Jewish Currents September-October 2008

$5.00 • September-October, 2008

A Progressive, Secular Bimonthly

The Magazine of The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring

Anti-Semitism in Lithuania Reports by Sara Ginaite and Rokhl Kafrissen

S. Anski, Jewish Folklorist Yankl Stillman

J Street Paves Its Own Road

Jewish Burial and Ecology

Nicholas Jahr

Joysa Winter

Jews and the Left: A Natural Alliance?

You Say Sukkot and I Say Sukes

Bennett Muraskin

Linda Gritz

SHOFAR

At this very moment, Earth is hurtling through space at 181/2 miles per second!

The rest of our expanding universe is rushing outwards at speeds ranging up to thousands of miles per second — zillions of stars and other heavenly bodies, both vast and tiny!

Meanwhile, our planet rotates on its axis at over 1,000 miles per hour, allowing us all to receive the life-giving rays of the sun — which burns at its core at 27,000,0000 F!

And here we sit, safe and sound . . .

haav ouh rec- hvhu crg- hvhu

LETTERS Names will be withheld from publication on request. Jewish Currents reserves the right to edit letters to restrict their length.

Native Yiddish Seekers In the May-June edition of “The Rootless Cosmopolitan,” Rokhl Kafrissen writes that Merle (Malke) Bachman’s study, Recovering “Yiddishland,” includes “Yiddish writers in English (such as Abe Cahan and Anzia Yezierska).”

Yezierska wrote in English only. She had her characters speak a kind of English that sounded as if it were translated from Yiddish, but it was definitely English.

Troim Katz Handler Monroe Township, New Jersey

Born-Again Yiddishist A couple days ago I happened upon an online video about Yiddish and then went all over the internet searching for

more information about Yiddish and its associated organizations. I then found your website, and I felt compelled to tell you about my experience.

I am now a born-again Yiddishist.

I all-at-once understand my Jewish identity in far greater depth than I ever have. Though I have for years actively involved myself in the study of Jewish literature, politics, history and religion, I was never satisfied. Somehow, in my wanderings through Buber, Kaplan, and Heschel, Bialik, and Ahad Ha’am, I never actually seriously contemplated Yiddish, the missing piece of the puzzle, the animating spirit of Jewish life.

Influenced by vague biases, I thought the Yiddish language an ugly aberration.

Vol. 62, No. 5 (650) September-October, 2008 www.jewishcurrents.org

Editor: Lawrence Bush Editorial Board: Adrienne Cooper, Joseph Dimow, Henry Foner, Esther Leysorek Goodman, Rokhl Kafrissen, Milton Kant, Lyber Katz, Judith Rosenbaum, Yankl Stillman, Tamar Zinn, Barnett Zumoff Contributing Editor (from Israel): Amy Klein

Continued on page 46

Editorial Advisory Council: Isak Arbus, Henrietta Backer, Paul Basch, Anne-Marie Brumm, Alvin Dorfman, Shaurain Farber, Gordon Fellman, Eric A. Gordon, Abbott Gorin, David A. Hacker, Estelle Holt, Nicholas Jahr, Carol Jochnowitz, Robert Kaplan, Michael Katz, Robert Kestenbaum, Arieh Lebowitz, Miriam Leberstein, Ira Mintz, Bennett Muraskin, Marie Parham, Peter Pepper, Sam Pepper, Sheldon Ranz, Eugene Resnick, Sid Resnick, Martin Schwartz, Rhea Seagull, Ralph Seliger, Paul G. Shane, Joel Shatzky, Ruth Singer, Harold Sosnow Website Editor: Rokhl Kafrissen

Though my grandparents surely can speak better Yiddish than Hebrew, they do not presently speak Yiddish beyond a few Yinglish phrases. I always assumed that if their generation had forsaken the language, it must have been for a good reason. Now I see things differently.

Ironically, my understanding of Judaism and Yiddish came while discussing Christianity and considering parallels between the Holocaust and the crucifixion of Jesus. Much like the innocent, loving Jesus, Yiddish and European Jewry suffered death — or almost. Yidishkayt, as a culture of counter-power, standing against the nation-state, war and oppression, may have seemed dead after the Shoah, but its spirit lives on, concealed.

For Jews to accept the state of Israel as consolation for the Holocaust, and then to revise history to proclaim such a state to have been their innermost desire for two millennia, is to give up the Jewish project. A Jewry wedded to power is a Jewry living in denial of the possibility of a resurrection of our seemingly dead hope. Israel may be a practical reality, a practical solution to an emergency situation — but we are still grasping for a new cultural expression by which to enact our values, to live counter-power, to embody universalism in our particularism.

Yiddish, at least for the Ashkenazim, is the hidden spark. We need to harness its creative force to proclaim to the world that pessimism and war do not have the last word, that even the most hurt and

Website Resources: Ira Karlick

Management committee: Stan Distenfeld, Nina Gordon, Ira Karlick, Elaine Katz, Bernard Kransdorf, Ruth Ost, Fred Rosenthal Cover: “Shofar,” by Lawrence Bush, from American Torah Toons: 54 Illustrated Commentaries, Jason Aronson Books.

JEWISH CURRENTS (ISSN #US-ISSN-0021-6399), September-October, 2008, Vol. 62, No. 5 (650). Published bimonthly by The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, 45 E. 33rd St., New York, NY 10016. Phone: (212) 889-2523. Fax: (212) 532-7518. E-mail: jewishcurrents@circle.org. Website: www.jewishcurrents.org. Single copies $5. Subscription $30 a year in U.S.; elsewhere, $35. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y. Copyright © 2008 by Jewish Currents.

CORRECTIONS • Bennett Muraskin’s obituary of Howard Metzenbaum was cut off by a production error (“In Memoriam,” July-August). The complete quote from Hershl Hartman about Metzenbaum’s appreciation of secular Jewish education says: Metzenbaum “expressed his appreciation for an education that combined an understanding of the history and culture of the Jewish people with a dedication to social and economic justice and peace . . .”

Editorials

and

Viewpoints

Editorials

2 Letters 3 Will Jews Be Part of the New Progressive Movement?

4 Iran’s Ambitions, Israel’s Fears Lawrence Bush 5 Two Dead Israelis Miriam Jochnowitz DaLuz 7 ‘Investigating’ Jewish Partisans in Lithuania Sara Ginaite

Articles 13 J Street Paves Its Own Way Nicholas Jahr 16 Jews and the Left: A Natural Alliance?

Bennett Muraskin 27 Jewish Burials in an Age of Ecological Crisis Joysa Winter 33 Troublemakers Janice Eidus

Columns 9 It Happened In Israel Waiting on the West Bank Amy Klein 20 Religion and Skepticism Science and Boundaries: An Interview with Bernard Bulkin Lawrence Bush 24 New Jewish Rituals You Say Sukkot and I Say Sukes Linda Gritz 30 Our Secular Jewish Heritage S. Anski, Jewish Folklorist Yankl Stillman 36 Concealed/Revealed Essays about Rabbis 44 The Rootless Cosmopolitan Vilne, Whispering Rokhl Kafrissen

Reviews 41 The Marketplace and the Peace Process Meyer Rothberg on The Hebrew Republic 42 “Why Don’t You Write My Story?”

Carol Jochnowitz on Call Her Blessed

Poetry

and

Art

26 On Learning that Rosh Hashone Is the Birthday of Our First Parents Yala Korwin 47 Rudolf Rocker’s Arbeter Fraynt SJoel eptember -October Schechter and, 2008 Spain

Will Jews Be Part of the New Progressive Movement?

“T

o be a progressive . . . means being a partisan —

at least for now,” writes the champion liberal economist and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, in his insightful book, The Conscience of a Liberal (2007). The restoration of an equitable economy and a decent social safety net, the providing of affordable and efficient healthcare for all, and other innovations that might bring America up to the civilized standards of the European Union, “will require leadership,” Krugman argues, “that makes opponents of the progressive agenda pay a political price . . .”

Such leadership cannot be fashioned by elections alone. The next President, whether he’s a so-called maverick or a so-called messiah, will not be inclined or equipped to undo the predations of the Bush Administration without immense political pressure from below. The machinery for that pressure has been roughly cobbled together over the last few years, declares Krugman, and a progressive movement is emerging that includes parts of the old New Deal coalition, notably organized labor, a variety of think tanks, and novel entities like the “netroots,” the virtual community held together by bloggers and progressive websites . . . What makes progressive institutions into a movement isn’t money, it’s self-perception. Many Americans with more or less liberal beliefs now consider themselves members of a common movement, with the shared goals of limiting inequality and defending democratic principles.

What about the American Jewish community, with its proud history of liberal voting patterns and social activism? Can Jews be counted on as an influential force in this emergent progressive movement? The sad truth is that Jewish organizational ambivalence about the war in Iraq has opened a wide gulf between the Jewish mainstream and the progressive community.

The unbounded and illegitimate nature of that war, and the way it’s been used as a crowbar by Bush to force entry for his autocratic conservatism, has most inspired progressive outrage — including among many activist, anti-war Jews — yet Jewish organizations have largely kept their mouths shut.

This reticence about Iraq, along with Jewish neoconservative cheerleading for the war, has produced among some leftists a perception of Jews as vastly influential, hopelessly parochial, and completely wedded to the Israeli right. This perception sometimes combines with an anti-Semitic tone of scorn for Israel and Zionism, which further aggravates Jewish alienation from the progressive mobilization. Such a vicious cycle can only

enhance the influence of Jewish neoconservatives, while Jewish progressives stand around in despair.

Our magazine and its parent organization, The Workmen’s Circle, along with our ally, The Shalom Center, are seeking to break this cycle with a conference, “Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America,” on November 23rd in New York City. (See our back cover ad —and please register and/or contribute!) Speakers include Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now,” Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Donna Lieberman of the American Civil Liberties Union, and attorney/activist Elizabeth Holtzman. Promi-

Viewpoints Lawrence Bush

Iran’s Ambitions, Israel’s Fears

T

he fact that Israeli Jews,

across the political spectrum, seem to view a nuclear-armed Iran as both an likelihood and a mortal threat has given me great pause as I’ve waited, protest sign in hand, for the Bush Administration to launch a military strike against Iran.

Unlike the U.S., with its “sole superpower” mentality, Israel has every reason not to get involved in a gratuitous war. So I take Israel’s warnings seriously. They force me to look into the abyss and assume that the Iranians are, indeed, seeking to obtain nuclear weapons — and are as hostile to Israel as their vile rhetoric suggests. Only by pondering such a pessimistic scenario can I clear my head of bias (against anything and everything Dick Cheney says, for instance) and take a credible stand on what is to be done.

Does such ‘realism’ mean that I’m ready to add my voice to the neoconservative war cry, which is getting louder and nastier now that the Bush Administration seems, at least temporarily, to be emphasizing diplomacy over military strikes in its approach to Iran?

Far from it. I am doubtful that Bush and Cheney have changed their minds about a preemptive strike; just as likely, they are simply laying the groundwork for calling military action a ‘last resort.’ Whatever the reality in Washington, however, I’m for negotiations, combined with economic pressure. Writing in the Jerusalem Post June 25th, Chuck Freilich, a former national security advisor in Israel, saw likely success in economic sanctions: Lawrence Bush is the editor of Jewish Currents.

nent leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations will also be present — which is, itself, a breakthrough.

Modesty aside, our effort on November 23rd and beyond is critical to the progressive movement that Paul Krugman has identified, a movement that should not miss out on American Jewish experience, generosity, and political influence as it strives to retrieve America from the damage wrought by George W. Bush. Our effort is equally critical, moreover, to the American Jewish community — for our seeds of continuity will not take root in soil that has been deprived of the nutrients of social justice and social activism.

Iran imports 40 percent of its refined gasoline products.

If the West banned these sales, its economy could be brought to its knees. Oil exports make up 80 percent of Iran’s state budget; were imports of Iranian oil banned, its economy would be brought to a standstill. Iran’s automobile industry is domestically produced, except for engines; cut sales of engines and its economy would be greatly weakened. . . .

Apart from such deprivations, there may be other developments that could influence the Iranian regime in the immediate years to come. These include Israeli-Syrian peace talks, an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, domestic unrest in Iran, a scientific breakthrough in renewable energy, a decision on the part of China or Russia to get serious about curbing Iran’s power, and the election of a new American president, to name a few. Each of these seems far more plausible and close at hand than the nightmare scenario of a nuclear-armed Iran inaugurating the mother of all suicide bombings.

Diplomacy brings the ability to respond to events as they unfold, and keeps the possibility of peace alive. By contrast, a preemptive military attack would send events spinning out of anyone’s control. At minimum, it would bring intense retaliatory attacks against Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah — and probably far worse.

It is time for Israel’s leaders to widen their search for allies, influence, and remedies to the contagious animosity that plagues the region. Too often, Israel has done little to cultivate its state-to-state relationships, except through arms sales. The opening of a conversation with Syria (with Turkey as the courier), and the welcome extended to France’s President Nicholas Sarkozy, are significant steps that should be built upon. Diplomacy is “the missing component in Israel’s foreign policy,” argues Eytan Gilboa of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (Israel Affairs, October, 2006). “[A] grand strategy in international Jewish Currents

conflict requires the integration and application of . . . force, diplomacy and communication. The last component, communication, may even be the decisive factor.”

Miriam Jochnowitz DaLuz

Two Dead Israelis

I’

this one struck me so powerfully. I can’t say it was a surprise, nor can I say it was any more tragic than the deaths of hundreds of others. But news of the deaths of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, for whom many of us have been praying weekly, has hit like a thunderbolt and left me crying at odd moments.

And somehow, the inability of the left to unequivocally condemn the murder of Israelis, indeed to even acknowledge it, is more hurtful than usual.

I have been called a bleeding heart liberal. I have been called a radical feminist (though thankfully not a feminazi). I have been called a socialist. I have been called these things affectionately, snidely, or angrily. I wear these labels proudly. But the issue that is closest to my heart is one that makes me feel like the enemy among those I consider my allies. Unabashed support of Israel, it seems, can only be found among right-wingers — people I think of as wrong on almost every issue. m not quite sure why

Oh yes, I know. You bristle at the suggestion that you might be excessive in your criticism of Israel. You are staunchly pro-Israel, you want us to know. After all, you believe in Israel’s right to exist. That’s a pretty lukewarm standard, don’t you think? By that logic, any nutcase who declared that America deserved to be attacked on 9/11 was a flag- waving patriotic American because they never said that America should be nuked out of existence.

I’ve actually tried to embrace the left’s party line. Fitting to one’s group is a very powerful motivator, so I’ve tried. And in trying, I discovered the very strong appeal of Israel-bashing among Jews. If the only reason people hate us is because we really are so bad, then it is within our power to change things. All we have to do is stop oppressing Palestinians, and Israel will no longer be attacked, condemned, or boycotted. How very seductive. Then, too, we seem to have a predisposition to blame ourselves.

It goes back to the days when the prophets declared that Jerusalem was destroyed because of idol worship. This is just the updated version, really.

Miriam Jochnowitz DaLuz is a Hebrew school teacher and community mediator in Goshen, New York.

September-October, 2008

In short, the model that Iran presents — armed, isolated, and indifferent to hostile world opinion — needs to be contained, not emulated, by Israel.

The problem is that this answer doesn’t make sense.

Israel’s real crime isn’t its policies, but its existence. Sure, there have been mistakes, missed opportunities, overreactions, even unwarranted brutalities. For anyone under attack, it would be incredible if that were not the case. It’s also true that Israel’s restraint, concern for civilian casualties, and respect for the rule of law have probably been unprecedented in warfare, certainly nonexistent among colonial powers, if that what Israel is supposed to be. Not that this matters; brutality is still unacceptable. A civilian death is no less a horror if it comes about because their own side is using them as human shields. But I’ve gotten tired of saying, “Well, I don’t approve of everything Israel has done but . . . ” I’m tired of having to make excuses for caring about what happens to Israel.

Remember when Israel withdrew from Gaza — the very thing that Israel’s harshest critics had long been demanding? Israel used its soldiers against its own people and dug up the graves of the dead who were buried there. Liberal commentators were awfully coy about the whole thing.

They may have paused in their criticisms but couldn’t quite bring themselves to praise the move. And when Hamas responded by launching rockets against Israel, there was a general sense that it would be poor form to bring it up.

Hey, they just needed to get it out of their systems; they would come around.

Then came the kidnappings of Regev and Goldwasser — and the “disproportionate” response in Lebanon. The commentators found their voices again. Disproportionate was worse than unprovoked.

And now this. And they are again silent.

It is time for the left to come out and be outraged, without qualifying it with comparisons to Palestinian suffering.

It is time to stop being enablers of those who keep their own people in poverty and hopelessness, and squander the opportunity to build a state of their own, for the greater good of destroying Israel. For those who profess concern for Palestinians, where is the outrage over that?

I went to a demonstration last year for the release of the two Israeli soldiers. I didn’t ask any of my non-Jewish friends to go; I thought they wouldn’t be interested. Then I thought: How stingy, how bigoted of me, to make such a presumption, that decent people would not care about such a outrage. Or worse, that they might try to justify it.

Please, prove me wrong.

WHERE WE STAND THE WORKMEN’S CIRCLE/ARBETER RING POSITION ON CURRENT ISSUES

Reflection and Renewal for America in the New Year

T

he countdown to the end of the imperious Bush Administration on January 20th, 2009 has begun.

Will our country engage with the process of reflection and atonement needed to renew itself?

Will the tax cuts that now cost our budget $140 billion annually, yet benefit only the very wealthiest Americans, be allowed to expire to provide capital for the common good?

Will a national system of health insurance at last be devised that will cure patients and providers alike of “bottom-line disease”?

Will regulation of vital industries like energy and finance be moved from a crisis footing to a preventive role? Will regulatory branches of government —including the Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency — be released from the chains of political and religious ideology?

Will the U.S. back off from its preemptive war policy — not only because of the blunt force of roadside bombs and suicide attacks, but in recognition of the superior moral and political power of diplomacy, negotiation, economic development and peace-making? Will these tools at last be brought to bear in Iraq, to end our ill-conceived invasion?

Will our government continue to equate national security only with military might and border control, or begin spending its extraordinary resources to uproot the inequities that lie at the root of much international violence? Will some portion of our hardly accountedfor war budget be reapportioned for infrastructure and innovation, particularly on the energy and environmental fronts, here at home?

Will undocumented immigrants who serve America in countless restaurants, hotels, orchards, meat-packing houses, and sweatshops be given a path to citizenship

that recognizes their sacrifice, their humanity, their family needs, their basic human rights?

Will the fundamentals of electoral democracy, including the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted, be sheltered from discrimination, gerrymandering, and outright fraud?

Will the U.S. renounce the dark world of torture and “rendition,” imprisonment without trial, and other ‘techniques’ of our ill-defined war on terrorism, in order to restore our international credibility as an advocate for human rights and human decency?

At The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring convention in June, our organization debated and passed its biennial slate of social action resolutions. These brief statements, combining analysis and concrete proposals, embody a progressive alternative to the destruction of American freedom and prosperity that the Bush Administration has set in motion. In a season of dramatic political debate and constitutional transition, the WC/ AR resolutions serve both as a shofar blast, warning our fellow Americans about the depth of our crisis, and as a road-map to the restoration of the good name and good fortunes of this precious country. (The resolutions can be read at www.circle.org.)

The American Jewish community has a great deal of acumen and communal wealth and energy to contribute to that restoration — if we can emerge from political ambivalence and fear to find our liberal voice once again. Towards that end, The Workmen’s Circle has helped to inaugurate a conference on November 23rd in New York City: “Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America.” Many prominent Jewish political and communal leaders will be in attendance (see back cover announcement), amplifying the too-quiet American Jewish voice for peace and renewal.

Comments to Mschwart@circle.org Jewish Currents

Sara Ginaite

‘Investigating’ Jewish Partisans in Lithuania The Protest of a Veteran Jewish Partisan

R

ecent actions by the prosecutor general in Lithuania, who seems to

have been pressured by some to discredit Jewish anti-Nazi partisans, are regrettable. Three elderly Jewish partisans are today being investigated in connection with events at the end of January, 1944 — a military action against an armed village, Koniuchy (now Kaniukai), in the Rudnicky forest area, in which thirty-eight villagers were killed.

Lithuania declared independence in 1918 and became a democratic republic. If Lithuania had been allowed to select its own future, I would surely not be writing this article today. Unfortunately, Lithuania suffered from two cruel annexations.

During the Nazi occupation (19411944), over two hundred thousand Jews in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian henchmen, totally destroying a vibrant comSara Ginaite, 1944 munity once famed as a center of Jewish culture. Among the victims were not to prosecute either the Nazi war criminals or the Soviet oppressors: almost all of my extended family.

During the periods of Soviet repres- Lithuanian courts have convicted sion (1940-1941 and 1944-1991), over only two or three of those who par74,500 Lithuanian citizens perished, ticipated in killing the Jews and two including Jews, Russians, Poles and or three active members of the Minpeople of other faiths and ethnicities. istry for Internal Affairs of the Soviet regime. Taking into consideration the Many more were oppressed.

