In an article published in 1899, the radical French Jew Bernard Lazare wrote: “The bourgeois and clerical antisemites reproach (…) the Jews for being revolutionaries. Let us work to deserve this reproach.”1 To be sure, a not-negligible number of radical Jewish intellectuals were already active in the nineteenth century, in Germany in particular: Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, and Ferdinand Lassalle are among the best known. But after 1890, and all through the twentieth century, a very strong presence of red Jewish intellectuals is visible in the political and cultural spheres, both in Europe and in the United States. The antisemites tended to associate Judaism and radicalism: it was Henry Ford who, in an important book, The International Jew (1920), invented the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which was to become a central theme in Nazi propaganda. The fact is that the majority of Jewish intellectuals were mild liberals, but it is true too that a group formed of leading Jewish intellectuals played a significant role in radical politics and culture: it began at the start of the nineteenth century with Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman and continued into the twentieth century. This phenomenon lasted until our own era, even if it seems that Jewish radicalism is in decline both in Europe (where few Jews have remained) and in the United States, after the extermination of the European Jews during the Second World War and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Such a de-radicalization was reinforced by the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab countries.
I shall deal here with radical left-wing Jewish intellectuals2. It is clear that these intellectuals do not form a bloc, the cultural development and the conditions in which they appear differing considerably according to specific historical moments or concrete geographical and cultural areas. My own research concerns first of all the radical social and political engagement of Jewish intellectuals in Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, that is to say, before Auschwitz. But starting from this specific group, one can suggest a few hypotheses and comparative propositions that concern both the European and the American radical Jewish intellectuals.
Radical Jewish intellectuals in Europe
In Central Europe
What differences were there among the radical Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe? Rather than adopt a classic political typology — anarchists, socialists, communists, left-wing Zionists, etc. — I propose another approach that begins by going beyond these political distinctions. The radical Jewish intellectuals of Mitteleuropa were drawn to the two poles of German cultural life, emblematized by the two famous characters of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924): Settembrini, the liberal, democratic, and republican philanthrope — partly inspired by his own brother Heinrich Mann — and Naphta, the strange romantic, conservative, and revolutionary Jewish Jesuit (!), probably inspired by Georg Lukács.
The first group was made up of Aufklärer, that is to say, of intellectuals faithful to the Enlightenment, partisans of Western modernity and of rationalism, non-religious and confident in progress, whether they were social democrats, Marxists, or communists: Eduard Bernstein, Paul Singer, Max Adler, Otto Bauer, Paul Levi, and Paul Frölich, among others.
The second group, the romantics, shared a critical vision of industrial/capitalist Civilization, which they considered responsible for the disenchantment of the world. Their protest against bourgeois society was inspired by a nostalgia for certain aspects of the pre-modern past. Among the romantic radicals, the anarchist Gustav Landauer or the Marxist Ernst Bloch were perhaps the most important.
In the specific context of the Judaism of Central Europe, a complex network of links — of elective affinities, to use a concept (Wahlverwandtschaft) borrowed from Goethe by Max Weber in his sociology of religions — had been established between romanticism, Jewish messianism, the anti-bourgeois cultural revolt, and the revolutionary utopias (socialist and/or anarchist). Such a messianism was not that of Jewish orthodoxy, but, seen through the prism of German romanticism, it was a new version of it, with a highly political tenor.
Within the romantic/messianic constellation of the radical Jewish culture of Central Europe, there were two poles. The first was made up of religious Jews with a radical/utopian tendency: Rudolf Kayser, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hans Kohn, and the young Leo Löwenthal. The predominant character of their thought was the rejection of assimilation and the affirmation of a religious and/or cultural Jewish identity. Most of them were Zionists, but they quickly left the movement (Kohn, Löwenthal) or remained in it while being marginalized on account of their anti-nationalist position (Buber, Scholem). But all shared, to varying degrees, a universalist utopian perspective, a kind of libertarian (anarchist) socialism, which they articulated with their messianic faith.
