Does American Jewish political engagement reflect a shtetl outlook?

I took Lizzy Ratner's recent blog, In the beloved Old Country, a Jew has visions of her homeland, to be a satire on Zionism, somewhat in the vein of Swift's famous "modest proposal." Unfortunately, or perhaps by intent, Lizzy stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest. And yet that may be for the good, because in one of her comments she raises an important question. Conjuring up "Zionists or ultra-religious folk who might happen to be reading this," she says, "they’ll accuse me of the greatest crime of all: of failing to understand the lessons of the Holocaust, of shrugging off centuries of hate."

And isn't that the real question? What exactly are the "lessons of the Holocaust?" What lessons have been learned, and are the lessons that were learned those that should have been learned? For Neocons, the obvious lesson is that Jews need a Fortress Israel that they can withdraw to in time of persecution. I have actually had highly-educated and intelligent Jews tell me that--if persecution should arise they can always flee to Israel. Like, if they're American neighbors start forming into murderous anti-Semitic mobs they'll somehow be safe crammed cheek by jowl into a tiny Levantine state, in a world awash in nuclear weapons. The Neocon response to this objection, of course, is to enlist the United States in a global search and destroy mission to level any country that expresses hostility to Israel. I submit, without denying the real threats that face Jews, that that is a mistaken lesson, a false lesson.

I've always favored an historical approach to understanding any human situation. For that reason, the seemingly endless Jewish - Polish recriminations actually serve a useful purpose: Santayana was correct, that those who are ignorant of history--or have misunderstood history and drawn mistake lessons from history--are condemned to relive or repeat history. That should be a very sobering thought when the history we're speaking of happens to be a mass genocide, the Holocaust.

So let me state what may seem a controversial view: the beginning of wisdom for Jews in understanding the Holocaust and, thus, in drawing correct lessons from the Holocaust, may lie in coming to a critical but sympathetic understanding of Polish realities as well as in a critical self understanding. Too often, it seems to me, the Holocaust has been simplified to the level of "they hated us for no reason," and those who seek deeper understanding are written off, as Lizzy says, as "shrugging off centuries of hate." Albert Lindemann, in Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (a book I highly recommend), has framed the issue with precision:

An underlying issue in these contrasting views [of Jews and Gentiles] has to do with the responsibility of the Jews in history for their destiny and their being: Have they been wholly helpless and passive objects, without responsibility for their misfortunes, or have their actions and decisions in some substantial sense been their own, as active, conscious subjects in history, entailing some degree of responsibility? The inclination to picture Jews as perennially helpless victims, in no sense responsible for the ills that have afflicted them, has often been part of an unsophisticated and transparently defensive reflex. the popular writer Howard Fast concludes his book The Jews, The Story of a People, with this remark: "Such despair and agony as the Jewish people had to endure over the past thousand years is the result, not of what they are, but of what the Christian world has inflicted upon them." This is by no means an isolated or unusual comment.

Hopefully, we may find in the past lessons for the present and future. One way to begin to address these issues would be to quote an author–Israel Shahak–whom Phil has often cited. Shahak is writing about the 1648 Cossack rebellion against and horrifying massacres of the Polish landowners and the (predominantly) Jewish servants of those Polish overlords:

This typical peasant uprising against extreme oppression, an uprising accompanied not only by massacres committed by the rebels but also by even more horrible atrocities and ‘counter-terror’ of the Polish magnates’ private armies, has remained emblazoned in the consciousness of East-European Jews to this very day — not, however, as a peasant uprising, a revolt of the oppressed, of the wretched of the earth, nor even as a vengeance visited upon all the servants of the Polish nobility, but as an act of gratuitous anti-Semitism directed against Jews as such.