About twenty years have now passed huge number of victims, it looked since Lithuania freed itself from Soviet somewhat strange. Yet the majority occupation and once again became an of Lithuanians have agreed with this independent, democratic republic. Its pragmatic approach. It hardly makes informal, unspoken position has been sense to begin the prosecution of Nazi Sara Ginaite, a native of Kaunas, was incarcerated in the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto and lost almost her entire family in the Holocaust. She escaped into the forests and joined the anti-Nazi partisans. After the war, she was a professor of political economy at Vilnius University for almost twenty-five years before emigrating to Canada in 1983. She published ten books in Vilnius and another two in Toronto,where she taught social science at York University. She was instrumental in arranging for Yad Vashem to honor a Lithuanian family that saved a Jewish child during the Holocaust and has recently negotiated exchange student agreements between Vilnius and Toronto Universities. Her best-known work on the Holocaust is Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community of Kaunas, 1941-1944 (2005).

September-October, 2008

war criminals today, since almost all of them are dead — and the Soviet collaborators are too old.

In this context, it is hard to understand the strange new action of opening, in 2008, a pre-trial investigation of the anti-Nazi partisans’ wartime actions. It is also very strange that the prosecutor did not explain the aim of the investigation and his special and very public attention to the Jewish partisans. All this has alarmed me, as a former partisan. It has alarmed, as well, many other Jews around the world, especially Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans of the Allied forces. It has made us suspicious that the prosecutor intends to prosecute (or, at least, intimidate or publicly defame) those who suffered the most and are guilty the least.

Jews did not join the partisans as a normal act of choice. We were forced to fight the Nazis to save ourselves from extermination. We took the gun in our hands in a desperate situation, when our parents, brothers and sisters were murdered, when children were grabbed from their mothers and sent to their gruesome death. We fought in order to survive; we fought against fascism, which was our enemy, the enemy of all democratic forces and the enemy of Lithuania.

The activity of the Jewish partisans was self-defense — in the face of the most overwhelming instance of genocide in human history. In contrast to Lithuanian collaborators, who volunteered to put to death their unarmed civilian Jewish neighbors, and Soviet collaborators, who also volunteered to kill and oppress the Lithuanians, the Jewish partisans’ aim was not to kill anyone, not to ‘inherit’ the property of a murdered people, but to fight our common enemy. However, in a military action, you cannot avoid civilian casualties and death. That is the ugly

reality of war, particularly a war of partisans who live in the forest and do battle against a world power.

During the events in Koniuchy, I was not in the Rudnicky forest. I was on assignment to return to the Kaunas (Kovno) Ghetto to prepare a group of ghetto fighters to escape to the forest. I cannot comment, therefore, on the details of the event. I can say this, however: In our own interest, we tried to keep friendly relations with the villagers in the Rudnicky forest.

We were never encouraged to harass or hurt them. In order to survive, we did have to collect food wherever we could, often from hostile villagers, but we tried as far as possible to seize food from German food storage areas or transports of food headed for Germany.

But we didn’t always have the luxury of choice. If not for the war, I would have preferred to eat together with my family the dinner prepared by my mother, not to risk my life confiscating a cow from a local peasant.

Such a confiscation, and the attack that followed by hostile villagers, during which two of our partisans were killed and a third captured and handed over to the Nazi-controlled Lithuanian police, is described in my book, Resistance and Survival.

There were many villagers, hostile to the partisans, who were organized into armed groups, supplied by the Germans. Yes, they were villagers, but no, they were not unarmed civilians.

Such a conflict was most likely the reason for the tragedy in Koniuchy.

Prosecutors can easily turn into agents of injustice if they begin campaigns on ethnic or political grounds that have little to do with the work of identifying specific crimes and seeking to bring to a fair trial their alleged perpetrators. I invite the general prosecutor to put everything into its rightful context and not pursue a

policy that appears to be based on ethnic targeting. The first step is to stop and ask: Why now, in 2008, schedule the pre-trial investigation of the circumstances of the event in Koniuchy, instead of examining the murder of 74,500 Lithuanian citizens during Soviet rule — and, yes, into the issue of who took part in the murder of two hundred thousand Jewish citizens of Lithuania during the Holocaust? Any request for bringing to justice the Nazi war criminals and the Soviet oppressors and killers is described as “too late.” Strangely, however, it has just become not too late to use the Lithuanian justice system to discredit those who fought against the Nazis.

How can one not be humiliated by this selective justice, which is, in practice, directed exclusively toward the few surviving Jewish partisans?

Investigation of the Koniuchy case is not justice. It is a manipulation of justice, with the goal of forming a negative image of the Jewish partisans and of Holocaust survivors generally.

A state prosecutor need not allow himself to become the instrument of some Lithuanian factions who support the idea of collective guilt and collective responsibility. But it looks as if the prosecutor has surrendered to pressure and has begun this useless investigation knowing perfectly well that he is not going to charge any concrete person with any concrete alleged crime.

The proceedings will only heighten tensions between Lithuanians and Jews, and pave the way to hatred and accusation. The defacing of the Vilnius Jewish Community Center with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on August 10th is a disturbing example of what may follow. Perhaps certain organizations and the extreme rightwing press welcome such an outcome, but I doubt that this is so of the Lithuanian government.

Over sixty years have passed since

the defeat of the Nazis, and almost twenty since the restoration of the independent democratic Lithuanian Republic. According to my understanding, significant motivations for conflict and tensions between Lithuanians and Jews do not exist anymore.

We have to face the reality: Virtually all those who committed genocide against Lithuanian Jews are dead.

At the same time, no one should forget the contribution of the Jewish community to the development of the first Lithuanian Republic between the two world wars. Jews were a most loyal ethnic minority in Lithuania.

Serving in national infantry battalions, Lithuania’s Jews actively participated in the country’s 1918-1919 battles for independence. They defended Lithuania’s interests and political aims during the Polish ultimatum of 1938 and the Klaipeda (Memel) crisis. Jewish organizations and many Jewish authorities helped to enhance Lithuania’s international stature and contributed to the development of its culture and economy.

Unfortunately, the seeds of antiSemitic poison left by Hitler managed to survive and are still active in Lithuania. The best way to overcome the old and contemporary prejudices and hostilities is to reach a better understanding and mutual respect. I urge the prosecutor to resist those urging him to pour more potent drops of poison onto Lithuanian-Jewish relations. He should abandon these absurd proceedings and assure the last of the last Holocaust survivors, internationally, that they are still welcome to visit their native country without fear of interrogation or “interviews.”

It is high time to pass the investigation of Lithuania’s 20th-century history to historians and educators, not to prosecutors and judges.

For more on the Lithuanian situation, see pages 44-46.

Jewish Currents

Rabbi Amy Klein

Waiting on the West Bank Analysts and Activists in East Jerusalem

View from Israel

t’s like waiting

in line for a roller coaster ride — that’s the image that occurred to me at the Tarqumia checkpoint terminal in the south Hebron hills, where bars snake around and hold people in an orderly line. Many of the Palestinians seeking to enter Israel, however, have this nearly two thousand workers cross over, many with never visited a luna park (that’s Hebrew for “amusement permits to spend the week inside Israel. park”) and would not have appreciated the comparison.

I was there on a Sunday morning in May with Aviva I have been to the occupied territories/West Bank/Yehuda Weisgal of Machsom Watch, an organization of Israeli and Shomron (the names vary as you move politically from women who volunteer as observers at checkpoints throughleft to right) a few times. The first was as a tourist in 1990 out the occupied territories. Aviva joined after years of with a van full of young adults. We visited Rachel’s Tomb protesting the occupation at the Nachshon intersection of on the outskirts of Bethlehem (where I refused to accept a Routes 3 and 44 every Friday with Women in Black. She piece of red string promising me fertility), and from there emphasized to me that she might meet her son’s army to the Cave of Makhpelah, the burial place, according to friends at any given checkpoint; the soldiers are not her Jewish tradition, of the rest of the Jewish matriarchs and enemies and she always tries to be very civil to them. patriarchs. It is also the site where Baruch Goldstein masWe had left Jerusalem in the dark at 4 A.M. On the way sacred twenty-nine Palestinians in 1994. we saw transits headed toward us, a sign that the checkI was in the West Bank next in 1992, on a rabbinicpoint was open and that al student tour. While the flow of Palestinian admiring the beauty workers into Israel had of Tekoa, the reputed begun for the day. We birthplace of the propharrived at around 4:45 et Amos, southeast of and were waved through Bethlehem, I couldn’t to the Palestinian side help thinking how Jewwith hardly a glance. ish settlers there had The Tarqumia terminal acquired some of the is large and modern and most beautiful land in operated by a private the region. I was ansecurity company rather gry when our tour endthan the Israel Defense ed with dinner at the Forces. The idea behind guide’s house in the The separation barrier between East Jerusalem villages the “monstrous appasettlement of Efrat, as ratus,” as Aviva called it, is “to take the sting out of the I had a policy of not making social visits to Jewish West checkpoint process.”

Bank settlers. Yet I broke that policy soon after, when I Most of the Palestinian workers on line had left their was a counselor for a summer tour group in Israel. One of homes by 3:30 AM to ensure that they wouldn’t miss their our Israeli participants invited the group to spend shabbat 5:30 transit, which would deliver them to their jobs by 7. with families in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, where For some, missing a specific transit means losing a day’s she lived. I went on the condition that I could tell the group work. Most work in construction, some as contractors; in advance why I was uncomfortable doing so. It was an others in agriculture. They told us that things run rather unsettling shabbat. smoothly at this crossing, which admits them to Ashkelon, In 1997, after moving to Israel, I went with friends to Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, Bet Shemesh and, in some cases, Tel Ramallah, where I could purchase wood shelving more Aviv or Jerusalem. The security workers are polite and cheaply than in Israel. We were between intifadas, yet I felt efficient, yet there simply are not enough of them; only nervous and went straight home from the lumberyard. two of the eight gates were manned. On the average day, Today, I am forbidden by Israeli law to visit any West it takes fifteen minutes to get through, but on Sundays like Bank places under the Palestinian Authority’s control. I September-October, 2008

Photo: www.map-uk.org

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The

did manage to go olive-picking during the early fall harvest last year with Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), helping a Palestinian family that lived outside the settlement of Alon Shevut, near Nablus. As we swapped personal stories and ate homemade pita, labane and olives, it was easy to forget that we were there to protect the farmers from attack by the settlers.

This year, the harvest went more smoothly, as the Israeli military (IDF) granted more work days to the Palestinians with IDF protection from settler attack. The gains made in the harvest are enabling RHR to turn its attention to trying to regain access to farmlands and prove ownership of lands taken by force by settlers. One challenge is convincing the IDF to remove unnecessary blockades that prevent Palestinians from accessing their land; after each success, new blockades are put up elsewhere, and the whole procedure begins again.

A nuanced picture of the Israeli and Palestinian attitudes that shape life on the West Bank is found in the “Code of Peace Activism: Towards a New Shared Set of Principles for Israeli/Palestinian Peace-Building 2007,” by the Center for Democracy and Community Development’s Walid Salem and Edy Kaufman. The document analyzes “www — what went wrong” with recent peace-building efforts in a violent atmosphere. “When civilians in particular are targeted,” they write, “the trauma caused by loss and vulnerability, by violence being considered ‘normal,’ by feelings of uncertainty, threat, and stress, leads to the reciprocal accumulation of hostility . . .” While support is still broad in both nations for a negotiated peace, they continue, people also endorse violent responses to the aggressions of the other, and the peace camps on both sides have had no success in opposing calls for revenge and violence.

Salem and Kaufman note the asymmetry of the violence. Israel’s violence, they say, is connected to continuation of the occupation; if the occupation ended, Israel would no longer act violently against Palestinians. Palestinian violence, however, manifests regardless of whether it will help end the occupation.

Israel has responded to this Palestinian ‘irrationality’ by moving to a strategy of “managing the conflict” — which 10

postpones the Palestinian right to self-determination and statehood and, they note, furthers the moral deterioration of Israel.

Salem and Kaufman also point to asymmetry in the ways the conflict’s violence is described. Israelis cite “concrete violence,” the kidnapping and killing of Israeli civilians and soldiers, while Palestinians cite “structural violence” aimed at their daily existence, including the disruption of access to healthcare, food, jobs and shelter. The suffering endured by the entire population under occupation is unrelieved and results in premature deaths, reduced life expectancy and generalized post-traumatic stress disorder. “Most Israelis can conduct their daily lives oblivious of the occupation,” the authors note. “Most Palestinians,” by contrast, “have to confront the impediments and ordeals of the restrictions in their lives . . . on a daily basis.”

Israel’s demand for an end to Palestinian terrorism as precondition of peacemaking ignores the difficulties of building a democracy under occupation, they say. Even Palestinian negotiators often cannot get through checkpoints to participate in peace talks. Indeed, participation of late has been restricted to East Jerusalem Palestinians, who have a much easier time because of their Jerusalem residency status.

I got to meet Walid Salem, the coauthor of this report and director of the Center for Democracy and Community Development, when I spent a day in May in East Jerusalem with Encounter, an educational organization that provides Jewish leaders from across the religious and political spectrum with exposure to Palestinian life.

In the morning, we first met with Hajj Ibrahim Abu El-Hawa, whose family has a 1400-year history in the East Jerusalem city of At-Tur on the Mount of Olives. Most Jews know only about the Jewish cemetery there, close to the ‘Holy of Holies,’ the inner sanctum of the Temple. They don’t realize that a Palestinian community lives here as well. Ibrahim’s home is a hostel open to all who promote peace. A Muslim influenced by Sufi mysticism, he inherited the concept of opening his home from his father, who worked for the Jewish cemetery transporting headstones on donkeys and hosted many Jewish and Christian leaders in his home. The family was also the village’s Jewish Currents

After Ashraf Khatib, we at last came to Walid Salem, who gave a presentation at once theoretical, fact-laden, and personal. He opened by citing the conclusion of the 1994 U.N. September-October, 2008

Human Security Report, which states, “All human beings should have freedom from fear and freedom from want.” Ensuring this right, Salem believes, requires two new international commitments: to move beyond state and national security to guarantee the physical safety and basic needs of individuals, and to Walid Salem require the U.N. to enforce human rights, not merely educate about them.

Applying this concept to East Jerusalem, Salem noted that on June 28th, 1967 — his tenth birthday — Israel had annexed the city of Jerusalem but not the people. Palestinian residents are considered by Israel to be Jordanian citizens, but their Jordanian passports are considered temporary by Jordan. Salem also has an Israeli travel document, but not an Israeli passport. This status has many implications. He lives in Shuafat, a part of northeastern Jerusalem that has not been zoned since 1967. He built his house illegally because he could not get a permit. In 2002, the municipality issued a demolition order, which he has successfully stayed, though it is still on the books. (The municipality demolished forty homes between January and May 2008; its budget limits demolitions to one hundred and fifty homes per year.) If Salem leaves East Jerusalem for more than seven years, he, like Ibrahim Abu El-Hawa’s adult children, will not be permitted to return. Palestinian spouses from the West Bank, moreover, no longer qualify for Jerusalem residency status; Salem’s wife, from Nablus, has had to renew her permit to stay in East Jerusalem every six months since 1985.

East Jerusalem Palestinians feel manipulated by all sides, Salem observed. Jordan uses them to continue to maintain the special responsibility of the Hashemites over the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. The PA uses them to postpone resolution of the permanent status of Jerusalem. West Bank Palestinians think of them as having better rights and so resent them. East Jerusalem Palestinians consider themselves Palestinians, said Salem, but they have bitterness toward the PA for ignoring them. Still, they are not Israeli citizens — and Israeli authorities demonize them.

Only twenty thousand Jerusalem Palestinians received Israeli citizenship between 1967 and 2002. Today, none would apply, as they consider Jerusalem to be an occupied city. What Salem said he wants, however, is both the access 11

Photo: www.justvision.org

dairy farmers, boiling and delivering milk every morning to residents. Ibrahim himself worked thirty-four years for the Israeli phone company Bezeq. He encouraged his children to study in American universities — but now they are not permitted by the government to come home to Israel. Perhaps the most jarring words amid Ibrahim’s talk of peace and love were this: “Weapons have an expiration date like milk. So when they are about to expire, the business people need to find somewhere on this earth to fight.”

We met next with Ashraf Khatib, from the Palestinian Authority’s Negotiations Support Unit. He is from the East Jerusalem village of Sheikh Jarah, which was annexed by Israel after 1967. Most of the village lands have since been appropriated by the settlement Ma’alot Dafne. A Muslim, Khatib was educated primarily in Christian schools and attended university in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he studied construction management. He took us to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, from where we could see Ma’ale Adumim, Abu Dis and Ras al Amud, as well as the separation barrier and the Route 1 checkpoint going down to the Dead Sea. The Ma’ale Adumim Jewish settlement has expanded in a way not permitted for the surrounding Palestinian villages. There are currently over 30,000 residents there, with plans to expand to 120,000.

Ehud Olmert has promised to review settlement expansion plans left over from Sharon, to moderate their impact and ensure that they will not block contiguity of a Palestinian state. Yet settlement expansion is happening everywhere. In Abu Dis, Irving Moskowitz, an American gambling mogul, bought the abandoned police station to expand the settlement of Ma’ale Zeytim. The municipality refused the request of Palestinian residents of Abu Dis to use the building for a much-needed school.

Palestinian residents of Jerusalem like Ashraf Khatib number two hundred and fifty thousand. They are not citizens, and on their identity cards, in place of “Arab” or “Jew,” are asterisks. They can vote in municipal but not national elections. They pay between 20 and 22 percent of Jerusalem’s taxes but receive a much lower percentage of city services. While they officially have access to West Jerusalem, some fifty thousand Palestinians with Jerusalem identity cards now live outside the separation barrier and can only cross at checkpoints — many of which are for pedestrians only and are not always open. It used to be a fifteen-minute car trip from Abu Dis to West Jerusalem; now one must drive around Ma’ale Adumim, a forty-fiveminute ride if one is not delayed at the Zion checkpoint.

he now has to West Jerusalem and a Palestinian national identity. If forced to choose between Israeli citizenship and leaving the city, most East Jerusalem Palestinians, he believes, will opt for citizenship.

Asked about the repercussions of the terrorist attack on the Yeshivat HaRav yeshiva by an East Jerusalemite, Salem described a complicated situation. There are residents, he said, who are part of the Jordanian regime and report on others; there are those working with the PA, and those who have been recruited by Hamas and/or Hezbollah. East Jerusalem has six seats in the PA parliament, two reserved for Christians. In the last election, the Christian seats went to Fatah and the other four to Hamas. It is clear that Hamas is the strongest party in East Jerusalem. However, Salem said, a vote for Hamas is not a vote in support of terrorism, but a vote in support of efficient services. Hamas, for example, is working with Israeli authorities to improve healthcare — much more successfully than Fatah.

According to Yossi Alper, coeditor of bitterlemons, a journal of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, the Abbas government is unable to come to terms with the depth of the crisis in Palestinian society brought on by the rise of Hamas.

The West Bank is still ruled by gangs and clans, not the PA security forces. Nonetheless, the PA government has registered some successes. There is today much more cooperation than ever before between Israel and PA security teams, particularly in the implementation of an amnesty program that to date has included four hundred and thirtyeight Palestinians accused of terrorist activity.

The PA has also revoked the legal status of three hundred organizations for channeling funds to Hamas, and has increased supervision over imams in mosques throughout the occupied territories. In all Palestinian cities, there has been dramatic improvement in public order and a more effective response to criminal activity since the summer of 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza. A high Israeli security officer recently commented in Ha’aretz: “In recent years the thing that most affected the West Bank Palestinian citizen was the security chaos. Today, West Bank residents are most bothered by the economic situation and the [lack of] freedom of movement in the territories.”

Somewhat reluctantly, PA security forces are also acting against terrorism, predominantly in areas where Israel requires them to be active or where the PA feels threatened.

The PA is reluctant to arrest Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders, however, and usually releases them quickly. Even in Jenin, where the largest security campaigns of the PA have taken place, terrorism has not been rooted out. As a result, Israel has no current plans to return specific areas to PA control for fear of a takeover by Hamas.

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On Israel’s side, the biggest problem is that Prime Minister Olmert, who seems serious about negotiating a final-status agreement with the Palestinians and has openly recognized the immorality of the occupation, is under investigation for corruption and will no longer be prime minister soon after this column is published. All of his likely replacements from within Kadima would do well to heed Olmert’s words before the Knesset Committee on Security and Foreign Affairs on May 26th: that among the American elite the idea of a “state for all its citizens” is growing in popularity. This is a very dangerous development that threatens Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

Indeed, Ali Jarbawi, professor of political science at Birzeit University, has suggested in bitterlemons that the only way Israel might get serious about a two-state solution, rather than “managing the situation” while expanding its presence in the West Bank, is for the Palestinian Authority to announce its own deadline for such a solution.

Handmade rockets are not a serious enough threat, says Jarbawi, but the promise to begin pursuing a one-state solution could be.

Meanwhile, there are many Israeli, Palestinian and joint Israeli-Palestinian organizations working for peace. The Geneva Initiative (www.geneva-accord.org), to cite one, has been steadfast in sharing its wisdom about the real possibilities of peace. In the last week of May alone, six Knesset members from five different parties participated in Geneva Initiative events, where MK Yossi Beilin, cofounder of the Initiative, was a tireless presence. A twoday seminar was also held with senior members of the Shas Party and ultra-Orthodox press members; participants toured the separation barrier in Jerusalem, heard lectures from senior security officials and Palestinian leaders, and learned about conflict solutions. Similar activities took place for Jewish residents in the northern city of Ma’alot-Tarshih, and for Russian immigrants in Ashdod and Or Yehuda. A Russian-language Initiative blog was begun to encourage discussion on the part of participants.