The other pole was composed of assimilated, atheist Jews, anarchist and/or Marxist sympathizers: Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, the young Georg Lukács, Manès Sperber, and Walter Benjamin. Unlike the others, they had distanced themselves from Judaism without breaking all ties with it, with its messianic tradition in particular. The expression religious atheism, which Lukács used apropos of Fyodor Dostoevsky, helps us to understand this paradoxical spiritual figure who, with the energy of despair, seemed to seek the messianic point of convergence between the sacred and the profane. Among those who represented this type, some had received a Jewish religious education in their childhood (Fromm, Sperber), but most of them discovered Judaism later in their lives.
In Eastern Europe
Three essential elements distinguish the radical Jewish intellectuals of German culture from those who lived in Eastern Europe: Yiddish (rather than German) culture; a very visible political leadership in the radical movements; and the rejection of religion.
Yiddish culture
In Eastern Europe, a whole literature in Yiddish, deeply rooted in the life of the shtetl (the Jewish village) and of the Jewish communities, was widely diffused. Authors (radical in one way or another for the most part) such as Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, David Bergelson, I. L. Peretz, Moyshe Kulbak, S. Ansky — and later in the United States, Sholem Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer — created an authentically Jewish literary universe while having a universal significance, without equivalent in Central or Western Europe. German-language Jewish writers such as Arnold Zweig and Franz Kafka were fascinated by this culture, whereas their own literature was of an altogether different sort.
The political intellectuals
The participation of Jewish intellectuals in the revolutionary movements was far more important in Eastern Europe — that is to say, in the Yiddishland that comprised the whole space of the former tsarist empire — than in Central or Western Europe; a very large fringe, when it was not the majority, of the intellectuals linked to the various anarchist or Marxist groups were Jewish.
The best known are only the visible tip of the iceberg: among the Marxists: Lev D. Trotsky (Bronstein), Julius Martov (Tsederbaum), Raphael Abramovich, Lev Deutsch, Pavel Axelrod, Mark Liber (Goldman), Fyodor Dan (Gurvitch), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld), Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), Grigory Zinoviev (Radomyslsky), Yakov Sverdlov, David Riazanov (Goldendach), Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Adolf Joffe, Mikhail Borodin (Grusenberg), Adolf Warski, and Isaac Deutscher; and among the anarchists, Voline (Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eichenbaum), Efim Yarchuk, Abba Gordin, Alexander Shapiro, Aron Baron, Senya Fleshin, Olga Taratuta, and Emma Goldman.
To this list must be added the intellectuals linked to specifically Jewish radical organizations, such as the Bund or the left-wing Zionists, as well as the Jewish intellectuals of Eastern Europe who emigrated to Germany and played an important role in the labor movement: Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Parvus (Israel Helphand), Arkadi Maslow (Isaac Cheremisky), August Kleine (Samuel Haifiz), and many others.
Atheism
Whether they were Marxists or anarchists, Bundists or communists, left-wing Zionists or internationalist socialists, all these revolutionary intellectuals rejected religion. The romantic current, drawn to the “re-enchantment of the world,” so important in Mitteleuropa, was practically absent among them. Their vision of the world was resolutely rationalist, atheist, secular, Aufklärer, materialist. In their eyes, the Jewish religious tradition and in particular the mysticism of the Kabbalah, Hasidism, or messianism, were only obscurantist survivals of the past — reactionary medieval ideologies of which one ought to rid oneself as quickly as possible, with the help of science and the Enlightenment. When a radical Yiddish writer such as Moyshe Kulbak wrote about messianism in his novel Lundi (Monday / Montog, 1926), it was to denounce the sinister role of false messiahs such as Jacob Frank, who led his disciples to catastrophe3.
