Jewish Conversions

Jewish Incorporability, American Exceptions

Throughout the early post–World War II period, the purported supremacy of American philosophical commitments to liberal pluralism emerged as an enduring infrastructure through which to combat what Gunnar Myrdal presciently called the “American Dilemma.” That narrative typically celebrated individual autonomy, and while membership in particular racial or ethnic groups was often seen to determine an individual’s habits, cultural mores, or place of residence, such group differences were rendered incorporable epiphenomena by their being relegated to the historical past and/or the private sphere. Analyses of liberalism’s institutionalization of structural violence were routinely displaced by explanations of prejudice and discrimination rooted in psychology and individual pathology, a problem of the “American heart.”5

The uptake of the “Jewish question” as part of a tradition of American liberal pluralism often oscillated between intranational and supranational expressions of emancipation. The United States’ capacity to effectively incorporate Jewish difference epitomized the “universal” values of American pluralism, especially after World War II. The incorporability of Jewish difference was often hailed as an exceptional U.S. national capacity, in contrast to European histories of Jewish minority exclusion. The narrative of Jews becoming American ethnics was, at least in one sense, a story of American secularism’s triumphant exceptionalism, a model for the model minority.6 At the same time, the irreducibility of Jewish particularity meant that national incorporability was always partial and incomplete. Jewish difference expressed through a genealogy of diasporic thought and practice, for instance, exceeded the incorporative capacities of a secularizing U.S. national imaginary.7 The key post-Holocaust iterations of the Jewish question in the United States—are Jews white, white ethnics, or both? Are Jews secure in the United States? What role does Israel play in guaranteeing Jewish freedom?—frequently limned debates about the contours of social movement, civil rights and human rights struggles, domestic and foreign policy positions, and perceptions of Israel’s place in a hostile world.8 The stakes of these debates were intensified as African American claims for racial justice revealed the inadequacies of a form of liberal pluralism that had nevertheless contingently propped up Jewish national standing in the United States.9

It is hardly incidental, then, that for much of the twentieth century, the largest American Jewish civil rights organization, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), was professedly non-Zionist. From its inception in 1906, the AJC advocated for an exceptionalist paradigm of American liberal inclusion as the most effective way to achieve Jewish security. While the organization recognized the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to a Jewish national home in Palestine and supported aliyah (Jewish immigration to Palestine), it remained avowedly agnostic on how a potential independent state should be structured.10 This non-Zionist U.S. exceptionalism was expressed evocatively by the prominent American Jewish political philosopher Morris Cohen. In 1919 Cohen took to the pages of the New Republic to contest the potential exclusionary logic encoded in the Balfour Declaration and its uptake in the ensuing Mandate system. Under the title “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism,” Cohen writes the following:

Concerning questions of race and religion, even more than those of politics, scientific knowledge is pitifully small and men’s convictions are accordingly most intense. But the discussion of Zionism is beset with the additional difficulty that clear and honest thinking is subtly hindered by the fact that really plain speaking is almost unattainable. An exceptionally long history of struggle and suffering has left many sore and sensitive spots in the body of Israel, and the thoughtful non-Jew feels the necessity of excessive caution lest he touch any of these tender spots; while the Jew, no matter how emancipated, cannot completely overcome the effects of a traditional attitude which may put group loyalty above devotion to the simple truth. . . . In normal times mankind is protected from the clamor of zealous enthusiasts by its profound inertia and by the equally emphatic denials which every zealous group sooner or later provokes; so that those who care for impartial truth can generally wait with some confidence for a favorable time when the still, small voice of reason can make itself heard. But in abnormal days, when small but determinedly loud groups are mistaken for vast multitudes and are causing irreparable harm, one cannot wait for slow time to bring its withering refutations.11