The Geneva Initiative also held a conference on the relationship between the separation barrier and the peace process with former senior security officers, academics, and the mayor of Alfei Menashe, a settlement on the Palestinian side of the separation barrier. The mayor, Eliezer Hasdai, said that Alfei Menashe residents have taken up a protest to push for their security needs. At the same time, however, in exchange for “real peace,” he is willing to leave Alfei Menashe. The Geneva Initiative is thus working to convince decision makers, future leaders, internationalists and grassroots communities, both Israeli and Palestinian, that peace and a final-status agreement are achievable.

Jewish Currents

Nicholas Jahr

J Street Paves Its Own Road The New Jewish Lobby in Washington

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arely has the appearance of a new lobbying outfit in Washington

been greeted with the avalanche of press that heralded the opening of J Street last April. The name, “J Street,” quickly became something of a floating signifier, at once an allusion to the group’s Jewish background as “ If you’ve been to Jerusalem, it well as to the single street famously doesn’t take much imagination missing from DC’s alphabetical to understand that Jerusalem grid, a street that would run parallel really is two separate polities. to K Street, home to the capitol’s most powerful lobbying firms. By The notion that there’s some inference, the name also revealed the unified city is a figment of the ‘virtual’ nature of the new enterprise imagination.” and the “yawning vacuum” in the American debate over Israel. course, groups such as Americans for “Yawning vacuum” is the phrase of Peace Now and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom J Street’s executive director, Jeremy have long argued for diplomacy and Ben-Ami, who observes that while a a two-state solution to the Israelihalf or more American Jews have been Palestinian conflict (leaders of both shown in polls to favor the establish- groups are included on J Street’s large ment of a Palestinian state, one would advisory council). “The reason we hardly know that from the organiza- formed J Street is there are things that tions that supposedly represent Jewish they can’t do,” Ben-Ami says. interests. Drawing on his experience as policy director for Howard Dean’s Those things mostly involve money. presidential campaign and as deputy In fact, J Street comprises two sepadomestic policy adviser to President rate entities: the eponymous lobbying Bill Clinton, Ben-Ami hopes that J group, which will focus on Congress Street will give that majority a way to and online organizing, and JStreetbe heard, in large part through online PAC, which will channel money to advocacy and organizing that taps select candidates. It’s the latter field the power of small donors across the that progressive Jews have more or country. less surrendered to conservatives, Encouragingly, in just three months until now. “One dynamic in the JewJ Street has raised $1.5 million, its en- ish community is that the people who tire operating budget for the year, and tend to be single-issue activists and built an e-mail list 50,000 supporters voters tend be more conservative strong. “There’s a pent up demand for on those issues,” Ben-Ami explains. this voice,” Ben-Ami said in an inter- “People who make their voting deciview with Jewish Currents, “be- sions and funding decisions purely cause people are frustrated and tired based on Israel tend to be further to of this void in American politics.” Of the right,” while Jews “who are to I

Nicholas Jahr is an occasional contributor to Jewish Currents who has also written for Dissent, The Brooklyn Rail, and City Limits. He is a founding editor of the Crumpled Press (www.crumpledpress.org).

September-October, 2008

the left tend to have a wider range of issues and concerns that impact their decisions” and their activism. Using the online organizing tools pioneered

by MoveOn as well as the Dean and Obama campaigns, J Street aims to sharpen the contradiction between the often messianic agenda of the right and the values of mainstream American Jews, rallying the (theoretically) silent majority to support candidates committed to a reinvigorated peace process.

J Street has now made its first two rounds of endorsements, signing off on a baker’s dozen worth of candidates who are running for or have already grabbed a seat in the House of Representatives. In 2006, the average cost of winning a seat in the House was $1.25 million, while a win in the Senate ran about $8.8 million, meaning that House races are more susceptible to the sort of targeted donations J Street can marshal. Although some of the endorsed candidates, like Darcy Burner of Washington State, have taken strong stands against the war in Iraq — which give some sense of where they would stand if elected — the records of the five sitting Congressional representatives whom J Street is backing provide the best indication yet of what to expect from the new lobby.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), backed in the second round of J Street endorsements, is in some ways both the biggest and most problematic catch.

A six-term congressman, Wexler is a co-chair of the Obama campaign in Florida and is often cited as an authority on Israel who ‘speaks for’ U.S. Jews. His acceptance of J Street’s endorsement conveys a certain degree of legitimacy and defense from the inevitable ‘anti-Israel’ charges being leveled against the lobby.

Yet in the 2008 election cycle alone, 13

Wexler has already pulled down $47,700 from PACs labeled as “proIsrael” by the Center for Responsive Politics, placing him among the top twenty recipients in the House. AIPAC lists him as a co-sponsor of eight out of eleven items of legislation that it’s currently pushing on the hill. In the fall of 2007, Wexler introduced a resolution backing Israel’s not-so-covert strike against Syria’s alleged nuclear shenanigans, and he’s now co-sponsoring an anti-Iranian resolution that, critics say, empowers the Bush administration to impose a naval blockade ­— essentially an act of war.

This is hardly the record of a peacemaker. As of this writing, however, Wexler seems to be publicly reconsidering the blockade provisions.

While it’s too soon to attribute this to J Street’s influence, it raises some measure of hope for providing even as staunchly a ‘pro-Israel’ politician as Wexler room to maneuver.

Jeremy Ben-Ami has said in interviews that J Street will not hesitate to endorse Republicans that meet its criteria. The initial slate includes just one: Louisiana Representative Charles Boustany. First elected in 2004, Boustany is a Lebanese-American who grew up in the U.S. Along with Gary Ackerman (D-NY), he co-authored a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, in advance of the Annapolis conference, commending her efforts and declaring that “we can not allow the financial asphyxiation of the Palestinian Authority, particularly while some continue to provide or allow funding of Hamas.” The letter, which ultimately had 135 congressional signatories, was quietly endorsed

by AIPAC (much to the dismay of at least two of the lobby’s major financial supporters).

During the war in Lebanon in the summer, 2006, Wexler, Boustany, and Representatives Lois Capps (D-CA) 14

and Susan Davis (D-CA), who were also endorsed by J Street, voted in favor of the House’s bellicose resolution of support for Israel. Boustany cast his “yes” vote despite the defeat of an amendment that he and the House’s three other members of Lebanese descent had drafted urging restraint against civilian targets. The Washington Post declared that the final resolution “went even beyond the Bush administration in supporting . . . Israel in its battle with Hezbollah militants.” The Post went on to quote Boustany: “Violence and warfare are always disturbing, but as policymakers, we need to look at what steps need to be made to make a lasting peace, not just knee-jerk reactions . . . I agree with what Israel is doing.”

Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) is just a year into his first term. He’s already been on a trip to Israel on AIPAC’s dime in the summer of ’07, which he followed up by endorsing the Ackerman-Boustany letter later that year. Upon receiving J Street’s endorsement, he told the Forward, “I don’t see J Street and AIPAC as being antithetical in any way.” AIPAC lists Cohen as a co-sponsor of seven of eleven of its bills.

With friends like these, J Street may not need enemies. To be effective, however, the lobby must seek to sway relative moderates in a deeply conservative time. Ben-Ami describes his task as providing representation for the “voices of moderate, mainstream American Jews and other friends of Israel,” to contrast “voices on the right that are out of step with the mainstream American Jewish community” and are “leading us down a path that has no relationship at all with the values of the American Jewish community.”

On occasion, J Street’s favored candidates have clashed among themselves. In June, 2007, Robert Wexler

co-sponsored a House resolution calling on the U.S. to recognize Jerusalem as “the undivided capital of Israel.” Lois Capps criticized the resolution, stating that “it has long been understood that a permanent agreement about the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem will be left to final-status negotiations . . . I think we tread on dangerous territory when Congress adopts positions that run counter to issues that have yet to be negotiated.”

As Gershom Gorenberg, veteran correspondent for the American Prospect, has observed, the issue of Jerusalem is likely to be a flashpoint in any serious negotiations undertaken by a new president. During the Oslo peace process, AIPAC successfully campaigned for a resolution to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, infuriating the Palestinians as well as the Arab world. This time around, the tactic may be to push for a congressional resolution calling for an “undivided” Jerusalem. But the fate of Jerusalem, Ben-Ami believes, “is up to the sides, and it should not be up to an American politician to declare one way or another what the future of Israel will be. And it’s certainly not up to American Jews to make that declaration.

“This is an issue that should not be a political football in American politics,” Ben-Ami concludes. “The issue is too difficult and serious. Jerusalem is a sacred place that has been the scene of violence and war and conflict for millennia. A simplistic word like ‘undivided’ doesn’t do justice to the complexity. When it’s used to score political points, it only sets back the prospect of a realistic agreement to ensure Israeli peace and security.”

Indeed, in an article reporting the debut of J Street, the National Journal also reported on the formation of the Coordinating Council on Jerusalem, a new organization backed by a number of Orthodox and Zionist groups, Jewish Currents

among others, with a budget of $1 million. The Council has declared that “we oppose any negotiations which involved possible concessions of Jewish sovereignty or control [over Jerusalem].”

“If you’ve been to Jerusalem,” BenAmi counters, “it doesn’t take much imagination to understand that Jerusalem really is two separate polities.

There is an Arab collection of villages that were Arab villages before 1967 and remain in existence today. It’s still relatively easy to know which side you’re on when you’re there. So the notion that there’s some unified city is a figment of the imagination.”

Ben-Ami’s stance is generally pragmatic; he leaves open the question of how far J Street is willing to push politicians to accept an agreement. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Saree Makdisi, a UCLA professor who has written a new book on the occupation, cited a year-old United Nations report stating “that almost 40 percent of the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure — roads, settlements, military bases and so on — largely off-limits to Palestinians. Israel has methodically broken the remainder of the territory into dozens of enclaves separated from each other and the outside world by zones that it alone controls (including, at last count, six hundred and twelve checkpoints and roadblocks).”

“The two-state solution that is going to be reached will have to take down some of that infrastructure,” BenAmi replies. “Removing settlements and taking down illegal outposts are critical elements of Israeli security.”

Ultimately, he believes that while “the final contours of the agreement need to be negotiated by the parties, it’s pretty clear that the agreement will need to provide the Palestinians with the equivalent of 100 percent of the pre-1967 West Bank.

September-October, 2008

Winning such concessions will require hard bargaining, and the best leverage the U.S. has to bring Israel to the table is the ‘special relationship,’ including the $2-4 billion Israel receives each year in American aid. “There’s got to be some sort of intervention here where the U.S. says to Israel the time has come to finally do something,” Ben-Ami stated in an interview with Newsweek. Asked, however, if that “intervention” could include lobbying against the special relationship — for example, against the $170 million raise in military aid Congress approved this past June — Ben-Ami’s answer is a flat “No.” “Most of the initiative for a settlement, an ultimate agreement,” he told Jewish Currents, is going to have to come through presidential diplomacy and the serious engagement of a new administration,” he observed. “The goal of J Street is to provide that president with the political backing and the clear support to use his best judgment to bring about that solution.”

For the time being, J Street’s actions have focused on beginning to drive a wedge between voices on the right and those Jews who might be lulled into listening to them by promises of support for Israel, and simultaneously introducing a voice of reason into the debate over Iran. On the former front,

J Street joined other progressive groups in lobbying Senator Joe Lieberman not to address the summit of the notoriously bigoted Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. (Lieberman went ahead anyway, opening his speech by declaring, “I am your brother Joseph.”)

J Street’s call for diplomacy with Iran has actually been its most successful campaign to date. While the American Jewish Committee’s 2006 survey of Jewish opinion had 57 percent of American Jews supporting a preventive military strike against Iran, J Street’s own polling this summer suggested that 69 percent of American Jews would be more likely to support a candidate who called for “tough diplomacy.”

Although there’s not necessarily a logical contradiction between these two positions, the former is regularly greeted with far more enthusiasm than the latter at AIPAC’s annual conference.

The challenge before J Street is to pry open a space in which the 69 percent of American Jews willing to give diplomacy a chance can be heard.

A fundamentally moderate voice in a conservative time, It remains to be seen whether offering candidates the political cover to speak out will be enough, or if a more radical approach is needed.

“If you have money, you’re wise and handsome, and you can sing.”

—Sholem Aleichem The

Sholem Aleichem Bobblehead Doll $18 plus $6 shipping. www.jewishcurrents.org • (212) 889-2523 Coming in 2009: The I.L. Peretz Bobblehead Doll!!

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Bennett Muraskin

Jews and the Left: A Natural Alliance?

A Skeptical Historical Look

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originated with the French Revolution, but its roots were about a hundred years older, with the inception of the Enlightenment in late 17th- and early 18th-century Britain and France. It meant a commitment to the struggle to overturn autocracy and establish representative government based on natural rights. If you asked one of the Enlightenment thinkers if Jews were allies in that struggle, they might have looked at you as if you were crazy.

Voltaire in France and Thomas Paine in early America attacked Judaism and Christianity with equal venom. Jews were almost universally perceived by the original “left” as a backward religious caste, mired in medieval superstition. There were no Jews among the Enlightenment thinkers or the leaders of the French Revolution — and when Napoleon’s armies freed the Jews from European ghettos and gave them equal citizenship rights, the Jews were Two faces of medieval Jewish life: Receiving a royal charter, left (14th century, Koblenz, and not rising up to liberate themselves. being attacked by the mob, facing page (14th century, Frankfurt).

The impetus came from without.

Earlier in European history, the nificant [anti-Jewish] massacres and The tried and true survival strategy major threat to existing power struc- persecutions of the medieval period of Jews in medieval and early modern tures came from peasant rebellions, were the work of rebels or anti-estab- Europe had been to seek the protection typically led by lower-rung Christian lishment mass movements, frequently of the powerful — to serve them, enclergy. If there was one thing a Jew in of a religious nature.” rich them, appease them, bribe them, pre-modern Europe feared more than The Khmelnitski rebellion in the whatever it took to stay in their good anything else, it was a peasant rebel- Ukraine (1648), for example, was graces, because only the elites could lion. For both religious and economic an uprising of Ukrainian peasants protect Jews from the “mob,” that is, reasons, Jews would inevitably be tar- against Polish landlords. When they the lower orders of society. This stratgeted. Many Jews functioned as estate could not get their hands on a Polish egy was used as early as the Crusades managers for landlords, leaseholders landlord, the Ukrainian peasants mas- in the 11th and 12th centuries, and was of lucrative businesses, moneylenders, sacred Jews, who in their eyes were still employed in tsarist Russia as late tax collectors, merchants and in other agents of the landlords. Similarly, as the turn of the 20th century. You can positions that served the ruling classes the abolition of serfdom in Russia read stories by Sholem Aleichem or of Europe. Social unrest was a direct in 1861 actually harmed many Jews I. J. Singer in which Jews, at the first threat to their interests. As historian who made their money supplying the sign of a pogrom, go and bribe the David Biale wrote, “The most sig- feudal landlords. nearest government official to call out soldiers to defend them from potential Bennett Muraskin is the author of Let Justice Well Up Like Water and Humanist violence. And if that could not be Readings in Jewish Folklore. A member of our Editorial Advisory Council, he is a key done, Jews hid, ran away, rode out the activist in the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations. This paper was presented storm, suffered in silence. They saw at a workshop at the Jewish Currents weekend at Circle Lodge, July 11th-13th. no prospect of making alliances with 16

he term “left”

Jewish Currents

the mob, who most often perceived Jews as aliens and Christ-killers.

Judging from Karl Marx and his rivals on the 19th-century left — the Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin — Jews were to be scorned as classic capitalist exploiters, financial specu-

lators, stock market manipulators, money grubbers, and worse. Indeed, the Jewish economic profile in Western and Central Europe in the 19th century was that of business people, and nearly every early socialist and anarchist had a harsh assessment of Jews as rapacious capitalists. Some, like Marx himself, never changed their negative opinions of Jews.

However, around the time of the 1848 democratic revolutions throughout Europe, we do see the beginnings of a Jewish affinity for the left in the more advanced countries in Europe.

The most logical explanation of this leftwards shift of Jewish opinion was that their worst enemies were now on the right. The days of the friendly emperor, king, noble and bishop were drawing to a close. With the dawning of the era of mass politics, the elites instead needed to appeal to the “masses” — and one way to gain their September-October, 2008

support was through anti-Semitism, the “socialism of fools,” as German Jewish socialist August Bebel called it. The left, for its part, had no special love for Jews, but believed as a matter of principle that all citizens should be equal before the law, and perceived anti-Semitism as a tool of the rich and powerful to divert popular senti-

ment for liberty and social justice into harmful channels. Benjamin Nones, a Jewish supporter of the American Revolution, perceived this in 1800: I am a Jew, and if for no other reason, for that reason I am a republican.

Among the church establishments we are ranked with Turks, infidels and heretics. In the monarchies of Europe, we are hunted from society, stigmatized as unworthy of common civility. In republics, we have rights; in monarchies we live but to experience wrongs. Among the nations of Europe, we are inhabitants everywhere, but citizens nowhere, except in republics . . .

Many traditionally religious Jews had mixed feelings about these democratic movements, which they feared would lead to the abandonment of Judaism and to intermarriage and assimilation, and their attitude to socialist movements was almost

universally hostile. More liberally religious Jews and the secularists, however, gravitated to the “bourgeois left” and some even to the socialist left — including many middle-class Jews — because by and large their values and their self-interest were served by this identification. Jews were an international people and therefore resistant to national chauvinism; so were socialists. Jews favored a secular state that did not enforce a state religion; so did socialists. Jews were an urban people, with a history of literacy and devotion to education; socialism was primarily an urban movement that welcomed intellectuals and urged its followers to study literary classics as well as political writings.

Binding all of this together, perhaps, was the Jews’ longstanding outsider status. No longer in the physical ghetto, and free from the mental ghetto erected by the traditional rabbinate, the secularized, modern Jews still never entered the mainstream. Due to a combination of anti-Semitism and Jewish cultural cohesion, they were, at best, never fully accepted, at worst, shunned or despised, by the gentile majority. As outsiders, Jews saw the world with a critical eye and were therefore more open to radical solutions. As Sigmund Freud explained in his oft-quoted lecture to B’nai B’rith, “Because I was a Jew, I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect. As a Jew I was prepared to join the opposition and to do so without agreement with the ‘compact majority.’”

Once the Haskole (Enlightenment) broke through from the West, Jews of the tsarist empire and their descendants were perhaps the most natural constituency for radicalism because they suffered both national and class oppression. At first, however, Jewish radicals considered their fellow Jews 17

to be hopelessly parochial and tried to organize the Christian peasants instead. Only after Jews began to leave the shtetl for the big cities did the picture change. They no longer lived under the thumb of their traditional leadership, in tight-knit communities in which Jews were indoctrinated to fear non-Jews. City Jews became proletarianized and were desperately poor and exploited. As leftist ideas began to penetrate, these urban Jews formed a receptive audience.

Even in the shtetl, class struggle soon began to emerge. Poorer Jews were soaked by taxes imposed by the traditional shtetl elite, and they recalled bitterly how, in the first half of the 19th century, their leaders had betrayed them during the period of child conscription by saving their own sons while turning over the sons of the poor to the tsarist army.

By early 20 th century, socialism was firmly entrenched among a large segment of the Jewish population.

The Jewish Labor Bund became the largest component of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and Jews were prominent among both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Tsarist anti-Semitism was a great recruiting tool; there was no more popular cause for Jews around the world, rich and poor, than the overthrow of that obnoxious regime. Yet even in ‘civilized’ Germany, middle-class Jews were well represented in the leadership and rank-and-file of the Social Democratic Party.

The prominent Jewish role within the American left, and the continued Jewish loyalty to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party despite our relatively high incomes, are well-known.

Before the 20th century, however, a different situation prevailed. The great struggles between ‘left’ and ‘right’ in 19th-century America were over slavery and over the impact of indus18

trialization on farmers and workers.

Jews were not prominent as abolitionists, feared the farmer-based populist movement, and came late to the labor movement. The American Jewish identification with the left thus dates not from 1848, but the early decades of the 20th century.

What about the role of Jewish religious texts and traditional practices? Here I must agree with the conservative Jewish scholar Robert Wistrich, who said, “It was not the Jewish religion which in the 19th and 20th centuries was responsible for Jewish radicalism.

Rather its tribal-national basis encouraged separatism and its messianic hope promoted political indifference.”

After all, who were the best known Jewish revolutionaries? Karl Marx was a Lutheran convert with no Jewish education and a hostile attitude toward Jews as a people. Ferdinand Lassalle was born a Jew but knew little about Judaism and didn’t care for Jews either.

The Austrian Jewish Marxists Victor Adler and Otto Bauer were notorious for the contempt they displayed for Judaism and Jews. Rosa Luxembourg and Leon Trotsky were untainted by anti-Semitism, but did not identify as Jews, took no special interest in Jewish affairs and were largely ignorant of Jewish history and culture.

True, not all Jewish socialists had the same attitude. Eduard Bernstein, the German socialist, and Leon Blum, the French socialist who became prime minister in 1936, both had Jewish sympathies, but knew very little about Jewish tradition. Einstein, a socialist and an exemplary Jewish humanist, attended a Catholic elementary school.

Of course, all Jewish socialists favored the complete political and civic emancipation of Jews, but in this sense they were no different from non-Jewish socialists.

How is it possible for Jewish texts to have influenced Marx or Trotsky or

Blum if they never read them? Obviously, we have to look elsewhere for the source of their radicalism. This comes into sharper focus when we think of the extraordinary role played

by Jewish women in movements of the left. With rare exception, they were deprived of anything more than a rudimentary Jewish education.

