Last week we ran a piece about a fawning profile in the New York Times of neoconservative Robert Kagan and his family in which Kagan argued that the U.S. has an imperial role to play in a “world order built around American economic, political, and military power.” The piece mentioned that Kagan’s wife Victoria Nuland is an assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Michael Smith, co-author of the new book, Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, offered this footnote. A dialogue ensued.–Phil Weiss.
Nuland is the daughter of the recently deceased Dr. Sherwin Nuland, a most wonderful man. He was a surgeon and a medical historian who taught at Yale. He wrote a number of books including the very fine “How We Die.” His humanism came from early childhood, growing up as a first generation Jewish immigrant in the Bronx. His daughter you may remember bragged about United States spending 5 billion dollars to accomplish the violent overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine, and put in place, for the first time since 1945 a number of ministers who are openly Fascists. How ironic that his daughter and son-in-law turned out to be monsters. Only in America.
Weiss: What I sometimes wonder is, Was the socialism of our grandfathers a predictable Jewish response to their conditions, as empire neoliberalism is a predictable Jewish response to ours? I am not putting your socialism in that category, Michael: It is an intellectual and spiritual commitment that would survive any test. But when my grandmother was praising the Rosenbergs, I wonder how much of it was simply tribal; her grandchildren are as materialistic a group as any other Americans.
I think my grandfather’s generation, which lived around the time of the first world war and the greatest antiwar movement of them all, the Russian Revolution, was shaped by and responded to their world. Both Jews and non-Jews alike covered the spectrum from being apolitical, to tribalistic, to socialists.
My grandfather came here as a teenager in 1916. He became a tailor in Chicago. He was the president of an organization called United Chicago Jews of Hungarian descent.
He was not particularly political.
The Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia had varying responses to their oppression. A small minority were Zionists. Others were in the Bund which, as you know, was a socialist organization with tribalistic leanings. Others became revolutionaries whose primary identity was not Jewish but socialist. The most famous Jew to carry forward this tradition was of course Leon Trotsky.
Jews in America were exceptionally successful. I think materialists in your family are an example of that. Kagan Nuland and Kristol are other examples, successes in the political/intellectual world. And successful because they advanced the ideology of American imperialism in a quite a successful manner. So they were embraced.
I would suggest your reading Isaac Deutscher. Particularly his three volume biography of Trotsky which is a good history of the times, as well as his singular essay “The Non-Jewish Jew,” which is available online.
I think it is significant that the Jewish radical tradition has carried forward for the last 100 years. Yes, there are materialistic successes, but there also are Jewish Voice for Peace and folks at Mondoweiss, etc. Young Jews were heavily and disproportionately represented in the generation of 60s radicals and are in the current generation.
When the Rosenbergs were framed up, tried, and convicted and sentenced to death it was very brave for people to come forward and support them given the atmosphere of the times. Good for your grandmother, who identified herself as a Jew with the Rosenbergs who were vilified as Jews. In fact, the perfidy of this government was such that they used a Jew as a prosecutor, judge, and main witness against the Rosenbergs. Your grandmother’s understanding this trickery and still identifying and supporting the Rosenberg’s was extraordinary and commendable.
Good for your grandmother, who identified herself as a Jew with the Rosenbergs….”
why? that is tribalism.
They were soviet spies, just as undoubtedly there are agents of a hostile foreign power, even now embedded in our national security state, media, and economy.
Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?
http://monthlyreview.org/2011/02/01/is-there-anything-more-to-say-about-the-rosenberg-case
“In fact, the perfidy of this government was such that they used a Jew as a prosecutor, judge, and main witness against the Rosenbergs. ”
I suppose that the Jewish prosecutor and judge acted in good faith – and so where’s the perfidy? In fact, the Jewish prosecutor and judge did a lot to improve the public opinion about Jews.
In any case, the first Jews who turned anti-communist took a brave standing against general (Rooseveltist) opinion as well as against their own tribe and that ought to be acknowledged. Of course, later on being an anti-communist became a matter of conformity, but that’s the way things go; we can’t judge the forerunners like the latecomers.
Many of our grandfathers — and grandmothers — in the Russian Empire and other parts of Eastern and Central Europe were indeed socialists of various kind, and this can of course be viewed as a response to their material and psychological conditions (though by no means fully determined by those conditions). However, Jews were also active in other segments of the political spectrum, including liberalism (e.g., Mikhail Gershenzon) and even conservatism. Liberal and conservative Jews tended to come from higher-status families and were less alienated from “respectable society.” Some conservative Jews even fought on the White side in the Civil War. I have written about one of these figures, Yakov Bromberg, on my site:
http://www.stephenshenfield.net/themes/jewish-issues/jews-in-tsarist-russia/105-the-jewish-eurasianism-of-yakov-bromberg
At the other extreme, Jews also took part in the anarchist insurrection of Nestor Makhno in Ukraine.
Are you suggesting that the Rosenbergs were not traitors? If so, where does this come from? They were a key component of how Stalin got the bomb. Was that a good thing? If so, how so? Anybody want to explain this? I’m confused.
“The Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia had varying responses to their oppression. A small minority were Zionists. Others were in the Bund which, as you know, was a socialist organization with tribalistic leanings. Others became revolutionaries whose primary identity was not Jewish but socialist…”
Two comments:
1.You could choose to be a Zionist or a socialist , but it wasn’t necessarily either/or. There was also a “mating” , so to speak, of Zionism and Socialism, producing Socialist Zionism, aka Labor Zionism -which went on to become a significant, even dominant, part of the Zionist movement.
2.The Bund was a Jewish socialist-autonomist movement. In other words, they sought Jewish non-territorial autonomy , in the context of a socialist society. It was a mass movement at the time, committed to Yiddish language and culture. I don’t think the term “tribalistic” is appropriate.