In Western Europe
The situation in Western Europe was considerably removed from the Jewish intellectual experience of the two other regions. Far more integrated into established society, the Western Jewish intellectuals were rarely radical. They generally supported the dominant culture in its liberal and democratic version. Such an orientation derived from the great bourgeois revolutions of these countries — Holland, England, and France — which emancipated the Jews and made possible their economic, social, and political participation in society4. For the Western Jewish intellectuals, resurgences of antisemitism such as the Dreyfus Affair were survivals of the past, ultimately condemned to disappear. Take the example of France.
The social democrats
One can of course find French socialist Jewish intellectuals, but they were generally moderate social democrats, such as Lucien Herr, the influential librarian of the École Normale; Léon Blum, prime minister of the Popular Front (1936); or Victor Basch, the president of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (assassinated by the Milice in 1944). Such figures were liberal rationalists, men of the Enlightenment, without any inclination for romanticism or for romantic/revolutionary utopias. The historian Marc Bloch came from the same milieu, but he joined a resistance movement of communist orientation during the Second World War; he was arrested and shot by the Nazis.
The radicals
Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), symbolist writer and anarchist thinker, one of the principal animators of the campaign for the defense of Alfred Dreyfus, is an exception. Lazare’s revolutionary ideas were anchored in romanticism, that is to say, in the cultural protest against modern bourgeois/industrial civilization, which spoke in the name of pre-capitalist communitarian values. He was radically anti-authoritarian, an enemy of the State in all its forms — past, present, or future — and a libertarian romantic. Lazare was not religious, but he celebrated the libertarian and egalitarian value of the biblical prophetic tradition. One of the consequences of this tradition was that:
“the Jews believed not only that justice, liberty, and equality could be the sovereigns of the world, but they believed themselves specially commissioned to work toward this reign. All the desires, all the hopes that these three ideas gave rise to ended up crystallizing around a central idea: that of the messianic times, of the coming of the Messiah”5
It was not surprising that the Jews had been implicated in all the modern revolutionary movements, from Leo Frankel, the Communard of 1871, to Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Karl Marx, that “descendant of a lineage of rabbis and doctors (…) animated by that old Hebraic materialism.”6
In the first half of the twentieth century, one can of course find a few other figures of radical Jewish intellectuals in France (and in other Western European countries), but most of them were immigrants from Central or Eastern Europe. Some played an important role in left-wing French culture, especially after the Second World War: Lucien Goldmann, creator of an innovative Marxist sociology of culture, and Georges Haupt, historian of internationalism, both originally from Romania; André Gorz (Gerhart Hirsch), founder of a socialist ecology, born in Vienna; Joseph Gabel, sociologist of alienation, born in Budapest; Maxime Rodinson, the most important Marxist historian of Islam, whose Russo-Polish parents had emigrated to Paris at the end of the nineteenth century7. Among the radical French Jews, there were also a few important writers, the most remarkable of whom are Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock), the founder of Dadaism, Gherasim Luca, the surrealist poet, and Paul Celan, one of the greatest poets in the German language — all three of Romanian origin.
After Bernard Lazare, one of the first radical Jews born in France was a woman, Claude Cahun, a magnificent photographer and surrealist essayist, issued from an old French Jewish family. A lesbian, living with her half-sister, Cahun began as a symbolist writer, but soon developed radical ideas and Trotskyist sympathies. In 1934, she was the first to formulate a surrealist conception of the relations between poetry and politics, and became, during the 1940s, the central organizer of the anti-Nazi resistance on the island of Jersey.