We further know that there has always been a definite correlation between the level of observance and political affiliation, with Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews on the right of the political spectrum and the less religious and secular Jews on the left.

If immersion in Jewish texts were a source of Jewish radicalism, the reverse should be true.

Some Jewish socialists did place great stress on the religious tradition as a source of their radicalism. Morris Winchevsky, a poet, journalist and socialist agitator in Germany, London and New York once said: For almost everything I write, I have to thank that poet preacher Isaiah who entered my heart and mind with love for the orphans and widows and other defenseless and oppressed people with his hatred for everything that stands for robbery and murder and deceit under whatever mask it parades. I am grateful not only to him . . . but to Amos and Hosea before him and Micah after him.

This is the same person who wrote the words to “Ale Brider” (“All Brothers”), the labor unity song. Here is one translated verse: Yes, we are all one, whether we have much or little.

And we are all brothers and pray from one prayerbook.

Devout and leftist, united all, like the bridegroom and bride; Like the Torah and the commentary. . .

The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, the great New York City garment workers strike of 1909-1910, began Jewish Currents

with a meeting at Cooper Union, where the striking workers took what they called “old Jewish oath.” Rather than saying, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither,” they declared, “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may my right hand wither.”

What was going on here? The Jewish radicals who used Biblical and Talmudic references were maskilim — followers of the Enlightenment — who had rejected the religious tradition but struggled to find a way to reach the Jewish working class and discovered that reinventing the Jewish textual tradition was a good way to do it. The prophet Isaiah’s number one concern, after all, was combating pagan influences, not social injustice. He was a religious fanatic who claimed to be speaking for God and preached death and destruction to anyone who disagreed with him. But if quoting Isaiah won recruits to the socialist cause, it was worth taking him out of context. The same is true of the old Jewish oath.

It is about Jewish longing for the restoration of the Temple, not labor militancy. The radical version that inspired the strike was administered

by Benjamin Feigenbaum, a militant atheist who regularly heaped abuse on Judaism as a religion.

These Jewish radicals appealed to the religious tradition for utilitarian purposes, as a means to a revolutionary goal that most devout Jews, who devoted major portions of their lives to studying these texts, found abhorrent.

Citing the Bible was also a clever method of reaching potential Christian allies. In 1934, socialist Baruch Charney Vladeck convinced the American Federation of Labor to denounce Nazi anti-Semitism with the following analogy: “In the torture chambers of fascism, the Jew occupies a conspicuous and painful place.

September-October, 2008

One of the most important reasons why all tyrants hate us is because of our long experience resisting injustice. Over four thousand years ago, a Jew by the name of Moses led the first strike of bricklayers at the pyramids, and since then all pharaohs are our enemies.”

Bad history, but great propaganda.

Other Jewish radicals drew on the more recent and even less plausibly ‘radical’ Jewish tradition of hasidism. Under the influence of Gershom Scholem and especially Martin Buber, Marxists Walter Benjamin and Ernest Bloch and anarchist Gustav Landauer imagined a hasidic utopian community inspired by messianic fervor to engage in healing the world. Their romanticizing of hasidim drew this caustic response from Isaac Deutscher: We [East European Jews] had been steeped in hasidism. All its idealizations were for us nothing but dust thrown into our eyes. We had grown up in that Jewish past. We had the 11th, 13th and 16th centuries living next door to us and under our very roof; and we wanted to escape it to live in the 20th century. Through all the thick gilt and varnish of the romanticists like Martin Buber, we could see and smell the obscurantism of our archaic religion and a way of life unchanged since the middle ages . . .

Social conditions, anti-Semitism, the vicissitudes of diaspora existence, the impact of the Enlightenment and the radical ideologies it spawned — these are the ingredients of Jewish radicalism, not Leviticus, Amos or Maimonides.

I do believe, however, that there is one element in Jewish tradition that has perhaps helped inspire Jewish affinity for the left. Judaism allows for the challenging of authority, with numerous examples of Jews arguing with God himself in the Bible (Abraham, Moses, Job, Habakkuk), Talmud and hasidic folk tales. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye reflects this tradition in Yiddish litera-

ture. As S. Anski said, “Truth stands so high, it even calls God to judgment.

If the Almighty issues a harsh decree, the righteous man comes to nullify it.”

And if God is not immune from criticism, why would human authorities get off easy?

In this regard, I recently learned of a remarkable religious practice, ikuv ha’keriah (interrupting the Torah reading), which allows any Jew with a grievance to delay the Torah reading until his or her grievance is heard and steps are taken to resolve it.

(See Childhood in Exile by Shmarya Levin.) It is also worth noting that much Jewish humor revolves around deflating the pretensions of makhers or other bigshots. Long live Jewish irreverence!

I am not confident, however, that Jews will remain on the left. In France, the majority of Jews voted for Sarkozy, not the socialist candidate, for president; in Great Britain, Jews are hardly identified with the Labor Party; in the U.S., neoconservatives have played a role way out of proportion to their numbers in moving American politics to the right. And in Israel — the perfect Jewish laboratory — rightist parties have at least as much support as leftist ones.

Some may argue that the gravitational pull of Israel and Zionism has generated an ethnocentric mentality that has suppressed our anti-authoritarian and internationalist tendencies.

Others may argue that Israel-bashing or anti-Semitism on the left has forced Jews to look for new allies in the center or on the right. That is the subject for another discussion, but either way, there is no Jewish ‘essence’ that makes us natural leftists. Whether the last hundred and fifty years or so of Jewish leftism turns out to be a historical anomaly or an enduring phenomenon is really up to us.

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Lawrence Bush

RELIGION AND SKEPTICISM Science and Boundaries Should Humanists Fear Scientific Innovation?

T

he world was not destroyed when the Large

Us, Byron L. Sherwin distinguishes between the golem legend of Jewish tradition and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story by noting that the golem is created by a wise human being, Rabbi Judah Loew, for the sake of the greater good (protecting the Jewish community), while the Frankenstein monster is created by a hubristic egotist bent on establishing his scientific immortality and proving his God-like powers. Sherwin points to a strong humanistic strain within Judaism that urges human beings to exercise our powers to the fullest — but also urges that those powers be restrained by “knowing when to stop. . . . When we choose Frankenstein over Judah Loew,” he writes, “. . . it is time to stop creating.”

Today it seems that the only sources of “knowing when to stop” for scientists are peer review and the pressures of the marketplace. Yet science stands at the threshold of major breakthroughs that mess around with the very fundamentals of creation. Should there be sources of moral and ethical guidance for science other than the marketplace?

Hadron Particle Collider was started up in Switzerland this past summer — yet some scientists had feared otherwise. A lawsuit filed March 21st sought a restraining order to prohibit the start-up, said the New York Times, for fear it “could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which . . . could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a ‘strangelet’ that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump . . .”

I couldn’t help wondering whether the international Bernard Bulkin: I am going to make a distinction between scientific community had the right to jeopardize the science and technology. Science is very much about using planet for the sake of research, no a specific methodology, the scientific matter how heavy the odds against method, to broaden and deepen our a disaster occurring. While I’m understanding of every aspect of the deeply pro-science and do not share universe, from the smallest and most the paranoia about scientific experifundamental to the biggest and most mentation communicated by both complex. It is constrained not only by religious mythologies and popupeer review and peer pressure, but by lar culture, there are times I find the methods of science itself. worrisome the lack of informed, Of course, the ethical question of democratic, ethical discussion what we should do versus what we can about the progress of humanity on do has been with science for a long the scientific front. There is a great time — and has often been framed in deal of hoopla about what we can relation to religion. Galileo, Bruno, do with science to transform our Kepler and others were pressured world, but little discussion, outside not to do their science because of the corporate boardroom, of what conflicts with the Catholic Church. we should do with that power.

Darwin certainly wrestled with the I recently discussed my conreligious consequences of his work, cerns with Bernard Bulkin, reand his wife pressured him on this tired chief scientist at British score. Anthropologists (to the extent Petroleum (BP), a man with conwe consider this a science) have faced Bernard Bulkin siderable experience in both the lab many serious ethical questions about and the boardroom. A key developer of BP’s clean fuels their physical evidence and cultural observations. And in strategy, he now works as a consultant and investor in the 20th century, the rapid development of quantum theory various green technology enterprises. Bernie (who is my and the understanding of radioactivity and the fundamencousin by marriage) is active in a Liberal Judaism congre- tal transformational properties of matter and energy led gation in London, where he has lived for decades. to many ethical questions.

Some would say that in at least a few of these examples, Lawrence Bush: In a fascinating book, Golems Among science made the wrong choice in moving forward. I would 20

Jewish Currents

disagree. The science that was done changed our understanding of the world. I think it is possible to argue that real human progress in alleviating suffering has resulted from science-led society. Scientific progress has made us aspirational as a society — we can understand more and, through our understanding, improve our society.

All that is prologue to what you are really pushing as an issue.

Genetics is a part of science that has advanced enormously in the past fifty years. People of my generation were taught classical Mendelian principles of genetics, plus some idea that there was a connection between these principles and Darwin’s principles — and that was about it. Molecular-level genetics changed everything. We found we could understand at the most fundamental level how inheritable characteristics were passed from generation to generation, how characteristics were copied, and how mistakes occurred.

The technology for applying this science is, in part, directed at curing disease. But part is also directed to creating specific sorts of offspring — and to exploring the creation of completely new life forms. Is this a good thing?

That’s a decision society has to make, but it is not about science. Similarly, during the early development of the science of thermodynamics it was recognized that this fundamental science had applications to making more efficient cannons. Society had no place regulating the development of thermodynamics, but it had a big role to play in deciding about the manufacture and use of cannons. By the way, different societies will make different decisions, because the societies we have created in different parts of the world have different ideas of what is ethical, desirable, and useful.

Bush: I agree that science has been the major tool that has taken us out of helplessness and vulnerability and made “the good life” possible. But human beings have not really developed the social and political tools to match our scientific maturity. Sophisticated genetic science, for example, may enable us to prevent inherited disease, but it may also lead to gender selection, which is already creating an unnatural gender gap in China — or to Pierre Cardin designer children in America! How do we weigh the right of scientists and corporations to pursue such applications against questions of the larger social good?

By way of another example, several years ago I read an article by a plastic surgeon suggesting that he could, within a decade, place functional wings on a human being’s back. We could fly without machinery. Such innovations would actually be illegal under present U.S. law, he said; apparently, there are real restrictions on what cosmetic September-October, 2008

surgeons are allowed to do. Now, I myself want people to be permitted to have wings — humanistic angels! — but then I think about how at least a third of the human race doesn’t have enough food or a safe place to live, and I think about a third of the human race flying while a third lies broken on the ground, and it feels to me that our species would be dividing into two, as in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. So I conclude, Fine, no wings until there’s more equity among human beings.

The question is, who should make that decision? Elected officials, who are subject to the popular fear of science and the pressures of fundamentalist preachers? Or the Boeing or United Airlines boardroom? What mechanisms would you like to see to guide the application of scientific prowess?

Bulkin: In principle, the only ethic for science is honesty.

Propose theories, do experiments, test the statistical validity of the outcomes (science is often not about ‘finding out the truth’ as much as it is about establishing things to

“I would want to be more mindful of how we ensure that science can be published without interference than of how government (or another part of society) can regulate science.” higher levels of statistical certainty). But like other things that are true ‘in principle,’ sometimes it is not so easy. Even the Ten Commandments have shades of gray.

When Einstein wrote to Roosevelt about the possibility of nuclear weapons, only a part of the science behind the project was completed. Oppenheimer, Teller, Von Neumann, Bethe, Feynman, and many others were scientists, not engineers, and while quite a bit of the work done there was about the practicality of making a nuclear weapon (and figuring out how to explode it without getting killed yourself), a lot of science was also done. This was the extreme case of scientific ethics put to the test. That the war was one of good versus evil was not in doubt. That science was put to work to create a weapon designed to kill on a massive scale is also not in doubt. Somehow, the overwhelming majority of people concluded that it was the right thing for science to do. Perhaps more controversially, the United States and England also realized that German scientists doing similar work were not war criminals. To me, this is a difficult but clear-cut example of society setting up an ethical standard for science.

Now let’s take another situation. The U.S. administration for the last eight years has attempted to impose its ethical standard on any science that does not suit its policy objectives. When climate scientists have produced work 21

that the administration doesn’t like, their reports have been censored and altered and some scientists have been slandered as individuals. Government has been trying to set up controls on science, motivated not by the danger that science might get out of control, but by the fact that government’s own policy objectives fail to be supported by good science. To me that is the real danger, and I would want to be more mindful of how we ensure that the science can be published without interference than of how government (or another part of society) can regulate science.

Bush: So under some circumstances a democratic government can be an effective arbiter of what should and shouldn’t be done in science — or, at least, of what should and shouldn’t be implemented. But there are circumstances, as you note, when the government becomes biased.

In the case of the Bush administration, fundamentalist Christianity has been permitted to interfere with scientific objectivity. There are also examples of governments with left-wing biases interfering with scientific research.

Religious ideologies aside, however, the U.S. government seems even more concerned with corporate profit margins than with the social good — in fact, it seems to conflate the two, as in the old motto, “What’s good for General Motors (or Halliburton) is good for America.” So when we leave it up to government to decide, aren’t we, in essence, leaving it up to corporate decision-makers?

Bulkin: I once saw BP’s chief executive, John Browne, after he had returned from a meeting with the head of Greenpeace. “I’ve just had a very interesting conversation,” he said to me. “He (the leader of Greenpeace) thinks that we are very powerful, and I told him that I don’t feel very powerful. Well, his logic was that government has given up more and more of its power as various things were privatized, and the power that they gave up must go somewhere, so I guess it went to us, the big corporations.

Now, isn’t that an interesting idea, that there is a constant amount of power in the world, and if one entity has less, another must have more?”

Bush: I understand the chief exec of BP not feeling powerful, perhaps because no CEO really controls a large corporation — there aren’t enough hours in the day for anyone to exercise such control. Still, corporations certainly do make decisions about the implementation of science that affect millions of people — whether to pollute that river or not, whether to clone sheep en masse or not, whether to start up the Large Hadron Collider or not . . .

Bulkin: In my view, successful modern corporations op22

erate, for the most part, based on the idea that what they are doing is an all-around good: good for employees (that is, safe, not endangering their health, providing them with income and fulfilling work), good for shareholders (many of whom are pension funds these days) by increasing capital and paying dividends, good for customers by providing them with products they want at a reasonable price, and good for the countries in which the corporation is operating (at the very least by paying taxes, and beyond that through other aspects of corporate responsibility).

Sometimes science challenges one or all of these goods. There is probably no more famous or pertinent example of this than DDT, the insecticide whose creator, Paul Muller, received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to human health. DDT saved millions of lives from malaria, typhus, and even starvation due to insect destruction of food. Was not the company who produced it, Geigy, doing a great good for humankind? It was — but then Rachel Carson produced a synthesis of a large volume of scientific research that showed the negative consequences of DDT use. I well remember the outrage of the corporate chemical community against Rachel Carson in the early 1960s. The establishment, represented by the American Chemical Society, questioned everything about her methods and conclusions. But the establishment was wrong in refusing to believe in science that ‘attacked’ their business (and not just DDT, but the whole pesticides industry).

Yet the lesson was learned, at least in part. Some years later, when Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina brought forth their understanding of the role of chlorfluorocarbons (CFCs) in the destruction of the ozone layer, there were some howls from corporate producers about the consequences of replacing these useful chemicals, but they were muted compared to the DDT episode. Companies just got on with the phase-out of CFCs and the creation of replacements. There was a difference — Rowland and Molina were very respected members of the chemical research community, so the challenge to the establishment came from within, whereas Rachel Carson was very much an outsider, more an author than an active scientist.

The worst example of corporate denial of scientific reality was with tobacco. I don’t think the tobacco companies ever fooled themselves into thinking that their product was good for their customers. The epidemiological evidence against them was overwhelming, and they did not behave ethically in the face of that evidence. The price they have paid for that is high, though perhaps not high enough.

How do we allocate responsibility for behavior in the face of adverse scientific evidence between corporations and government? Personally, I opt for a model in which corporations are themselves fully accountable for knowJewish Currents

ing the science about their products and processes and for acting responsibly in the face of that knowledge. But most countries do not follow that model. Instead, their governments set up regulators and draw lines that companies must not cross.

Even under those circumstances, we see companies behaving in different ways. For example, when it comes to emissions to air, or water, or land, some companies say, We always obey the law. You tell us what is legal, and we will live within that, and if we don’t, you can punish us appropriately. Other companies take the view, We need to continuously reduce our emissions. The law sets the maximum we can emit, but we set our own corporate limits, which may be well below that. I would always be proud to work for a company in the latter group, but I can’t argue persuasively that the former approach is wrong.

The Large Hadron Collider is an exotic example of a problem faced by science over the decades, and it is addressed by what is known as the precautionary principle.

There are many statements of this, but a good place to start is the one that was adopted at the Rio Conference in 1992: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

Another version of this was stated at a conference in Wisconsin, the Wingspread meeting, and goes as follows: “When an activity raises threats to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken, even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context, the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof (of the safety of the activity).” This latter version is interesting because it deals with the issue of shifting the burden of proof.

political or religious agenda. Often these stand out because at their root there is a fallacious syllogism, but not always.

So the application of the precautionary principle to new activities is not so straightforward. Ultimately someone has to make judgments, and these are not easy.

Bush: There’s a certain fear in the Jewish tradition about human arrogance colliding with the precautionary principle. One legend, for example, portrays the generation of Enosh, a grandson of Adam and Eve, building a golem, and it comes to life thanks to the machinations of Satan, who causes the humans to think that they have the power to bestow life. Entranced by their ‘power,’ they start exploiting the planet and building idols that are four thousand miles tall. As a result of their tampering, the legend goes, humanity suffers an enormous flood. Sounds a bit like modern America!

Bulkin: Enough with golems, don’t you think?

Bush: Fair enough. But is there, in fact, any content to your Jewish identity that informs your thinking about social responsibility as a scientist?

Bush: I am reminded of the Jewish principle of s’yag l’torah, placing a fence around the Torah, which mandates extra caution about violating commandments. The origin of this principle is a text about preserving life by placing parapets on rooftops. So there is a fundamental Jewish ‘precautionary principle.’

Bulkin: I now spend most of my scientific time working on environmental issues, and we often talk about such issues in my Jewish community. There is a lot about the environment in Torah, and much more in the writings that came after. Social action is a cornerstone of our religious practice, as is trying to set our religious practice in modern society. So I am very conscious that what I do scientifically is supported by what I do religiously, and vice versa (though less so).

At another level, we can make a useful separation of science and religion. The late Stephen Jay Gould, who was my high school classmate, probably put this best when he wrote: “The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: What is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry. To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.”

Bulkin: I support strong application of the precautionary principle. However — and this is a big however — there are people who raise issues in our society for reasons that have nothing to do with damage to the environment or to health (of humans, animals, or plants); rather they are raising them to call attention to themselves, or to support a

For a secular Jew, of course, “how to go to heaven” is not a concern, and essentially reduces religion to fantasy.

My goal is not to dismiss religion that way, but to cultivate it as a humanistic enterprise, concerned more with “how to create heaven on earth” ­— including how to cultivate ethical discussion about scientific innovation!

September-October, 2008

23

Here are some of the many themes that can make Sukes meaningful to progressive, secular Jews.

• Sukes is the second-oldest worker’s holiday (following shabes, the weekly day of rest, which is the oldest). After harvesting the fall crops, the people rejoiced for at least a week (Sukes extends for seven, eight, or nine days, depending on your period in history, geographic location, and level of observance). The focus of the holiday is a suke (sukkah Linda Gritz in Hebrew), a temporary shelter with a partially covered roof, where one can eat, sleep, and celebrate.

• Sukes emphasizes our connection to the earth. The original suke may have been the hut that farmers built in the A Harvest Holiday, fields to make it easier to gather the fall harvest. Since many of us today have little connection to agriculture, Sukes is Ripe for Secular Celebration a great opportunity for taking the time to appreciate the ukkot in modern Hebrew, Succos in Ashkenazic planting, growing, and harvesting of our food. If this makes Hebrew, Sukes in Yiddish with standard (YIVO) Sukes sound like the American holiday Thanksgiving, that transliteration — it’s a fun holiday, however you is not a coincidence: The Pilgrims knew about Sukes from spell it. the Bible and were inspired to give thanks after surviving In ancient times, Sukes (pronounced “sook-ess” or their first year in the New World. “sook-iss”) was the largest of three Jewish agricultural • Sukes can also serve as a platform for considering pilgrimage festivals: the Feast of Matses (which later be- energy conservation, global warming, and pollution iscame Passover), when the first sues. Recycling, carpooling, sheaf of barley was offered as saving energy, reducing our a sacrifice, the Feast of Harvest carbon footprint, and agitat(which later became Shevues/ ing for planetary protection Shavuot), when two loaves of all take work. For a welcome bread were offered in thanks change from this daily effort, for the wheat harvest, and the try Sukes as a joyous approach Feast of Ingathering, the fall to environmentalism. harvest, which retained part of • Sukes emphasizes human its original meaning through interconnection. “Rejoice modern times as the holiday in your feast,” it is written we know as Sukes. During the in Deuteronomy, “with your centuries of temple-centered family, your servants, and the Judaism, Sukes was the prestranger, the orphan, and the dominant festival of the year, widow who are in your midst.” so much so that it was called, “Whoever shuts the door of his simply, ha-hag, the festival. house on this festival,” says It is likely that our ancestors Maimonides, “and sits at table The four species, from the Yiddish Minhogimbukh (Book borrowed the idea of this festiwith only his own family, eatof Customs), 1593 val from the Canaanites, who ing and drinking, is concerned celebrated the fall grape harvest with revelry. With several only with the happiness of his own stomach.” In ancient of our ‘religious’ holidays thus rooted in agricultural activ- temple days, seventy sacrifices were made in honor of the ity, secular observances actually may more closely reflect seventy nations known in those times, honoring the contheir origins than ‘traditional’ religious adaptations! nection between Jews and other peoples.

• Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE-50 CE) taught that the suke is a reminder of poverty to those who are wealthy. In Linda Gritz is a regular contributor who chairs the ritual committee in Boston Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring and sings contrast, the poor can feel rich in a suke. Avrom Reisen wrote a Yiddish story about a poor man who lived in a tiny in its Yiddish community chorus, A Besere Velt.

You Say Sukkot and I Say Sukes

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Jewish Currents

shack, to which he felt ashamed to invite his relatives — but at Sukes he would build a suke larger than his house, enabling him to invite his relatives to dinner and feel like a king.

• Farmers in ancient times left the corners of their fields unpicked for the poor to glean.

Today, when most of us take our food and our homes for granted, Sukes teaches us to rejoice and be thankful for what we have — and to think of those who are less fortunate. Sukes can be a time to mount a food drive to stock a food pantry, to work in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, to support migrant workers and labor rights . . .

• The suke is meant to be a place of joy, but there are restrictions that keep it simple and temporary. In contrast with the wedding khupe (canopy), which represents a solid roof over the bride and groom, the roof of a “A suke, a suke, fir vent, a tir, a dakh/A suke, a suke, mit frishn grinem skhakh” suke is made of leafy greenery, with enough “A suke, a suke, four walls, a door, a roof/A suke, a suke, with a fresh green covering.” gaps to see the stars at night. All of us, rich From Yontefdike Teg, by Chana and Joseph Mlotek, Workmen’s Circle publishers. and poor alike, are instructed to live in these temporary shelters, exposed to the elements, as a reminder an eye: “Notice the beauty of the world.” The araba a lip: of a more insecure time. Maimonides (1135-1204) taught “Speak kindly of those around you.” And the esrog a heart: that the suke provides a lesson in human frailty. Rabbi “Open your heart to love and gladness.”

Arthur Waskow, in his wonderful guide to the holidays, Shaking the lulav in all directions — east, south, west, Seasons of Our Joy, expands on this concept: “For much north, up, and down — evokes a visceral primitiveness that of our lives, we try to achieve peace and safety by building recalls ancient times, reaches out towards infinity, creates with steel and concrete and toughness: pyramids, air raid the sound of wind or rain, and gathers strength for the shelters, Pentagons, World Trade Centers. Thick skins and coming winter. It is a special treat for children. tough hearts. But the suke comes to remind us: We are in truth all vulnerable. If, as the prophet Dylan sang, ‘A hard Both real and imaginary guests (ushpizin) are invited to rain’s gonna fall,’ it will fall on all of us.” dine in the suke. In the early centuries of the common era, the spirit of Abraham the patriarch was invoked. Centuries Four plants are used symbolically during the festival of later, the Jews of Spain added six other ushpizin, each said Sukes: the citron, or esrog; the palm branch, or lulav; the to represent a desirable characteristic: Abraham for khesed, myrtle, or hadas; and the willow, or araba. Some believe loving kindness, Isaac for gevurah, power; Jacob for tiferet, they represented an ancient talisman for rain. A later inter- beauty; Moses for nezah, endurance; Aaron for hod, glory; pretation sees them as symbolic of four types of people: Joseph for yesod, foundation; David for malkhut, majesty.

The esrog, with taste and fragrance, represents those who In more recent times, women of the bible were “invited” possess learning and do good deeds; the lulav, with taste into the suke, including Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, but no fragrance, represents those who are educated but Miriam, Deborah, and Esther. Poor people were also to do not use their learning to do good deeds; the hadas, be invited, because tradition held that the ushpizin would with fragrance but no taste, represents those who are not reject an invitation to a suke if others were excluded. Since educated but do good deeds; the araba, with neither taste the imaginary ushpizin did not actually eat, the equivalent nor fragrance, represents those who are neither learned nor of their dinner was to be donated to charity. Today we can good. We bundle these together — perhaps in hope that we add modern ushpizin and discuss their characteristics: might all learn from each other.

Rosa Parks, Mohandas Gandhi, Emma Goldman, Albert The four plants are also thought to represent the human Einstein, Betty Friedan, John Lennon, Hannah Senesh, and body — and virtuous behaviors. The lulav resembles a people dear to us . . . spine: “Stand straight and be brave.” The hadas resembles Sukes is traditionally a time to read from Ecclesiastes, September-October, 2008

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Yala Korwin

On Learning that Rosh Hashanah Is the Birthday of Our First Parents The earth was ready. There were flies and bees, two camels, two wild dogs, two cats that purr, and grasses, flowers, weeds, bushes and trees with roots. Beings with wings or coats of fur.

And there was barley, corn, and dates so sweet.

But still, the earth seemed empty without man.

So God declared: “My work is not complete,” and He went on, according to His plan.

He promptly took about a pound of clay.

Thus Adam. And then Eve: one of his ribs.

All this the Lord made in five plus one day.

They both were fully grown. No need for cribs.

Their birthday is our blessed holiday.

If you believe it, go to shul and pray.

Yala Korwin

Yala Korwin is a painter and writer (www.yalakorwin.com) whose book of poems, To Tell the Story, is distributed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

the biblical source of the words adapted by Pete Seeger for his song, “Turn Turn Turn.”

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

Sukes is a time to reflect on the impermanence of our lives and learn to value each day. Individually, each of us is as frail as a suke — but in community we find strength.

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Jewish Currents

Jewish Burial in an Age of Ecological Crisis Can Jewish Customs Continue to Evolve?

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Jewish preference for burial over cremation presents an ecological dilemma today. The quandary would be less pronounced were all Jews to follow the 16th century’s Shulkhan Arukh’s burial principles, which stress strict adherence to values of simplicity and obscure any indication of a person’s economic status in life. Burial with the body adorned in nothing but a simple burial shroud is required. (In Israel, coffins are used only in military and state funerals.)

Most Jews today, however, participate in contemporary American burial practices, which involve the heavy use of rare tropical woods and chemical two thousand years. The name Adam and metal pollutants, coupled with (“human”) derives from the noun extravagant funeral expenditures that adama (“earth”), and two Torah texts typically top $10,000. And both Jew- are usually invoked to assert that ish and American burial practices raise burial is the only way of handling the ethical questions about our “footprints” dead: “Dust you are and to dust you upon the earth, and whether it makes shall return” (Genesis 3:10) and “His sense to tie up a plot of land forever, body shall not remain all night upon effectively rendering it useless for the tree, but you shall surely bury him humans and wildlife alike. Our planet the same day” (Deuteronomy 21:23).

With “burning” deemed as one of has been the home to ninety-six billion human beings over the course of the four methods of execution cited history. Had they all been interred in in the Torah for a number of offenses, marble-pocked cemeteries, we would cremation was deemed a humiliation be facing serious land shortages world- worthy of criminals (Joshua 7:15) and was condemned for this reason. Trawide.

How can Jews blend their concern ditional Jewish belief in bodily resurabout the ecology of our planet with rection, common until the modern their desire to integrate Jewish cus- period, also influenced the prohibition toms into their lives? Is there an end- against cremation, as did the fact that of-life option that manages to honor cremation was widely practiced by pagan peoples, including the ancient both concerns?

Burial has been a mainstay of nor- Greeks, Romans and Persians. Jewish mative Jewish practice for more than preference for burial might also have he traditional

Joysa Maben Winter is a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.

Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Lilith, Na’amat Woman and Midstream. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Aaron, and their new daughter, Adiel.

September-October, 2008

come down to practical concerns: Acquiring the amount of wood necessary to burn a corpse fully isn’t easy to do in a desert climate.

By the rabbinic period, the biblical mandate of burning criminals was considered so abhorrent that the rabbis refused to follow it (Sanhedrin 7:2).

Other Talmudic citations regard the burning of corpses as an idolatrous practice (Zarah 13) and interpret earthly burial to be an actual positive commandment (Sanhedrin 46b).

Burial of the dead was regarded as the highest of obligations, taking precedence over the study of law, the circumcision of a son, and the offering of the Passover lamb (Megillah 3b).

It is clear that the Jewish textual tradition strongly supports burial over cremation. What Jews have actually done, in practice, however, is a different story.

In Rome, for example, bodies were often placed in catacombs and were allowed to dry out rather than becoming one with the soil. In some communities, even prior to the 1st century, bodies would be placed in tombs until the flesh had decomposed, the bones then being placed in ossuaries or containers. Yet historians writing in the 1st century confirmed that at that time Jewish communities strongly favored burial. Tacitus noted that “the Jews bury rather than burn their dead” (Histories 5:5), which he contrasts to Roman practice.

Between the 1st and 16th centuries, however, some rabbinical authorities felt free to interpret the biblical mandate of “returning to the earth” as indicating that as long as human remains were placed in contact with the earth, the actual mode of burial could be a matter of custom rather than religious law. Rabbi Moses Isserles (15201572), for example, in his comments on the Shulkhan Arukh, permitted the spreading of quicklime over the body 27

Photo: Lawrence Bush

Joysa Winter

in the grave to hasten decomposition.

For a while this became a common practice among Portuguese Jews.

By the late 19th century, cremation was widespread in parts of Western Europe and America, in part due to dwindling cemetery space. Most rabbis condemned the practice, but not all. In 1892, the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis resolved not to refuse to officiate at the cremation of a departed Jew if invited to do so. In 1887, Rabbi N. M. Adler, chief rabbi of London’s United Synagogue, permitted the ashes of a Jewish person to be interred in a Jewish cemetery, a concession subsequently discontinued.

In 1892, the Reform movement passed an official resolution on cremation that remains unchallenged to this day: “Resolved: That in case we should be invited to officiate as ministers of religion at the cremation of a departed coreligionist, we ought not to refuse on the plea that cremation is anti-Jewish or irreligious.”

Rabbi A. Wiener of Oppeln, Germany, used a creative interpretation of Maimonides (1135-1204) and Joseph Albo (1380-1444) to defend cremation. In 1890, Rabbi Moses Israel Tedeschi of Trieste, Italy, published a rebuttal to an anti-cremation sermon

by Rabbi B. Artom of the Portuguese Jewish community in London — and requested that his own body be disposed of through cremation.

From its inception in the late 1960s, the Reconstructionist movement has also been open to the possibility of cremation, although it has adopted cautionary language. The 2006 Reconstructionist Guide to Jewish Practice stresses the importance of respecting individuals’ personal wishes, but notes that the association of cremation with the Holocaust remains “for many people a significant reason to not choose cremation.” Cremation also may undermine the possibility of other 28

end-of-life Jewish traditions — the burial service itself and the unveiling of a headstone — and may leave some mourners with a lesser sense of closure, the guide says.

Given the traditional Jewish view of cremation as a denial of bodily resurrection and an affront to the dignity of the human body, it is not surprising that halakhically oriented branches of Judaism today continue to issue severe injunctions against the practice.

Jewish cremains are not allowed to be buried in Conservative- or Orthodoxrun Jewish cemeteries, and Jewish law requires no formal mourning practices for a person who has been cremated.

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s Guide to Jewish Funeral Practice has only one thing to say on the topic: “Jewish law does not permit cremation.” End of story.

There is no doubt that the Jewish value of burial has a long and wellrecorded history. But so do Jewish values of environmental preservation.

Biblical and rabbinic law provide comprehensive legislation on issues such as conservation, animal welfare, species preservation, sanitation and pollution, and Jewish concern for the land and its inhabitants extends even beyond the Torah and Talmud, to medieval midrash and even 18thcentury folktales. Just a few of these references include: • The Torah’s prohibition of wanton destruction of natural resources, even in war (Deuteronomy 20:19).

• The midrash (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:13) that portrays God leading Adam and Eve around the Garden of Eden: “Look at my works,” God says. “See how beautiful they are, how excellent!

For your sake I created them all. See to it that you do not spoil or destroy my world — for if you do, there will be no one to repair it after you.”

• Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s practice of praying in nature to make

“whole my heart and my speech through the life and spirit of growing things.”

What we are left with, then, is a significant clash of values: between the desire to be buried with a sense of alignment with Jewish custom, and the clear Jewish mandate for environmental protection.

Virtually all environmental ills associated with contemporary burial are avoided by traditional Jewish burial practices. Unfortunately, a majority of American Jews have adopted American burial practices, with ecological damage that should not be underestimated. Bodily fluids from decomposition and embalming chemicals have proven highly toxic, and at some locations, long-buried bodies are now causing groundwater contamination.

Arsenic, used as an embalming chemical in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is an ongoing source of such pollution. Each year, Americans bury more than eight hundred thousand gallons of embalming fluid, which includes formaldehyde; more than one hundred and eighty million pounds of steel; five million pounds of copper and bronze; and thirty million board feet of hardwoods, including endangered tropical woods.

While a traditional Jewish burial avoids these environmental ills, there still remains the issue of land use.

Cemeteries “turn beautiful places into a monoculture of gravestones,” says Mary Woodsen of the Pre-Posthumous Society, an organization dedicated to bringing memorial nature preserves to New York. “Then backhoes, lawnmowers and tree pruners put diesel emissions into the air, and pesticides and fertilizers into the water.”

One answer to this dilemma, especially for Jews who are not part of a synagogue community, is to choose cremation. As the Reform movement noted over one century ago, cremaJewish Currents

tion does not have to be viewed as “anti-Jewish,” but simply as one more adaptation in response to a changing world. Nor do cremation practices, including the scattering of ashes or their burial in unmarked grounds, obviate other Jewish burial traditions. The cycle of mourning practices; the ritual of tahara, or purification of the body, prior to interment or cremation; the graveside service at interment or scattering; all of these can be performed.

Only the unveiling of the tombstone, typically done six to twelve months after death, is lost in a typical cremation. In its place, however, friends and family could gather to plant a bush or tree or flower bed. People can also take the additional step of donating the money that would ordinarily have been used for marble engraved tombstones to tsedoke.

It remains true, however, that for some Jews, including some secular Jews, the connotations of “burning” and “crematoria” are disturbing. For these and all others who prefer burial to cremation, a solution might be found in the “green burial” movement, which offers the possibility for an environmentally friendly burial. “Green cemeteries” are specially designated natural woodlands or nature preserves used as burial grounds. They contain no headstones, don’t disrupt the natural ecosystem (apart from the actual

September-October, 2008

grave plots), and make it possible for land to continue to be used by the living: hikers and wildlife. Burial in a nature park comports with Jewish standards of simplicity and costs a fraction of a typical burial.

Currently there are over two hundred green cemeteries in Great Britain, accounting for more than 10 percent of all burials, but only a handful have been established in the United States.

This is changing, however, with natural cemeteries opening in California, South Carolina and Texas in recent years. In 2006, the state of New York opened its sixth. Their popularity is clearly on the rise.

A recent poll conducted by AARP found that 41.6 percent of those surveyed would choose a green burial compared to 48.6 percent preferring a traditional cemetery burial (8.3 percent wanted cremation). One website, the Alternative Funeral Monitor, has been created specifically to track the green burial movement, while the nonprofit Green Burial Council (www. greenburialcouncil.org) has formed “to encourage ethical and sustainable practices in the deathcare industry, and to use the burial process as a means of facilitating ecological restoration and landscape-level conservation.”

In the Jewish community, Kavod v’Nichum (www.jewish-funerals.org), a network long involved in encourag-

ing the formation of traditional burial societies, known as khevrey kadisha, is now providing information on green burials.

During the days between Rosh Hashone and Yom Kippur, Jews traditionally visit the graves of their relatives. Could this tradition (also associated with Sukes, Peysakh and Shevues) be satisfied by a visit to a green burial park, with no headstones on which to leave pebbles as a sign of visitation? For that matter, can the notion of a separate Jewish burying ground be replaced by a multi-use natural park? Clearly, there are deeply emotional aspects to Jewish burial and mourning practices that need to be satisfied, along with the demands of the environment, by whatever new “green” Jewish burial traditions evolve. Little has been done in this regard; there is much room for creative exploration by Jewish ritual-makers, religious and secular alike.

Charles Darwin Art Show at the Los Angeles Workmen’s Circle Gallery “R U Evolved? Artists Reflect on Darwin @ 200” will be a juried art show opening January 11th, 2009 at A Shenere Velt Gallery at the Southern California Workmen’s Circle headquarters.

The show celebrates the 200th birthday of the founder of evolutionary theory (February 12th, 2009) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. The gallery asks artists to “consider the meaning of his life and work, and reveal to us any suitable historical or contemporary insights.” Entry due date: October 24th, 2008.

Guidelines for submission are at www.circlesocal.org.

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more imbued with the idea of “going to the people.” Soon he went from being a genuine Jew to being a genuine Russian. He left Vitebsk to live for a few years with coal miners and Russian peasants in the Donets basin, then to St. Petersburg, and finally to Paris to see how the French lower classes lived. He lived in Paris from 1894 to 1900, working as private secretary to Peter Lavrov (1823-1900), a well-known thinker and socialist who was a rival to Mikhail Bakunin, known to us today as an anarchist. The mood of the Russian peasantry at this time, Anski noted, was such that intellectuals like Lavrov regarded them as “congenital” socialists.

Author of “The Dybbuk” Shortly after Lavrov’s death, Anski once again became creative in Yiddish, under the direct influence of Dr. Zhithloyme Zanvl Rapoport, better known lovsky and because of his fuller reading of I.L. Peretz’s by his pseudonym, S. Anski, is one of the work (which was just then republished as a Festschrift to luminous figures produced by the Jewish honor the twenty-fifth year of Peretz’s literary activity). people in Russia,” wrote Khayim Zhitlovsky, in the first In 1902, Anski wrote di shvue (“The Oath”) which was volume of his memoirs, about his close, life-long friend. promptly accepted by the Jewish revolutionary movement They were born within two years of each other, Anski in as its “Marseillaise.” It remains the anthem of the Jewish 1863 and Zhitlovsky in 1865, in the Byelorussian city of Labor Bund to this day.

Vitebsk. Zhitlovsky described him further: “. . . a great, In his Predecessors and Contemporaries (forgeyer warm, Jewish heart suffused with a creative artistic spirit, un mitsaytler), Yiddish literary critic Nachman Meisel full of love for all the oppressed and suffering, for all who (1887-1966) details some of Anski’s works. “He published strove for a better, more just life. . . . Although his life’s a novel entitled In Nayem Shtrom (In the New Stream), work — always devoted to the ideals in which he believed dealing with the [failed] Russian revolution of 1905-6. This — ­ was suddenly and prematurely cut short, Anski left us was followed by a novel, Pioneers, in two parts — The a rich” literary heritage.

First Swallow (di shvalb) and Fence Breakers (tsoymen brekher). Together they depict Anski’s youth and how he Anski’s father, Aaron Hacohen Rapaport, a broker and progressed from a yeshiva bokher to a maskil, i.e., a supagent, traveled a lot between his underpaid jobs. Anski’s porter of the Enlightenment (haskole), to a Russophile, mother ran an inn; her Yiddish name Khane or Anna was and then became one who spread culture and light in the the basis for his pseudonym. (I. B. Jewish community.”

Singer also used his mother’s name, Anski also wrote short stories and Basheva, or Batsheba, as the basis for poems depicting everyday Jews with his pseudonym, Bashevis.) Anski studgreat warmth. All his works are domiied in a kheyder and was very good at nated by a strong sense of ethics and traditional studies of gemore and other benevolence towards his characters. In Talmudic commentaries. He began to this respect, Nachman Meisel wrote, learn a trade, working at first as a smith “he was a faithful disciple of Russian and afterward as a bookbinder. His populist culture, of Gleb Uspensky father was upset by his son’s lack of [1840-1902] and Vladimir Korolenko interest in takhles (concrete purpose).

[1853-1921], to both of whom he felt

S. Anski Anski also began to read in modern a greater affinity for a long while than Hebrew, which was just then in a growth period. “Books to Mendele, Sholem Aleichem and Peretz.” in Hebrew tore me away mightily and convulsively from old Judaism and its traditions and pushed me toward the Having lived among the Russian peasants for several Russian language and beauty of its poetry,” wrote Anski years, Anski found his boyhood interest in their stories and about this period in his life. proverbs reawakened. He became deeply interested in the Anski’s thinking soon approached that of the revolu- sources of Russian folklore. The results of his research were tionary narodniks (populists), as he became more and published in 1894 in Studies in Popular Literature, which

Yankl Stillman

Our Secular Jewish Heritage

S. Anski, Jewish Folklorist

“S

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31

http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Drama/plays/dybbuk/1dybbuk.html

he wrote in Russian. The research techniques that he developed were useful to him later when he decided to “go back” to the Jewish people.

Here, too, he wanted to get to the very root of folklore and folk-creativity.

To this end he organized a Jewish Scientific Ethnographic Expedition, which went with a group of researchers to various towns and cities, eventually numbering seventy communities in Volhynia and Podolya (western Belarus and Ukraine). They collected stories, legends, folksongs, and proverbs that reflect the A scene from Habima’s version of “The Dybbuk,” 1922 character of the Jewish people.