With these remarks, Cohen emphasized the elemental epistemic concerns raised by an enlightenment discourse of reason and science that provided the grounds for “impartial” truth. The temporality of “abnormal days” following World War I did not allow the luxury of “slow time” through which to craft a proper stable knowledge about the Jewish question’s relation to religion, race, and Zionism. As a way to mitigate this epistemic ambivalence, Cohen asserted that the geopolitical project to locate a Jewish national home in Palestine ran counter to the ideals of American liberal democracy. Attempts to “solve” the Jewish problem through nationalist territorializing land claims forcibly refused a broader “salvation” of Jew and non-Jew. He writes, “A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily mean a state founded on a peculiar race, a tribal religion, and a mystic belief in a peculiar soil.”12 As an alternative, Cohen turned to an exceptionalist discourse about the United States as ethno-racial melting pot. He lauds “liberal America,” a place that “has traditionally stood for separation of Church and State, the free mixing of races, and the fact that men can change their habitation and language and still advance the process of civilization.”13 Cohen thus argued that the secularization of the U.S. state and the incorporative impetus of a seemingly race-neutral national community were core normative commitments of American liberalism, to be embraced by American Jews for their emancipatory capacities.

To be sure, American liberalism’s abstract principles never substantively contravened the widespread effects of contemporaneous expressions of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call racial dictatorship: anti-Black racism of Jim Crow segregation, the state-sanctioned and extralegal violence toward Mexican Americans in the Southwest and Native Americans throughout the United States, the racialized logics of immigration premised on Asian exclusion, or the formative U.S. military occupations in the Caribbean, the Philippines, and the Pacific. American liberalism’s propensity for racial violence was the absent presence occluded by Cohen’s lauding of Jewish assimilation as an alternative to Zionist territorialization.

Cohen’s essay has generally fallen through historiography’s cracks. I first found it in Hasan Sa’b’s 1965 monograph “Zionism and Racism,” written for the Palestine Research Center.14 Better known is the immediate rebuttal Cohen’s argument received. Horace Kallen, the pragmatist philosopher who in 1919 advanced cultural pluralism as a theory of civic nationalism, and whose work marked a foundational moment in twentieth-century theories of American ethnicity, responded to Cohen in the New Republic. He asserted that Zionism’s territorializing aims were not contradictory to, but rather commensurate with, the ideals of American liberal pluralism. In Kallen’s view, building a Jewish national home in Palestine would normalize the relationship between Jews and other immigrant communities in the United States. “The Jew in America or elsewhere will not be free to ‘adjust himself harmoniously’ with the non-Jew,” writes Kallen, “until he also becomes unambiguous. The reestablishment of the Jewish homeland will make it so and it is thus an essential element in the ‘harmonious adjustment of the Jew to American life.’”15 Kallen replaces Cohen’s exceptionalist paradigm of national incorporability with the exceptionalist paradigm of cultural pluralism to underwrite a project of settler nation building—one that in Kallen’s view held the key to an “unambiguous” modern Jewish subject. He attempts to resolve anti-Semitism through a framework of liberal democracy whose practical articulation was predicated on indigenous Palestinian exclusion, dispossession, and dehumanization.

Arguments in critical counterpoint to Cohen’s notions of secular incorporation and Kallen’s cultural pluralism were advanced by Reform Jewish religious organizations, especially prior to World War II. Many of these organizations opposed Zionism’s investment in a political state for the Jews. For more than five decades, beginning with the Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, for example, organized Reform Judaism emphasized the need to define Jews as explicitly a religious community plainly assimilable into a national polity whose founding legal documents guaranteed freedom of religion while legitimating modalities of racial exclusion. In 1937 a revised set of guiding principles for the Reform movement underscored “the obligation of all Jewry to aid in [Palestine’s] upbuilding as a Jewish homeland.”16 Yet throughout the mid-1940s spirited debates abounded within the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) about the rightful way to express support for the Zionist project in Palestine. These debates included the small but vocal American Council for Judaism, a group of Reform-ordained rabbis who in the 1940s took explicitly anti-Zionist positions to counter the drift in the UAHC in support of the potential partition of Palestine.17 It was only after World War II, as the historian Emily Alice Katz shows, that Reform Jewish organizations promulgated widespread pedagogies meant to suture the Israeli national project to American Jewish life.18