The postwar generation
It was above all during the 1950s, in the struggle against France’s colonial war in Algeria, and in the 1960s, around May 1968, that a new generation of radical Jews born in France emerged. During the Algerian War, the famous historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, issued from an old French republican Jewish family, was, with his friend the mathematician Laurent Schwartz, one of the most important anticolonialist intellectuals in France. Some of the central figures of the student revolt of May 1968 were radical Jews, such as the anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Trotskyists Daniel Bensaïd, Janette Habel, Alain Krivine, and Henri Weber; the Maoists Alain Geismar and Benny Lévy; and Pierre Goldman, the outsider. During the years that followed, their roads diverged appreciably: while a great number of them, like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, de-radicalized, others like Benny Lévy became Zionists and converted to orthodox Judaism; still others, like Daniel Bensaïd, remained faithful to their revolutionary ideas, while beginning to take an interest in heretical Jewish messianism (often through the intermediary of the work of Walter Benjamin). Pierre Goldman, who wrote in prison the best-seller Souvenirs obscurs d’un Juif polonais né en France (Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France, 1975), was assassinated by an unidentified fascist commando. There are few Jewish figures of this sort today. It should be noted, however, that a former resistance fighter, a Jew and a survivor of the Buchenwald camp, Stéphane Hessel, became an international icon for the radical youth movement against neoliberalism, thanks to his pamphlet Indignez-vous ! (Time for Outrage!, 2010). This pamphlet was translated into a dozen languages and millions of copies of it were sold throughout the world8.
Radical Jewish intellectuals in the United States
The immigrant Jewish left
The first group of radical Jews in the United States was composed of immigrants, a certain number of whom, already social or political militants in their countries of origin, tried to pursue such intellectual or militant activities on American territory. Coming from the Yiddishland, especially the Russian and Polish one, they arrived at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are famous examples, as is Isidore Wisotsky, born in Lithuania, engaged in the organization of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). To a large extent, their way of thinking and their political culture remained those of their East European milieu of origin. Perhaps they tried to adapt their anarchist or socialist principles to the American context, but one can hardly speak of a specific radical Jewish-American culture. Abraham Cahan and the intellectuals who gravitated around the socialist newspaper Forverts, the most widely diffused Yiddish daily in the world, also correspond to this model. The same can be said, a few years later, of another group — Moissaye Olgin and his friends around Freiheit, the communist Yiddish daily — or of left-wing Yiddish writers such as Sholem Asch. As Alan Wald has shown, the background of immigration also affected the new generation: at the foundation of the great proportion of Jews within the radical left, among the communists in particular — about 50% of its intellectuals — one finds “the families of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (who) brought into their new country (…) working-class and socialist loyalties.”9
One can develop the same argument apropos of the immigrants from Central Europe who reached the United States after 1933 as refugees from Nazism. Whether their stay was temporary — as for Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Ernst Bloch — or permanent, for those who chose to remain in the United States after the Second World War — such as Leo Löwenthal and Erich Fromm — in both cases, the culture, the interests, and the style of thought that characterized these figures were those of German Judaism. This was also true for those who, like Herbert Marcuse, tried to a certain extent to integrate into American cultural and political life.
The communist and Trotskyist milieus
It is only among the Jewish intellectuals born or educated in the United States that one can find specifically American political/cultural manifestations as well as the constitution of a “Jewish American” radical intellectual type. This radicalism was in part similar to the East or West European type, but significant (perhaps evident) differences prevailed. Whereas the radical Jews had had a far more important cultural weight in the United States than in Eastern Europe, there were far fewer eminent revolutionary political leaders issued from the American Jewish milieus than from the Jewish milieus whose heritage came from Eastern Europe. The comparison with Central Europe is even more striking: the romantic/messianic/revolutionary Jewish culture of Mitteleuropa had very few equivalents among the radical Jewish-Americans.
Yiddish culture, or Jewish history, may have been a source of inspiration for a great number of radical American Jews, but religion or messianism very rarely played such a role. In an article of February 1930, “Religion and the Good Life,” Felix Morrow claimed that the dynamic element of Judaism was characterized as an ethical tradition more than as a religion, and on this point he no doubt spoke for many radical Jewish intellectuals of his generation10. Morrow’s article appeared in the Menorah Journal, a remarkable Jewish journal founded in the 1920s that attracted a brilliant group of left-wing intellectuals: Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Solow, Felix Morrow (Mayorwitz), Clifton Fadiman, and Tess Slesinger. Most of these writers, endowed with a cosmopolitan sensibility, became communists or Trotskyists in the thirties.