In 1915, they produced a 258-page volume in Yiddish, The ever to be presented on the Yiddish or Hebrew stage. It Jewish Ethnographic Program, which detailed two major has been performed over the years by a variety of Jewish tasks: a) guidelines for collecting items of folk-creativity, troupes around the world, and the most prominent actors and b) 2,307 questions dealing with the Jewish beliefs, cus- have sought to act its characters. Directors, musicians and toms, and superstitions (see my column on Jewish super- painters were all challenged by Anski’s bizarre work. As stitions in Jewish Currents, July-August, 2005) that en- early as 1930, Habima, which became world-famous as mesh a person from cradle to grave. Unfortunately, the first a result of putting on The Dybbuk, had clocked its seven World War prevented completion of the compilation of this hundredth Hebrew-language performance, under the direcrich, ethnic material. It remained in its original note-format tion of well-known Russian director Yevgeni Vakhtangov in the State Library of St. Petersburg/Leningrad, becoming (who did not know Hebrew), with music by Joel Engel and fully available to researchers only in 1991. scenery by Nathan Altman.

In 1914, right after World War 1 began, Anski, as direcThe Dybbuk was played with great success all over the tor of the Union of Russian Cities under the protection world in various languages including English, French, of the Duma (tsarist legislature), plunged into war relief Polish, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish. In work for the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, whose lives 1929, Aaron Copeland (1900-1990) wrote a piano trio, were totally disrupted. He visited the destroyed front-line “Vitebsk,” named for Anski’s birthplace, after seeing a towns and lived in the hell to which the Jews in these towns performance of the play. An opera based on the play was were subjected. He gathered a wealth of material about the performed successfully in Italy, Poland and the United unfortunate towns and settlements, compiling them into a States; a Yiddish film of the work was made in Poland in three-volume work, The Destruction of Poland, Galicia 1937 under the direction of Michal Waszynski. Leonard and Bukovina.

Bernstein and Jerome Robbins created a ballet based on Meisel describes, in Predecessors and Contemporaries, The Dybbuk. Joseph Chaikin and Tony Kushner both wrote how Anski used to arrive in Kiev from the horrors of the adaptations of it. front and “pour out his bitter heart to the affluent Jews Yet Anski could not get his play performed even once of Kiev, begging them to help ease the conditions of the during the six years between its creation in 1914 and his persecuted Jews.” He had aged greatly and his head was death in 1920. “I’m getting nowhere with the piece,” he bowed “because of the heavy burden of troubles on his wrote in a letter in 1915, quoted by Meisel. “The direcshoulders.” tor of the Moscow Art Theater has a nervous disorder and has gone off to a sanatorium somewhere. Contacting Anski’s The Dybbuk — originally titled “Between Two Stanislavsky [director of the Moscow Art Theater, 1863Worlds” — is arguably one of the most successful plays 1938] is harder than reaching a government minister. To

tell the truth, I have lost the desire to submit it to them.

I had no idea that in order to reach the stage, one has to crawl through so many low little doors.”

Nevertheless, when an occasion arose, even though he was up to his ears with his war-relief work, he would read the drama to friends and literary colleagues. When he read it to a group of authors and critics in 1916 in St. Petersburg, the prominent critic Shmuel Niger (1883-1955) wrote in the American Yiddish daily, der tog, that “he did not impress anyone strongly . . . Almost the entire group felt that The Dybbuk was nothing more than an artificial combination of Jewish folk-customs and folk-beliefs.”

The play is about two talmudic scholars who are dear friends, Sender and Nisn. As young men, they vow that when they become fathers, their children will marry each other. Sure enough, when Nisn’s son Khonen meets Sender’s daughter Leyele, they fall deeply in love. Sender, however, has grown rich with the passage of time and does not want his daughter to marry a poor scholar, so he finds her a rich groom. When Khonen hears of it, he “drops dead in mystical ecstasy.”

The wedding of Leyele with the rich young man has been prepared. Under the khupe (wedding canopy), Leyele cries out, “You are not my bridegroom!” and rushes off to her mother’s grave at the cemetery. She is possessed

by Khonen’s dybbuk — a ‘transmigratory’ spirit. A man’s voice issues from her mouth and declares that he has returned to claim his betrothed and will not leave her.

Leyele is taken to a khasidic miracle worker who is to exorcise the dybbuk. There are exorcism scenes and courtroom scenes, and a magic chalk circle is drawn within which Leyele is protected — but she steps out and dies, thereby returning to her beloved in the next world.

Clearly, the play is ripe for interpretion and manipulation.

It reverberates with echoes of “Romeo and Juliet,” with which Anski, as an educated man, was familiar. Still, the play was not performed in any language during Anski’s lifetime.

The Dybbuk was translated into Hebrew by Chaim Nakhman Bialik and published in Moscow in 1918, even before the publication of the Yiddish original. Because of the uncertainties of the military and political situation during the Russian evolution, Anski left Moscow for Warsaw, leaving behind his manuscript of the play. In order to have a Yiddish “original,” he retranslated Bialik’s Hebrew version into Yiddish.

Meisel quotes from a letter that Anski wrote in August, 1920 to his friend Khayim Zhitlovsky: “You ask if I want you to talk to the theaters about performing the piece.

What a question! A play needs to be performed like a girl 32

needs to get married. . . . If the play could be performed in America, it would be a bit of good fortune for me . . .

It might even help other works of mine to become known in America. . . . My fondest dream now is to have my collected works published.”

Anski’s health was deteriorating. In the same letter to Zhitlovsky, he wrote, “I feel good today, so much so that I have been able to write this letter. But I tried to leave the sanatorium in which I am currently staying, and I returned more dead than alive. My legs were swollen and refused to walk. And my heart felt so weak. Maybe I’ll be able to get to Berlin.” Anski died a few weeks later, on November 8th, 1920. The Jewish population was shocked and agitated.

He had remarkable funeral and was buried alongside his close friends Y.L. Peretz and Yankef Dineson. There is a single tombstone for all three.

At his open grave, the actors took an oath to perform The Dybbuk after shloyshim, the thirty-day mourning period after the burial. This actually happened. Within the next decade, Anski’s collected works in Yiddish were published in an edition of fifteen volumes.

Jack Slavin passed away on Monday, June 2, 2008, at the age of 79. He was the beloved husband and best friend to Norma, his wife of 56 years. Throughout his adult life, Jack’s first priority was always his children, and he served as a devoted father to Rina, Jim, Amy, Gary, David and Pat. He took great joy in spending time with his grandchildren and was an extraordinarily caring grandfather to Ethan, Nichole, Jessica, Hannah, Emma, Gary Jr. and Elizabeth.

Jack was a pioneer and innovator in the field of special education. He was the creator of the Nannahagen School for Autistic and Special Needs children in Pleasantville. At Nannahagen, he developed a therapeutic support program for his students by bringing together special education teachers, social workers and psychologists. Jack faced significant obstacles throughout his career, but overcame them through his desire to help his students learn, grow and improve the quality of their lives. His life was enriched by fishing, sailing and an ongoing devotion to conservation.

Donations in Jack’s name can be made to the Nature Conservancy. Jack was loved by everybody who knew him and will be sorely missed by all.

Jewish Currents

Janice Eidus

Troublemakers A Writer’s Jewish Ambivalence and Affirmations

W

hen I was a little girl, bright and early one Rosh Hashone morn-

ing, my volatile father ordered me, my brother, and my sister to put on our bathing suits. Then he drove us from our housing project in the northeast Bronx to Orchard Beach, where despite the nippy fall weather, he went for a long swim. Eric, Alice, and I sat on the sand, wrapped up in blankets to keep warm. We grew hungry waiting for him to finish, so we ate the sticky peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that my mother had made for us before we left. “I’m as opposed to organized religion as you,” my mother had told my father, her voice strained, as she handed him the large plastic picnic bag containing the sandwiches, “but you don’t have to rub everyone’s faces in your beliefs.” “Oh yes I do,” my father insisted, happily.

We all knew that swimming was just his excuse for taking us on this irreverent excursion. The real reason why we’d gone to the beach in our bathing suits was so that when he drove us back to the projects, he could park his car on the side furthest from our building, which meant that we’d have to walk the projects’ entire length in order to get home. And this meant that we’d have to walk past the observant Jews sitting on the wooden benches ther, all four of us in our bathing suits outside their buildings, home from and rubber flip flops. It was clear synagogue, wearing their nicest wool to me how proud my father was of coats, the men wearing yarmulkes on the figure he cut, his back straight, their heads, and the women wearing his head high, a strong man who warm cloche hats and lots of fake gold could withstand cold water and cold weather, a big bellied, muscular man jewelry.

Like three little ducklings, Alice, with three devoted children in tow.

Eric, and I followed behind my fa- But most of all it was clear how much Janice Eidus is the author of five books, including The War of the Rosens (2007), a novel about an iconoclastic Jewish family in the Bronx. Her work appears in such anthologies as The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories and Scribblers on the Roof: Contemporary American Jewish Fiction (www.janiceeidus.com).

September-October, 2008

he relished the shocked and disapproving stares we received from the Jews on the benches. As we passed, they shook their heads, whispered, frowned, rolled their eyes and clicked their tongues like cartoon characters, letting us know that they were absolutely appalled by our behavior. My rebel father grinned from ear to ear: he loved nothing more than to offend Jews more religious than he, showing them how superior was his “radical free thinking,” as my mother called it, to their conventional ways.

But I felt confused and self-conscious parading around barely dressed on one of the High Holy Days. I was especially worried about hurting the feelings of those elderly Jews on the benches who were Holocaust survivors. Yet I also couldn’t help but feel proud that we were so different, so much more exciting, than those conventional Jews.

That same year, my father went into the hospital for some minor surgery.

Just admitted, he sat on the edge of his hospital bed still fully dressed in baggy bluejeans and a denim workshirt. My mother, in a flowered cotton housedress and flat shoes, sat in the single chair provided for visitors, while my brother, sister, and I leaned uncomfortably against the windowsill.

My father was filling out a form attached to a clipboard, and a heavyset nurse appeared after a few moments to collect it. Glancing at it, she immediately turned so red that I felt hot.

“You can’t just write ‘none,’” she said loudly to my father. “Everyone on this earth has a religion!”

My father, uncharacteristically quiet and remote since arriving at the hospital, suddenly came alive. “It certainly is my right to say ‘None,’” he declared, sitting up straight, his blue eyes happy for the first time all morning. “And you’re dead wrong.

33

Not everyone ‘has a religion.’ If I don’t believe in God, I don’t have a religion, do I?” The nurse put her hands on her wide hips. “Listen, Mister,” she said, glancing over at my mother, her face still inflamed, “you’re Jews, I can tell, so just write it down.” Bending over my father, she pointed to where she wanted him to write.

“I will not.” He was so happy his voice sounded musical.

“Arthur,” my mother said wearily, leaning forward, playing with the clasp of her pocketbook, “just write Jewish.”

“You see?” The nurse roared triumphantly and straightened up.

“I see nothing,” my father said.

“My wife is merely capitulating to your bullying.”

My mother seemed embarrassed and didn’t say anything else. Alice and Eric looked as confused as I felt: if he wasn’t Jewish, what did that make us? After all, my mother had always made a big deal of saying that we were “ethnically Jewish.” She and my father spoke Yiddish to each other whenever they didn’t want us to know what they were saying. Once they’d bought me a dreydl, which I’d dizzily spun around the apartment having no idea what it signified; there was an old menorah buried in our linen cabinet among towels and sheets, although I didn’t know where it came from, since both sets of my grandparents were, like my parents, radicals and atheists. And a few times on Passover my mother set the table with her prettiest white tablecloth and served us macaroons and matzah, even though I had only the vaguest idea what the holiday meant.

And my father often made fun of my mother’s uncle Izzy Goldberg who’d changed his name to Ira Grant because he felt “it would be better for business,” and yet who went to synagogue every week. “What a hypocrite, 34

ashamed of who he is while pretending to be so devout,” my father said to us, making a point of calling him Izzy and not Ira whenever they got together. Also, my father often complimented me by saying, “You’re a great Semitic beauty, not just any kind of beauty, remember that.”

But now in the hospital room, my father was denying being Jewish, and

heard plenty in the Northeast Bronx), we let the offender know how hurt, angry, and disappointed we were.

When I first started to write short stories in my junior year of high school, many of my pieces were socially conscious and almost painfully earnest. Frequently they featured a Jewish teenager with long brown hair

I felt confused and self-conscious parading around barely dressed on one of the High Holy Days. Yet I also couldn’t help but feel proud that we were so different, so much more exciting, than those conventional Jews. the nurse looked hard at my mother, then back at my father. “Okay,” she said, “do what you want, Mister, but I’ve got your number. You’re a troublemaker.” She stormed out. My father looked delirious with joy.

My parents’ identities as atheists and leftists were much stronger and clearer than their Jewish identities.

Frequently, my father sat in his big easy chair in our living room (his “throne,” he called it), and read aloud to the family from a book called The Atheist Manifesto, a proselytizing, fable-like tract. In the mornings, he sang “The Internationale,” and in the evenings he played his Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie records, while I sang along, trying to mimic Robeson’s powerful deep voice and Guthrie’s lyrical Oklahoma drawl. My father and mother called religion “the opiate of the masses,” and instilled in us children how lucky we were not to need “the crutch of religion” in order to grow up to be “decent, moral people.” We never went to synagogue, never attended a seder, and almost never discussed Jewish customs or history. We did, however, eat plenty of my mother’s blintzes, noodle kugel, and potato latkes. And when any of us heard an anti-Semitic remark (and we

and blue eyes like mine, who lived in the Bronx and passionately joined every progressive protest march and rally she could. These stories appealed very much to my parents, especially to my father, who, despite his own mischievous and irreverent personality, made it clear that he appreciated only serious, politically progressive writing.

At the same time I also wrote some stories in which that same girl experimented with sex and hallucinogenic drugs. These stories horrified my parents, who, despite wanting me to flout the conventions of Judaism, didn’t want me to flout sexual conventions, and this made me as happy as the fact that my other stories pleased them. At 15, like most teenagers, I needed my parents’ approval, but I also needed to distance myself from them.

Throughout college, I continued to write both kinds of stories, and my parents continued to react predictably.

Then in my mid-twenties, I went on for a master’s degree in fiction writing.

I studied with a famous and brilliant writer who eschewed realistic, overtly autobiographical writing, and I happily and willingly fell under his sway.

I wrote exclusively in my less traditional vein, sexual stories that were also risky in form and style (no more Jewish Currents

realistic, socially conscious stories for me), and for the first time in my life I felt completely free of my parents’ expectations. It was a glorious and liberating time for me. On the one hand, I felt a bit like the troublemaker I’d been raised to become, defying what I perceived as “literary convention.” On the other hand, I was rebelling against the edicts of my own troublemaking father.

After graduate school, I published Faithful Rebecca, my first novel. I sat in a West Village cafe, having coffee with D., a well known Jewish writer. D., who was much older than I and a Holocaust survivor, stroked his substantial grey beard and said, “I enjoyed your novel.”

Deeply flattered, I thanked him.

“But,” he added, “I was very surprised, shocked, really, when I learned that you were Jewish.”

“Why?” I leaned back in the tall wooden chair.

“Because,” his voice was gentle, “I’ve never read a novel written by a Jew and not known from page one, sometimes from the very first sentence, that the author was Jewish.”

He placed his hand over his heart. “I feel it here. But,” he said, “I never felt your Jewishness. Not once.”

Although he sounded bemused and not at all judgmental, I felt stung. I interpreted his words as criticism, even though I hadn’t intended my novel to have anything to do with my being Jewish. Still, I acknowledged to myself that, having grown up receiving so many mixed messages about being Jewish from my parents, especially from my father, it was no wonder that D., so highly attuned to the subject, hadn’t been able to read any Jewish identity into my written words.

After my meeting with D., I came to realize that my Jewishness deserved exploration in my writing. I was grown up now, a big girl and a mature September-October, 2008

writer. I no longer needed to prove that I had my own identity apart from my parents, and I no longer needed to prove that I could turn the literary world upside down every time I set pen to paper. What I needed to do was simply to be true to myself, to whomever it was that I, the not-sonice Jewish girl from the Bronx, had turned out to be.

But who have I turned out to be?

Well, someone, it seems, not all that different from the long-haired girl I’d been back in high school. Like her, I still hope to change the world (in very much the same ways my parents had hoped to change it, in fact); I work to help create a world in which there is no hunger, no racial, sexual, and economic inequities, and no war.

Also, like that girl, I’m still funny, and at times irreverent enough to make some readers blush. But these sides of me are no longer in opposition. Rather, they co-exist peacefully (at least most of the time) both inside me and on the page, energizing each other.

So how do I feel my Jewishness? In many ways, as it’s turned out. In attitude, stance, worldview. In my great desire to fix all the world’s problems; my pride in my own iconoclasm; my suspicious nature; my deep-seated feeling of always being an outsider; my chutzpah; my feeling, upon meeting another Jew when I’m traveling, that I have found kin; my awareness, like a chronic ache, of the pogroms and concentration camps that my ancestors suffered through; my use of the handful of Yiddish phrases I know, letting out a loud exasperated “Oy vey!” on line at the bank, or (when my husband is driving), wailing, “We’re farblondjet!”; or to a dear friend, offering one of my greatest compliments, “You’re so heymish!”; my pride when a Jew succeeds at something for which Jews aren’t well known, whether it’s baseball or rock

stardom; my sense of personal shame when a Jew does something heinous; my poring through the telephone book looking for Jewish names every time I travel to a new city; my perceiving my life as a constant moral quest; my strong belief in the primary importance of the intellect (so much so that when I perform physical exercise, which I’ve trained myself as an adult to do regularly, I feel very American, but not very Jewish); my sense that, through my writing, I engage in an ongoing dialogue with the Jewish writers who have preceded me, from Sholom Aleichem and Anzia Yerzierska to Philip Roth and Grace Paley, even when my work has no overt Jewish content; my serious intent even in my most comic stories; my lifelong love of telling stories. And finally, I can’t forget the night, at a movie theater in Sioux City, Iowa, where Woody Allen’s Sleeper was playing, and I was the only person in the audience laughing (and laughing hysterically, I might add).

And, when I became a parent, I felt a fierce desire (as did my equally secular husband) to raise our daughter as a Jew, and so we found our way to a Humanistic Jewish congregation, where we three are able to celebrate and study Jewish history, ethics, and art, and where Jewish holidays are observed as “cultural expressions.”

I feel neither superior nor inferior to those Jews who are more traditionally religious than I. Rather, I feel deeply connected to them because of all that we do share, rather than estranged because of what we don’t.

And now, when I write, my goal is to merge and link the social and the personal, the conventional and unconventional, the comic and the tragic, and the intellect and the heart.

And now when I touch my chest, I feel my Jewishness ever-present.

35

CONCEALED REVEALED Rabbis

“A rabbi whom they don’t want to drive out of town isn’t a rabbi...” —Rabbi Israel Salanter Lipkin

I was in the mall last December with our newly adopted children, Hunter and Clarice, ages 6 and 7. After years in foster care, they had come to us eight months earlier, going overnight from never having known Jews to becoming a rabbi’s kids. Though they had come to think of the synagogue as a second home, there were still things from their former life that they found comforting, things my wife and I hadn’t quite decided how to handle. Like Santa.

The kids spotted him as we walked past the cinema. Suddenly I was a rabbi whose kids wanted to sit on Santa’s lap.

We had talked about how Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, and they had accepted that. They were intrigued by “Hanukkah Harry” who, we said, brought Jewish kids Hanukkah gifts and belonged to the same union as Santa. Still, they wanted Santa.

They were still new to us, and so fragile.

“God help me,” I thought, and I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt and got in line.

At last it was their turn. “What would you two like for Christmas?” Santa asked, as he took them on his lap.

“Well, actually, we’re Jewish,” Clarice

E

Topics and Deadlines for “Concealed/Revealed”

“Jerusalem” . . . September 21st “Justice, Justice”... November 21st “Jewish Men” . . . January 21st Submit to: lawrencebush@earthlink.net

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“Concealed/Revealed” invites readers to write essays of up to 300 words that focus on personal experiences that have been transformative, provocative, or just plain unforgettable. Names will be withheld upon request. Future topics and deadlines will be posted in each edition of the column (see box, below left). Essays should be submitted to jewishcurrents@circle.org or mailed to us at 45 East 33 Street, NYC 10016. You will be contacted if your essay is selected for publication.

said. “We don’t celebrate Christmas.”

Santa seemed at a loss. “Happy Hanuka,” he finally said.

“We were just adopted, and our forever family is Jewish. My dad’s a rabbi. He says you know Hanukkah Harry,” Clarice continued.

Hunter pointed me out to Santa. I waved.

“Well,” Santa said slowly. “Actually I am friends with Hanukkah Harry.” Then he drew the kids closer. “You know, I’m so glad you’ve been adopted and are learning about new traditions and holidays with your new family. And just so you know, if you ever need to, you can always come back and talk to me. And meanwhile, I’ll tell Hanukkah Harry you said hello.”

And then my two kids got off Santa’s lap, smiling, having asked for nothing.

Rabbi Maurice Harris (with Melissa Crabbe) Eugene, Oregon

h I sang in the choir on the high holidays, so I had a special vantage point that day, but any given shabbes morning promised an intellectual thrill ride, the sermon a brainy bilingual monologue — part Shakespearean, part stand-up — delivered with intense physicality. Rabbi Harold Schulweis paced the bimah, black robe sailing, small, expressive hirsute hands clutching animatedly at the air, his hornrimmed glasses extending his gaze, a distracting pool of white foam collecting

in the corners of his mouth as he spoke — fast, intense. That Rosh Hashone morning, the sanctuary was packed and Schulweis was compiling an indictment of slum landlords who exploited Black tenants in our town, Oakland, California.

