Jack Ross was one of the first people to reach out to me on this site four years ago. We met at a chocolate bar near Union Square then at Junior’s on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Jack was built like a lineman, with an Abe Lincoln beard, and was just 22 but if you shut your eyes and listened to him you would think he was 50. Later Jack brought me to meet an anti-Zionist leader of the 50s and 60s named Leonard Sussman, and Sussman expressed the same surprise. From the telephone he’d thought Jack was 50, his voice was so deep and his thinking so complex. He had graduated from the National Labor College in Washington but everything he knew he seemed to have taught himself. “I can’t get over the fact that you… never heard of the draft riots,” he said to me on our second or third meeting.
That winter I met his rabbi Ellen Lippmann, from Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn. “So you know our silent genius,” she said. Jack was clad that day as he often is, in Birkenstocks without socks, in a black bowler hat straight out of the old country, in a long black coat from a Ben Shahn lithograph. Who could doubt that this youth was a prodigy. His writing for this site was always so compressed and layered and pointed. Who at his age was capable of such focus?
Now Ross is 26 and has written a book on the career of the anti-Zionist rabbi, Elmer Berger (1908-1996), with the same fierce focus and concision. Rabbi Outcast is an independent and glorious intellectual achievement. I was sorry it was over so quickly. I wanted more than 189 pages. The book begins with a dedication to the memory of Tony Judt and ends in the triumphantly optimistic spirit that Ross often signs his emails with: Flourish! It ends with a commandment to himself and to young Americans to heed the prophecies of Rabbi Elmer Berger and Isaiah and Judah Magnes — “those who warned against the madness.”
I can’t say that Ross ever fully captures the personality of Berger, a thrice-married chainsmoking outsider– that would be tough work for a young man– but who cares about personality, it is Berger’s political visions that so resonate. And this is a work of intellectual and religious history; Ross has disinterred a rich living tradition of Reform anti-Zionism in the 1930s-1970s, culminating with Berger’s friendships with Jim Abourezk, Edward Said and Walid Khalidi, a tradition that fully anticipates the non-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity movement we are in today. I am including a list of Ross’s discovered quotations at the bottom of this review, including a juicy Hannah Arendt misstep.
Berger was there first. He was thinking through all the issues that Jews who are freeing themselves of Zionism today are thinking of but decades ahead of us: he developed a religious philosophy of integration and not nationalism, he understood the refugee issue in all its vast moral squalor in the moment, he was crushed by the nascent Israel lobby that took over American Jewish life in the 50s, and he understood as an American that the issue was not just what Zionism was doing to Palestine but what it was doing to the United States.
Jack Ross has the unqiue ability to walk a reader through these religious and political awakenings in a brisk knowing way. His account is distinguished by two qualities, laserlike focus on a group of anti-Zionist rabbis of the American Council for Judaism (yes, honored by Thomas Kolsky’s book). And second, by its moral clangor. Jack Ross is taking on the neoconservative conspiracy that began in the 1940s or the 1880s, he is taking on the nationalist spirit that corrupted Jewish religious authorities and then American politics and played a role in the Iraq war and that he now declares is at an end. Ross is not a cautious thinker, he is a silent genius at a soapbox, and the moral clangor of his own writing is thrilling. Like this, for instance: When in 1999 the Reform rabbis declared that Israeli and Diaspora Jews were “interdependent communities,”
The leadership for the Reform mvomeent thus pledged its devotion to a faith owing more to Moses Hess and Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel than any authentically Judaic source, essentially reducible to the proposition that God so loved the Jews that He sent unto them His only begotten nation-state so that ‘the Jewish people’ would not perish but have everlasting life.
The book is occasionally marred by Ross’s dense style and preference for the conditional over the past tense (Berger would do this, would do that; when I upbraided Ross about this in a note, he said, “What are ‘woulds’ to all your never ending cheesy non-sequitur rhetorical devices?”) but I don’t know that it matters much in the end. This book will be read because it is so taut and ambitious, and though wide readership is as much as anyone could want for it, I am also pushing attention for my prodigious and unconventional friend. He didn’t go to graduate school, he didn’t have a mentor, he mentored himself, with his book-filled apartment in Brooklyn and rows of file cabinets, he has followed no ordinary path to these insights. I hope that more prominent publications than this one will review Ross’s book and meet the author, that Ross will not just be read, but that he will gain attention so that he might flourish.
To that end, the best service I can do to the book is to quote some of its many scholarly gems. Here are a few, most of them Berger quotes:
Berger, 1942:
The “Jewish problem” is not realy Jewish at all, though the Zionist is well on his way to making it so by seeking this thoroughgoing exclusiveness of Jewish life. The destiny of the Jew still lies with the destiny of the liberal world. Because fundamentally, Zionism has no faith with that world, I am a non-Zionist.