With Philip Rahv (Ivan Greenberg) and William Phillips (Litvinsky), some of the radical Jews of the Menorah Journal in turn created Partisan Review, which drew closer and closer to Leon Trotsky at the end of the thirties. The members of this group, those who are called the New York Intellectuals, were perhaps the most “European” of the radical American Jews because of their admiration for the great European modernist writers: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and even T. S. Eliot.
While the Jewish religion rarely had importance in their lives, the radical Jewish-Americans, in particular (but not only) those who gravitated around the communist newspaper New Masses, manifested a certain romantic tendency rather close to that of the historical German Jewish community. An obvious example of this is the communist writer Michael Gold, whose best book, according to Wald, presented a “dazzling mixture of workerism, bohemianism (and) romanticism.” Unlike other Jewish communists, who were often “non-Jewish Jews” of the type identified by Isaac Deutscher, Gold was deeply immersed in (Yiddish) Jewish culture. His famous novel, Jews Without Money (1932), reflects directly his romantic/populist engagement on behalf of this community. The social and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, who met the young Gold before the First World War, recalled years later that he was “a passionate, intelligent, and vehement young man (…) a romantic and an anarchist, closer to Rousseau and Stirner than to Marx.” But even after his conversion to communism, the romantic component remained alive, for example in Michael Gold’s enthusiastic support of a perfectly romantic American poet, Walt Whitman, to whom he dedicated his “Ode to Walt Whitman”11 in 1935. There were also messianic moments in Gold’s texts. One of them is a tender but ironic reference to childish hopes: brutalized by an antisemitic gang, a Jewish boy dreams of the Messiah as a sort of Buffalo Bill, riding a white horse and using his rifle to vanquish the enemies of the Jews! The most important formulation of Gold’s secularized messianism appeared, however, in the conclusion of the first edition of Jews Without Money (this passage was suppressed in later editions): “O Workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely, suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. When you come, you will destroy the East Side12 and build there a garden for the human spirit.”13
Antifascism, engagement on behalf of the Spanish Republic, and the link with socialist, communist, or Trotskyist parties were common to most of the European and American radical Jews. They were also linked by a whole range of literary techniques going from socialist realism to modernist experimentation, sometimes combined in a creative way. What most differentiated the Americans from their European counterparts was the primacy of literary intellectuals among the radical Jews — as well as their concentration on American themes such as race, for example.
The primacy of literary intellectuals
Mike Gold is only one example among others of the astonishing importance of the group of radical Jewish-American writers. Whereas there were fewer radical political leaders in the United States than in Eastern Europe — with the exception of small Trotskyist groups in which very many Jews played a great role (Max Shachtman, George Breitman, George Novack, Albert Glotzer, Albert Goldman, Martin Abern, and many others) — most of the radical Jewish-Americans belonged to the domain of literary and artistic culture. However, unlike Central Europe, there were few philosophers among them, with the exception of Sidney Hook.
Among the talented Jewish-American writers were Nelson Algren (Nelson Abraham), Ben Barzman, Alvah Bessie, Vera Caspary, Guy Endore (Samuel Goldstein), Howard Fast, Kenneth Fearing, Michael Gold (Irwin Granich), Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets (Gorodetsky), Tillie Olsen (Lerner), Dorothy Parker (Dorothy Rothschild), Abraham Polonsky, Muriel Rukeyser, John Sanford (Julian Shapiro), Irwin Shaw (Irwin Shamforoff), Budd Schulberg, Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid), Tess Slesinger, Nathanael West (Nathan Weinstein), and still others14. There is no equivalent list of radical Jewish writers in any European country.