This rebellion occurred before peasant emancipation and land redistribution. Shahak's characterization is, I think, valid and the events have been mirrored several times in history. Polish memories of these events are probably equally as one-sided as Jewish memories–the fault is one-sidedly attributed by both groups to Cossack savagery alone (which was, in fact, considerable and horrifying), and each group sees itself as martyrs. None of the three groups are entirely wrong, but certainly none are entirely right, either. I recently came across an interesting book, Shattered Faith, by a Holocaust survivor. I quoted it in an earlier post and the same passage was quoted above by Eva. For me the author's description of shtetl life in the inter-war years was fascinating. The author references this matter of Jewish servants of Polish landlords–as well as a lot about Jewish attitudes toward Poles–and he notes that few of the peasants ever came in contact with their “own” local Polish nobility, but only with the Jews who were employed by the nobility–and by the Jews they were kept strictly at arms length. Other posters here have cited the quite acerbic views of Isaac Bashevis Singer in the same respect. Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin of Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago, citing Singer, reduced the much wrought issue of Polish - Jewish relations to a very fundamental level:

Similarly, it does not seem to occur to some Jews that manifestations of Polish anti-Semitism might be reactions to Jewish clanishness and parochialism. As a character in Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel "The Manor" puts it: 'How can anyone move into someone else's home, live there in total isolation, and expect not to suffer by it? When you despise your host's god as a tin image, shun his wine as forbidden, condemn his daughter as unclean, aren't you asking to be treated as an unwelcome outsider? It's as simple as that’.

Ouch. Is it really that simple? No doubt more could be said, and I'll try to address this by citing the views of Eva Hoffman (pictured here). Still, Singer is saying little that hasn't been repeatedly stated by other Jews about Jewish attitudes toward Poles. As Weliczker Wells states in Shattered Faith,

... We lived in a self-imposed ghetto without walls. The Jewish religion fostered our living together in groups which separated us from non-Jews. ...

... We, Jews, felt superior to all others, as we were the "chosen people", chosen by God Himself. We even repeated it in our prayers at least three times a day, morning, afternoon, and evening ...

... We were strangers to the neighboring gentiles because of our religion, language, behavior, dress, and daily values. Poland was the only country, where a nation lived within a nation. ... We lived in a strictly self-imposed ghetto, and it suited our requirements and wishes. ... Our parents not only praised that time [i.e., Austrian rule] as being better for the Jews, but spoke with pride about the superiority of German culture and its people compared to the Polish culture. This attitude was very badly received by the Polish people. ... The belief that German culture was superior continued even to the time. when Germany occupied Poland in 1939, and in its eastern part in 1941.

The pro-German sentiments mentioned by Weliczker Wells should not be underestimated. Nor should religious and ethnic loyalty and solidarity. As Prof. Yacov Talmon, speaking from his experiences in the Russian partition of Poland, acknowledged,

... many important factors infused in the Jews a spirit of contempt and hatred towards the Poles. In contrast to the organizational activity and capacity of the Germans, the Jews saw the Poles as failures. The rivals most difficult to Jews, in the economic and professional fields were the Poles, and we must not underrate the closeness of Yiddish to the German language as well. I still remember that during my childhood the name "goy" sounded to me as referring to Catholic Poles and not to Germans; though I did realize that the latter were obviously not Jews, I felt that the Germans in the vicinity were not simply Gentiles.

It would be shocking to think of it to-day, but the pre-Hitlerite relations between Jews and Germans in our vicinity were friendly. ... In the twenties, Jews and Germans stood together on election lists. Out of those Germans rose such who, during the German invasion, helped in the acts of repression and extermination as experts, who had the experience and knew the secrets.

It is not surprising, then, that in the mixed loyalties of the time Jewish unity grew stronger and deeper, and consciousness in this direction burned like a flame. ... the actual motherland was not a temporal one, but a heavenly one, a vision and a dream - to the religious it was the coming of the Messiah, to the Zionists it was a Jewish country, to the communists and their friends it was a world revolution. And the real constitution according to which they lived was the Shulhan Aruch, code of laws, and the established set of virtues, or the theories of Marx, and the rules of Zionism and the building up of a Jewish country.