As he built his argument, a bit of commotion developed in the front row of seats, as an entire family stood up to leave the sanctuary — father, mother and several children. They were on their way up the aisle when Schulweis said, “Ushers, please lock the doors.” Addressing the father in the family by name, he said, “You have to return to your seat and hear this. You can’t leave.”

I gathered that the guy was a landlord and had paid top dollar for those front row seats where he took pride of place once a year — and now, nailed! Turning in the aisle, and then excruciatingly back in those seats, they endured the rest of the sermon. A teenager then, I have no idea what happened after that day — whether the slumlord withdrew his membership, whether the rabbi had to answer to congregational leaders, whether I even remember the events as they really happened. But it kept me coming back for more.

I went to shul because it was the most subversive intellectual show in town. It could be dangerous. It offered endless freedom to argue, the high-wire example every Saturday of a smart man working out a complex thought, dragging an ancient text up through history into the light of a contemporary day. Schulweis entertained your doubts. He got me young and impressionable, and his heymish, funny, frustrated intensity fixed in me the excitement of engaging JudaJewish Currents

ism, of struggling within its embrace.

Adrienne Cooper New York, New York

h In December of 1947, when Lyber and I were getting married, our parents, strongly anti-religious but very active in Jewish secular life, wanted a wedding with a Jewish tam (flavor). Rabbi B., a family friend, agreed to officiate. There was one problem, however, he explained.

As a rabbi in an Orthodox congregation, he would be required to perform all the vilde shtik (weird carryings-on) if the ceremony were to be in a synagogue or public place. However, he would not be bound to ritual if took place in a private home. So, at the home of Lyber’s parents, thirty-six guests — all but one family members, some from a religious background — gathered.

Rabbi B. was about to begin when he noticed that Lyber was bareheaded. That was more than the rabbi could bear and he exclaimed: “A hitl muz men!” (There must be a hat!) However, Lyber never wore a hat, didn’t even possess one. So someone grabbed the first available hat, thrust it on his head, and even though it fell over Lyber’s ears, the rabbi proceeded to deliver a wonderful talk on the role and responsibility of progressive young Jewish people to maintain the best of Jewish culture, much to the delight of most, except those used to a religious weddings.

To maintain the Jewish tam, a kosher dinner was arranged at a local hotel. To make sure that the dinner was strictly kosher, the caterer had a mashgiekh — a rabbinical supervisor of Jewish dietary laws — stationed in the dining room. In keeping with the spirit of maintaining progressive Jewish culture, people, one after another, offered toasts and spoke of their own experiences.

The one non-family guest was a close friend of Lyber’s father who had survived the war as a partisan in the Polish woods and was now the cultural attaché of the Polish government in the U.S. He contrasted our wedding with that September-October, 2008

of a young Jewish partisan couple and told how his outfit, during a raid on a local Nazi headquarters, had salvaged a confiscated Jewish book, which was then given to this couple as a wedding present.

When he finished, the mashgiekh, visibly moved, got up from his chair and slowly walked around the banquet table, shaking each guest’s arm and then said: “I have seen many, many Jewish weddings, but this one is the most memorable!”

Elaine Katz Bronx, New York

ed and liked. But I’m not the charitable sort. I think rabbis truly have no idea what their job should be. The historical mandate of the rabbi, to judge and to teach, has been (happily) undermined by modern society. The rabbi is no longer asked to judge if a chicken’s lungs are diseased, or whether a second wife has to have the same size house as a first wife.

Jewish textual learning is a hobby, even for the most Jewishly involved adults, which puts the rabbi in the same position as the yoga teacher at the Y.

h

The rabbi’s real job in the modern world is marketer. Run good services (not even a traditional rabbinic function), give an interesting sermon and adult-education classes, know everyone’s name. Be personable. In other words, make your congregation one that people want to pay to be part of. Or, uncharitably, hustle yourself a job.

What is this weird form of address rabbis are using these days?

I’ve never been invited to call anyone “Professor Jeff,” “Senator Barbara,” “General Dwight” or “Justice Ruth.”

(Admittedly, nuns are known as “Sister Joseph Arimathea” but “Joseph” isn’t her given name, most nuns don’t technically have last names, and anyway, “Sister” isn’t a job title.)

I don’t call my ob-gyn “Dr. Kevin.” I call him Dr. Woo and he calls me Ms. Seid. I don’t call my dentist Dr. Michelle. I call her Michelle and she calls me Judy.

Why, then, do rabbis insist on being called “Rabbi Rob” and “Rabbi Sally?”

It makes it impossible to have a reciprocal address, unless you’re willing to go plantation and answer to “Miz Judith.”

Why the first name? Is it that modern rabbis are so uncomfortable with the idea of rabbinic authority that they need to soften the title? Or are they trying to seem part of your real, personal life by being on a first-name basis, in order to make up for the idea that being Jewish isn’t already part of your real, personal life?

Then why the title? Is their confidence in our appreciation of their special abilities and education so fragile that even when they try to be friendly and accessible, they have to use the title to attain some status?

To be charitable, I might say that they want Jewish learning to be both respect-

So: “Jerry” so that people will like you.

“Rabbi” so they’ll think you’re worth paying. Makes you wonder if the title “Rabbi” might just be as meaningless as the title “God.”

Judith Seid Pleasanton, California

h Three haikus about rabbis: Rabbi Waskow says, “What we breathe in, trees breathe out” also vice versa Praying with his feet Rabbi Abraham Heschel marched for civil rights Rabbi Ben-Ora: “God is a job description, not a proper name” Dan Brook San Francisco, California

h My father picked our rabbis. There was an official committee, mostly men, with one woman named Bess, but my father, a well-educated man who appeared to know what he was doing, had the addi37

tional benefit of white, white hair, which seemed to confer the authority necessary for decisions of higher authority.

As in all small communities where people don’t have enough to do, the rabbi was a goldfish in a bowl, scrutinized infinitely. All his actions were commented on, usually with a sentence beginning, “The rabbi shouldn’t have xyz.”

When it was time to prepare for my bas mitsve, our congregation began a new rabbi search, and my father — although he didn’t say this — was looking for a rabbi for me. I was an odd child, and my father found an odd rabbi for me.

His name was Teddy, and he studied and taught Aramaic at Yale. Teddy had a deep rabbi voice. He looked like a frog born in Flatbush. I was one of those why-whywhy kids (my Rumanian grandmother would always respond with her own version of a poem: why-why-why the fourth of July), and Teddy was the first person who would talk to me exhaustively. He’d keep going on any subject at all: the relative nature of belief, Freedom Rides, Jews in general, Dr. King, TV, popular culture, love. All was fodder for Teddy.

He could talk and listen both.

He had a wife named Marilyn and two small children. They’d drive forty-five minutes to go to the supermarket because they liked to shop at midnight. That’s when they were most awake. Members of our congregation repeated that fact, probably more than any sermon.

Teddy became a part of me, so I’ve vaguely followed his life for over forty years, known something about his path.

He moved away, to a bigger congregation, where he had an affair with the congregation president’s wife. All we heard about her was that she played tennis. I’m sure Teddy never played a game. Then he left the rabbinate, became a psychoanalyst, and married an Iyengar yoga teacher. He lives somewhere in the Midwest. I’ve always thought Teddy would be a good character in a novel.

Esther Cohen New York, New York 38

h When I was a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, one of the giants of the pulpit rabbinate in Philadelphia came to teach a class on pastoral visits by rabbis at hospitals.

He went into great detail about what to do and what not to do; about privacy and confidentiality; about asking about prayer rather than assuming it; about end-of-life decision-making; and about working with the extended family of a hospitalized person.

We were all a bit overwhelmed imagining ourselves having these complex and sensitive responsibilities lying ahead of us when we graduated as rabbis. The visiting rabbi then asked us if we had any questions. I was thinking, “Yes, what do you say to someone who asks why God is doing this to them?” But before I had a chance, a classmate quickly raised his hand: “I have a question: when you go to the hospital, if you put one of those plastic ‘Clergy on Call’ cards on your dashboard, can you really park anywhere without getting a ticket?”

Rabbi Richard Hirsh Wynnewood, Pennsylvania

h Something sweet and gallant lent stature to the makeshift shul. Driven from its former quarters by a steep rent increase, the synagogue was reduced to tacky wood paneling and thirty metal folding chairs. Only a tenth of its former size, it clung to its bit of midtown Manhattan to serve Conservative Jews who work in the office towers that march up the Avenue of the Americas.

My mother, then 77 and frail, had showed me the shul’s New York Times ad that September. It invited newcomers to Rosh Hashone services in the diamond district.

Unaffiliated but hopeful, I ventured over from my office a few days in advance.

The rabbi’s pleasant secretary gave me a ticket and a little news of the shul’s history.

Erev Rosh Hashone, as nightfall began

the Jewish new year, I returned for my first synagogue visit in about two years, pleased to be seeking a link with the religion of my people, knowing that my overture would lift my mother’s spirits.

6:30 P.M.: I arrive fifteen minutes early, the first congregant. The rabbi greets me perfunctorily and immediately tells me that men sit there, in those seats, and women here, in these, so that he can count the minyan.

Mistaking my blank pause for incomprehension, the rabbi asks whether I understand. I reply, “I understand it, but I don’t like it.” The rabbi says, “You mean you want to sit with the men?” “I would like men and women to be able to sit where they choose,” I reply. The rabbi is brusque: “They do. Let’s not make an issue where no problem exists.”

He walks off.

I sit in the women’s section, as if obedient. No one else has come yet. The occasion, so promising before, is already polluted. Meeting a newcomer in an empty shul, the rabbi has offered no word of welcome, expressed no interest in her. He has instead dealt with his top priority, segregated seating — Jane Cohen instead of Jim Crow. Woman. Sit her here. Over and out.

6:45 P.M.: The service is scheduled to start. Nine people are on hand — the rabbi and his son, who is the assistant rabbi, five male congregants, another woman, and me. A man remarks that no minyan is present. The rabbi replies, “We’re getting close. We have seven.”

He leaves the room, oblivious to the two who do not count.

6:50 P.M.: Two women and eight men.

Ten in all. Rage congeals in my chest.

7:00 P.M.: The rabbi returns: “How are we doing?” His son answers that “one more” has arrived so “we have nine.”

Neither rabbi notices that I have been making notes. A rabbi and a couple of the men discuss prospects for getting the tenth man. Who was supposed to bring others with him? Which men in the building or neighborhood can be Jewish Currents

recruited by phone at the last minute?

A few feet away, we two sit silently, as if on empty chairs. A third woman arrives. To pass the time, the men gossip among themselves. One mispronounces the word “puberty” the same way that Johnny Carson used to.

7:05 P.M.: Four women, nine men. The rabbi announces that “we have nine” but that the service will start anyhow. He does not explain. The U.S. Constitution counted a slave as three-fifths of a person. In dire straits, maybe four women equal one Jew. 7:15 P.M.: A tenth man enters. The rabbi interrupts the service to hail him, exclaiming, “The Almighty is with us!”

The final count is seven women, eleven men. Except for one who remains beside his wife, the men sit facing the Torah, the sacred scroll. Women are to the side, at right angles to it. I am the youngest congregant, by perhaps ten or fifteen years.

Conducting the service, the rabbi calls upon the Lord in the name of man and mankind so that all men can be brothers.

He talks of God and His countenance.

The prayerbook speaks of the God of our fathers and of Jacob; speaks of the man who this and the man who that; speaks of God and His such-and-such. In closing, the rabbi says the small turnout shows how important it is for people to be punctual for tomorrow morning’s service, “especially the men.” He repeats the admonition and the words “especially the men.”

7:30 P.M.: In the elevator as we leave, one man comments in friendly fashion that it’s nice that women attended.

“We’re here but we aren’t counted,” I say. He promptly replies that some synagogues do count women in the minyan.

Clearly, he’s aware of the subject. But I cannot talk with him. Having sat rigidly still in the shul, choking on spiritual fury, I need air. I walk away from the building as fast as possible.

The incident is no aberration. Petty affronts within organized Judaism recur.

When I phone a different shul for travel directions, a man calls me “dear.” At a September-October, 2008

friend’s wedding, a synagogue ignores her instructions and labels her “Mrs. His” instead of “Ms. Herself.” Officiating under the khupe at my cousin’s wedding, a rabbi dwells on the groom’s accomplishments as a teacher and gives short shrift to the bride’s achievements as a musician; during the ceremony he jokes about Jewish mothers At the funeral of Martin Abzug, husband of feminist pioneer Bella Abzug, the rabbi refers to “the Lord . . . His . . . .” When the rabbi at my father’s funeral enumerates the survivors, down to what sounds like the fourteenth cousins thrice removed, and never mentions that the dead man left a daughter, the damage runs deeper. Sociolinguists call it “symbolic annihilation.”

Lilith magazine once said that Judaism is bleeding from “the loss of talented women.” Across the nation, some synagogues coddle even a reluctant or selfimportant man while showering insults upon eager women. But other sisters, drained by secular sexism, don’t go to shul, feeling that if Judaism demeans us it is redundant. How many sisters have fled, as much in sorrow as in anger? How many more will be lost?

Marie Shear Brooklyn, New York © 2008 by Marie Shear

h It was a cold, rainy Central Valley winter in Stockton, California and my sister Mimi, 21, was dead. I drove the seventyfive miles home in grief.

What we had always feared had happened. I remembered her first seizures in her crib, a few days after Mimi came back with my mother from the hospital.

The seizures were never well controlled.

Mimi never had a “normal” life.

But she’d had a good life. Small steps, then learning to walk. Recognizing letters and learning to read. Holding a ping-pong racket Chinese style and being able to really volley. And loving beyond measure all of us: her brothers David and me, our father, Boris, our mother Florence, who was Mimi’s greatest teacher, her grandparents, and her friends. Strug-

gling to express herself, fighting the burden of medications that attempted to control her seizures but slowed her ability to speak clearly.

She liked to laugh. Once she joked with us, telling me her name was not Mimi but “Pupchik.” So she was Pupchik for an afternoon.

I never heard her say a cross word or show jealousy or anger.

She was in special ed classes; she was mainstreamed; she went to schools, then to a sheltered workshop. My parents kept Mimi at home. And when my brother and I left home, being home meant being with her. My parents willingly were resolved to take care of her for the rest of their lives.

They could not imagine life without her.

Whatever their sacrifice, Mimi was the one who held us all together.

In the darkness of a winter night, Rabbi Steven Chester came to our door. Perhaps he was 35. He wore the boots of the counterculture. He chain-smoked. He wore a black beard and an intense expression as he listened to us speak about Mimi.

And the next day, his eulogy captured the way she was. The thirty-six lamed vovniks (righteous people), he said, were by definition hidden; God speaks through his handicapped children, who are equally made in the image of God; my sister was one of pure soul.

We wanted Mimi to be with us forever, and Rabbi Chester helped us believe that our suffering was not for forever. He did not minimize our loss, but comforted us knowing that there was no comfort possible. He allowed us to believe that, as the yortsayt prayers say, “love is stronger than death.”

Because of his eulogy, my sister’s grave has been a holy place where we go not only to mourn but to remember — a place where our tears have been sanctified by Rabbi Chester’s embracing words.

Marek Breiger Hayward, California

h Robert Goldberg of Congregation Mish39

kan Israel in Hamden, Connecticut was unique among rabbis I have met. He was a community activist who never hesitated to speak out against injustice and racism, and for peace and a progressive response to every issue that came up.

When the inner-city riots of the 1960s broke out, some of the city “leaders” blamed Bob Goldberg for stirring up the Black community with his frequent speeches condemning racism. During the march on Selma, Alabama he was arrested and shared a cell with Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Bob later invited to speak to the congregation. It turned out to be one of the largest gatherings in the synagogue’s history. The Reverend William Sloane Coffiin was another “jailbird” who became a speaker.

Bob Goldberg became known to many readers and supporters of Jewish Currents when he agreed to join the Editorial Advisory Council, on which he served for many years. Several times I heard him explain that his concept of God was as a spirit within us. Once, at dinner, I asked him again to explain this. In reply he told a story: During an oral exam at the Reform Hebrew Union College in Cinncinnati, he told the three rabbis questioning him that there was something on his mind they should know.

What was it? Bob said “There are times when I have doubts.” The chief rabbi then responded, “Young man, don’t answer questions nobody asked you.”

Perhaps Bob Goldberg’s major claim to fame for some is that he was the officiating rabbi who married Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.

Joe Dimow New Haven, Connecticut

h “That’s a good story, isn’t it? Hang on a second, sweetie. Sweet — sweetums — just hang on.” (Lights cigarette.) “Ah. That’s better.”

“Let me ask you something else. Your grandparents. Did they go to shul?”

“There was no such thing. Religion was 40

not a big deal with these people.”

sense to have a rabbi marry us.

“Did your grandmother light candles on Friday night?”

Where do you find a rabbi when you’re not a member of a congregation? We looked where we looked for everything else in those days — in the classified section of the Village Voice. There we found our rabbi: A. Bruce Goldman, a freewheeling freelance spiritual leader who hosted a radio show on WBAI called “Up Against the Wailing Wall.” Goldman had been the chaplain at Columbia during the 1960s and was a champion of undergraduates’ rights to cohabit in the dorms (he subsequently lost his job for participating in the 1968 riots). Perfect for us — a hippie rabbi.

“I have no idea. As I said, all the rest of the family went over there on Friday nights and we didn’t. There was no shul. There was Dr. Mann’s Reform Temple.”

“What was it called?”

“Temple Sinai.”

“Dr. Mann? Not Rabbi Mann?”

“Doctor Mann. I never heard anyone call him ‘Rabbi.’”

“So did you go to Temple Sinai?”

“No. My father wouldn’t join. Dr. Mann used to get after my father to join, and my father would say, ‘Don’t tell me how to run my business and I won’t tell you how to run yours.’ Then my father died in 1964 and my Uncle Norman called Dr. Mann.”

“He was still around?”

“Retired. He was about 80 years old, and he was sick.”

“So what happened?”

“Norman called Dr. Mann, and he said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m retired. You’ll have to get somebody else.’ Then he called back a few minutes later and said, ‘Did you say it was Maury who died?’ And my uncle said that was right. And he said ‘Nobody’s gonna talk at Maury Ross’ funeral but me.’ So there he was. Hanging on to the lectern with both hands. He spoke for forty-five minutes. Talking about his friend Maury Ross. Why are you asking me all this stuff, anyway?”

Pete Wolf Smith New York, New York

h When we decided to get married in 1981 (after living together for three years in unwedded bliss), we needed to find a rabbi who was available on short notice.

Neither of us was religious, but we were both Jewish, so it made some sort of

We called and were told we’d have to come in for a couple of sessions of premarital counseling so he could get to know us before he’d marry us, and the whole thing would cost us $350.

So we got on our motorcycles and rode from Queens to the Upper West Side for premarital counseling two or three times, and chatted with the hippie rabbi about how much we loved each other and how strong our intentions were. We had both recently completed the EST training, so we had very strong intentions, you see.

The wedding day came, and Rabbi Bruce did a great ceremony. He also stayed for the reception and partied hearty, got inebriated, made a pass at my sister, and gave us some great wedding memories.

Twenty-seven years later, we’re still married. Here’s to you, Rabbi Bruce!

Nina Gordon Oakland Gardens, New York

48 Pages Not Enough?

Read the Editor’s Blog and the Rootless Cosmopolitan Blog at www.jewishcurrents.org Our website has a new archive of historical articles from our 62 years of publishing and many other features.

Jewish Currents

Meyer Rothberg

The Marketplace and the Peace Process

E

BOOK REVIEWS

Israel have a particular poignancy for me; the future of Israel even more so. Our only child, our son, emigrated to Israel when he was 19; he’ll be 40 this year.

Shaiya teaches Jewish philosophy at Reviewed in this essay: the Conservative yeshiva in Jerusalem The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterwhere he lives with his sabra wife and prise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last, by Bernard Avishai. Harcourt, three sons. He served as an officer in 2008, 304 pages. the IDF, stationed in Gaza. Amos, 13, his eldest son, will serve in the IDF in and an emerging Israeli elite quite treatment of Israeli Arab citizens. They just five years. capable of leading the country to it . . .

So when I looked at the cover of are, he warns, “a fifth of the populaIsraelis live in a wider world and have alBernard Avishai’s The Hebrew Re- tion [and] are threatening a shock to ready met the more daunting challenge: public: How Secular Democracy and Israel’s civil society which the state building a vibrant Hebrew culture and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel . . . has no means to absorb . . . [E]ven an exacting economic engine, qualifyPeace At Last, I was more than eager if the occupied territories just disaping them to be . . . advanced global to delve into it and be encouraged to peared . . . the country would face, players . . . which today’s Israelis are indulge in optimism! Avishai has good soon, another intifada, this time from really good at. credentials for his task: he spent “the within . . . their country has evolved best part of the 1970s living in Israel, into an advanced global, multicultural The book is marked by interesting and the better part of the 1980s visit- state, and its democratic flaws have interviews with people ranging from ing and writing about the country.” become insufferable to them. ” Ehud Olmert to Palestinian Arabs Avisha also bemoans Israel’s allowSince 2002, at the beginning of the who are quite direct in their criticism Al-Aqsa intifada, he has been living ance of disproportionate influence by of Israeli policies. The reader gains a in Jerusalem and teaching at Hebrew the ultra-Orthodox, and encourage- sense of being an “insider,” of hearment of the settlement movement ing first-hand an extensive range of University.