As for the American Jewish Committee, its president Jacob Blaustein celebrated the 1948 founding of Israel with thick American resonances—“a pioneer land . . . a melting pot” in the midst of “another 1776.” He nevertheless underscored the AJC’s professed non-Zionism. Jews, no matter where they resided, should be able to claim citizenship rights and have “full freedom for religious and cultural development.”19 The AJC leadership expressed concern that Israel’s founding would inspire coerced Jewish emigration from the United States. Its leaders were troubled by how members of the Yishuv and the nascent state had represented Jewish exile as an abnormal condition to be resolved through settlement in Palestine. In 1950 Blaustein received a public commitment from Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion underscoring the liberal ethos of the new state’s relation to potential Jewish immigrants: “The essence of halutziut [lit. pioneering] is free choice.” When Ben-Gurion prominently broke that pledge in 1960, asserting that Jews “living in free and prosperous lands [faced] a slow and imperceptible decline into the abyss of assimilation,” the AJC swiftly repudiated his remarks, and received a careful clarification and apology in response.20 Tellingly, after 1967, abiding by the spirit of the so-called “Blaustein-Ben Gurion Exchange” was far less pressing. As the historian Charles Liebman notes, the AJC “sent no protests . . . when Israel called for mass aliya from the West after 1967.”21 The tenor of the AJC’s work shifted dramatically after the war, becoming much more attuned to mobilizing American Jewish support for Israel.22

Instant Zionism

The AJC’s 1967 shift, alongside similar shifts in the ADL, the UAHC, and many others, marked a departure from a bevy of orientations toward the Jewish question. In the wake of the June 1967 and October 1973 Wars, Norman Podhoretz, then the editor of the AJC-affiliated journal Commentary Magazine, diagnosed this shift in especially evocative ways, describing it as nothing less than the mass conversion of American Jews to Zionism. The hegemonizing impulse of Podhoretz’s high-profile argument is worth close consideration. Writing in the New York Times Magazine in February 1974, Podhoretz asserted that, following the founding of the state in 1948, the long-standing ideologies of anti-Zionism, non-Zionism, and “indifferentism” were outmoded. The only practical formulation that these ideologies could articulate was to advocate Israel’s total “dissolution.” For Podhoretz, this position readily dovetailed with an ominous undifferentiated Arab threat whose “murderous intentions,” while not of late “overheard by Americans,” were nevertheless being put into practice via the “oil weapon and the Soviet-American détente.” For American Jews, the fear of a menacing murderous Arab threat was deepened by the “residual effect” of Europe’s genocidal destruction of the Jews. The Holocaust “lodged . . . in the souls of Jews everywhere” a pledge to resist “the massacre of yet another Jewish community.” Yet, in Podhoretz’s estimation, “instant Zionism’s” most robust catalyst was not the soul-shifting conversion of Holocaust memory but the “hidden apocalyptic terror” of anti-Semitism as an “irresistible will . . . to make this planet entirely Judenrein.” Not even the “last remaining major community of Jews, the ones in the United States,” would be safe.23 Much like the ADL, and not far removed from the discourse mobilized after the so-called swastika epidemic of 1960, Podhoretz figures anti-Semitism as a near-permanent inexpungible virus, a transhistorical force endowed with its own intentionality.

Podhoretz’s “Now, Instant Zionism” obscures heterogeneous historical expressions, manifestations, and critiques of Jewish Zionism, rendering singular what had for so long been variegated. Nevertheless, the essay’s hegemonizing impulse bears out in striking congruities across American Jewish cultural production of the period. Crucial distinctions in this culture work should not be gainsaid, to be sure; the heated antagonistic intra-Jewish rhetoric between them is incontestable, as the historian Michael Staub, among others, has demonstrated.24 Yet despite their differences, at the knotty entanglement of the early 1970s, Jewish neoconservatives and Jewish radicals shared deep-seated anxieties about Arab and Palestinian critiques of Zionism, especially those critiques, often elaborated by the Black Power movement, that narrated the continuities between settler colonization, the Palestinian Nakba, and Israel’s post-1967 occupation. For some, Zionism as a Jewish liberation movement was buttressed by ideals of the muscular Jew expressing Jewish nationhood, a necessary reaction to the timeless “virus” of anti-Semitism. Others were influenced by the long history of socialist Zionism, one whose narrative centered the pioneering utopianism of Jewish settlement in Palestine and a war of liberation against the last vestiges of British imperialism. At the crossroads of U.S. racial politics, then, Zionism as an anti-imperialist expression of national liberation met Zionism as an exceptional expression of liberal democracy in a Cold War world. While disagreements between them raged about how to countenance Black freedom struggles, these ideologies nevertheless shared a subjugated investment in the structured absence of Palestine and Palestinians that Black Power’s Palestine had begun to make legible. It is to the emergence of this knotty entanglement that I now turn.