Unlike most of their European counterparts, a great number of these authors were eager to participate in popular culture, by writing detective novels, pulp novels, or film screenplays. The impressive presence of radical Jews, screenwriters and film directors, in Hollywood, is a chapter in itself, without equivalent in Europe. Six of the Hollywood Ten persecuted by McCarthyism in 1950 — all talented screenwriters — were Jewish: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole (born Lester Cohn), John Howard Lawson (Levy), Albert Maltz, and Samuel Ornitz15.
American themes
The writers and the artists were not the only Jews drawn to radical movements, it must be stressed. In 1939, about 40% of the members of the Communist Party were Jewish, and one would no doubt find an analogous percentage for the small Trotskyist groups. The fact remains that the field of cultural production in which the radical Jewish-Americans prospered differentiated itself still more from the European scene by the presence of specifically American themes that determined their work. Among the predominant themes, one found certain American heroes, positive American traditions, or, on the contrary, the resistance to social injustice in American history, such as the extermination of the Indians and above all the oppression of African Americans by slavery and racism.
Noam Chomsky is a striking example of the positive reception of American traditions by radical Jews. He presents his anarchism, or his libertarian socialism, as a present-day prolongation of classical liberalism and of Jeffersonian democracy. Like many other radical Jewish-Americans, Chomsky defines himself as a son of the Enlightenment opposed to all forms of “irrational beliefs.”16 He affirms that an important and visible red thread leads from Cartesian rationalism and the Enlightenment (Immanuel Kant, Alexander Humboldt, and even Adam Smith) to the anarchist ideas that he adopts17. But he insists above all — and this is less evident — on the fact that the critique of the State is “as American as apple pie”: a great number of representatives of the “old American tradition,” such as Thomas Jefferson, denounced the “coercive power of the State,” and it is no accident that anarchist thinkers have often responded favorably to the American experience and to the Jeffersonian idea of democracy18.
Certain radical Jews chose another group of heroes: the rebel African Americans. Antiracism, but also a passionate identification with the sufferings and the struggle of African Americans, have long been a strong component of radical Jewish-American culture. One of the reasons for this was certainly the association between anti-black racism and antisemitism, between the lynching of African Americans and the pogroms against the Jews in Europe (and the anti-Jewish Nazi atrocities). But also, as Alan Wald rightly remarks, “the idea that anti-black racism was the symptom of an unequal capitalist economic order, dangerous for the Jews and for the other oppressed groups,” was reinforced in the wake of the Great Depression19. To be sure, the Jews did not have a monopoly on American antiracism: internationalism and solidarity with the oppressed were in general key elements of left-wing culture. But the history of the Jews as a persecuted minority contributed to reinforcing this empathy, which led many radical Jews to write novels whose heroes were rebel African Americans. This empathy was not, moreover, unilateral, but indeed reciprocal: a great number of leading radical African Americans, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, did not content themselves with denouncing antisemitism, they also manifested an active sympathy toward the Jewish minority. As Nicole Lapierre writes in her book on the common struggles waged by Blacks and Jews in the world, empathy was not humanitarian compassion, but solidarity based on respect and reciprocity20.
While some writers, like Guy Endore, celebrated slave revolts in their novels (Babouk, 1934), others, like John Sanford, praised the antiracist revenge of an African American female character (The People from Heaven, 1943). It is interesting to note that these two novels were criticized by the spokesmen of the Communist Party, who accused them of leftism and of being influenced by black nationalism21.