One writer who has tried to probe these issues somewhat more deeply, with a constructive intent, has been Eva Hoffman. I will offer here an extended quote from her fine study Contested Memories (and I highly recommend the entire lecture), which picks up on several of the themes outlined above--interspersed with my own comments and questions.

In an eye-opening book, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, the historian David Biale gives an account of Jewish political life in the Diaspora, and shows that through the long centuries of exile, Jews used conscious political theories and political institutions to negotiate their own affairs and relationship with the governing powers of the countries in which they found themselves. Biale’s account is not so much in argument with Yerushalmi’s thesis as an important supplement to it. The interests of Diasporic Jews ran mainly to the preservation of a traditional, religious, separate identity; so politics was used, one could say, in the service of destiny—in the service of maintaining that ahistorical vision of their fate that Yerushalmi describes. In this fundamental aim, the Jews of Poland to a large extent succeeded, though it was success that carried its own price. However, the shtetl, judged by these criteria, was a remarkably resilient social formation, preserving its structures and its religious, legal and educational autonomy over centuries. In the Jewish imagination, the shtetl has become the locus of nostalgia and the metaphor of loss; it is usually seen as a quaint realm, either of Chagall-like innocent spirituality, or of Cossacks and pogroms. But one of the features of the shtetl which struck me was its high level of organization. Symbolically, life was structured by a system of religious belief that governed every aspect of behavior, from eating, to sexuality, to the shaping of the day, the week, the year. More concretely, the shtetl was organized into a network of brotherhoods, societies, and associations, ranging from the important burial brotherhoods to societies for the aid of poor finances and later, cooperative banking associations.

[Comment: Hoffman, indirectly, addresses Lindemann's central theme and answers it: Polish Jews were active players in their fate, not merely passive subjects, but their choices had consequences. We will want to ask whether their choices continue to have consequences.]

It is quite possible that these communal organizations were a precursor and a preparation for the amazing explosion of Jewish political life which took place in Poland in the interwar period. This interval of Polish independence saw both the rise of ideological, nationalist anti-Semitism, and an exfoliation of Jewish life and creativity, which included the formation of many political parties, the election of numerous Jewish representatives to the Polish parliament, and ongoing, heated debates about the proper relationship between the Jewish minority and the Polish majority.

[Comment: Is it possible that this communal background of the shtetl continues to inform Jewish political activism?]

…[O]ne of the fervently debated questions in the field of Polish-Jewish relations is whether there was any continuity between pre- Holocaust Polish history and attitudes, and Polish behavior during the Holocaust itself. The nature of that behavior is also the subject of painful disputes.

The behavior in fact covered the entire spectrum of human possibilities— much as it did in other countries. In the shtetl which I studied, I was told of the kinds of episodes which were reenacted in countless localities throughout Poland. There were Poles who helped rescue Jews, sometimes on an impulse, and sometimes with the full knowledge that they were endangering their own and their families’ lives; there were those who informed on their Jewish neighbors, or colluded more actively in anti-Jewish violence, with a variety of motives: for payment, for petty revenge, or out of sheer anti-Semitism. There was a story I was told by a survivor whose entire family was killed in one moment by the local Gestapo, who had probably been notified of their whereabouts by a Polish passerby. He and another man were kept alive by a family of Polish peasants who built a special hiding place for them, and took enormous and conscious risks over a period of nearly two years to aid them. I think it needs to be remembered that in the awful calculus of the time, it took one act of meanness to end the lives of many; it took the efforts of many to save one Jewish life.

