Hertzler wrote that the non-Jew typically
"feels that the Jew, despite his protestations to the contrary, is still a
'foreigner' at heart; still divided in his loyalties and sympathy; still
not completely a national, not quite one with him; still living 'off' him
but now with him. Many of the Jews, he feels, are still a people more
interested in their own nation and their own people than in their
allegiance to the countries in which they have thrown their lot....
[Non-Jews] do not cherish among them people who want to be part
of them and yet separate from them." [HERTZLER, p. 77]
"The more committed majority among Jews," wrote Arthur Hertzberg twenty-two years later, "represents a uniqueness in both culture and politics, an apartness from all other Americans, that they both will and choose." [HERTZBERG, p. 293] (This aspect of Jewish American identity was dramatically manifest in 1825 when Mordechai Noah, the former American consul to Tunis, bought land on an island in the Niagra River in upstate New York to create a Jewish separatist colony from other Americans.) [SCHMIDT, p. 7]
Ever present and enduring, in 1996 Henry Feingold noted that
"It is a residual feeling of belonging to the Jewish people that gives
American Jewry a strange and persistent duality that is reflected in
virtually every facet of their experience in America. They are in America
but never completely of it. Something is held back ... I have called this
phenomenon 'American Jewish exceptionalism,' by which I mean not its
superior achievement but the unique duality it possesses." [FEINGOLD,
p. 35]
Feingold's "exceptionalism" -- a not too subtle play on the Chosen People idea -- exists (and by traditional Jewish definition, always will) for those who insist upon the classical exclusionist, particularist, elitist and nationalist tenets of "being Jewish," and is the primary source for anti-Jewish hostility , popularly mystified by Jewry today as an irrationally demonic "anti-Semitism." "Anti-Semitism," notes Oliver Cox, "tends to be triggered by a dominant society's recognition of Jewish participation in cultural advantages of the community, to an enviable degree, but still remaining alienated from the parent group. Jews, in other words, tend to identify with the host people according to their own advantage." [COX, p. 184]
A recent real-life paradigm of this -- in sensational form -- is the story of a fabulously wealthy Jewish business tycoon (who once even owned the New York Daily News), as told by John Gross:
"A Jew from an obscure part of the Eastern Central Europe arrived in
England. Starting from nowhere, he accumulated a vast fortune. Those
who knew him realized he has amassed it by the most ruthless and
brutal means, though he is able to keep up a facade as a public
benefactor. He changes his name to one which nobody would take to
be Jewish; when the question of his Jewishness is raised, he announces
that he is a member of the Church of England ... Then, in his later
years, he reverts to his origins. He dies, and although for most of his
career he has been firmly embedded in English public life, his is buried
in Israel. His funeral -- an Orthodox Jewish funeral -- takes place on the
Mount of Olives, amid a blaze of international publicity. Within days of
his dying, his malfeasances are exposed: they involve colossal
swindles of a particularly nasty kind, including ripping off five hundred
million pounds from a pension fund. Thousands of ordinary workers
see their pensions disappear .... In fact what I have given you is an
account (if anything a toned down account) of the career of the late
Robert Maxwell." [GROSS, p. 380-381] (Some of Maxwell's own
words were read at his funeral, including these: "I do believe in the
ethical lessons of Judaism. I love and admire my peoples' devotion to
the study of the Torah. I definitely see myself as a Jew. I was born a
Jew, and I shall die a Jew, so help me God." [MAXWELL, E. p. 35]
Gross' telling of this tale was in a panel discussion about "anti-Semitism;" there was no noticeable anti-Jewish reaction to Maxwell's lifelong deceit. "An affair of this magnitude," says Gross, "would once have produced a torrent of antisemitic comments, possibly even antisemitic violence. In the 1990s, the dogs didn't bark."
Dogs barking or not, in a frank discussion of what Adam Garfinkle calls the "two religions of American Jews" -- Judaism (and its chauvinist particularism) versus Americanism (and its avowed universalism) -- in 1996 he noted that:
"Properly understood, the two conflicting belief systems claim allegiance
over most of the same realm; it follows that no one can be fully true
to both." [GARFINKLE, p. 4]
This classic irresolvable Jewish universalist-particularist tension is evidenced in the remarks of Louis Brandeis, a Jewish Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court and prominent community leader in the early twentieth century (Brandeis University is also named after him). In 1910 he said:
"Habits of living or thought which tend to keep alive differences of
origin or classifying men according to their beliefs are inconsistent with
the American ideal of brotherhood, and are disloyal." [LEWIS, p. 544]
Five years later Brandeis said the irreconcilable:
"To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to better Jews,
we must become Zionists." [LEWIS, 555]
Brandeis, notes Edward Shapiro, "was careful to describe Jews as a 'people' and not a 'nation,' in part because he did not want Zionists to appear un-American and guilty of 'dual loyalty.'" [SHAPIRO, Jewish Americans, p. 160-161]
A popular slogan in circulation among American Zionists at the time was "Silence in America, Service in Palestine." [LEWIS, p. 554] Such open sentiment in 1916 worried prominent Jewish American financier Jacob Schiff:
"Thanks to the preaching and machinations of Jewish nationalists we
[Jews] are gradually being forced into a class by ourselves and if this
continues, it will not be many years before we shall be looked upon by
our fellow citizens as an entirely separate class, whose interests are
different than the grass [roots] of American people." [LEWIS, p. 554]
Schiff also resisted the Zionists elsewhere, insisting that, "I am an American pure and simple and cannot possibly belong to two nations." [SCHMIDT, p. xi] In the same era, the (Jewish) American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, worried that Zionism "would cost the Jews of America most of what they had gained in liberty, equality, and fraternity." [AUERBACH, p. 336] "As Zionism grew stronger in America," notes James Yaffe, "the reaction against it [by some Jews] grew stronger too. From the beginning most of the German Jews [in America] were opposed to it ... It wasn't long before [Zionism] began to seem less nonsensical and distasteful than downright dangerous. What these obstreperous Zionists seemed to be saying was that a Jew in America owed his first allegiance to some foreign country. The louder and longer they went on saying this, the more chance there was that somebody besides their fellow Jews would hear them ... The horrid old question was raised, What will the goyim think?" [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 184]
"In maintaining a dualistic relationship," wrote J.O. Hertzler, "[Jews] run counter to all the principles of acceptance and assimilation, realistically considered. To become one with a people, particularly in the sway of modern nationalisms, you have to cease being, and wanting to be, something else at the same time... The Jew alienates himself from every people of the world among whom he seeks refuge. As long as he preserves his racial and spiritual unity, he cannot hope to have complete civil and personal unity with non-Jews. 'Special' minorities are suspected, not accepted." [HERTZLER, p. 77]
The enduring issue of dual loyalty took formal shape in the modern nation-state era with the 1860 birth, in France, of the International Israelite Alliance -- the granddaddy of Jewish "defense agencies" -- an organization that sought, very publicly, a transnational Jewish solidarity. One of its members, a French politician, Isaac Adolphe Cremieux, went against French government policy in cooperating with France's enemies, England and Austria, in attempting to free a group of Jews accused of murdering a monk in far away Damascus. Jewish activists in the issue included the very powerful Rothschild, Montefiore, and Arnstein banking families, and various European, American, and Egyptian statesmen were heavily lobbied. With the ultimate release of the imprisoned Jews, says Howard Sachar, "the diplomats saw the deeper issue: the complex machinery of a modern foreign ministry had been thrown out of gear largely by the persistence of a handful of Jews." [SACHAR, p. 144] "What was hailed as a new solidarity by Jews," says Albert Lindemann, "appeared as the reaffirmation or reemergence of a very old and ominous one to other observers. For them Jews remained, as they had been for centuries, a peculiar nation spread throughout the nations of Europe." [LINDEMANN, p. 38]
The issue of dual loyalty remains today, more so than ever with the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. As the president of the World Zionist Congress, Nahum Goldmann, boldly proclaimed in 1959, "American Jews must have the courage to openly declare that they entertain dual loyalty, one to the land in which they live and one to Israel." [WEYL, N., 1968, p. 293]
This perspective has been taken deeply to the American Jewish heart and in "multicultural" America, Jewish dual loyalty is openly celebrated. "Never in modern times," wrote Michael Meyer in 1990, "have Jews in the West been more committed to Jewish peoplehood. And most of them see Israel as its chief embodiment." [GORNY, p. 235] "As Zionist ideology assumed a central role in Jewish identity," says Israeli Meron Benvenisti, "doubts about it amount to the negation of Jewish consciousness." [BENVENISTI, p. xi] "There is no single Jewish community in this country," said Bruce Arbit (head of a computer company that identifies Jews for mailing lists) in 1986, "There are different groups with varying ideologies. The only thing that unites them is support for Israel." [CHAFETS, MEMBERS, p. 53] American Jews funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to the Israeli state every year out of their own (and others') pockets, as well as billions more that Jewish lobbyists shake out of the United States government and American taxpayers for foreign aid. Huge efforts must be exerted in the Jewish community to stifle and disguise this issue, mainly in reinforcing American popular ignorance and uninformed opinion, securing that most non-Jews have not the slightest idea that there is even an issue to investigate.
"It is alarming," wrote a Jewish anti-Zionist, William Zukerman, in the decade after the founding of the state of Israel,
"to discover how Israeli nationalism has penetrated into American life
and thought. It has not only deeply affected organized Jewish communal
life, philanthropy, the synagogue, the press, the lecture forum, social
centers and clubs, but it is also attempting to influence American
literature, at least that literature created by American Jews ...
[ZUKERMAN, p. 126] ... The average Zionist is very sensitive about
the question of double loyalty. The fanatic becomes furious when the
subject is merely mentioned; the more tolerant person tries to evade it.
But none can escape it. The specter of dual loyalty doggedly follows
Zionism like its shadow ... [ZUKERMAN, p. 228] ... This new
nationalism and spirituality ... can convert American Jewry into a
'colony,' or worse yet, into a satellite which takes orders and lives
merely for the sake of its ideological parent." [ZUKERMAN, p. 232]
In 1982, another Jewish anti-Zionist, Alfred Lilienthal, wrote that
"This and this alone is the issue: will American Jews allow Zionism to
separate themselves from America as a special collective whose fate is
outside and beyond the American fate? ... The sentimental affection that
Americans of Irish (or Italians or French) birth have for their country of
origins offers no analogy to the feeling toward Israel exhibited by many
American Jews ... It is beneath anybody's self-respect to go on
pretending that Zionism was merely an attempt to enrich American
folklore by promoting a Jewish counterpart to the St. Patrick's Day
Parade. Zionism is a hard-headed political creed which proposes to
subject American Jews to the sovereignty of Israel." [LILIENTHAL, p.
231]
"This curious [Jewish] feeling [for Israel]," says Jewish author James Yaffe, "has very little in common, I think, with anything that the Irishman feels for the Free State or the Italian for Sicily. No Sicilian ever loved his country for its military power; no Irishman in his right mind ever praised the Free State for its tremendous economic expansion. What they feel for the old country is all nostalgia, but the American Jew's feeling for Israel has something else in it." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 190] "American Jews have a profound dedication to Israel," noted Irving Friedman, the executive vice-president of the United Jewish Appeal in 1973. [GOLDEN, H., 1973, p. 120] "Even if they are not Zionists according to classic definition," noted David Mittelberg in 1999, "most American Jews are pro-Israel. They support Israel 'politically, economically, and emotionally.'" [MITTELBERG, D., 1999, p. 7] "[F]or virtually all the Jews in Canarsie [an area of Brooklyn, New York]," wrote Jonathan Reider in his study of Jews and Italians there, "the observant and the faithless, Zionism was inseparable from the issue of [Jewish] communal survival." [REIDER, J., 1985, p. 47]
Former American Jewish Committee official Stephen Steinlight admits Jewish "dual loyalty" freely; it began to trouble him when the balkanized American society Jews have been instrumental in creating seemed to be threatening Jewish interests (i.e., that other minority groups were seizing the Jewish-inspired model):
"We cannot pretend we are only part of the solution when we are also part of the
problem; we have no less difficult a balancing act between group loyalty and a
wider sense of belonging to America. That America has tolerated this dual
loyalty -- we get a free pass, I suspect, largely over Christian guilt about the
Holocaust -- makes it no less a reality." [STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
"In recent years," notes Jewish scholar Peter Novick, "it has become not just permissible but in some circles laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty. 'We are Jews first and whatever else second,' says Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the author of a searing indictment of American Jews' reaction to the Holocaust." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 34]
Former American Jewish Committee official Stephen Steinlight admits Jewish "dual loyalty" freely; it began to trouble him when the balkanized American society Jews have been instrumental in creating seemed to be threatening Jewish interests (i.e., that other minority groups were seizing the Jewish-inspired model):
"We cannot pretend we are only part of the solution when we are also part of the
problem; we have no less difficult a balancing act between group loyalty and a
wider sense of belonging to America. That America has tolerated this dual
loyalty -- we get a free pass, I suspect, largely over Christian guilt about the
Holocaust -- makes it no less a reality." [STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
"In recent years," notes Jewish scholar Peter Novick, "it has become not just permissible but in some circles laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty. 'We are Jews first and whatever else second,' says Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the author of a searing indictment of American Jews' reaction to the Holocaust." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 34]
"No other people in the world is so attached to its country of origin -- Palestine [i.e., Israel] -- as the Jews," wrote Nahum Goldmann, head of the World Jewish Congress and World Zionist Organization,
"who are bound by feeling and religion, as well as by utterly mystical
ties ... [GOLDMANN, 1978, p. 7] ... The Jews are the most separatist
people in the world. Their belief in the notion of the chosen people is
the basis of their entire religion. All down the centuries the Jews have
intensified their separation from the non-Jewish world; they have rejected,
and still do reject, mixed marriages; they have put up one wall after
another to protect their existence as a people apart, and have built
their ghettos with their own hands." [GOLDMANN, 1978, p. 8]
In 1959, in a survey of 1,000 teachers in Jewish schools in the United States, only 48 were found to be "teaching Israel as a subject of study." By the early 1980s, 98% "included Israel/Zionism in some form or another as part of the curriculum." [ACKERMAN, W, p. 179-180] By 1996, some 40-45% of all American Jewish children attended part-time Jewish schools where there is, notes Walter Ackerman, "an increased commitment to the idea that Israel is central to the identity of Jews growing up in America." Noting the preponderance of Israelis actually teaching the courses in Jewish American schools, he adds that "today it is doubtful that Jewish education in the United States could function without Israelis." [ACKERMAN, W, p. 187-188]
As James Yaffe noted in 1968:
"Synagogues around the country have become Israel-minded: they raise
money for Israel; they say prayers for Israel on the Sabbath; they display
Israeli flags and play Israeli melodies; they teach Israeli folk songs and
dances in their religious schools; they sell Israeli popular art, like dolls,
prayer shawls ... Israel has also become a major political issue among
American Jews. Most of them don't know what the Diaspora is and
aren't aware of being in it, yet they would almost automatically vote
against any politician, Jew or gentile, who they felt was anti-Israel."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 187]
In a textbook for Jewish high school students published by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1964, Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn tells his students:
"Our continued financial and political help is still needed by Israel ... Intelligent,
well-trained Americans can help Israel immeasurably by their willingness to
to volunteer for limited periods of service there. During the Arab War of 1948,
many young Americans -- including some Christians -- volunteered for
military service on Israel's behalf because they saw in the new State
an expression of the highest and finest American ideals of democracy."