The “Preface to Neoconservatism”

In 1961, soon after taking over as Commentary editor, Norman Podhoretz approached James Baldwin to write an essay on the popularity of the Black Muslims in Chicago and New York. Baldwin readily agreed. After a year of being out of touch with each other, Podhoretz contacted Baldwin, only to learn that he had submitted his essay to the rival New Yorker magazine. At the core of Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” was an inquiry into the psychological and affective dimensions of Black life in the United States that in his estimation posed an insurmountable obstacle to liberal integration. For Baldwin, this integrationist thinking was an insufficient palliative among whites that did little to redress centuries of structural racism. “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Baldwin famously asked.25

In his 1967 memoir, and reiterated as recently as 2013, Podhoretz describes his “fury” at seeing, upon the publication of Baldwin’s essay, “what a precious item had been stolen from me.”26 His anger intensified, Podhoretz notes, because “a good many people in the publishing world who would have been outraged if any other writer had acted in similar fashion were ready to forgive or ‘understand’ Baldwin because he was a Negro” (341). The perceived theft was sanctioned by a liberal-minded white guilt that in Podhoretz’s view had become commonplace and that Baldwin was “such a great connoisseur of.” When the two writers met in New York to discuss the situation, Podhoretz lashed out at Baldwin with an argument whose crux performed a paradigmatic white ethnic disavowal of structural racism:

Neither I nor my ancestors had ever wronged the Negroes; on the contrary, I had grown up in an “integrated” slum neighborhood where it was the Negroes who persecuted the whites and not the other way round. I told him several stories about my childhood relations with Negroes and about the resentment and hatred with which my experience had left me. (342)

Baldwin urged Podhoretz to write down these stories. The result, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” Podhoretz penned over several days and published in the February 1963 issue of Commentary. What became in the historian Michael Gerson’s words the “preface to neoconservative thinking” reveals an ambivalent white and Jewish dismay at the civil rights commitment to racial integration. The subject position from which Podhoretz speaks—as Jewish and/or white—exemplified the early-1960s racial landscape for Ashkenazi-descended American Jews. Furthermore, the essay’s confessional qualities catalyzed readings of “My Negro Problem” as a touchstone for studies of whiteness, Black–Jewish relations, and neoconservatism alike, anthologized and commented on routinely.27 Effaced in many of these critical assessments, however, is how the essay both diagnosed and contributed to a shift in U.S. imperial culture that would have important repercussions for considering Israel and Palestine.

“We have it on the authority of James Baldwin that all Negroes hate whites,” Podhoretz writes early in the essay. “I am trying to suggest that on their side all whites—all American whites, that is—are sick in their feelings about Negroes.”28 Podhoretz surmises that Baldwin’s major claim was that there was a hatred embedded in the heart of Black life in the United States and symbolized by the Black Muslims made the goal of integration impossible (100). The sentiment, according to Podhoretz, was mutual among whites. In the working-class Brooklyn of Podhoretz’s childhood, having many different ethnic communities living in proximity hardly translated into amity. He recalls with evocative detail being verbally and physically abused by Black youth. The psychological result for Podhoretz was that Black people were to be at turns both hated and desired precisely because they were perceived as “free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic, and . . . most important of all, they were tough, beautifully, enviably tough” (97). Podhoretz’s youthful fetishization of Black masculinity as object to be desired, feared, and hated was transposed from street corner beatings to his adult appreciation of Black male “physical grace and beauty” performed on the dance floor and the sports field. The essay’s objectifying forms of gendered racialization center on the Black body to encode desire and envy, and to elicit in almost a mirror image the prefiguration of the tough Jew that would become central to the neoconservative political imaginary in the years to come.

