The Nation has an excellent piece by Victor Navasky on the latest chapter in the Rosenberg saga– a new book that fingers Ethel Rosenberg’s brother and sister-in-law the Greenglasses as the spies. I will save you the details, it’s not my cup of tea. But what impressed me about Navasky’s piece was his willingness to look on the Rosenberg saga for what I have always seen it as, a reflection of the Jewish response to modernity:
Pardon me if I ask, “The Rosenbergs, the Rosenbergs’ in-laws… From the perspective of history, what’s the difference?” After all… both were poor, first-generation Americans whose immigrant parents had come from Russia. Both had joined the Communist movement. Both were Jewish in a post-Holocaust moment when fears of anti-Semitism were matched by fears of being charged with anti-Semitism (it was no accident that the sentencing judge, Irving Kaufman, was Jewish; that the prosecutor, Irving Saypol, was Jewish; and that his assistant, Roy Cohn, was Jewish)…
What I hear Navasky saying is that the Jewish attraction to Communism was sociocultural, that it reflected in part the Jewish experience of anti-Semitism in eastern Europe.
Jerry Muller says it best in his recent book, Capitalism and the Jews— when he says that often before the ideology came political identity formation issues:
Before addressing the issue of Jewish ideological responses to capitalism, it is worth recalling the range of Jewish political responses to modernity. For the sake of analysis, one can group them under four broad rubrics: integrationist, isolationist, socialist, and nationalist….
Muller says that integrationists were the largest group, and sought to make peace with modernity while keeping a distinctly Jewish identity. They were least concerned about anti-Semitism and tended to be pro-capitalist. As for Jewish communism, he treats it in part as a revolutionary/idealistic Jewish response to pervasive anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.
There the Jewish experience was played out against a background of deeply ingrained anti-Semitic sentiment. In the Russian empire and in Romania, that sentiment was expressed on the official level by the denial of citizenship rights, by restrictions on residency, and by limited access to educational institutions, and on the popular level by pogroms [The whole Palestinian experience today]…
Both authors show how the primal Jewish response to anti-Semitism and modernity predicts a lot of Jewish political behavior. And this explains why many nationalists and Communists have a lot more in common even today than either group has with the integrationists; for they are both more concerned with anti-Semitism than the integrationists are, they just have different ways of addressing it. My mother, for instance, took the side of the Rosenbergs back in the ’50s, brought me up to see the case as a bright-lights demonstration of how the U.S. treated Jews; and today she supports Israel because it is the place that the Jews made in a hostile world. She’s never been an active Communist or an active Zionist; but the two currents flow through her worldview, and they are not incompatible.
Obviously these are historical generalizations. Many former Jewish Communists are today anti-Zionist; they are a key component of anti-Zionism in the U.S. today. But I’d say that many more former Communists have morphed into liberal and rightwing Zionists– look at Israel itself– because even their Communism had an ethnocentric basis.
And this demonstrates why, when Walt and Mearsheimer had the indelicacy to point out that neoconservative Zionists helped push the U.S. into war with Iraq, they were attacked not just by the neocons, but by former socialist Jews, many of whom are now liberal Zionists. Both groups share a concern for anti-Semitism, and both groups saw Walt and Mearsheimer through that lens, as goyim attacking Jews. “In Dark Times, Blame the Jews,” said the reactionary Forward headline.
I am saying that the response to anti-Semitism may be the baseline issue for predicting a Jew’s political behavior. For instance, my readiness to hear Walt and Mearsheimer’s teaching reflects my integrationism. I don’t mistrust the goyim, I don’t think anti-Semitism is a big problem. I was myself drawn to what was left of Communism as a kid in my own way– there were Communists around in my Jewish community and I care about economic justice– but I believe one reason I didn’t trend that way is that I liked the goyim.
And meantime some of the old Communists and Zionists have regrouped around a fresh Jewish concern, as dire in its way as anti-Semitism: assimilation, all the Jews marrying out, the disappearance of Jewish life. A real concern, yes… But that’s another issue.