[GITTLESOHN, R., 1964, p. 223-224]
"Popular Jewish attitudes [have] underwent a profound 'Israelization,'" wrote Peter Novick in 1999,
"The hallmark of the good Jew became the depth of his or her commitment
to Israel. Failure to fulfill religious obligations, near-total Jewish illiteracy,
even intermarriage, were all permissible; lack of enthusiasm for the Israeli
cause (not to speak of public criticism of Israel) became unforgiveable ...
The presence of Israeli artifacts in the living room became as mandatory
as a mezuzah on the doorpost. (In none of this was any knowledge of
Israel required. A survey in the 1980s revealed that fewer than a third of
American Jews knew that the archenemies Menachem Begin and Shimon
Peres were members of different parties)." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 148]
In a textbook for Jewish high school students published by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1964, Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn tells his students:
"Our continued financial and political help is still needed by Israel ... Intelligent,
well-trained Americans can help Israel immeasurably by their willingness to
to volunteer for limited periods of service there. During the Arab War of 1948,
many young Americans -- including some Christians -- volunteered for
military service on Israel's behalf because they saw in the new State
an expression of the highest and finest American ideals of democracy."
[GITTLESOHN, R., 1964, p. 223-224]
"Popular Jewish attitudes [have] underwent a profound 'Israelization,'" wrote Peter Novick in 1999,
"The hallmark of the good Jew became the depth of his or her commitment
to Israel. Failure to fulfill religious obligations, near-total Jewish illiteracy,
even intermarriage, were all permissible; lack of enthusiasm for the Israeli
cause (not to speak of public criticism of Israel) became unforgiveable ...
The presence of Israeli artifacts in the living room became as mandatory
as a mezuzah on the doorpost. (In none of this was any knowledge of
Israel required. A survey in the 1980s revealed that fewer than a third of
American Jews knew that the archenemies Menachem Begin and Shimon
Peres were members of different parties)." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 148]
"In a bulletin of the Washington Heights, New York, Sunday School of the Y.M.H.A. and Y.W.H.A. (Sunday School Life, Chanukah issue)," noted Alfred Lilienthal in 1982, "one reads this extraordinary pledge of young Americans: 'Here is our pledge, Israel: I pledge my loyalty to God, to the Torah and to the Jewish people and to the Jewish state ... When a questionnaire was issued to pupils of the public school system in Galveston, Texas, 102 students answered the question 'What is your nationality?' with 'Jewish.'" [LILIENTHAL, p. 23] And the results of such socialization? Take, for example, the case in 1999 when an American Jewish teenager, Abraham Derman, made international news when he cut through a razor wire fence at Boston's Logan airport, climbed into an open jet unnoticed, and rode with other passengers to London. Why? He "told investigators that he wanted to go to Israel and had hopes the stunt would help him get a job with Mossad [Israel's international spy agency]." [BORGER, J., 7-30-99, p. 15]
Somewhat similarly, in 1997, California-born Israeli soldier Adam Sager made Jewish American news for winning an Israeli Defense Force poetry contest. "The poet's affinity for Israel surfaced at a young age," noted the Jewish Bulletin. "Ever since I was 5," said Sager, "my parents would ask me, 'Adam, what do you want for your birthday?' And I would always answer, 'I want to go to Israel.'" [KATZ, L., 1997, p. 29] "Between the years 1966 and 1993," notes David Mittelberg, "just over a quarter of a million Jewish youngsters from all over the world participated in some type of educational program in Israel under the auspices of the Jewish Agency." [MITTELBERG, D., 1999, p. 13]
In 1981, Jewish author Ann Roiphe went to her daughter's kindergarten class and listened to another mother gush about her own child drawing pictures of the Star of David:
"Look at that Jewish star, look at the picture of her family. She knows
she's Jewish. Jewish and family; those are the two pillars of her identity.
Isn't that really healthy?" [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 50]
Roiphe, looking around the room at non-Jewish children, observed that "None of the Christian children had drawn crosses or churches." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 52]
"To the extent that we may identify Zionism with support for Israel," notes David Schnall, " -- and there will be some who object to this identification -- the United States Jewish community has been 'Zionized.' The battles of the past -- fears of dual loyalties ... have not so much been won as made irrelevant." [SCHNALL, p. 122]
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks in America, and worries about increased balkanization of American ethnic cultures that could undercut Jewish ethnocentric interests , Stephen Steinlight (former Director of National Affairs for the American Jewish Committee) had some confessing to do:
"We cannot consider the inevitable consequences of current [immigration]
trends -- not the least among them diminished Jewish political power -- with
detachment ... We Jews need to be especially sensitive to the multinational model
this crowd (many of them Jewish) is promoting. Why? Because one person’s
'celebration' of his own diversity, foreign ties, and the maintenance of cultural
and religious traditions that set him apart is another’s balkanizing identity politics.
We are not immune from the reality of multiple identities or the charge of divided
loyalties, a classic staple of anti-Semitism, and we must recognize that our own
patterns are easily assailed, and we need to find ways of defending them more
effectively as the debate goes on. Much public opinion survey research undertaken
in recent years continues to indicate that large numbers of Americans, particularly
people of color, assert that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States.
For Jews, it is at best hypocritical, and, worse, an example of an utter lack of
self-awareness, not to recognize that we are up to our necks in this problem. This
has been especially true once we were sufficiently accepted in the United States
to feel confident enough to go public with our own identity politics. But this
newfound confidence carries its own costs; people are observing us closely,
and what they see in our behavior is not always distinct from what we loudly
decry in others. One has to be amused, even amazed, when colleagues in the
organized Jewish world wring their hands about black nationalism, Afrocentrism,
or with cultural separatism in general — without considering Jewish behavioral
parallels. Where has our vaunted Jewish self-awareness flown? I’ll confess it, at
least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared
as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for
10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer
camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting
its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign
folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration
to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my
generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I
contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the
superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to
view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of
hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than
ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we
could rely on no one." [STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks in America, and worries about increased balkanization of American ethnic cultures that could undercut Jewish ethnocentric interests , Stephen Steinlight (former Director of National Affairs for the American Jewish Committee) had some confessing to do:
"We cannot consider the inevitable consequences of current [immigration]
trends -- not the least among them diminished Jewish political power -- with
detachment ... We Jews need to be especially sensitive to the multinational model
this crowd (many of them Jewish) is promoting. Why? Because one person’s
'celebration' of his own diversity, foreign ties, and the maintenance of cultural
and religious traditions that set him apart is another’s balkanizing identity politics.
We are not immune from the reality of multiple identities or the charge of divided
loyalties, a classic staple of anti-Semitism, and we must recognize that our own
patterns are easily assailed, and we need to find ways of defending them more
effectively as the debate goes on. Much public opinion survey research undertaken
in recent years continues to indicate that large numbers of Americans, particularly
people of color, assert that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States.
For Jews, it is at best hypocritical, and, worse, an example of an utter lack of
self-awareness, not to recognize that we are up to our necks in this problem. This
has been especially true once we were sufficiently accepted in the United States
to feel confident enough to go public with our own identity politics. But this
newfound confidence carries its own costs; people are observing us closely,
and what they see in our behavior is not always distinct from what we loudly
decry in others. One has to be amused, even amazed, when colleagues in the
organized Jewish world wring their hands about black nationalism, Afrocentrism,
or with cultural separatism in general — without considering Jewish behavioral
parallels. Where has our vaunted Jewish self-awareness flown? I’ll confess it, at
least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared
as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for
10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer
camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting
its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign
folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration
to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my
generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I
contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the
superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to
view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of
hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than
ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we
could rely on no one." [STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
"No other ethnic group in American history has so extensive an involvement with a foreign nation [Israel]," wrote Melvyn Urofsky in 1975, "No other nation relies upon a body of private individuals who are neither residents nor citizens of their land to underwrite a major portion of their budget. American Jews buy Israeli bonds, give generously to the United Jewish Appeal, lobby [American] government representatives to pursue pro-Israel policy, travel to Israel (where they are greeted with 'Welcome Home' signs), respond to every crisis in that part of the world, and yet maintain passionately that they are Americans first and Jews afterward." [UROFSKY, p. 1]
Jewish "peoplehood," Zionism, and all other nationalist allegiances to Israel today are in fact enduring abrogrations of the very condition for the granting of equal rights to Jews with the rise of the Enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century, as epitomized in the famous quote by Clermont Tonnerre in 1791:
"Everything shall be denied to the Jews as a nation; everything should be
granted to them as individuals. They are obliged to become citizens.
Some argue that they do not want to be. Let them say this themselves
and let them be expelled. It is impossible for them to be a nation within a
nation." [FEUERLICHT, p. 45]
As England's Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations, Jonathan Sacks, noted 200 years later:
"Enlightenment thought had stressed the idea of universal humanity
on one hand and the abstract individual on the other, freed from the
constraints of tradition to make his own world of meanings through
his choices. This was a language into which traditional Jewish identity
could not be translated ... The terms of emancipation liberated Jews
as individuals, not as a collectivity." [SACKS, J., One, p. 9-10]
"To have insisted on apartness, of course," notes Leonard Fein, "has meant also to reject the liberal dogma of universalism. The extraordinary tension, within the Jewish communities of Europe, between those who saw the Enlightenment, with its presumed tolerance and humanity, as the best hope for Jewish survival, and those who insisted on clinging to more traditional and more parochial patterns, is an argument which has not yet been put to rest." [FEIN, Israel, p. 6]
The question, as always, begs to be answered, yet again in our own day, as it has always been : As a collective group, where do primary Jewish loyalties really lie? With America, or with Israel? With fellow human beings at hand, or Jews across the world? Do Jewish loyalties lie primarily in contributing to the improvement of deteriorating socio-economic environment in the universalist land in which they live, or does their honest allegiance point first to Israel and the particularist demands of Jewish brotherhood? How do Jews explain it when they not only have "dual loyalties" to America and Israel, but even dual passports (as is a virtual certainty with any American Jew who emigrates to Israel) to these countries as well? (At the same time it is illegal in the respective states in America to even hold dual-state drivers' licenses). American Jewry answers the question the way it has for decades: bringing up the question of dual loyalty, they argue, is a malicious act of anti-Semitism and their dual passports, dual allegiances, and deep roots in Israel are merely "an expression of American democracy." "Many American Jews," notes J. Bruce Nichols, "feel a dual loyalty to the United States and to Israel. Public political criticism of Israel is taken by some as a personal attack on the American Jewish community, Israel's chief supporters." [NICHOLS, p. 164]
The political and ethical absurdity of American Jewish immigrants to Israel still maintaining their legal right to vote in American elections on issues they may not even know or care about (save how they affect their new country, Israel), is well illustrated in a 1988 article in The Jewish Week:
"Thousands of immigrants from the United States, holding dual United
States-Israeli citizenships, are voting in two elections this month. As
Americans they will have a say in the November 8 presidential elections;
as Israelis, they voted November 1 for prime minister. On domestic
issues in the United States they may be poorly informed, but when it
comes to Israel and the Middle East, they know better than most
American Jews." [REBIBO, p. 7]
The basis for this situation stems from the 1960s when an American Jew had his citizenship revoked for voting in an Israeli election. He filed suit (Efroyin v. Rusk) to get it back, and on May 29, 1967 the United States Supreme Court "ruled that Congress did not have the power to pass laws depriving Americans of their nationality without their consent." [ISAACS, p. 6] "The Israeli government quickly revised its immigration laws to enable Americans to 'back into' Israeli citizenship without having to give up their American rights." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 362] Thanks to such American Jewish legal efforts and lobbying, dual citizenship -- formerly forbidden -- was now assured. (This particular case was convenient and curiously well-timed for those American Jews operating that very moment -- some in military capacities -- in Israel. On June 5, 1967, one week after the Supreme Court ruling, Israel attacked Arab positions to begin the Six Day War. Between 1,000 and 1,500 Jews of American citizenship served in the Israeli army in this military clash). [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 180] On the other hand, in 1987 the U. S. State Department repeatedly protested "discrimination" in Israeli passport policy, especially "the confiscation of passports and other restrictions on American citizens of Palestinian Arab origin when they arrive in Israel.") [JEWISH WEEK, 5-22-87]
Before the modern state of Israel was even founded, as Melvin Urofsky notes:
"As early as May 1945, Palestinian Jewish leaders, preparing for the
possibility that they would have to fight for independence, had looked
to the United States as a possible reservoir of [Jewish] soldiers ...