Gendered racialization further frames Podhoretz’s analysis of Black history. It was hard for Podhoretz to discern a history of Black people worthy enough of a robust identification in the present because of the “stigmas” of “his past, his color” (101). These obstacles were contrasted with the impetus for Jewish survival in the wake of the Holocaust, one catalyzed by Jewish “memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption” (101). Since Black people were irreconcilably cut off from a historic past and a redemptive future, the only hope for removing the stigmas of racism would not be integration but a form of racial amalgamation that Podhoretz calls “miscegenation” (101). The “fact of color” is the single largest impediment to “solving the Negro problem” and can be achieved only through “the wholesale merging of the two races” (101). The essay closes with Podhoretz wondering how he would respond if one of his own daughters “wanted to marry one.” “I would rail and rave and rant and tear my hair. And then I hope I would have the courage to curse myself for raving and ranting, and to give her my blessing” (101). Even while he retreated from what he frames as the seemingly utopian claim of complete racial amalgamation, noting subsequently that “(as Ralph Ellison bitingly remarked to me) the babies born of such marriages would still be considered black,”29 interracial progeny nevertheless serves as a stand-in for an adequate reckoning with the problem of structural racism in a national context predicated on white supremacy. Miscegenation amounts to the only racial horizon worth imagining.30

Color-Blind Toughness

“My Negro Problem—and Ours” fashions the figure of the tough Jew defending liberal pluralism against the gendered and racialized claims of Black life.31 Ten years later, expressions of Jewish vulnerability would appear all the more pressing. In 1971 the ascendance of race-conscious critiques of American liberalism revealed how, in Podhoretz’s view, Jews in the world were less secure, more isolated, and more vulnerable. Podhoretz sketched out the “certain anxiety” Jews had to confront in a post–civil rights world. He writes how a condition of relative normalcy had been achieved for American Jews by being incorporated into the “American pattern” of immigrant success through “merit-based” avenues to economic mobility in federal hiring, and the forced removal of anti-Semitic quotas in elite university enrollments. Yet two “traumatic events” called this condition into question. These events broke the public “taboo” on anti-Semitic discourse most threateningly by “forces of the radical Left” and fashioned the need for a militant toughness articulated as early as “My Negro Problem” as crucial to responding to the perceived crisis of Jewish security worldwide.

The first trauma, writes Podhoretz, occurred in 1967. It was “not so much the war itself—which was a triumphal event and not a traumatic one—as the period leading up to the war and the period following its conclusion.”32 The rhetoric leading up to the war, of Israel’s “inhabitants pushed, as the Arabs were so vociferously promising, into the sea,” signaled the very real possibility of a second “annihilation” of Jews in the twentieth century, and not only in Israel but in the United States as well. A new “feeling,” prefiguring the conversion narrative of “instant Zionism,” overcame Jews in response:

The feeling was one of literal identification, a literal embodiment of the idea that kol yisrael arevim zeh ba-zeh, every Jew is part of every other. Here, if we wish to use the language of mysticism, were words that were truly made flesh, and the American flesh into which they were transmuted experienced along with them—in many cases for the very first time—an ineradicable and inexpungible sense of Jewish vulnerability. (6)

For Podhoretz, claiming a singular “literal” identification after 1967 resolved the problem of the Jewish diaspora—converting distinctions of the soul and the flesh into a singular Jewish American political body. An intensified Jewish corporeality gave Podhoretz the body so starkly lacking in “My Negro Problem.”