The most archetypal representative of the radical Jewish-American intelligentsia was perhaps the writer Howard Fast, whose books present all the non-European particularities that I have mentioned. A member of the Communist Party from 1943 to 1956, blacklisted, persecuted by the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) and imprisoned, he is the author of numerous very popular novels, some of which (such as Spartacus) were adapted to the screen. Howard Fast wrote three books on the period of the American Revolutionary War: Conceived in Liberty (1939), The Unvanquished (1942), and Citizen Tom Paine (1943). He also paid tribute to the struggle of the American Indians in The Last Frontier (1941), which deals with the attempt of the Cheyenne to return to their native land, as well as to the struggle of African Americans against racism in the nineteenth century in Freedom Road (1944), prefaced by W. E. B. Du Bois. Freedom Road became a worldwide success; it has been said that it was one of the most reprinted and read books of the twentieth century22. Based on a true story, it describes the life of Gideon Jackson, leader of a group of former slaves during Reconstruction23. Their families having been abandoned by the federal government, Jackson and his friends took up arms to defend them against the Ku Klux Klan, but they were vanquished and assassinated. Freedom Road corresponds perfectly to the specific empathy of the radical Jewish-Americans for the calvary of the African Americans. The news that reached him from Auschwitz affected Fast in the writing of this antiracist book: “reports on the destruction of the Jews were beginning to filter out of Germany. All the notes I had taken, everything I had thought for a novel on Reconstruction, telescoped together — and all the moments I could steal from my job at the OWI (Office of War Information) were devoted to writing the new book.”24
Like the novels of Guy Endore and of John Sanford, Fast’s Freedom Road celebrates the taking up of arms and the struggle for freedom of former slaves against the racism of the Whites. With these ideas of the self-defense and the armed struggle of African Americans, these authors were in disagreement with the line of the Communist Party, which never defended a policy so radical, whether in 1934 (the date of the publication of Babouk), in 1943 (The People from Heaven), and still less in 1944 (Freedom Road), when the CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA), led by Earl Browder, was officially dissolved in the name of “national unity” during the war. It was not the line of a party, but strong antiracist sentiments as well as a profound identification with the destiny of the African Americans that nourished these singular Jewish-American literary explorations25.
Far from having been everywhere and always the same, the political cultures of the radical Jewish intellectuals vary significantly according to the generations and the different European and American contexts that gave rise to them. The comparative approach that I have adopted, taking into account historical developments, cultural dimensions, and sociopolitical conditions, can help us to understand, to a certain extent at least, these particularities. As one might expect, many questions remain unresolved. How and why did so many Jewish-American intellectuals become radical (until the middle of the twentieth century at least and, to a certain extent, still today) when no mass radical party, no mass socialist or communist party, of the type that prospered in Europe — Eastern, Central, and to a certain extent Western (France) — existed in the United States? I have no answer.
(Translated from English by Martine Leibovici)
Notes
Bernard Lazare, “Le prolétariat juif devant l’antisémitisme” (“The Jewish Proletariat Faced with Antisemitism”), in Juifs et antisémites (Jews and Antisemites), ed. Philippe Oriol, Paris, Allia, 1992, p. 139.↩︎
I call “radical” those left-wing intellectuals and militants who want to go all the way to the “root” of what they perceive as the ills of present-day society, who want, in other words, to abolish the capitalist system and/or the State. I shall not embark on a definition of “Jew,” but I can say what I mean by “intellectual”: a social category, that is to say, a group of individuals defined on the basis of non-economic criteria such as the production or creation of cultural and symbolic goods — unlike a larger mass of intellectual workers who exercise the liberal professions, or who work in education or the media. As a social category, they have a certain autonomy in relation to the social classes. This is the reason why Alfred Weber and Karl Mannheim invented the concept of freischwebende Intelligenz, free-floating intelligentsia, particularly suited to the Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, often exiled, nomadic, reduced to a marginal, unstable, and precarious condition.↩︎