Haganah [forerunner to the Israeli army] began serious recruitment
of these [Jewish American military] veterans in the fall of 1947
through such cover agencies as Land and Labor for Palestine, the
Palestine Vocational Service, and Service Airways. Under the guise
of informing prospective settlers about Palestine, these front groups,
all connected and financed through the Sonneborn Institute, spread
the news that a variety of interesting jobs were about to open in the
Holy Land ... In order to protect the citizenship of the Americans,
Israeli officials administered an oath of allegiance, so that it could
be said they served 'with' rather than 'in' the Israel armed forces."
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 180-181]
"Under the then current [American] law," notes Joseph Heckelman, in explaining this dissimulative allegiance oath, "taking an abstract oath of allegiance to a foreign government (or voting in a foreign election) was clearly a cardinal offense, whereas actually risking one's life in the service of a foreign government could be presumed to be less reprehensible." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 181] Among those Jewish Americans killed in the Israel's 1947-48 war with the Arabs was West Point graduate David "Mickey" Marcus, a Colonel in the American army and member of Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff in World War II. "Of the more than three thousand men buried at the United States Military Academy at West Point," noted Melvin Urofsky in 1978, "Mickey Marcus is the only one to have been killed while fighting under a foreign flag." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 182]
Among the most disturbing dimensions to this kind of two-faced positioning is the chameleon-like status of the recent right-wing prime minister of Israel: Benyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu (whose father taught at Cornell University in New York) spent the first grade in Israel, the second and third in the United States, grades 4-8 in Jerusalem, and high school in Philadelphia. He served in the Israeli military and then received a BA and MA degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has always held dual American/Israeli citizenship, which allowed him to garner American student loans for his college education. Although he has publicly claimed to have relinquished his American citizenship to serve as the Israeli prime minister, no one has ever been allowed access to his actual records on the subject. "Interestingly," notes Israeli political scientist Neve Gordon," the status of his [citizenship] files in the United States has not changed, so according to U.S. law Netanyahu remains a U.S. citizen." [GORDON, N, p. 11]
The most sensational expression of the dual loyalty issue in America in recent years was the 1987 case of Jonathan Pollard, an American-born Jew who worked in a sensitive position in the U.S. Navy. Pollard became a spy for the Israeli government and passed along more than 800 "top secret" documents to his "first loyalty." For seventeen months he had been in daily contact with Israeli co-conspirators, two of whom were given military promotions in Israel after Pollard's spying concluded. [BOOKBINDER, p. 130] The United States government prosecutor in the case, Joseph di Genova, stated that Pollard's spying "was the largest physical compromise of United States classified information in the twentieth century." The Defense Secretary at the time of Pollard's arrest, Caspar Weinberger, wrote a 46-page document to the Federal Court, noting that he "could not conceive of greater harm to national security' than Pollard's deeds. [FITCHETT, J., p. 1]At the first news of the Pollard case, an American Jewish Committee member in Washington DC warned that "if it was perceived in America that we had come to the defense of Pollard because he's a Jew, our credibility as a Jewish community would be down to zero overnight and Israel would be the loser." [BOOKBINDER, p. 132]
But as the story about the Jewish American spy unraveled, it didn't turn out to be as threatening to the Jewish community as some has feared. After all, one of the most disturbing aspects of the whole Pollard affair was that so few Americans had any grasp of what was going on in the case. A New York Times/CBS poll in 1987 was undertaken one month after Pollard's sentencing and attendant news publicity about military promotions for two Israeli liaisons who aided in Pollard's spying. "A very surprising finding," says Hyman Bookbinder, "was the amount of general ignorance of the Pollard case. Only 18% of American non-Jews knew that it was Israel for whom Pollard had spied. 13% thought it had been the Soviet Union!" [BOOKBINDER, p. 137] That same year saw no cut in America's economic aid to Israel "despite the Federal budget crisis that required protracted negotiations and cuts in many domestic programs. The full $3 billion for Israel in military and economic aid, the same as the preceding year, was approved -- all of it outright grant." [BOOKBINDER, p.]
Within a few years the proclamation could be heard in the Jewish community that Pollard was sentenced to prison for so long, not for his crime, but because of anti-Semitism. [DERSHOWITZ, p. 309] "Israel must become intimately involved in the Jonathan Pollard case," the (New York) Jewish Week editorialized in 1991, "Israel's founders envisioned a state that would protect any Jew, wherever, who suffered from anti-Semitism. Pollard is unquestionably such a victim." [JEWISH WEEK, 5-31-91, p. 24] "Grass roots Jews reacted with mixed and complex emotions," says Alan Dershowitz, Pollard's lawyer, " .... But some Jews were ... understanding of, if not sympathetic with, a Jewish zealot who put Israeli survival -- at least as he perceived it -- before the bureaucratic niceties of the [United States] classification system ... [DERSHOWITZ, p. 285] ... Momentum began to build slowly on Pollard's behalf in both Israel and the United States. There was still no public criticism [of Pollard's sentence] by the Israeli government or by the major Jewish organizations. But the [Jewish] mood was changing perceptibly in Pollard's favor." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 304] Amidst the "changes" was a 1990 supportive statement for leniency towards Pollard signed by the American Jewish Congress and the West Coast B'nai B'rith. Further support came from prominent Jewish public figures, Eli Wiesel and Arthur Hertzberg, a former President of the World Jewish Congress -- Philip Klutznick, the leaders of three major rabbinical seminaries, and the Washington Board of Rabbis who asked the President to commute Pollard's sentence. [GINZBURG, p. 217] In January 1996 the state of Israel awarded Pollack, still imprisoned, formal Israeli citizenship. "Pollack's lawyers," noted the Boston Globe, "hope the Israeli government will act to free him the same as it does prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action." [BOSGLO, 1-25-96] (It wasn't until 1998 that Israel formally admitted Pollard spied for them).
By late 1997 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to have raised the issue of Pollard's release to Israel with President Clinton on three occasions, and for the first time an Israeli official -- Immigration Absorption Minister Yuli Edelstein -- visited Pollard in prison. In December 1997 Netanyahu's "diaspora affairs adviser," Bobby Brown, declared that "the time for mercy has come ... The feeling throughout Israel is that we should do whatever we can to try and help bring about the American decision to free him." [AIN, S, p. 35] (This reflected Israeli public opinion. A newspaper poll found that 90% of those surveyed in the Jewish nation thought their country should help Pollard and his wife, who was also implicated, in a lesser degree, in the spying. [FRANKEL, p. 218] One innovative tact in Pollard's defense in the American Jewish community is to change a defense into an assault, charging that not only was the convict's long prison sentence motivated by anti-Semitism, but that Israel was entitled to whatever information he stole from the U.S. military. In a 1998 issue of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Anne Roiphe appealed to fellow Jews, saying
"Maybe we haven't found the smoking gun [of anti-Semitism], but most
of us believe in some way [Pollard's] unequal treatment, this odd matter
of why Israel didn't have the information Pollard gave them, is related to
anti-Semitism." [ROIPHE, Jewish Leaders, p. 8]
An extremely rare voice in the Jewish community was that of Joseph Aaron:
"The Jewish community's behavior [about the Pollard case] has been
shameful. Almost all Jews, and even more sickeningly, almost all
Jewish organizations have taken up Pollard's cause. They have called
for his release and have either stated or implied that anti-Semitism is
keeping him in jail ... Now you have to believe that every top American
official -- Democrat or Republican, civilian and military, executive branch
and legislative -- is an anti-Semite or you've got to recognize that Pollard
did such overwhelming harm that all agree he must be punished by staying
in prison the rest of his life. Still, most American Jews call for his release
... how many Jews have I heard say, 'Well, he was doing it for Israel' --
as if that made it OK or at least not so bad, as if doing it for Israel is any
kind of excuse or explanation or factor." [AARON, J., 2000, p. 21]
A few years later after Pollard, a Jewish army engineer, David Tenenbaum admitted to passing along classified information to an Israeli officer at the United States Army Tank Automotive and Armament Command in the Detroit area. [JEWISH BULLETIN, Inter] In fact, from the mid 1960s to mid 1980s there have been 40 formal United States investigations into Americans working for Israel. [FINDLEY, p. 125] By 1963, notes Seymour Hersh, American officials felt that "extensive penetration of the United States government [by spies for Israel] needed to be curbed." [HERSH, S., p. 162]
A 1979 CIA report noted that "Israelis devote a considerable proportion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence. This has included attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States and other Western nations." [GREEN, S, p. 253] In 1971, for instance, a Swiss court sentenced a Jewish-Swiss engineer, Alfred Frauenknecht, to four and a half years in prison, "but only after he had transferred to Mossad [Israel's CIA] agents some 200,000 blueprints and the specifications for the precise machine tools used in the Mirage's [the French-Swiss military jet] construction." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 235]
In 2001, Shawn Pine, a Jewish reserve officer in the U. S. Army, charged anti-Semitism when he was stripped of his security clearance and was forced "to give up command of an intelligence unit." Why? Pine, born in America, emigrated to Israel and served in its army in the late 1970s. He returned to the U.S., went back to college, and served for nine years in the U.S. Army. Bouncing back to Israel in 1995, he studied at Hebrew University and served part time in the Israel Defense Forces. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency put it: "Anti-Israel feelings may be 'endemic' in the U.S. Army's intelligence, Pine believes. 'When they see a Jew, they see Jonathan Pollard,' he said." [SAMBER, S., 10-29-01]
In 2001, Shawn Pine, a Jewish reserve officer in the U. S. Army, charged anti-Semitism when he was stripped of his security clearance and was forced "to give up command of an intelligence unit." Why? Pine, born in America, emigrated to Israel and served in its army in the late 1970s. He returned to the U.S., went back to college, and served for nine years in the U.S. Army. Bouncing back to Israel in 1995, he studied at Hebrew University and served part time in the Israel Defense Forces. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency put it: "Anti-Israel feelings may be 'endemic' in the U.S. Army's intelligence, Pine believes. 'When they see a Jew, they see Jonathan Pollard,' he said." [SAMBER, S., 10-29-01]
Victor Ostrovsky, a former Israeli Mossad officer and secret agent, left that organization because of moral conscience. In his 1990 book, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer, Ostrovsky reported that about two dozen Israeli agents are "actively spying, recruiting, organizing and carrying out covert activities, mainly in New York and Washington, which they refer to as their playground." [OSTROVSKY, p. 269]
Throughout the world, many Jewish citizens of other nations in all walks of life function as extensions of Israel's CIA. They are called, in Hebrew, sayanim. ("Our greatest advantage," noted Mossad official Shmuel Toledano, in reviewing his career in the Israeli spy agency, "was always that we had people who could pass for any nationality. Arabs, Germans, whatever." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 191] ) These sayanim, says Ostrovsky
"are a unique and important part of the Mossad's operation. Sayanim --
assistants -- must be 100 per cent Jewish. They live abroad, and though
they are not Israeli citizens, many are reached through their relatives in
Israel ... There are thousands of sayanim around the world. In London
alone there are about 2,000 who are active, and another 5,000 on the
[Mossad] list. They fulfill many different roles. A car sayan, for
example, running a rental agency, could help the Mossad get a car
without having to complete the usual documentation. An apartment
sayan would find accommodation without raising suspicions, a bank
sayan could get you money if you needed it in the middle of the night, a
doctor sayan would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to police,
and so on. The idea is to have a pool of people available when needed
who can provide services but will keep quiet about them out of loyalty
to the cause ... One thing you know for sure is that even if a Jewish
person knows it is the Mossad, he might not agree to work with you --
but he won't turn you in. You have at your disposal a nonrisk
recruitment system that actually gives you a pool of millions of Jewish
people to tap from outside your own borders ... The one problem with
the system is that the Mossad does not seem to care how devastating it
could be to the status of the Jewish people in the diaspora if it was
known." [OSTROVSKY, p. 86-87]
In an unprecedented action, at the request of the state of Israel in 1990, an American judge banned publication of Victor Ostrovsky's book (from which the above quotation is excerpted) until the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division rescinded the censorship. "The Israeli government," noted the Jewish Week, "claimed the book could imperil Mossad agents by blowing their cover." [JEWISH WEEK, 9-21-90, p. 20] In 1995 Ostrowsky sued a Canadian television station that interviewed an Israeli journalist, Yosef Lapid, who proclaimed on air that he hoped "a decent Jew in Canada" would assassinate the telltale former Mossad member. [KEZWER, G., 2-12-95, p. 8] Ostrovsky's house in Canada was also burned down.
Loyal Jews of various nations work in the service Mossad. In 1999, for example, the Jerusalem Report reported an interview it had with former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's son:
JR: "Israel gave the CIA a copy of your father's famous speech
denouncing Stalin, delivered behind closed doors at the 20th
Party Congress in 1956. How did the [Israeli] Mossad get a hold
of it?"