Still, the question of continuity between Polish history and Polish behavior during the Holocaust—that is, the question of intrinsic Polish anti-Semitism—is one on which the views of the various participants most painfully diverge. The Polish participants remind us that Poland was the only country that experienced two invasions—one from Germany, and the other from the Soviet Union. They would say—they have said—that the Jewish populations of the eastern shtetls actively welcomed the Soviets, who were Poland’s historical enemy and occupiers. The Jewish inheritors of this history reiterate that it made sense for Jews to welcome the Soviets, who were seen by them as a much lesser evil than the Nazis, and who brought with them the promises of universal equality and the erasure of ethnic and class differences. Once the Nazi occupation went into full effect, it created unprecedented conditions, which were perhaps more horrifying than anywhere in Europe. In terms of attitudes towards Jews, the situation imposed by the Nazi occupation was one of grotesquely warped morality. Within the Nazi universe, helping and rescuing Jews was punishable by death, whereas giving one’s Jewish neighbors away was rewarded—albeit very poorly. Within this perverted framework, there were people who behaved odiously, and people who behaved heroically; and there was the great majority which was indifferent or indeed ignorant of the tragedy happening in its midst. In their own terms, both parties are right. How can one, then, evaluate—never mind reconcile—their claims, the claims of still living, still rankling memories?

Or, to put this question differently: Can one, in interpreting this extremely difficult past, move beyond the point of view of its participants? Can one, in particular, step away from the perspective of the most victimized subjects? Until now, it has seemed indecent to do so. In our thinking about memory, the perspective of the victims has been the touchstone—and this to some extent has remained untouchable; it has seemed beyond interrogation. And I believe that on the individual level, it should be. The testimony of personal suffering—especially of the degree endured during the Holocaust—should not and cannot be questioned “objectively.” It can, at best, be listened to and understood. And, on the individual level, acts of violence or cruelty against the victims can only be condemned.

But on the collective level, in situations and histories as complex and contested as the Polish one, I think one has to gain a more holistic, more contextual understanding: to understand the interaction of various participants, and the structure of the situation as a whole. Otherwise, one runs the risk of only repeating the separate narratives, and replicating the lack of understanding between them. The historian Saul Friedlander in his book, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews, speaks of the impossibility of thinking about the Holocaust outside one’s own subject position. Nor do I think for a moment that I could step outside my own subject position—outside my actual experience and family memories, in other words—or that it is desirable for anyone to do so. I think that, in any case, there is hardly such a thing as impartial thinking; unless we are writing from a very long temporal or affective distance, we almost necessarily begin from a mental location, so to speak, and a point of view. On the other hand, there is no contradiction between point of view and strenuous thought. And I think that if one presses one’s own subject position far enough, one eventually always encounters the Other. For no history, and certainly no Jewish history, has taken place in isolation. Now, encountering the Other cannot always lead to reconciliation. There are situations in which the injustices committed in the past, or the inequities of power, are so extreme, that a structural understanding can lead only to an acknowledgment of the wrongs of the past. Of course, if such acknowledgment is made by both sides, that can be helpful and can even aid in healing. But in histories as entangled as the Polish-Jewish one—histories which resemble more closely the tangled politics of our own societies—to think of any one group’s memory without taking the other into account is to deny the real conditions of that group’s existence. And I think that if one does examine any one subject position far enough, one also comes upon one’s own weaknesses, or prejudices and projections towards the other—for no one, not even minority groups, are without them.

[Comment: It's fascinating that Hoffman refers to "the tangled politics of our own societies." Is this a reference to the intense political activity of Jews in America? Is she suggesting that that intense activity is deficient, that it denies the real conditions of "the other"? I'm reminded that Lizzy refers to her "elaborate fantasy" of Jews joining with "any other oppressed and dispossessed." Is that (in my view, recurrent) fantasy--of Jews leading the "wretched of the earth" in struggle against their oppressors based on real critical self understanding of both oppressors and oppressed, or does it speak, perhaps uncritically, to the unquestioned presuppositions of the fantisizer? Opinion surveys have repeatedly shown that mainstream political thought among Jews is far different than that of other Americans. We can certainly discuss the relationship of Neocons toward their fellow Americans, as Phil has ironically noted on several occasions, as well as the irony that Lizzy notes in the treatment of Palestinians by Zionism. But the question arises, too, of the relationship of liberal Jews (the vast majority) to their own brand of activism. Is their liberalism an effort to reconstruct the all embracing communal life of the shtetl, against the wishes of most of their fellow citizens? Does this evince a failure to acknowledge "the other" that Hoffman speaks of? Lizzy has noted that nearly 75% of American Jews have their roots in Poland, in the shtetl communities or the urbanized shetl-like neighborhoods. Hoffman speaks of the "nostalgia" of American Jews for that past. Is it not possible that this nostalgia influences Jewish - Gentile relations, but is unacknowledged and unexamined? Phil has repeatedly called for an examination of the nature of Jewish participation in the American elite--might this be a reasonable starting place, for both Jews and Gentiles?]