See Rachel Ertel’s introduction to Kulbak’s novel Lundi (Montog), 1926, Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1982. One can find a similar point of view, years later, in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel Satan in Goray (1928).↩︎
Holland is one of the clearest examples of the integration of the Jews into bourgeois society. There were few radical Jewish intellectuals: Abraham Soep, who was active in the socialist movement in the Netherlands and later became one of the founders of the Belgian Communist Party; Saul (“Paul”) De Groot, the indisputable leader of the Dutch Communist Party for decades; among the Trotskyists, Sal Santen, who was active against the Algerian War, and in the young generation, Joost Kircz, specialist in Marxism and philosopher.↩︎
Bernard Lazare, L’antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (Antisemitism: Its History and Causes) (1894), Paris, Les Éditions 1900, 1990, pp. 322–323.↩︎
Ibid., p. 346.↩︎
In a different cultural sphere, one can mention the famous left-wing photographers Robert Capa (Endre Friedmann, Budapest), Chim (David Szymin, Warsaw), and Gerda Taro (Gerda Pohorylle, Stuttgart), who became famous for their photos of the Spanish Civil War.↩︎
We cannot speak here of the other Western European countries. In Belgium, for example, one finds two eminent Marxist (Trotskyist) Jewish intellectuals, Abraham Léon and Ernest Mandel, born respectively in Warsaw and Frankfurt. The first, author of a classic essay on the materialist conception of the Jewish question, died at Auschwitz, while the second survived internment in various prisons and labor camps.↩︎
Alan Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007, p. 180.↩︎
Cited by A. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987, p. 48.↩︎
A. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left, Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002, pp. 39–49, 47 & 63.↩︎
The East Side (the Lower East Side) is a neighborhood of New York, mainly populated — or rather overpopulated — at the beginning of the twentieth century by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who worked for starvation wages in workshops nicknamed sweatshops. It was there that New York Yiddish culture developed. Cf. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (French ed. Le monde de nos pères, trans. C. Bloc-Rodot and H. Michaud, Paris, Michalon, 1997). (Translator’s note)↩︎
Michael Gold, Jews Without Money, New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984, p. 309.↩︎
Such as, for example, Nathan Asch (the son of Sholem Asch), Maxwell Bodenheim, Stanley Burnshaw (Bodenheimer), Edward Dahlberg, Daniel Fuchs, Albert Halper, Walter Lowenfels, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, Edwin Rolfe (Solomon Fishman), Henry Roth, Leane Zugsmith, and Louis Zukofsky. The Jewish names in parentheses are those they received from their parents (although in certain cases the father had already “Americanized” his name).↩︎
A. Wald, Trinity of Passion, op. cit., p. 182.↩︎
Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1992, p. 118. His opposition to “all forms of irrational beliefs” did not prevent Chomsky from prefacing, in the name of the right to freedom of expression, Robert Faurisson’s book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire. La question des chambres à gaz (La Vieille Taupe, 1980), while claiming not to have read it. On Faurisson and Chomsky, cf. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire. Un « Eichmann de papier » et autres essais sur le révisionnisme (Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust), Paris, Éditions La Découverte, 1987, pp. 93–103 (Editor’s note).↩︎
Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1997, p. 137.↩︎
Noam Chomsky, “Notes on Anarchism,” introduction to Daniel Guérin, Anarchism, Spunk Press, 1970.↩︎
A. Wald, Trinity of Passion, op. cit., p. 185.↩︎
Nicole Lapierre, Causes Communes : Des Juifs et des Noirs (Common Causes: Of Jews and Blacks), Paris: Stock, 2011, p. 300. On the ties that strongly united the Jews and the radical African Americans in the United States, see A. Wald, “Jewish American Writers on the Left,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, eds. Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 170–189.↩︎
A. Wald, Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics, London: Verso, 1994, pp. 178–186 & 199–211.↩︎
A. Wald, Trinity of Passion, op. cit., pp. 193–194.↩︎
Reconstruction in the United States designates the period that followed the Civil War (1863–1877), marked by the destruction of the slave system and the failure of the integration of former African American slaves in the segregationist Southern states (Translator’s note).↩︎
Howard Fast, Being Red: A Memoir, New York: Laurel Trade, 1990, p. 75. Fast also wrote a novel on Jewish history, My Glorious Brothers (1948), about the revolt of the Maccabees. It is far from being his best novel, but it became very popular among the Zionists.↩︎
Within the limits of this article, we cannot deal with the radical Jews in the New Left and in the 2000s.↩︎