Sergei K. : "The daughter of a Polish party leader had a Jewish boyfriend,
and that boy worked for the Mossad. The boyfriend found a copy
of the speech on the Polish leader's desk and 'borrowed' it for a
while." [JERUSALEM REPORT, 9-13-99]
One such sayan, New York-based Jewish American Howard Schack, even wrote a book about his adventures as a volunteer for Mossad, entitled A Spy in Canaan. My Secret Life as a Jewish-American Businessman Spying for Israel in Arab Lands. "What did I," he wondered one day, "
"a middle-aged Jewish-American businessman, have to offer [Israel]? The next
day as I sat at my desk in my construction company I realized that before me
lay something that might prove useful to Israel. Heaped on my desk were
plans and specifications for an offshore naval expansion program in the Red
Sea and Persian Gulf that had been put out for bids by Saudi Arabia. These
plans had come to me quite routinely. My firm had exactly the experience
needed to carry out portions of the project. Reviewing the plans, I wondered
if the government of Israel was aware of them ... I had had dealings with
with foreign governments that took me all over the globe, bringing me in
contact with hundreds of executives who did business worldwide, especially
in the Middle East." [SCHACK, H.. 1993, p. 7]
Schack -- member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Shriners and Kiwanis clubs, and other community organizations [SCHACK, H., 1993, p. 17] -- contacted the Israeli consulate in Washington DC, offering his espionage services for Israel."I conduct business in the Middle East," he explained to a consular official, "I have access to projects such as public buildings and massive capital development projects from Kuwait to Libya. My credentials permit me to work intimately with Western firms that have construction contracts in those countries." [SCHACK, H., 1993, p. 8] Schack was soon assigned to a Mossad "handler" and was even provided a spy camera.
One such sayan, New York-based Jewish American Howard Schack, even wrote a book about his adventures as a volunteer for Mossad, entitled A Spy in Canaan. My Secret Life as a Jewish-American Businessman Spying for Israel in Arab Lands. "What did I," he wondered one day, "
"a middle-aged Jewish-American businessman, have to offer [Israel]? The next
day as I sat at my desk in my construction company I realized that before me
lay something that might prove useful to Israel. Heaped on my desk were
plans and specifications for an offshore naval expansion program in the Red
Sea and Persian Gulf that had been put out for bids by Saudi Arabia. These
plans had come to me quite routinely. My firm had exactly the experience
needed to carry out portions of the project. Reviewing the plans, I wondered
if the government of Israel was aware of them ... I had had dealings with
with foreign governments that took me all over the globe, bringing me in
contact with hundreds of executives who did business worldwide, especially
in the Middle East." [SCHACK, H.. 1993, p. 7]
Schack -- member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Shriners and Kiwanis clubs, and other community organizations [SCHACK, H., 1993, p. 17] -- contacted the Israeli consulate in Washington DC, offering his espionage services for Israel.
From the very formation of the modern state of Israel, American Jewish sayanim have aided the Jewish state at high administrative levels. A good example was a Jewish American 'mole' in the United States veteran's bureaucracy. Thousands of American Jews served in the Israeli military during the founding of the Israeli state in 1947-48, despite a United States State Department decree noting that those who enter foreign armies "cease to be entitled recognition as [U.S.] citizens during the period of such service," and that they would lose their American passports. [GREEN, p. 52] Nonetheless, in 1948 a Unites States Security Group of Army Intelligence report noted that
"There presently exists among [branches of Israel's armed forces] a plan
to recruit former [U.S., almost all Jewish] army officers ... It was
reported that someone in the Pentagon who had access to [classified]
officers' AGO (Adjutant General's Office) files and who is making
available to these organizations the names of former officers thus
qualified." [GREEN, p. 53]
This Pentagon source was identified as Colonel Elliot A. Niles, "an ardent Zionist, formerly a high official of B'nai B'rith." His brother, David, was an aide to President Harry S. Truman, "one of two or three most influential persons in the White House on Middle East policy matters." [GREEN, p. 54]
Meanwhile, while American Jews can vociferously condemn with indignation the well-earned suspicions of their dual national loyalty which they themselves (quite literally by the millions) have solidly secured for their entire community, in Israel the standards for the evaluation of entire groups of people is quite another matter, where the actions of a handful of people indict as suspect a community of millions. Take the case of Ze'ev Chafets, Head of Israel's Government Press Office, an American Jew who immigrated to Israel, and his refusal to allow Palestinian laborers to work in his Jerusalem home:
"Is it fair to discriminate against everyone for the crimes of the few?
Maybe not, but how do you tell the good guys from the terrorists?"
[FRANKEL, p. 239]
In the Middle East context, Michael Bar-Zohar notes the omnipresence of Jewish spies (working for "Shai," the early Israeli spy organization) during the British rule of Palestine:
"No one know when or how or where the ubiquitious, wraith-like Intelligence
Service of the Resistance originated. The British knew it existed, but they
could never put their finger on its nerve center, identify its directors, or
discover its headquarters in spite of the fact that there were thousands of
Shai agents. Nearly all the Jewish police, military officers, and inspectors
worked for Shai unbeknownst to their British bosses and their Arab
colleagues. The same was true of postal workers, telephone operators,
hotel chambermaids, cafe waiters, newspapermen, secretaries, typists,
and the Jewish department heads in the British bureaucratic system.
Shai also maintained networks of Arab agents who reported on what
went on in the headquarters of the Arab tribes and in the secret
meetings of influential Palestinians ... It was seldom that a confidential
telephone conversation, an exchange of official correspondence, or a
coded telegram escaped detection by the invisible antennae of the
Jewish espionage." [BAR-ZOHAR, M., 1972, p. 19-20]
In the Middle East context, Michael Bar-Zohar notes the omnipresence of Jewish spies (working for "Shai," the early Israeli spy organization) during the British rule of Palestine:
"No one know when or how or where the ubiquitious, wraith-like Intelligence
Service of the Resistance originated. The British knew it existed, but they
could never put their finger on its nerve center, identify its directors, or
discover its headquarters in spite of the fact that there were thousands of
Shai agents. Nearly all the Jewish police, military officers, and inspectors
worked for Shai unbeknownst to their British bosses and their Arab
colleagues. The same was true of postal workers, telephone operators,
hotel chambermaids, cafe waiters, newspapermen, secretaries, typists,
and the Jewish department heads in the British bureaucratic system.
Shai also maintained networks of Arab agents who reported on what
went on in the headquarters of the Arab tribes and in the secret
meetings of influential Palestinians ... It was seldom that a confidential
telephone conversation, an exchange of official correspondence, or a
coded telegram escaped detection by the invisible antennae of the
Jewish espionage." [BAR-ZOHAR, M., 1972, p. 19-20]
In today's world, dual loyalty, ever encouraged in the Jewish community (i.e., Jewish chauvinism and allegiance to Israel as an inalienable American democratic right), left completely unchallenged by all in modern American culture for fear of being branded an 'anti-Semite," has invariably given arrogant rise to nakedly hostile and subversive statements by those obsessed with Jewish identity. Consider the words of Jane Delynne, an American Jew who has reaped the benefits of life in America with three published novels, an Elizabeth Janeway Prize for Prose Writing, a Book of the Month Club Fellowship, and a New York Foundation Fellowship for the Arts. Her forum, from which the following is quoted, is not some obscure, fanatic off-the-edge cult magazine, but a 1989 book on Jewish identity by powerhouse publisher Random House, a fact that testifies to the disturbing acceptability of this kind of attitude -- as a legitimate opinion -- in the Jewish American community:
"The existence of Israel is the reaffirmation of Jews as the chosen
people ... Israel is suffused for me with a moral meaning absent from the
existence of any other nation in the world. If there was a war between
the United States and Israel, I would choose Israel. Sometimes I think I
am secretly glad for] its occasional brutality so that the world will know
there is a monster out there -- a monster who will never forget [the
Holocaust]. Although in general I believe in nuclear disarmament, I am
glad Israel has the atomic bomb, and the continued existence of Israel is
the only cause for which I consider it justifiable to use nuclear weapons.
Let me put this in its starkest and ugliest light: I am not sure, but I
believe that, if the choice were between the survival of Israel and that of
the remaining 4 or 6 billion people of the world, I would choose the 4
million [Jews]." [DELYNN, p. 65]
Such a conviction merits serious attention for many reasons, among them the fact that some American Jews were even instrumental in helping Israel secretly develop its own arsenal of nuclear bombs. Seymour Hersh notes that:
"A few American nuclear physicists were known to have emigrated to
Israel after World War II; one was a veteran of the Manhattan Project
[America's nuclear bomb-making effort] who had worked until 1956 in
the most sensitive areas of nuclear reactor design ... The CIA had even
been tipped off about the fact that Israel was raising large sums of
money for Dimona [the site of Israel's nuclear bomb center] from the
American Jewish community." [HERSH, p. 58]
Among the friends of Ernst David Bergmann (the "founder" of the Israelli atom bomb, whose father was one of leading rabbis in Berlin) was Lewis Strauss, the American Jewish chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s. Strauss knew well of Israel's clandestine efforts to build nuclear weaponry. "Strauss's [Jewish] background and his strong feelings about the Holocaust," notes Seymour Hersh, "cannot be disregarded in analyzing why he did not tell anyone -- especially [his AEC chairman predecessor and eventual head of the CIA] John McCone -- about Dimona. Fair or not, the issue of 'dual loyalty' -- exemplified by Strauss's actions -- has been a very real concern to the American intelligence community since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948." [HERSH, p. 89]
Another Jewish American sometimes mentioned as possibly influential in the development of Israel's nuclear bombs was Zalman Shapiro who had a nuclear fuel processing business in Pennsylvania. Shapiro was an activist in the Zionist Organization of America. In 1965, the Atomic Energy Commission found that 200 pounds of enriched uranium was missing from his company's storehouses. Nothing was ever proven, but the "CIA ... found Shapiro's longstanding ties to Israel to be of continuing interest ... Shapiro, as the CIA and AEC never learned, did have a secret life. He had met and befriended many of Israel's senior nuclear scientists." [HERSH, S., p. 247]
"The dual loyalty question," wrote Anne Roiphe, like Jane DeLynne, in a 1995 volume (which included articles by prominent Jewish authors, including Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League), "is one that anti-Semites use to isolate us politically in America. We're not supposed to discuss it. But the truth is that ... we are only Americans as long as America reins in its anti-Semites. We are Jews forever under all circumstances." [ROIPHE/CHANES, p. 464]
"Under all circumstances." What conclusions should the reasonable, impartial, and just observer make about the following Zionist volume that is published every year in Israel? In English, it is entitled, Who's Who in Israel and Jewish Personalities from All Over the World. More bluntly, however, in its seminal version in Hebrew it is called, Who's Who In Israel and In the Work for Israel Abroad. [See national library online OCLC subfield] Those Jews listed in the volume who are noted to be "working for Israel abroad" include:
* Frank Lautenberg, a Jewish American U.S. senator from New Jersey
and former chairman of the United Jewish Appeal
* Paul Rose, a former member of the British Parliament
* Arne Melchoir, member of the Danish Parliament (and former
member of the Danish Zionist Federation)
* Lionel Stoleru, the Minister of Planning for the French government
(and chairman of the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce)
* Simone Weil, member of the French Parliament (and former president
of that organization)
* Roy Welensky, former Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia
and Nyassland
* Stanley Clinton Davis, a former member of the Belgium Parliament
[A reader of this work states that he was a member of the British Parliament]
[A reader of this work states that he was a member of the British Parliament]
* Michael M. Fidler, former member of the British Parliament
* Benzion Netanyahu, professor of Judaic Studies at Cornell University
and father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
* Fredman Lincoln, president of the Royal Navy Reserve Officer's
Club in England
* Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League
* Stanley Fuld, retired chief judge for the state of New York
* Ezra Kolet, retired Joint Secretary and Chief Controller of Chartering
for the government of India
Others on the list include the Leonard Bernstein (the famous composer), actor Theodore Bikel, Edgar Bronfman (chairman of the World Jewish Congress), and others who live throughout the many countries of the world as judges, newsmen, bankers, lawyers, dentists, real estate moguls, librarians, and other distinguished careers. In 1987, nearly a million adult American Jews (of a total man, woman, and child U.S. population of approximately six million people) felt it important enough to actually register to vote in that year's World Zionist Congress elections. [GOLDBERG, JJ, 9-12-97] By the 1940s, 955,000 American Jews (of a total man, woman, and child population of 5 million) "formally belonged to one of dozens of Zionist organizations." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 126] Yet even those who are not formal members of such organizations often have strong attachments to Zionist policies and the state of Israel. As Kevin Avruch notes about studies of American Jews who immigrated to Israel in the late 1960s and early 1970s: "Anywhere from 40 to 65 percent of all American olim [immigrants to Israel] were not members of any Zionist organization in the United States ... It is important to understand that commitment to Zionist ideology can exist quite separate from a concomitant commitment to Zionist organizations." [AVRUCH, K., 1981, p. 50]
To begin to understand the origins of the insistent Jewish dual loyalty conviction, we must refer of course to Jewish genetic "Chosen People" and "Nation Apart" foundations of identity. As Jewish scholar Will Herberg observes, "Built into [the Jewish] being is a transnational, transcultural, transpolitical dimension that makes him irrevocably and irreducibly 'different.'" [HERBERG, p. 272] But it is also necessary to spotlight another keystone of traditional Jewish identity throughout the world: galut, a Hebrew word meaning "exile." Originally (and for many still today) grounded in religious conviction, the notion of galut has been emphatically renewed in contemporary Zionist secular ideology. The basic premise of galut is that Jews are everywhere estranged and alienated from the people and cultures around them, they are intrinsically unfulfilled and restrained as Jews, this condition is innately irresolvable, and the only true remedy for Jewish dissatisfaction in galutis -- in both religious Orthodoxy and Zionist ideology -- a return to the homeland of Israel. "The golah [galut/exile]," says A.B. Yehoshua in his article entitled Exile as a Neurotic Condition, "and our attitude to it defines the essence of the Jew." [YEHOSHUA, A., p. 15]
"Down through its history," notes the Encyclopedia Judaica, "the feeling of galut has been one of the most permanent and prolific incentives in Jewish thought." [ENCY JUD, v. 7, p. 294] In traditional religious terms, "the very soul of the Jew is affected in the galut, which renders him 'unclean with inequities' (Song R. 8:14) ... The galut detracts from the completeness of the Kingdom of Heaven (Mid. PS to 97:1) ... [ENCY JUD v.7, p. 279] ... From the beginning the galut[starting with the Biblical exile from the Holy Land to Egypt] was a phenomenon which demanded an explanation ... The [religious] sages could not be satisfied with a general answer about the sins of the [Jewish] people, and they gave their opinion about the specified causes of the destruction of the second temple. Unlike the first exile, which resulted in idol worship, incest, and the shedding of innocent blood, the second destruction [of the temple] was caused by baseless hatred and love of money (Yoma 9b)." [ ENCY JUD, v.7, p. 78]
In modern Israel, notes Batya Keinan, an official of the Zionist/Socialist MAPAM party, "The lowest and most disgusting thing you can say about someone in Israel is 'He's galuti,' meaning from the Diaspora and not one of us." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 165] As recently as 2000, the president of Israel, Moshe Katsav, was still publicly calling for Jews worldwide to give up their lives in other countries and move en masse to Israel. [HOFFMAN, G., 9-11-2000]
Samuel Heilman notes this traditional Jewish separatist view in today's ultra-Orthodox:
"Many of [the ultra-Orthodox] tried to remain strangers and sojourners
in the contemporary secular world. That was the essential message they
read in the promise by God in Leviticus 20:26: 'And I will separate you
from the nations to be for Me.' One should not try to be a Frenchman,
a German, an American, or even a secular Israeli or any other kind of
citizen, but always a Jew. The world beyond the Jewish one was
essentially evil and one must 'distance oneself from it ... so as to not
learn its ways.' Jews could never forget that they were in exile."
[HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 18]
"Abraham cut this groove," says Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg,
"and his descendants deepened it. Jews in every era have struggled to
reconcile two opposing inclinations. They have wanted to maintain
a separate and special culture, even as they have wanted to be accepted
by the majority. This desire to be both different and the same is the
root of great turmoil on three levels: It is the source of tension within
the souls of individual Jews who do not know to which culture they
belong; Jewish factions keep quarreling with one another about how
much of the majority culture is admissible before it compromises the
Jewish character; and Jews are always trying to achieve equilibrium
with the rest of society, balancing their otherness with their desire
for inclusion." [HERTZBERG, 1998, p. 49; quoted in O'BRIEN, 2000]
"Abraham cut this groove," says Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg,
"and his descendants deepened it. Jews in every era have struggled to
reconcile two opposing inclinations. They have wanted to maintain
a separate and special culture, even as they have wanted to be accepted
by the majority. This desire to be both different and the same is the
root of great turmoil on three levels: It is the source of tension within
the souls of individual Jews who do not know to which culture they
belong; Jewish factions keep quarreling with one another about how
much of the majority culture is admissible before it compromises the
Jewish character; and Jews are always trying to achieve equilibrium
with the rest of society, balancing their otherness with their desire
for inclusion." [HERTZBERG, 1998, p. 49; quoted in O'BRIEN, 2000]
In 1921, Jewish immigrant Maurice Samuel became an American citizen. Yet Samuel, a prolific author, and a secular Zionist, only three years later wrote:
"If I have long pondered this question of the Jews and gentile it is
because I suspect from the first dawning of Jewish self-consciousness
that Jew and gentile are two worlds, that between you gentiles and us
Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf .... [SAMUEL, You, p. 9] .... I do
not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is
reconcilable." [SAMUEL, You, p. 23]
This ancient religious self-perception of Jewish identity, equally manifest in a secular, usually Zionist, form, has profound impact in mainstream Jewry's general sense of its communal self and its position in the United States. Shalom Carmy notes that "One way of keeping alive a sense of Galut in America is to inculcate an instinct to snideness toward 'their' [non-Jewish] culture, from baseball to apple pie. Another is to limit, as a matter of principle, active concern for the affairs of American society, to cultivate a studied schadenfroh toward the moral adversities that rock it. The most forceful way of nursing an awareness of Galut, however, is to dwell on anti-Semitism." [SHALOM, p. 60-61]
"My own feeling is that Galut is still very much part of the Jewish community," noted Justin Hertog, a faculty member at Vassar College, during an academic conference about the subject, "... My self-conception of my Jewishness is always in tension with my identity as an American. And I presume that most American Jews feel the same ... The assumption that Jews should desire to 'integrate' [into American, or any other, non-Jewish society] seems wrong to me. Why should Jews desire to give up all they have suffered over the millennia? Why should Jews attempt to be like American Christians?" [HERTOG, p. 14] "To be honest," says Janet Kirschheimer, an assistant to the president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, "I have never felt truly American. I grew up in two different worlds: one that diddn't exist any more [her parents were from Germany] and one in which I didn't feel at home [America]." [KIRSCHHEIMER, J., 4-5-01]
"America may be a very comfortable and accommodating exile and many even be favorable to many forms of Jewish creativity," noted Bruce Saposnik of New York University at the same gathering, "Jews will choose to live here both comfortably and Jewishly. They will nevertheless always be living in exile." [SAPOSNIK, p. 37] "Exile diminishes the soul of every Jew -- in Israel or abroad," added Yosef Abramowitz, "who have not found union between the self and her or his Jewish self. Exile diminishes the collectivity of the Jewish people where a union has not been created by Jews ... And Exile, Galut, is Jewish life in America." [ABRAMOWITZ, p. 18] "Deuteronomy 12:29-13:19 is a passage of warning," says Jewish college freshman Steven Stryer, "directed at the Israelites entering Canaan. The problem of assimilation that is addressed are familiar to Jews today, in Israel and the United States." [STRYER, p. 90]
Popular Jewish American author Cynthia Ozick addresses galut and its alienation from non-Jewish culture this way:
"As we more and more pour not only the Jewish sensibility, but the
Jewish vision, into the vessel of English, we achieve the profoundest
invention of all: a language for our need, our possibility, our
overwhelming idea. If out of this new language we can produce a
Yavneh for our generation within an alien culture, we will have made
something worthwhile out of the American Diaspora, however long
or short its duration." [OZICK, p. 34] [Yavneh was town where Jews
were allowed to have a religious academy under Roman rule. "It was
out of Yavneh," says Ozick, "that the definition of Jewish life as a
community in exile was derived." [OZICK, p. 35]
(Meanwhile, in view of this issue of Jewish-American unassimilability and the role of Israel in it all, a note of irony. In 1998 a few hundred people held a rally in front of the offices of the Boston Herald newspaper in protest of an article by (Jewish columnist) Don Feder who had called Puerto Ricans "inassimilable." He "described Puerto Ricans as immigrants -- even though they have been citizens of the United States since 1917 -- and equated Spanish speakers to criminals, welfare recipients, and aliens." The Hispanic protesters demanded a personal apology from Feder, noted the Boston Globe, but "Feder has been in Israel and unavailable for comment." [VALDES-RODRIGUEZ, p. B4] )
David Ben-Gurion, the widely revered first prime minister of modern Israel, once stated that "the basis of Zionism is neither friendship nor sympathy but the love of Israel, of the state of Israel ... It must be unconditional love. There must be complete solidarity with the state and people of Israel." [LILIENTHAL, p. 231] This, of course, underscores a huge, but unspoken, problem in America -- widespread Jewish American sympathy, allegiance, and, for many, primary loyalty to Israel. Jews are numerous in important positions of power throughout American society, including the military and defense contracting firms. In 1996 a Pentagon security office issued an internal memo warning employees about Israeli (and other "close ally" countries) efforts to steal military and intelligence secrets. Jews were singled out as an example of susceptibility, by virtue of their "strong ethnic ties" to the Jewish nation. The Pentagon memo more generally noted that other country's search for spies and traitors focused on "ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and exploitation and identification of individual frailties" of American citizens. "Placing Israeli nationals in key industries," the memo also said, "... is a technique utilized with great success." The warning also cited Israeli theft of optics information and radar test equipment in the past.
By any measure of rational, historical, moral, and experiential examination, the memo addressed a legitimate issue of concern, but modern America is -- for all its 'political correctness' -- completely paralyzed in coping with it. For fear of offending American Jewry for an honest assessment of a reality that the American Jewish community itself has created for its individual members, the Pentagon was positioned as "discriminatory" and had to disavow and condemn the warning when it was leaked to a Jewish magazine. "This Pentagon memo' is a distressing charge," declared Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman, "which impugns American Jews and borders on anti-Semitism." [SMITH, p. A1] Certainly the President of the United States -- beholding to so much Jewish economic and political influence -- cannot speak freely about the issue of Jewish dual loyalty. Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab note that "as recently as 1992 President George Bush complained bitterly that 'thousands' of Presidential lobbyists, obviously mobilized by American Jewish organizations, had descended on Washington to oppose his position on certain loan guarantees ... for Israel. Jews saw this as a dual-loyalty reference, and the President eventually made an apology." [LIPSET/RAAB, p. 128]
With absolutely no one around with the courage to stand up to the charge of "anti-Semitism," Jews are increasingly emboldened to test the limits of dual loyalty tolerance even in American intelligence agencies. In 1999, for example, Adam Ciralsky, a Jewish CIA employee began proceedings to sue the spy unit for anti-Semitism. His lawyer was Neil Sher, the former head of Israel's foremost lobbying organization in America, AIPAC. Ciralsky's loyalties had become suspect to his employer when he failed a lie-detector test when questioned about his family's "contacts with right-wing politicians like Prime Minister Netanyahu," and whether his family donated money to "Israeli government causes." "I think that it is important that he state openly he and his family's support of the [Israeli right-wing] Likud party," noted one commentator in a CIA document. "He may be simply withholding on this issue, because it paints him and his family as extreme supporters of Israeli hard-liners in the Likud Party, and he wishes to avoid being seen as a lover of Israel." [HENRY, M., p.4] Another CIA memo noted that Ciralsky's lack of candor "will not be misunderstood by the CIA, for we are sophisticated and broadminded enough to understand the unique ties that bind American Jews to their brethren in Israel." [HENRY, M., p. 4] The Jerusalem Post noted that Ciralsky's dual loyalty suspicion was "not the first such case. An FBI counterintelligence agent won a six-figure settlement and a lifetime annuity for being suspended after a trip to Israel." [KOHN, M., p. 9B] Ciralsky was investigated, noted a Florida newspaper, because he "did not fully reveal a relationship with two people holding dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, both employees of Israeli defense firms with possible ties to Israeli intelligence." [PRESS JOURNAL, 2-7-2000]
"CIA memos," noted the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "single out Ciralsky's Jewish background, including his proficiency in Hebrew, trips to Israel and a Judaic studies minor in college ... He was also asked about connection to his great-grandfather's first cousin, Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president. He was not, however, asked about a previous internship at AIPAC [Israel's American lobbying organization]." [DORF, 4-14-99, p. 13] For popular American consumption, TV's "60 Minutes" perspective (via Jewish reporter Leslie Stahl) on the Ciralsky case was that "the former CIA lawyer says he is not a spy and was targeted for investigations because he is a religious Jew." [60 MINUTES, online, 2-6-2000]
"[My client's] family visited, they support Israel, they support Jewish causes like the UJA, buying Israel Bonds," Ciralsky's lawyer declared, "If contributing to UJA and Israel Bonds makes one suspicious and questions your loyalty, then the majority of American Jews would be under suspicion." [HENRY, M., p.4]
And here -- the irony of his statement beyond the lawyer's grasp -- we have the crux of the problem, a condition that Zionism is creating for the Jewish community at-large.
In a similar kind of attack, with the legal aid of B'nai B'rith Canada's "League for Human Rights," charges of anti-Semitism in the Canadian armed forces were made in Canada in 1998 by a Jewish naval reserve officer, Andrew Liebman. He was allegedly told in 1991 that, with high tensions in the Middle East, he could not be granted a promotion to a high position in the Arab country of Bahrain during the Persian Gulf War because he was Jewish. The Canadian Forces' policy was "designed," the Forces argued, "to maintain peacekeepers' neutrality and [to] avoid inflating already-tense situations." B'nai B'rith wanted Jews anywhere and everywhere, no matter what the surrounding conditions, and asked a Canadian court to rule that country's policy had been discriminatory and unconstitutional. [CSILLAG, R., p. 3]
Investigations of Jewish loyalties are not unwarranted. The issue of dual loyalty in the spy context, for example, has a very substantial history in the American Jewish community with some disturbing precedents during the post-World War II American-Soviet "Cold War." In recent years, with the collapse of the Soviet Union's communist regime, KGB and FBI archives have been increasingly accessible for scholarly examination and it is has become starkly clear that a large proportion of American spies for communist Russia were Jewish. They were instrumental in helping the Soviet Union secure American nuclear bomb secrets, as well as other espionage. In the 1950s, notes Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, "fear that the Jewishness of so many of the atom-bomb spy suspects would provoke an anti-Semitic reaction led to a defensive attempt [by Jewish organizations] to prove the patriotism of America's Jewish community and 'scare off' Jews who might be attracted to the Left." [RADOSH/MILTON, p. 353]
"What has proven most disturbing," noted the Jewish Exponent in 1999,
"is the picture we have of the extent of the betrayal -- truly overwhelming
in sheer bulk. The fact that many Jewish [American] radicals participated
in espionage [for Russia] sticks in peoples' throats ... Spies, spies
everywhere ... [Recent books about the subject] are invaluable for what
they add to our knowledge of the [Cold War] period and may yet spur a
bout of soul-searching among the remnants of the progressive community
in America, so many of whom were -- and are -- Jewish ... [Such
betrayers] allowed the Soviet Union to develop atomic weapons years
before it may have been [otherwise] possible." [LEITER, p. 46]
Kevin MacDonald notes the 1950s case of Andhil Fineberg of the American Jewish Committee and his exploring of Jewish defensive strategies over the
"repercussions of the fact that the great majority of communist spies
were Jews ... Fineberg suggested that the best way to combat this
threat to Jews was to de-emphasize Jewish group identity of 'good
Jews' like Bernard Baruch as well as a 'bad Jews' like the communist
spies. Identifying people like Bernard Baruch as Jews 'reinforces the
concept of group responsibility' and 'the residue in the mind of the
average American person whom the editorial is intended to influence,
is likely to be, 'But why is it all those atomic spies are all Jews?'