Since the history of Polish-Jewish relations is so long and varied, it offers a very large field within which one can start asking certain basic questions. One underlying question which concerned me as I was thinking about this past is: what makes for harmonious cross-cultural relations, and what makes them break down? Certainly, the elements of religious and later ideological anti-Semitism in the majority culture affected the relationship between Poles and Jews greatly. And yet, despite this, there were decades and even centuries in their common history when the two groups lived side by side amicably, or at least in a state of benign indifference. This is something that I think needs to be taken into account. We tend to parse the past through its climactic moments—that is, the moments of violence and conflict. But the long phases in which nothing very notable happened between Poles and Jews suggest to me that the instinct of tolerance is as basic as its opposite, and that when hostilities are not actively stimulated, people and groups are capable of accepting each other, for all their cultural and spiritual differences. The eruptions of active hostility within Polish society usually took place during periods of heightened economic competitiveness, or marked conflict of interest— and there were times, as during various Russian occupations of Poland, when actual Polish and Jewish political interests diverged to a considerable degree.

Still, the deepest and the most obvious factor affecting Polish-Jewish coexistence—a factor which may seem so self-evident as not to bear noting—was that separateness and the failure to create a common sphere of interests and concerns. The cultural and spiritual gulf may have been breached by daily familiarity; but on the fundamental level, it was largely chosen on both sides. The barriers on the Polish side to full Jewish inclusion were high and well fortified; but the determination of most Jews to remain a “nation” apart from the surrounding majority was just as strong. I think that this sustained separateness led to what Zygmunt Bauman in his brilliant book Modernity and the Holocaust calls “the production of distance,” and that it had a great bearing on what happened during the Holocaust. At the moment of greatest danger and vulnerability, it took qualities of exceptional moral strength and courage for a Polish person to help a Jewish one. In the eyes of most Poles, Jews were not within their natural sphere of responsibility; they were not, in the Polish expression, “ours.”

What, then, can we in the “post-” generation do? What attitude should we take towards this painful history—and perhaps towards others? We are not in a position to demand justice, since the wrong was not done to us. And we are not in a position to forgive, since the wrong was not done to us. These are moral rights which belong to the participants in the events themselves; to assert or arrogate such rights for ourselves is, I think, an instance of false appropriation. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission is possible only in the immediate aftermath of horrific events. The privilege of demanding justice, and the magnanimity—I sometimes think the saintliness—of going beyond justice and choosing forgiveness over redress, belongs to those who have suffered. Any attempt to administer transgenerational justice is bound to get caught up in the cyclical logic of revenge—a logic evident, for example, in the recent wars in former Yugoslavia, in which the Serbs, with the help of a very long and stubborn collective memory, have been able to hearken back to their great defeat at the Battle of Kosovo in the fourteenth century as if it were a still present past, and could therefore view themselves as martyrs still at Muslim hands, and frame their campaigns of aggression as wars of redress.

These are some of the things we cannot do. But I think that the task in our generation is exactly to examine the past more strenuously, to press the questions raised by our memories—or, more frequently, received ideas—further; to lift, in other words, our own prohibitions on thought.

Mark Wauck blogs here

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