Avishai is not an apologist. His pre- since 1967. He covers current events, experience, thought, feeling, and vious book, The Tragedy of Zionism, including the security wall and its opinions of people whose immediate earned him the New Republic cover consequences for the Arab population experience of Israel is shared in an headline: “Jew Against Zion.” The in the West Bank, and the increasing intimate atmosphere. Avishai uses first part of his current book, which is influence of the ultra-Orthodox and these interviews both to support his well-written and informative, reviews settler factions. review of the unfortunate aspects of in detail the errors, some tragic, that what Israel has become and to introIsrael made during the 1948 War of This was hard reading, especially for duce his major thesis: that getting back Independence and has continued to someone looking forward to opti- to the liberal democracy that Israel’s make since 1949. He reminds us of mism! Avishai’s portrait presents quite founders intended and taking it furIsrael’s Declaration of Independence, a contrast to the secular, democratic ther (like eliminating certain unfair which endorsed “the complete equal- Jewish state that my son portrays in his advantages that Jewish citizens have) ity of social and political rights to all doctoral dissertation as rooted in Torah would provide the foundation for a inhabitants irrespective of religion, and other Jewish political writing.

“Hebrew Republic” that could join the Yet “there is a way out,” Avishai global economy in partnership with race or sex.” Then he describes Israel’s failure to achieve these goals in its argues, an adjacent Palestinian state. Israeli technological sophistication and busiMeyer Rothberg is a semi-retired psychotherapist who travels to Israel to visit ness acumen, already demonstrated, if with family twice a year. shared with the Palestinian state (and vents in and around

September-October, 2008

41

regional Arab countries like Syria and Jordan), would build a Palestinian social class that would be averse to the continuing conflict we see to this day.

Avishai’s book is weakest at showing evidence for the possibility of such developments — perhaps because little exists. The book is more a proposal than a report, a proposal of a better choice for Israel than the current path to disaster. Still, I kept an eye out for news articles that related to his thesis

as I grappled with his book. One was a report of the recent peace discussions, via Turkey, between Syria and Israel, in which the Syrian foreign minister declared that “Syria is not Iran” and spoke of a cooperative regional development zone. Another was a report in Ha’aretz in May that “77 percent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than any other country in the world.”

A second Ha’aretz piece that month was headlined “Israelis and Palestinians Launch Web Start-Up.” “The

Palestinian office in Ramallah, with about thirty-five software developers, is responsible for most of the research and programming,” the paper reported. “A smaller Israeli team works about thirteen miles away in the central Israeli town of Modiin.”

Avishai, writing in 2007, couldn’t have known about this development, but it would have warmed his heart.

It did mine. My son tells me that he tried the software and found it a bit slow — in keeping with the progress of the enterprise of peace.

Carol Jochnowitz

“Why Don’t You Write My Story?”

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the end of her life, Lara Berk asked her daughter Juliene, “Why don’t you write my story? It’s very interesting.”

“I can’t write your story, Mama,” her daughter replied. “Only you can do that.” The result of this exchange was a handwritten, sixtyReviewed in this essay: seven-page manuscript the older Call Her Blessed, by Juliene Berk, woman gave her daughter two weeks pages. later. Juliene Berk took pieces of her mother’s testament and surrounded poverty and hunger of more than them with her imagined reconstruc- one kind. Lara’s mother, a woman tions of the events they described to so stunted by her own childhood create Call Her Blessed. deprivations that throughout her life The mother’s writing is spare, blunt, she could hardly speak to her most matter-of-fact; the peculiarities of her remarkable daughter, dispatches Lara spelling and punctuation provide a at age 8 to a wealthy aunt and uncle visual analogue of her accented Eng- to lessen the number of mouths to lish. The daughter’s narrative is fluidly feed. Bercu’s father, who honored readable, essentially re-creating her brute strength and almost nothing else, mother’s life as a historical novel — pulls his son out of school at the same but one carefully grounded in reality. age and puts him to work hauling (Her exhaustive familial and archival sacks, not relenting even when the research is described at some length boy’s stomach is swollen with hunin her introductory section.) ger.

Lara responds by turning inward, Lara Moscovitz and the young man adopting the caution-strategy of she would marry, Bercu Bercovici, silence. Bercu grows up with a rage were born in Iasi, Romania in the that will run through his life like an last decades of the 19th century, into underground fuse. ne day near

Carol Jochnowitz was the production editor of Jewish Currents for many years until her retirement in 2003.

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www.julieneberk.com, 2007, 473 Lara’s family, driven by laws that are systematically making it impossible for Jews to survive in Romania, moves to the New World. Because of an earlier emigrant from Iasi whose letters home had become part of the local folklore, they choose to settle in Florida. Their experience there follows a familiar pattern, with regional variations.

They’re surrounded by parrots, palmettos and stifling heat as they move in with relatives and begin to work twelve-hour days in the store.

Lara’s jaw drops open the day she sees black people for the first time, a whole railway car full of them. (“We never even knew such people were in existence!”) Later, an account she hears of a public hanging literally sickens her with its brutality. It’s an experience she will remember years later when she reads of Leo Frank’s Jewish Currents

lynching in Georgia.

Bercu comes to America to claim his bride. Remembering the boulevards and theaters of Iasi, he’s repelled by the amusement-park culture that greets him, but nothing could have kept him away from the girl he had fallen in love with on sight and would adore for the rest of his life.

Nevertheless, their wedding night is a scarifying experience for the 18-year old girl. Stony as ever, her mother had never “told her anything,” and the world in which they lived was not one that could ever have provided Bercu with the vocabulary to do so.

The author plausibly extrapolates her mother’s experience from the account Lara wrote of an encounter with a salesman the next morning: . . . after such a wonderful nite . . . my Husband called me out to the store to introduce me to the man saying to him meet my Wif he couldn’t speak English good, the man didnt know what to say to me so he asked how I liked married life . . . my answer was, I hate it. wich I did . . .

Nevertheless, the marriage endures, a source of shelter and sustenance for the family it engenders, for over fifty years. But Bercu’s violent temper, which for a long time Lara cannot dissociate from his sexuality, casts a shadow between them for the rest of their lives.

They go into business with Lara’s

Jewish Currents welcomes our newest Life Subscribers MARK W. WEBER of Solon, Ohio KIT FARBER of Annapolis, Maryland RICHARD B. SOLOMON of Portland, Oregon and MARSHA and SOL WIENER of Port Townsend, Washington cousin and his wife, running a small grocery and sharing the apartment above it. They’re so pressed for space that the two couples have to take turns eating off the top of a sugar barrel.

Between her obligations in the store, at the stove and in bed, Lara’s days are packed full. Then the children start to come, and with them, at last, the joy of her life. She has seven in seventeen years, one more beautiful than the next. A studio photograph displays the first five in Victorian stepladderstyle, youngest to tallest, all in spotless white.

Lara and Bercu move into a home of their own, a modest bungalow. The family increases and its fortunes rise, until one day Lara is able to hire a contractor to design the house of her dreams — the peak moment of her life, outside of the births of her children.

Yet the devotion she expends on keeping her new home spotless eventually exhausts her. This episode provides a poignant insight into the housekeeping of the women of that generation, so often decried as obsessive.

The Depression nearly wipes them out, but they recover and Lara finally acquires the “beautiful things,” the china, crystal and silver that she had hungered for all her life. Glowingly, she sets her Passover seder table with them, and what is perhaps the most appalling scene in the book follows.

In a pathological fit of rage, Bercu screams a curse at his young daughter Hattye, who has suffered from eye trouble since birth, for spilling wine on the tablecloth. Hattye dies of a brain tumor barely a year later. The marriage almost founders, then recovers, parts of it irretrievably lost but still viable, eventually reblossoming into a long, peaceful retirement.

“You get what you Build. that’s my life,” are Lara’s words ending the book. Hers was a life spent meeting exhausting demands with honor. The account chronicling it, without being slick, feels much shorter than its 450odd pages. The author is a natural, and why she had to self-publish this book is beyond me.

The Jewish Currents Bookshelf Back in Print! Humanist Readings in Jewish Folklore

by Bennett Muraskin (Jewish Currents columnist and contributor) with a new foreword by Rabbi Adam Chalom, North American dean of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism 120 stories from traditional Jewish folklore that reflect progressive, humanistic values.

Chapters include Talking Back to God, Confronting Injustice, Jewish-Gentile Relations, Mentshlikhkayt, The Rich and the Poor, The Dangers of Fanaticism $24, postpaid, from www.jewishcurrents.org or call (212) 889-2523.

The author is donating profits from these sales to support the magazine.

September-October, 2008

43

the Rootless

Rokhl Kafrissen

Cosmopolitan

Vilne, Whispering

A

Semitic project of Lithuanian nation-building and myth creation. On the other hand, Vilne, the onetime “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” is a spiritual and intellectual home in the hearts of many, many Jews worldwide, this Jew included, and the story of the brave partisans of Vilne is as much a part of Holocaust education today as the mass murders at Ponar (outside Vilnius). In short, there’s no way that Jews, worldwide, would not take this investigation personally.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, for one, stated that the investigation of Jewish partisans was “part of an attempt to establish a ‘false symmetry’ between atrocities committed against Jews and atrocities allegedly committed by them.”

Indeed, if one gave a look at the Lithuanian language press this summer, much of the commentary on articles about the investigation express just such a sentiment of ‘parallel victimology.’ It’s easy to find comments such as “Crime has no ethnicity” (from Delfi.lt) and “When is justice going to be the same for all?” (Balsas.lt). Throughout June and July, many articles in the Lithuanian press referred to those resisting the investigation as “radicals” who are making wild accusations against Lithuania.

of July, I flew to Lithuania for a month-long Yiddish program at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. Right before leaving New York, I learned that prosecutors in Vilnius were investigating elderly Jews, former anti-Nazi partisans, for war crimes against Lithuanian civilians. The news seemed a joke that no one would dare make.

Except this was no joke. A Vilnius prosecutor has been seeking to interview Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, the 86-year-old librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and former partisan fighter from the Vilne Ghetto, with respect What are the facts? Ninety five percent of Lithuanian - massacre of January 29th, 1944, to the Koniuchy (Kaniukai) Jews, some 225,000, were murdered, either by Germans a raid carried out by Jewish and Soviet partisans that killed alone or with Lithuanian help (and on some occasions by at least two score civilians. According to reports in the U.S., Lithuanians alone). Seventy thousand of these were murtwo other elderly partisans dered in the forest pits of Poare also being investigated: nar, near Vilnius. As heroic as Yitzhak Arad, former chair the Jewish partisans were, the of Yad Vashem and a member reality of armed Jewish resisof a commission appointed tance (and, more importantly, by the Lithuanian president aggression) was ludicrously in 2005 to examine past war minute compared with the crimes; and Rachel Maroverwhelming force directed golis, who wrote a memoir against them. By any measure, about her experiences in the Jews were overwhelmingly resistance. victims. To look at these facts Lithuanian Prime Minisand cry for “equal treatment” ter Gediminas Kirkilas had points to something deeply actually been at YIVO in askew in a country’s selfNew York for the opening Update: Rokhl Kafrissen stands before the Jewish Community conception. ceremony for the Yiddish Center in Vilnius after it was defaced with swastikas and antiThere is no question that Summer Program, just a few Semitic imagery in mid-August. Photo by Tobaron Waxman. the Lithuanian people sufdays before my departure. I fered under both the Germans had assumed he was there for the free food, as I had been. and the Soviets. To understand the depth of Lithuanian Turns out his visit was also meant to answer the fears of suffering, you need only go to the state-funded Museum of American Jewish leaders regarding the continuing inves- Genocide, housed in what was the KGB office in downtown tigation of Vilne’s partisans. Clearly, the prime minister Vilnius. There you can fully understand the deportations, is walking a tightrope among constituencies. On the one killings and brutalization the Lithuanians suffered under hand, local Lithuanian politicians have their own agenda, Soviet rule, as well as the heroic resistance they showed. In tied to the increasingly nationalistic, xenophobic and anti- the Museum of Genocide, however, there is not one panel 44

t the end

Jewish Currents

about mass murder of Jews, and no mention of Ponar. The word ‘Jew’ is found twice in the whole museum, and the Jewish death toll is subsumed within a table of killings of Lithuanian citizens by Nazis. The exhibits on partisans make no mention of Jewish partisans.

The museum is a modern, beautifully designed, multi-media space. By contrast, the Vilnius ‘Holocaust Museum’ is in a tucked-away corner of the city, marked only by a tiny sign, way above eye level. Known as the Green House, it is also state-funded, but there is no comparison to be made with the beautifully maintained Museum of Genocide. The Green House is only six rooms and lacks complete signage in English. Those rooms are crammed with hundreds of years of Jewish history and hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.

The Museum of Genocide is both a monument to Lithuanian suffering and a reminder of the brutality of the Soviet KGB apparatus. The chilling recreation of KGB interrogation cells in the basement is a living reminder of the awfulness of the Soviet regime. But while anti-Soviet feeling may be an official ingredient in modern Lithuanian nationalism, the rawest nerve in Lithuania today, and on the streets of Vilnius, seems to be its citizens’ unresolved relationships with Poles and Jews. The ‘investigation’ of Fania Brantsovsky and others is just one part of this. Before the war, Vilnius was a majority Polish-speaking city, with a large portion of its inhabitants also speaking Yiddish. The transformation of Vilnius into a ‘Lithuanian’ city, and the creation of modern Lithuania, in toto, are works-in-progress, obviously and painfully so.

Vilnius is scheduled by the European Union to be next year’s Capital of European Culture (Liverpool is the 2008 capital), and residents are understandably proud. But that pride seems to coexist with shockingly casual expressions of xenophobia. A couple of my friends on the program at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute are non-Jewish Poles, from whom I heard the following anecdote: They had gone to a pub on Friday night. A young man started to chat up one of them, asking in English where she was from. Poland, she answered.

Ah, yes, Poles, he said. Even worse than the Jews Hardly the best pick-up line.

A recent poll of Lithuanian citizens found that the majority agreed that they would prefer not to have Polish or Russian neighbors — meaning not neighbors across the border of countries, but neighbors on the same street.

The modern visitor to Vilnius would be surprised to know that the city, not too long ago, was one of the real capitals of the Jewish world. Bookstores in the main tourist areas don’t carry guidebooks to Jewish Vilnius. English signs September-October, 2008

for major Jewish sites are few and far between, especially compared to the plentiful signage for the many beautiful churches and cathedrals. As for the traditional Jewish ghetto, as well as the wartime ghettos, the situation is even worse. Private homeowners have mostly removed all signs indicating that their street was once a Jewish street.

The Jewish community of Vilne does not own any part of the wartime ghetto and its preservation (or destruction) is left to a government which does not view preservation of Jewish history as its problem, to put it mildly.

Vilne speaks only in a whisper.

The Jewish library on Strashun Street, for example, is one of many Vilne ghetto landmarks that are unprotected.

The building had already been in use for many years as a library, Mefitse Haskole, when the wartime ghetto was established around it. The library, where ghetto residents patiently waited for their turn to read its books and perhaps regain a bit of dignity in their everyday lives, became the nexus of spiritual and armed resistance. It was where Dr. Herman Kruk, the director, kept his famous diary documenting life in the ghetto, and where the partisans hid their weapons and constructed their bombs in the basement. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the library to the demoralized, terrified residents of the ghetto.

You can still see the door to that basement and then walk through to the courtyard, where you can look up and see Dr. Kruk’s office window. The building is now a music school; the building behind it, in the courtyard, the former ghetto prison, now houses a children’s dance school. No plaques identify the history of either site.

Polish Vilne also speaks in a whisper. It’s easy to find monuments to Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), one of the greatest Polish poets, because he sang so eloquently of Vilnius that Lithuanians claim him as Lithuanian. There is no hint in the city, however, that Mickiewicz wrote in Polish and is today considered Polish. Indeed, if Mickiewicz was Lithuanian, it was in the sense in which he himself would have thought of it — as a member of the multicultural Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Mickiewicz attended what is now Vilnius University, which was named much earlier after its Polish patron king, Stefan Batory. It is somewhat taboo, however, to refer to Vilnius University by this original Polish name. Polish Vilnius has been scrubbed from the streets and walls of Vilnius by the same nationalistic forces that have erased Jewish Vilne.

In New York it has sometimes been difficult for me to understand why so many non-Jews want to learn Yiddish.

But the non-Jewish Poles and Lithuanians I’ve met studying Yiddish in Vilnius are the ones who are struggling the most with the history around them. For me, learning Yiddish is a path to Jewish healing from the traumas of the 20th 45

century. For my Eastern European friends, the trauma, and the challenge, are also tremendous. How can they rebuild their cities with bricks and plaques, words and deeds, in a way that relate so many stories of conflict and harmony?

The work happening at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, carried

Letters Continued from page 2

damaged can experience resurrection.

I, a 20-year-old undergraduate with no knowledge of Yiddish, now feel it as my duty to further the project of reviving Yiddish as the animating spirit of Jewish identity. I know hardly where to begin.

Isaac Binkovitz Montreal, Quebec

Radical Yiddish It was with enormous pleasure that I read Joel Schechter’s piece on “Nit Gedayget” in the May-June issue (“Radical Yiddish”). My father was manager at Camp Nitgedayget from 1944-1946 — just as the war ended and soldiers were coming to camp on their honeymoons, the Communist Party was holding weeklong seminars, folk dancing reigned supreme, and I was growing up.

This equivalent of “Eloise at the Plaza” was between the ages of 10 to 12, the only kid among adults, left to roam free since both my parents worked long hours at camp. I went to a one-room schoolhouse down the road (this, coming from P.S.96 in the Bronx) that had seven students, each at a different grade level, and one teacher, who hadn’t a clue as to what to do with me. For two years I sat in school and read books, answered some questions in a work book, and simply enjoyed it all. My friends were the children of the Greek kitchen workers at camp.

All ages. What fun.

It’s so nice to read about it. It triggers all kinds of reminiscences.

Harriet Wallman Ayer Niantic, Connecticut

Koval and the Rosenbergs Bennett Muraskin’s letter in the JulyAugust issue attacked the very good article by Carol Jochnowitz (“The Manhattan Project Spy”), as well as — by 46

out by non-Jews and Jews (including Fania Brantsovsky), is of utmost importance in bringing understanding and hope to future generations in this part of world.

Additional reporting for this article was provided by Daiva Repeckaite.

implication — our organization, the Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case. For decades, Jewish Currents supported and reported on the activities of those of us who have been calling for a reopening of the case, which we are confident will eventually result in the exoneration of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

That support ceased, unfortunately, with the death of editor Morris U. Schappes.

We are a coalition of those who oppose capital punishment; those who believe that the government knew Ethel had nothing to do with espionage but executed her anyway; those who believe Julius may have been guilty of something but received, as Muraskin puts it, “an unfair trial and an unjust sentence”; those who believe the couple was tried under the wrong law; those who believe the whole trial was tainted by perjury on the part of Harry Gold and (as he now admits) David Greenglass, as well as (in the case of Morton Sobell) Max Elitcher; those who (like Sobell) deplore and decry the horribly sloppy job done by the defense; those who believe the government was trying to hide its own incompetence and failure at catching people who actually did commit atomic espionage by scapegoating and indicting Jews who didn’t; and those who believe that if the Rosenbergs did attempt to aid the Soviet Union during World War II, they did so in a noble cause, trying to help a wartime ally.

But contrary to Muraskin’s assertion, Julius Rosenberg was not “an atomic spy.” He was convicted of conspiracy, not of espionage. Forty years later, in 1993, the American Bar Association deemed the evidence at his trial to have been insufficient to convict, outside the context of fear and hysteria at the time it was presented. The government then came up with the so-called Venona papers, a mix of fact, fiction and fraud

purporting to show that Julius had been part of a spy ring that endeavored to obtain and transmit industrial, not atomic, secrets. The continuing slander, which Muraskin’s letter perpetrates, is best expressed in the title of the late William Reuben’s The Atom Spy Hoax. We repeat: the Rosenbergs were not atomic spies.

Leonard J. Lehrman Richard Corey National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case New York, New York Bennett Muraskin replies: Ethel Rosenberg was innocent, but it is clear that Julius Rosenberg recruited his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, to find out what he could about the work being done on the A-bomb at Los Alamos. I refer readers to Sam Roberts’ The Brother, based on interviews with Greenglass, and Alexander Feklisov’s The Man Behind the Rosenbergs. Feklisov, I dare say, knew a bit more about this matter than Lehrman or Corey, since he was the KGB agent in charge of Julius’ spying activities.

As for those who believe that spying for the SSR during World War II was “a noble cause,” I suggest that they consider that the Soviet Union was content to remain an ally of Nazi Germany until attacked in July, 1941; that the loss of twenty or more million Soviet (including Jewish) lives had as much to do with Stalin’s malfeasance as with the strength of the German Army; that the gulag was operating full steam during the war; that the USSR committed its share of war crimes against minority Soviet nationalities, Poles, German civilians and plenty of others.

Would the defenders of the Rosenbergs have come to the defense of an American spy caught trying to steal Soviet military secrets in order to aid the American war effort against Hitler? Somehow I doubt it.

Jewish Currents

September-October, 2008

47

Sunday November 23rd 9:30 A.M.—5 P.M.

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Let’s make ending the Iraq war a national Jewish priority!

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