Fineberg argued that an attempt by Communist Party members to
portray their persecution as anti-Semitism would be 'devastating' to
Jews generally and recommended that the AJCommitttee reply to
charges linking Jews and communism to the effect that 'criminals
operate as individuals, not as members of religious or racial groups.'"
[MACDONALD, p. 25]
A variety of people of course functioned as spies during the Cold War, but among the disturbing implications of such recent revelations is that the Soviet side of the Russian spy system was in large part Jewish too; a critical examination of the Soviet transnational spy system points in no small way to Jewish networking. As high-ranking KGB officer Pavel Sudoplatev noted in 1994, "The men and women [in Russia] who were most influential in acquiring atomic bomb secrets for the Soviet Union were all later purged because they were Jewish [i.e., Soviet intelligence officers were eventually driven from the ranks because of allegations of a 'Zionist conspiracy' within it]." [SUDOPLATEV] Or, as Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter noted in 1982:
"Allen Weinstein's study, Perjury, seems to indicate that Jews constituted
a substantial majority of known members of the Soviet underground apparatus
in the United States during the 1930s. Soviet agents whose backgrounds
were probably Jewish include J. Peters, Lee Pressman, Harry Dexter White,
Marian Bachrach, Hedda Gompertz, and many others." [ROTHMAN/
LICHTGER, 1982, p. 100]
"Allen Weinstein's study, Perjury, seems to indicate that Jews constituted
a substantial majority of known members of the Soviet underground apparatus
in the United States during the 1930s. Soviet agents whose backgrounds
were probably Jewish include J. Peters, Lee Pressman, Harry Dexter White,
Marian Bachrach, Hedda Gompertz, and many others." [ROTHMAN/
LICHTGER, 1982, p. 100]
On the American side of the Soviet spy network, perhaps the most famous spy case in American history centered on two Jewish communists -- Ethel and Julius Rosenberg -- who were convicted and executed in 1953 for passing along secrets to the Soviet Union. Harry Gold and David Greenglass were also Jewish accomplices. Until recent intelligence disclosures, for decades many Jews have held that the Rosenbergs "were blameless [and] ... that the couple had been framed by the FBI and had been executed out of a mixture of anti-Semitism and the government's wish to set an example to all self-professed radicals." Recent investigations, however, noted the Jewish Exponent, "had to conclude that their subjects were guilty as charged." [LEITER, 2-4-99, p. 57]
Curiously, "by design or destiny," also said the Exponent, "all the principals in the [Rosenberg] case were Jews. The presiding judge was Irving Kaufman, the prosecutor Irving Saypole was assisted by Roy Cohn, and the defense lawyers were Alexander and Emmanuel Bloch, father and son. To redress the balance, the jury was all gentile." [LUVIA, Y., 7-2-93, p. 1x] (This situation paralleled a similar court case in South Africa, the Rivonia trial, where there was a "prevalence of Jews in the [Communist] Party ... In a striking echo of the Rosenberg Trial in this country," notes David Biale, the prosecuting attorney, Percy Yutar, was himself Jewish and may have been partly motivated to show that Jews could be loyal to the regime.") [BIALE, D., 2000, p. 64]
"The [Rosenberg] jury complexion, noted the Toronto Star in 1986, "has prompted charges that the Rosenbergs were victims of an anti-Semitic cabal." [AGES, A., p. M5] By 1999, however, the Jewish Exponent noted that "with the unearthing of voluminous evidence from the files of the FBI and the Kremlin, those who cling to the notion that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and [Gentile] Alger Hiss were innocent deserve to be compared to people who believe the world is flat." [TOBIN, J., 3-11-95, p. 33]
Peter Novick notes the dimensions of Jewish communist spies in that era:
"Lucy Dawidowicz -- later well known as an historian of the Holocaust, but
in these years the American Jewish Committee's expert on the percentage
of Jews among 'hostile witnesses' before various investigative bodies. Jews,
she found, often made up 75 percent or more of the totals. Worst of all,
producing something near panic among mainstream Jewish organizations,
was the number of Jews figuring in espionage prosecutions: the Amerasia
case, the Canadian Spy Ring, the Judith Coplon case -- culminating in
that ultimate disaster for Jewish public relations, the case of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Harry Gold, and David Greenglass."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 92]
Peter Novick notes the dimensions of Jewish communist spies in that era:
"Lucy Dawidowicz -- later well known as an historian of the Holocaust, but
in these years the American Jewish Committee's expert on the percentage
of Jews among 'hostile witnesses' before various investigative bodies. Jews,
she found, often made up 75 percent or more of the totals. Worst of all,
producing something near panic among mainstream Jewish organizations,
was the number of Jews figuring in espionage prosecutions: the Amerasia
case, the Canadian Spy Ring, the Judith Coplon case -- culminating in
that ultimate disaster for Jewish public relations, the case of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Harry Gold, and David Greenglass."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 92]
There was also Nathan Silvermaster, "a Russian-born economist who worked for the [American] Farm Securities Administration [and] established a network of friends in government to provide Soviets material and to aid the U.S.S.R. during World War II." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 189] Jewish-Russian Isak Akhmerov was the Soviet control officer of Yakov Golos (also Jewish), "the chief organizer of espionage activities through the American communist party." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 219] Gregory Kheifetz, Jewish too and one of the main organizers of the American Communist Party, had worldwide assignments from the Russians. [SUDOPLATOV, p. 84-85] Soviet agent Naum Isakovich Eitingen "used his connections in the [American] Jewish community to obtain new papers and identity." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 79] The Rosenberg's Russian case officer was also Jewish, Sam Semyonov (real name: Abe Taubman).
Controversial, prominent, and fabulously wealthy Jewish entrepreneur and art philanthropist Armand Hammer had long been under suspicion -- he was called by his secretary "the Pimp of the Politburo." [KUROPAS, p. 7] "Armand and his father," notes Edward Epstein, "had become crucial parts of the Soviet clandestine organization [in America] ... [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 103] ... By 1940, British intelligence had developed a lengthy dossier on Hammer. It identified him and his associates as part of the Soviet 'secret regime' in the West." [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 152] FBI files notes that Hammer "had been a Soviet courier," "he had laundered funds for the Soviet Union," "he had helped recruit Soviet spies and position them in the United States government," and "he had been, in the 1920s, a key link in a network that provided money to espionage rings in New York and London." [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 170]
Carl Blumay notes the fundamentally Jewish nature of Hammer's contacts in early Soviet Russia:
"From the moment of his arrival [in Russia] he was surrounded by old
family friends, among them Ludwig Martens, whom Lenin had appointed
to head the Soviet mining industry after his deportation from the United
States; Boris Reinstein, whose functions as Soviet propaganda minister
included serving as guide to visiting Americans; Julius Hammer's
[Armand's father's] partner, Abe Heller, whom the State Department
categorized as 'a notorious Bolshevik'; and the Hammer family's
European representative, Boris Mishell, whose first assignment was to
locate a Mercedes Benz for Armand." [BLUMAY, C., 1992, p. 43]
Maurice Halperin, who while heading "the research department of the Office of Strategic Services, America's main intelligence agency at the time, gave hundreds of American diplomatic cables to the KGB." [LEITER, p. 46] Bella Gold in the U.S. Commerce Department and Sonya Gold in the U.S. Treasury Department [WEINSTEIN, A.; VASSILEV, p. 167] were among those working with the aforementioned Nathan Silvermaster, a U.S. Treasury Department official who was also working as a Soviet espionage "group handler."
Theodore Hall (also Jewish: original last name Holtzberg), while working on the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico, was "the only American scientist known to have given the Soviet Union details on the design of an atom bomb." [ALBRIGHT/KUNSTEL, p. 9-17] In 1945, Philip Jaffe, editor of Amerasia magazine, was arrested by the FBI. "Jaffe," noted the Jewish Exponent, "[was] a committed sympathizer [and had] contacts with Soviet intelligence agents and said he wanted to spy for them." [LEITER, 8-22-96]
The only known U.S. Congressman to have spied (beginning in 1937) for the Russians was also Jewish, Samuel Dickstein, for fifteen years a Democratic Congressman from New York, and later a judge. The Russian NKVD (precursor to the KGB) codenamed Dickstein "the Crook" because of his "mercenary instincts." Consummate hypocrite and deceiver, Congressman Dickstein was also "the founding father" of the (HUAC) House Un-American Activities Committee -- the organization that sought to expose Russian communist agents in American government and popular culture in the 1950s. [GUARDIAN, 1-27-99, p. 6] (Ten of the nineteen people subpoenaed by HUAC were Jewish, as were six of the ten who were indicted by the committee). [NAVASKY, p. 113]
Among non-Jewish Americans spying for the Soviets were some whose espionage roots revolved around sexual affairs with Jewish Russian agents: Elizabeth Bentley was the aforementioned Jacob Golos' lover. [WEINSTEIN/VASSELIV, p. 84] Martha Dodd's partner was Soviet agent Boris Vinogradov. In Bentley's case, after Golos died, she defected from the espionage ranks. Jewish Soviet agent Joseph Katz was assigned the task of killing her, but the murder was never carried out. [WEINSTEIN/VASSELIV, p. 108] In Dodd's case, she never knew that her love affair with Vinogradov was being directed from Moscow. She eventually married wealthy Jewish-American businessman Alfred Stern, who also became involved in Soviet espionage activities. Stern was influential in setting up a music business, with a Jewish-American Hollywood producer, Boris Morros, as a front for Soviet espionage efforts. "Most Americans who spied for Moscow during the 1930s," notes Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vasselev, "were antifascist admirers of the Soviet Union whose involvement in espionage had ideological roots. There were two noteworthy exceptions, one a U.S. Congressman [the aforementioned Samuel Dickstein] and the other a Hollywood producer [Boris Morros]. [Both] offered their services as Soviet agents for a price tag." [WEINSTEIN/VASSILEV, photo section] Even Marilyn Monroe's Jewish psychoanalyst, Ralph Greenson, was secretly an agent for the communist Comintern. (Monroe had a series of romantic affairs with the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and innocently shared information she gleaned from him with Greenson). [WOLFE, D., p. 384]
In later years, the only known Soviet spy to have penetrated the CIA (1973-77), described "in intelligence circles ... as one of the most important spies in United States history" was Karl Koecher. He was also Jewish. Koecher, notes Ronald Kessler, "gave his Czech handlers and the KGB details of dozens of 'top secret' CIA operations targeted at the Soviets and U.S. allies alike. He supplied them with classified CIA documents, lists of photographs of CIA employees in the United States and overseas and names of U.S. government officials who might be blackmailed into cooperating with the Soviets." Koecher and his wife Hana were enjoyed their American stay in the fullest of ways; they were extremely active in group sex orgies, nudist retreats, and wife-swapping events. [KESSLER, 4-17-88, p. C1]
There were a significant number of Jews working on the American Los Alamos nuclear bomb project, including some from other countries like Hans Berthe, Emilio Segre, and Edward Teller. (Jewish equivalents in England included Rudolf Peierls). Such Jewish immigrants were so important in the development of the bomb that Richard Rhodes, in his Pulitzer-prize winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, devotes an entire chapter to their "exodus" from Europe, particularly Germany and Hungary. Jewish scientists involved in the bomb, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, even managed to get Jewish economist Alexander Sachs to convey to President Franklin D. Roosevelt the urgency of building the nuclear weapon. A colleague jokingly called immigrant Jewish bomb developers Szilard, Teller, and Eugene Wigner "the Hungarian conspiracy." [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 306, 308]
The director of the atomic bomb program was also Jewish, J. Robert Oppenheimer. "I had had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of the Jews in Germany," he once said. [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 445] The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, for that matter, in that era was also Jewish, David Lilienthal. "The most vital information for developing the first atomic bomb," says former top KGB official Pavel Sudoplatov, "came from scientists designing the American atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico -- Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 172] (Of the three, Fermi was not Jewish, but his wife was). Jewish Soviet agents Gregory Kheifetz and Elizabeth Zarubin "persuaded Oppenheimer to share information with 'antifascists of German origin' ... Oppenheimer, together with Fermi and Szilard, helped [the Soviets] place moles in Tennessee, Los Alamos, and Chicago as assistants in those three [nuclear] labs." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 190] Others seminally influential with Oppenheimer included Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels and Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer (later murdered in Soviet purges) -- Russian nationals on a tour of the United States with the Moscow Yiddish State Art Theatre. [SUDOPLATOV, p. 188] Soviet intelligence noted in 1944 that Oppenheimer, head of America's nuclear weapon program, was a "secret member" of the American Communist Party. [WEINSTEIN/VASSILEV, p. 183-184] For Szilard's part, the army's head of atomic bomb security, Leslie Richard Groves, thought the scientist was "the kind of man that any employer would have fired as a troublemaker." "Groves," says Richard Rhodes, "seems to attributed Szilard's brashness to the fact that he was a Jew." [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 502] Groves also suspected the scientist of being a spy and had him put under surveillance, but caught him doing nothing illegal. [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 506-507]
(Jewish involvement in weapons to invoke "holocausts" are a steady theme. In later years the "father of the neutron bomb" was also Jewish: Samuel Cohen. "Few people know the man behind the neutron bomb," noted the New York Times in 1982, "J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, the key scientists in the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, are well known but only dedicated students of weaponry have heard of Mr. Cohen.") [NEW YORK TIMES, 3-28-82, sec. 1, p. 34]
(Jewish involvement in weapons to invoke "holocausts" are a steady theme. In later years the "father of the neutron bomb" was also Jewish: Samuel Cohen. "Few people know the man behind the neutron bomb," noted the New York Times in 1982, "J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, the key scientists in the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, are well known but only dedicated students of weaponry have heard of Mr. Cohen.") [NEW YORK TIMES, 3-28-82, sec. 1, p. 34]