Berger, 1943:
I oppose Zionism because I deny that Jews are a nation. We were a nation for perhaps two hundred years in a history of four thousand years. Before that we were a group of warring Semitic tribes whse only tenuous bond of unity was a national deity—a religious unity… Certainly since the Dispersion we have not been a nation. We have belonged to every nation of the world. We have mixed our blood with all peoples. Jewish nationalism is a fabrication woven from the thinnest kind of threads and strengthened only in those eras of human history in which reaction has been dominant and anti-Semites in full cry.
Rabbi Morris Lazaron, 1952:
Let us pray that some generous proposal will be made by the state of Israel to the Arab and Muslim peoples to help solve their refugee problem…
Rabbi Irving Reichert of the American Council for Judaism in a 1936 sermon in San Francisco:
If my reading of Jewish history is correct, Israel took upon itself the yoke of the Law not in Palestine, but in the wilderness at Mount Sinai… There is too dangerous a parallel between the insistence sof some Zionist spokesmen upon nationality and race and blood, and similar pronouncements by Fasicst leaders in European dictatorships. Some types of propaganda may prove too tragically successful for our comfort.. If we succeed in teaching America that Zionism is the only instrument of our political salvation, we may live to regret it…
Norman Thomas, the American socialist leader, in 1952, on the new Israeli Law of Return:
Even more dangerous will be the consequences of this new law in fanning the flames of Arab chauvinism and Muslim fanaticism.
Berger, 1955:
The Old Testament Prophets wrote the most significant pages in the development of Judaism. They first conceived and articulated a religion dependent upon inner, moral strength, rather than upon land, nation or ritual. In Prophetic Judaism, as well as in the noblest conceptions of theAmerican dream, God is conceived as ‘indwelling’ within man.
Ross’s commentary: “It should be noted thought htat while it has gained vogue in recent generations as a position of quasi-agnosticism, the concept of the ‘indwelling God’ has an ancient pedigree in Judaism, originating at the shekhina of kabbalah.”
Berger on visiting Israel and Arab neighbors in 1955:
“I am more than ever concvinced of the absolute necessity for Jews outside of Israel to divorce themselves completely from a situation of moral degradation apparent in the Arab refugee problem.”
Frank Chodorov of ACJ in the 50s.
Israel is only part Israel, the rest being world-wide Zionism, and it is not certain which part wags which. Until this uncertainty is resolved, peace in the Middle East will be precarious, and American foreign policy will be in a similar state of turmoil.
Hannah Arendt in the early 1960s, writing to Berger. This quote should be hung around her reputation like a cowbell:
I am not really an anti-Zionist, and when Ben-Gurion passes from the scene Zionism will revert to the kind of broad, liberal movement it was as I first knew it in Germany.
Berger, followed by Ross:
“We could afford to lose, as we did, the battle against Jewish nationalism in far off Palestine… But we cannot afford to lose the battle against Jewish nationalism in America.” But this had always been the more hopeless battle. One way or another, the great majority of American Jews at the midpoint of the twentieth century were emphatically determined not be be ‘Americans of Jewish faith,” the identity that had meant so much to those who formed the Council [ACJ]. Zionism would give the most compelling answer to the anxieties of that generation, as it was inevitably becoming more Americanized.
Lessing Rosenwald of the ACJ on opposing Zionists:
We had to oppose them as undemocratic in conception and in operation, as archaic, attuned to medieval times rather than to the aspirations of the 20th century.
Ross comparing Theodor Herzl to Marcus Garvey
Garvey packed Madison Square Garden in 1921 to proclaim himself “Provisional President of Africa” in a stunning echo of Herzl’s declaration to have founded the Jewish State at Basel in 1897. Like Herzl, Garvey had a conspicuous taste for pompous dress and manner… The Garveyites, in turn, were no less fanatical than the Zionists against their adversaries, disparaging them in racially charged terms as ‘mulattoes’ and ‘octoroons.’”
And on the goal of Jews in the civil rights movement: “the complete integration into U.S. society of African Americans, a goal that, at least in theory, they had rejected for themselves.”
Berger in 1969 on the urgency of discussing the lobby. If Zionism is not ‘ventilated,” Mr [Abba] Eban will become again Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East.
Ross on recent history:
If anything, the peace process was only interpreted as a license for American Judaism to become more closely and intensely identified with Zionism than ever before… [The new prevalence of Holocaust awareness was a factor.] Another was the dramatic increase of Israeli influences on the religious practices of American Jews, whether directly from Israelis themselves or through the intensely Zionist-oriented Jewish summer camps, which defined the exposure of whole generations to Judaism….
Ross on Berger’s understanding of Jewish history:
The Old Testament reflected little more than a long saga of tribal warfare though the Iron and Bronze Ages …and that fundamentally the Jewish religion is not the tribal religion of this history but the faith of the prophets who proclaimed the possibility of a more just and righteous way of life.