On the Soviet side of the Russian-American spy rings, "the [Russian] men and women who were most influential in acquiring atomic secrets for the Soviet Union were all later purged because they were Jewish." [SCHECHTER, p. 301] These early 1950s purges in Russia (centering on alleged Zionist intrigue in the Russian intelligence agency and other departments) began with the alleged "confessions" of Naum Shvartsmann, whose own job was to edit "falsified confessions extracted from prisoners." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 300-301] Brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin grew suspicious of increasing Russian Jewish interest in the new nation of Israel. The principal focus of this concern was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization created to raise support for the Soviet Union from western Jewry in lobbying other governments against the threat of Hitler. But, to Stalin's chagrin, the JAC soon "brought an extraordinary stirring of Jewish consciousness in its own ranks, reflecting the prevalent mood of Soviet Jewry as a whole ... [It expressed] feelings of [Jewish] national solidarity and Jewish pride ... They were frequently so carried away by their faith and enthusiasm as to overlook the JAC dominant objective, namely, that of spreading Soviet propaganda ... JAC speakers and writers increasingly resorted to biblical imagery, Talmudic references, and Jewish historic symbols." [GILBOA, p. 46-48] Soviet poet Perets Markish, for example, publicly talked about "Jewish brothers" around the world, declaring that "we are one people, and now we are becoming one army." [GILBOA, p. 47] For Stalin, the JAC was turning into a anti-communist threat. Voices were also heard around the world like that of Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz who announced that, "Let us remember that if we do our full duty, we not only help to smash Hitlerism, but bring back Russian Jewry to the fold of Israel." [author's italics: GILBOA, p. 54]
Shortly after the founding of Israel in 1948, Foreign Minister Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union. Her arrival, notes Stuart Kahan, "brought with it a welcome far beyond anything contemplated. Soviet Jews poured into the streets of Moscow. They surrounded her hotel day and night. Her very appearance brought thunderous roars of approbation. Stalin was in shock. He called an emergency meeting: 'The Jews have still not been able to adapt themselves or become acclimatized like other minorities. Only very few can -- or want to ... They constitute an ever present danger. Every Muscovite Jew has foreign connections. We are threatened by the danger of Zionism.'" [KAHAN, S., p. 250] Among those deeply moved by Meir's visit was Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Joshua Rubenstein notes that Zhemchuzhina met
"members of the Israeli delegation at a diplomatic reception ... [and]
she could hardly restrain herself. 'I've heard you attend the synagogue,'
Zhemchuzhina told Golda Meir, speaking in Yiddish. 'Very good. Keep
going. The Jews want to see you.' When Meir asked how she knew
Yiddish so well, Zhemchuzhina proudly responded, 'Ich bin a Yiddische
tochter' (I am a daughter of the Jewish people), a phrase she repeated
several times. Zhemchuzhina asked about life in Israel, about the Negev
[desert], and conditions on the kibbutzim. She parted from them with
tears in her eyes, saying, 'I wish all will go well for you there and then
it will be good for all Jews.' " [Rubenstein, J., p. 262]
Zhemchuzhina herself was arrested by Soviet security a couple months later and sent into exile.
Although Zionism was banned in Russia under tsarist rule, Nora Levin notes that in the year of the Russian revolution, 1917, the Zionist movement had 300,000 members (of a total Jewish population of 3.5 million) in 1,200 chapters throughout the country. [LEVIN, N., 1988, p. 3, 7] Zionism prevailed in many pan-Jewish organizations -- for example, 60% of the vote in the All-Russian Jewish Congress. In nine Ukrainian provinces, in 193 kehillas (traditional Jewish self-governing bodies), 36% (the largest number of any ideological group) of the delegates were Zionists. "When the Bolsheviks took power," notes Nora Levin, "Zionism was unquestionably the dominant movement in Russian Jewish life." [LEVIN, N. 1988, p. 7, 87] Zionism's free expression after the Russian revolution was stifled by 1919, however, when the new communist government perceived the demands of expressly Jewish nationalism to be a threat. That year the new government also began forcing Zionist offices to close. Communist Party leader V.I. Lenin had called Jewish demands for national autonomy a "Zionist idea ... [one which] is reactionary in its political implications." [LEVIN, N., 1988, p. 17] "There is no doubt," says professor Norma Levin, "that had the [Russian] anti-Zionist campaign been relaxed, many Jews would have joined or rejoined Zionist groups, thus crippling communist control." [LEVIN, N. 1988, p. 94]
The theme of purges of various dissidents, real and imagined, in communist ranks, is a continuous one in Soviet history. Jews were periodically one of the major targets. Ironically, anti-Zionist purges in the 1930s "were all under [Jewish communist leader Lazar Kaganovich's] orchestration, and he relished it ... All Jewish cultural institutions were liquidated. The Communist Party apparatus and the ministries at all levels were purged of Jewish personnel." In the later anti-Zionist purge, prominent Russian Jewish leader S. M. Mikhoels "was shot to death in Minsk ... the order had been given by Lazar with Stalin's approval." [KAHAN, S., p. 250]
Common Jewish-enforced convention in the West holds that Stalin's anti-Zionist purge (and others in Soviet history) was rooted in baseless anti-Semitism. (Jews, of course, were not the only ones subject to brutal purges in the Russian communist past. As Jonathan Franklin notes, "it would be totally erroneous to suggest that the Jews were the only victims of the purges. Initially, at least in the years 1949-51, those communists suspected of national deviation ... were in the greatest danger and, throughout, 'Titoism' remained a major form of anathema held in readiness to fall almost at random on the leaders of the [communist] bloc countries." [FRANKLIN, J., p. 320] ) Philosemitic former KGB official Pavel Sudoplatov, whose perspective is that of a man with a Jewish wife who was a lieutenant in the Russian spy organization, condemns the 1950s anti-Zionist purge as unwarranted. Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff notes, however, that "any Jew who does not absolutely denounce Zionism can, with some truth, be charged with accepting it. By this interpretation, the [Zionist] movement is [in 1969] strong in the Soviet Union." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 87]
Or, as Sylvia Rothchild notes:
"In 1965, Elie Wiesel was in Moscow in time to witness the Simchat
Torah celebration. He was astonished to find crowds of young people
dancing and singing in front of the synagogue on Arkhipova Street,
as he reports 'openly celebrating their faith in the people of Israel.'"
[ROTHCHILD, S., 1985, p. 19]
Whatever the case, the charge of "Zionist conspiracy" as a "fifth column" looms as an endless, terrible cycle. Those with primary allegiance to the Jewish state invariably create suspicion in others for all Jews in positions of political power. Those Jews innocent of Zionist allegiance nonetheless gravitate towards Israel as insurance against anti-Jewish hostility. Hence, the problem -- in a self-fulfilling loop -- grows like the nature of anti-Semitism itself: Gentile suspicion of, and outrage at, Jewish alienation and intrigue, followed in consequence by further Jewish alienation, followed by further Gentile alienation, and so forth. Prominent Jewish Russian Zionist Natan Sharansky (famous among international Jewry for his fight to emigrate to Israel) stated the problem succinctly: "I loved Russian culture ... but I was a Jew because of anti-Semitism." When Sharansky was interrogated by the KGB for his Zionist activities, he writes that "I was eager to show the agent that I was a loyal citizen just like him, although I already knew in my heart that wasn't true." [SHARANSKY, p. xiv]
With the Soviet purge of Jews in its intelligence ranks, 50 colonels and generals were arrested, including the Deputy Minister of Security, Andrej Sverdlov, son of the first president of the Soviet Union. Such Jewish characters as Grigori Maironovsky, head of the "top secret toxicological laboratory" who had "personally liquidated a number of the most important enemies of the Communist Party and the Soviet government" [SUDOPLATOV, p. 279] also met their ends. Jews, notes Sudoplatev, were deeply entrenched in the communist elite everywhere: "Key members of the Politburo like Voroshilov and Molotov had Jewish wives; Kaganovich was Jewish." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 300] (Even in America, Earl Browder, for many years the head of the American Communist Party, had a Jewish wife, Raissa Berkman. Polish communist strongman Wladeslaw Gomulka also had a Jewish wife.) [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 82]
Although there was also a purge of Zionist Jews in the Soviet system in 1922-23 (particularly members of the Politzi Zion: "Police of Zion"), by 1933 "in every major ministry at the time, Jews held top positions." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 288] By 1937, "some students of the Kremlin power struggle put the number of Jewish military officers executed at 500, not less than twenty of them generals." In power struggles not solely aimed at Jews, one-third of the 75,000 Red Army officers were purged from the ranks of communist leadership. [LITVINOFF, B., p. 79] In September 1948, not long after the declaration of the founding of the new nation of Israel, a Jewish Communist Party member, Ilya Ehrenburg (later an elected member of the elite Supreme Soviet), "published a bitter tirade in Pravda against those Jews who looked with approval at Israel and Zionism." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 84]
In Czecheslovakia, Rudolf Slansky, the Vice-Premier of the country, and "considered the most powerful man in the country" was put on trial in 1952 along with the Deputy Ministers of National Defense, State Security, Foreign Trade, and Finance. Of the 14 on trial, 11 were Jewish. Romania's Jewish Foreign Minister, Anna Pauker, also were tried. "Large numbers of Rumanian Jews," notes Barnet Litvinoff, "were imprisoned on the grounds of Zionist activities." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 90] One Jewish Czech of intrigue, Otto Katz, had "developed a number of Communist cells in the Hollywood film community and was a key participant in the conspiracy to kill Foreign Minister Masaryk. He was executed during the Slansky purges." [GREENBERG, M., p. 44]
Indictments against Slansky and other Jewish communist leaders in Europe stemmed in large part from association with American Jews (and self-proclaimed communists) Noel and Hermann Field, who were involved in a variety of European intrigues and were ultimately imprisoned for allegedly spying for the United States. [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 76-85]
Further along in the Soviet spy world, other Jewish Soviet intelligence operators in America included George Gamo, who provided Moscow with "the names of left wing [American] students who might be recruited to supply secret information," [SUDOPLATOV, p. 192] Lev Vasilevsky, who from Mexico City headed efforts to get information from nuclear bomb director Oppenheimer, and Leonid Eitingon, who set up two Polish Jewish agents on America's west coast. The early lead scientist in Moscow's intelligence agency who studied stolen atomic spy secrets was also Jewish, Yakov Petrovich Terletsky.
Fleeing Stalinism, the most prominent Soviet spy ever to defect to America, General Alexander Orlov (originally Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin) was also Jewish. In the 1930s Orlov set up a Soviet spy school outside of Barcelona. An American Jew, Morris Cohen, "became one of the elitist of the elite at the special school," [ALBRIGHT, p. 31] and Cohen's first Russian spy controller in New York was also Jewish, the aforementioned Semyon Semyonov. [ALBRIGHT, p. 33] "Why [defector] Orlov never told American authorities about Cohen after the general received asylum in the United States in mid-1938 remains Orlov's secret." [ALBRIGHT, p. 32] Senator James O. Eastland once called Orlov "the highest ranking officer of the Soviet State Security [later KGB] ever to come to the side of the free world." Yet, with access these days to KGB archives, in an entire 1993 volume about Orlov, John Costello and Oleg Tsarev assert that "Orlov had played a subtle game of wits, first with the FBI and then with CIA interrogators. This enabled the Soviet agents he recruited and former colleagues he could have identified to continue clandestine operations against the West. Orlov's case was therefore a classic: it was the record of a man squeezed between divided loyalties with little room to maneuver." [COSTELLO/TSAREV, p. 10-11, p. xi, xii] (Other prominent Soviet Jews who defected to the U.S. were Valter Krivitsky (Samuel Ginzburg) and Ignati Reis (Natan Poretsky). [VAKSBERG, p. 97] )
From Poland, Jozef Swiatlo, also Jewish,
"won international fame on account of his defection in 1953. [He] was
head of Section One [in the Polish government], which dealt with foreign
intelligence services and their infiltration into key party and state
positions." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 70-71]
Another Polish Jew, Jerzy Bryn, a diplomat, attempted to defect from Poland to the West, changed his mind, and was sentenced to life in prison for treason. [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 152]
Elsewhere, the "most senior Soviet intelligence officer ever convicted in America," Colonel Rudolf Abel, [ALBRIGHT, p. 245] was also Jewish, later freed in 1962 in exchange for American spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers. Likewise, the "Resident Director of all Soviet spy networks in France between World Wars I and II" was Jewish, Ignace Reiss. [GREENBERG, M., p. 44]
In Britain, shockingly, the fifth Soviet spy known to have penetrated British intelligence was an heir to the fabulously wealthy capitalist Rothschild fortune, Nathaniel Meyer Victor Rothschild. An entire volume, entitled "The Fifth Man," about his betrayal was published in 1994. Rothschild "supplied espionage material to the Russians on work in everything from nuclear weaponry and radar to germ warfare developments at the biological center." [PERRY, p. xxii] Roland Perry also notes that Rothschild "was camouflaged as the Fifth Man by virtue of his powerful position in the [British] Establishment. The vast wealth of his banking dynasty embedded him in the power elite more than the other members of the [spy] Ring of Five. It was a perfect cover and served to shield him. He seemed the epitome of the ruling class in twentieth century Britain, and therefore the least likely to be a traitor ... Rothschild was more loyal to his Jewish heritage than anything English ... Rothschild assisted in the creation of a homeland [Israel] for the Jews who had been dispossessed [in Europe]." [PERRY, p. xl]
Another of the preeminent five Soviet spies in Great Britain was (non-Jew) Kim Philby. Alice Kohlman, notes the Jerusalem Post, was "the Jewish woman who had been Kim Philby's first wife, and by some accounts, instrumental in leading the young Philby to work as a Soviet agent." [ARAD, p. 21] Klaus Fuchs is another non-Jewish spy who served ten years in a British prison. A Jewish espionage associate, Ruth Werner (born Kuczynski), was never caught.
Canada? Erna Paris notes that
"The highest ranking Jew in the Canada Communist Party was Sam
Carr [born Shloime Kogan] ... Carr's crucial role as principal recruiter
of Soviet spies was revealed in the 1946 Royal [Canadian] Commission
on Espionage." [PARIS, p. 171]
Canada also had its own Jewish Congressman-traitor:
"The man who actually transmitted Canadian atomic information
to Russia was Fred Rose (born Rosenberg), the only communist
MP [Member of Parliament] ... The effects of Rose's conviction
ricocheted through the Jewish community of Montreal ... The
primarily Jewish voters of Cartier [an area in Montreal] ... found
themselves represented in Parliament by a convicted spy." [PARIS, p.
174, 175, 181]
Upon release from prison in 1951, Rose moved to communist Poland. [PARIS, p. 176]
Communist East Germany? "Markus Wolf, the mastermind of former East Germany's spy network" was in 1993 "charged with treason, espionage, and bribery." In recent years, noted the Associated Press, Wolf "has had more appreciation of his Jewish roots." [COSTELLO, K., 5-3-93]
In the years leading up to, and during, World War II, a Polish Jew, Leopold Trepper, headed a Soviet spy ring (known as the "Red Orchestra") in western Europe that was able to infiltrate the Nazi General Staff in the early 1940s. Trepper was an early member of the Zionist Hechalutz organization. [PERRAULT, p 16] Likewise, in the early 1930s, another Jewish communist, Isiah Bir (nicknamed "Fantomas") headed a Soviet spy ring in France. His number two man in command, Alter Strom, was also Jewish. [PERRAULT, p. 18]
In Trepper's network, in earlier years, a traitor to his organization was an unnamed Dutch Jew, a "former head of a Soviet Spy ring in the United States." [PERRAULT, p. 21] Trepper's spy network, notes Gilles Perrault, consisted of "a high proportion of Jews." [PERRAULT, p. 49] These included Leo Grossvogel, Jules Jasper, "Camille," the Sokols, Abraham Raichman, "Captain" Gurevich, and many others. Trepper survived the war and, under the alias Leiba Domb, became a publisher, specializing in "Jewish classical literature." [PERRAULT, p. 509]
During World War I, Dr. Isaac Strauss, a Jewish spy for Germany, was arrested in the United States. [BENDERSKY, J., 2000, p. 56] Incredibly, there were even Jewish spies working for Hitler's Aryan fascism, some of whom "had prewar careers as criminals ... The fact that several were so easily 'turned' [to work for Hitler] suggests that opportunism, rather than ideology, was often the dominant motive." Such spies included Hans Arnheim (sentenced to death in 1940 by the French who captured him) and Joseph Jakobs (part-Jewish; sentenced to death by the British in 1941). Rudolph Korda, a Hungarian-Jewish journalist, also headed a German spy ring til 1942. Karl Molnar (described as "part Jew"), chief of the Hungarian intelligence in Istanbul, was "a valuable collaborator with the Abwehr [the Nazi intelligence organization]." Ivan Lissner, described as "a German half-Jew," was a collaborator in Germany itself; he was even a Nazi party member. In Shanghai, Hans Mosberg served Nazi spy interests. "The terrible fact," noted the Jerusalem Post, "remains that their actions contributed, each in his own degree, to the Nazis' anti-Jewish and anti-human war machine." [WASSERSTEIN, B., 4-9-99, p. 5B]
* In 1999, Iran tersely rejected the formal protests lodged by the French minister of France "that the arrest [of 13 Iranian] Jews [on accusations of spying for Israel] was intolerable." The ambassador "summoned the Iranian ambassador [in France] to express France's anger." [INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, 6-22-99, p. 4] This small item meriting international attention and formal French "outrage" bears further scrutiny. Most such news reports on the subject neither itemized the charges against the Jews, nor evidence for or against them. As always, the reportage of such an occasion, with no context whatsoever, merely encourages the reader to absorb between the lines evidence of yet another case of endemic, irrational anti-Semitism. This time from Iran. Yet there are strong historical contexts and precedents for such accusation. Israel's Mossad was long prominent in the former Iranian Shah's secret police network (See later chapter). As recently as March 1998 too, three Mossad agents made the news after trying to bug a Muslim activist's home in London. Only a few days later another four Israeli spy members were arrested in Switzerland after bugging another Lebanese Muslim's home. These incidents, and the failed attempt to assassinate an anti-Israel Hamas official in Jordan, forced the head of Mossad, Danny Yatom, to resign. [MAHNAIMI, U., 1998]
And there has always been widespread Israeli spying on Arab countries, using Israeli Jews who originally came from those very lands.
Take for example, Israel's original spying unit on Arabs called Shin Mem 18, [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 43] created for the "infiltration and implantation of Israeli agents in Arab countries." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 43] Or take for example the case of Yolande Harmer, "born in Egypt to a Turkish-Jewish mother," who" posed as a journalist in her home country and took "on a succession of lovers, some of them simultaneously, mostly from Egypt's rich and powerful and from the foreign diplomatic corps in Cairo." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 61]
In 1998, the Times of London noted the profoundly ruthless and dedicated degree that Israeli espionage can go. In a newly-discovered story, the paper revealed that "members of an Israeli undercover unit in the 1950s went so far as to marry Muslim women and have children by them to ward off suspicion ... The unit was designed for long-term espionage. Its members, Sephardim from a variety of Arab countries, were taught to speak in Palestinian accents ... Ironically, because they had been so rigorously taught the Koran, some became teachers, which gave them perfect cover for spying." [WALKER, C., 9-30-98] (So, when seemingly ridiculous Polish communist-era "antisemitic and anti-Zionist propaganda" proclaimed that "Jews had been instructed by their 'world center' command post to marry Polish girls in order to gain influence over the population and thus be able to pursue their subversive and espionage activities more effectively," what are we toreasonably think of it? [CHEMCINSKI, M., 1982, p. 217]
Other Israeli spying units (later blending into today's Mossad) using indigenous Arab-speaking Jews included Shai (the Arab Division of the Jewish Agency political department) and Palmach's "Arab Platoon." In the 1950s an Israeli spy, Major Avraham Dar, "recruited a group of Egyptian Jewish youngsters and set up underground [Zionist] cells in Cairo and Alexandria." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 108] In 1954 "the [Jewish] Egyptian network embarked on its bombing spree ... [However] a bomb went off prematurely in the pocket of one of the group, Philip Natanson, as he was about to enter the Rio Cinema in Alexandria. Natanson was arrested and that night the Egyptian security police arrested the rest of the network: Dr. Moshe Marzuk, Shmuel Azzar, Marcelle Ninio, Victor Levi, Robert Dassa, Meir Za'afran, Meir Meynhas, Eli Ya'akov, and Azzar Cohen." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 111]
Quite possibly echoing the recent Jewish-Iranian spy accusation, Israeli intelligence "activated a wide range of European contacts to try to improve the treatment or obtain the release of the Cairo defendants. Among those approached were French parliamentarians such as Coure de Marville and Daniel Maier and leading British and French lawyers." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 113] The West German government was even persuaded to act on behalf of one of the Israeli spies, Max Binnet, recognizing his questionable German citizenship. "After his death," note Ian Black and Benny Morris, "in a rare piece of inter-Arab intelligence cooperation, the Iraqis informed Cairo that Binnet ... had been mentioned in the 1951 Mossad ring trial in Baghdad [regarding] the extensive spy network that had operated in Iraq and Iran." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 113] In 1965, in another situation, Eli Cohn, born and raised in Egypt, was the "first Israeli spy caught and executed as an Israeli." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 48]
In Morocco, in the 1950s "hundreds of Jewish volunteers were mobilized in a Mossad-led Jewish self-defense organization." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 176] "Over 100 [Jewish Moroccans] went abroad -- mostly to Israel -- for military training, though some were trained in Morocco itself: cells and 'units' were organized in the main towns (eventually there were twelve local units); arms were bought and dispensed in underground caches ... The members were trained in the uses of pistols, sub-machine guns and knives. At its height [the Jewish Moroccan secret cell] had 600 members (and in Algeria and Tunisia, another 600 altogether)." [MORRIS/BLACK, p. 176]
Zionist intrigue in Eastern Europe? From the early years of the Israeli state, note Ian Black and Benny Morris, "new Jewish immigrants [to Israel] from behind the Iron Curtain, Israeli diplomatic missions, and Jewish communities in Eastern Europe all served as valuable sources of intelligence." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 136]
In response to French parliamentary speaker Laurent Fabius' recent call to release the imprisoned Iranian Jews before a trial, Iran's Tehran Times responded, saying that "Mr. Fabius is probably under the influence of Zionists." [AGENCE PRESSE FRANCE, 7-3-99] Fabius too is of Jewish heritage.
ADDITIONS:
"80 per cent had watched a programme of Jewish interest [in the past year], 53 per cent had read a book on a Jewish topic, while just 10 per cent had not participated in any kind Jewish cultural activity or bought a piece of Judaica of any kind. A third had attended a Jewish lecture, and one in five a synagogue adult-education programme; 24 per cent had been to a Jewish film, theatre or music event; and 24 per cent had visited a Jewish museum outside the UK. Around 60 per cent had been to at least one Jewish educational or cultural event."
"More than half of those surveyed had done some type of voluntary work for their synagogue or another Jewish organisation in the past year ... As many as 13 per cent had served as a trustee on a Jewish charity."
"Forty-six per cent attached highest priority to Jewish causes in the UK; 20 per cent to general British charities; 14 per cent to Israel; and 11 per cent equally to Jewish and Israeli charities."
"'What is absolutely apparent,' the report comments, 'is that London Jews have long sinced ceased to comprise a religious group. They are truly an ethnie (ethnic group) within British society, with shared historical memories, a myth of common ancestry ... and an overall sense of solidarity."
"London Jews also like to be near other Jews. More than 97 per cent in North and North West London say they know of another Jewish resident in the same street, while more than half (two-thirds in the North West) have a next-door Jewish neighbor. More than 80 per cent in the North East, and more than 90 per cent in the North West, have a Jewish neighbour within three doors away." [Note: South London percentages are much, much smaller -- poorer part of town?]
"More than 90 per cent think it important for their children to mix with in Jewish social groups, and 89 per cent are willing to send their children on an Israel trip -- an "amazingly high" figure, the report notes, given the conflict in the Middle East."
FROM: The Way We Live Now, Jewish Chronicle [Great Britain], December 6, 2002, p. 31
ADDITIONS:
"80 per cent had watched a programme of Jewish interest [in the past year], 53 per cent had read a book on a Jewish topic, while just 10 per cent had not participated in any kind Jewish cultural activity or bought a piece of Judaica of any kind. A third had attended a Jewish lecture, and one in five a synagogue adult-education programme; 24 per cent had been to a Jewish film, theatre or music event; and 24 per cent had visited a Jewish museum outside the UK. Around 60 per cent had been to at least one Jewish educational or cultural event."
"More than half of those surveyed had done some type of voluntary work for their synagogue or another Jewish organisation in the past year ... As many as 13 per cent had served as a trustee on a Jewish charity."
"Forty-six per cent attached highest priority to Jewish causes in the UK; 20 per cent to general British charities; 14 per cent to Israel; and 11 per cent equally to Jewish and Israeli charities."
"'What is absolutely apparent,' the report comments, 'is that London Jews have long sinced ceased to comprise a religious group. They are truly an ethnie (ethnic group) within British society, with shared historical memories, a myth of common ancestry ... and an overall sense of solidarity."
"London Jews also like to be near other Jews. More than 97 per cent in North and North West London say they know of another Jewish resident in the same street, while more than half (two-thirds in the North West) have a next-door Jewish neighbor. More than 80 per cent in the North East, and more than 90 per cent in the North West, have a Jewish neighbour within three doors away." [Note: South London percentages are much, much smaller -- poorer part of town?]
"More than 90 per cent think it important for their children to mix with in Jewish social groups, and 89 per cent are willing to send their children on an Israel trip -- an "amazingly high" figure, the report notes, given the conflict in the Middle East."
FROM: The Way We Live Now, Jewish Chronicle [Great Britain], December 6, 2002, p. 31
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