The second “trauma,” in Podhoretz’s view, epitomized what he called the “black revolution,” namely, the unrest over the Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers strike. In the summer of 1967 New York City’s central board of education launched an experiment in local control of school boards. They gave the largely African American Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn the opportunity to choose its own school leadership. The local school board claimed the right to hire and fire its teachers, many of whom were Jewish. The ensuing clash pitted the mostly white and majority-Jewish United Federation of Teachers against the Black school board. In May 1968, when a Jewish school teacher was told he was fired, the teacher’s union called a series of strikes, culminating in a citywide halt that fall. For thirty-six days, over one million students were out of school. The widespread circulation of an anonymous anti-Zionist pamphlet critical of Israeli state violence in the June war and the on-air recitation of an anti-Semitic poem written by one of Ocean Hill’s Black students further fueled what became framed as an irreconcilable Black–Jewish conflagration.33 For Podhoretz, the strike epitomized a short-sighted movement that saw substantive change only “at the extreme edges of the movement for community control” (8). This too was a mode of discrimination on both philosophical and practical levels. Liberalism’s presumed commitment to the neutrality of state institutions and the law meant that hiring and admissions policies considering proportional representation as a way to correct for historical injustices were de facto discriminating against Jews.

In response to this feeling of vulnerability, Podhoretz argued that Jews in the United States needed to be hypervigilant, to “resist any who would in any way and to any degree and for any reason whatsoever attempt to do us harm, any who would diminish us or destroy us, any who would challenge our right and our duty to look after our families, any who would deny us the right to pursue our own interests or frustrate us in our duty to do so” (6). The position of Jews in the United States had moved from one of relative normality to one of impassioned crisis demanding resistance on all fronts. “We would from now on stand our ground, wherever that ground might be.” Such a fight had a permanent character for Podhoretz, “no matter how roundly we are abused as reactionary, or paranoid, or parochial” (6). For the tough Jew there was no alternative.

Nathan Glazer, a longtime contributor to Commentary and coauthor with Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the influential Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), extended Podhoretz’s argument. By the early 1970s the formal equality that had in Glazer’s view substantively benefited Jews in the United States was being challenged by the race-conscious critiques of American liberal pluralism. The demand for equality of outcomes in economic and educational terms was denaturalizing the keystone of American meritocracy, namely, a universal equality of opportunity. Glazer narrated his own conversion to this position as a process of deradicalization. While the younger Trotskyist Glazer was a self-styled “mild radical,” by 1970 he had witnessed the institutions of the U.S. state that provided civic stability and catalyzed progress—universities, government bureaucracies, the law itself—making major concessions to the New Left.34 The investments in meritocracy put in place in large measure to redress de facto anti-Semitism after World War II were, from a different angle, one of the New Left’s main targets, as they reproduced racially stratified institutions. In 1975 Glazer published a fully elaborated critique of race-conscious reforms, Affirmative Discrimination. Here he argues that the nation’s founding universalist principles have progressed in ways that “ever widen the circle of those eligible for inclusion in the American polity with full access to political rights. The circle now embraces . . . all humanity, without tests of race, color, national origin, religion, or language.”35 Because universalist inclusion had ostensibly been achieved, from Glazer’s perspective the race-conscious remedies for structural racism reified precisely those racial categories that a color-blind commitment to inclusion eschewed. Such remedies likewise drew on statistical measures that collapsed distinct ethnic white groups into a single racial category. “That is not the way ‘whites’ see themselves, or indeed are, in social reality. Some may be ‘whites,’ pure and simple. But almost all have some specific ethnic or religious identification.” Echoing the narrative of white ethnic disavowal of racism that prompted “My Negro Problem,” Glazer intimates that “there is little reason for them to feel they should bear the burden of the redress of a past in which they had no or little part.”36

Glazer critiqued affirmative action with the same argument that a few years later underwrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s rollback of affirmative action in higher education. In the pages of Commentary, he also linked the defense of color-blind meritocracy to existential fears for Israel’s survival. In “The Exposed American Jew” (1975), Glazer maintains that while American Jews had escaped the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s remarkably unscathed, a confluence of new developments left them especially vulnerable.37 Affirmative action’s adoption as a way to achieve social equality put Jews in a precarious situation, as their achievements had been predicated largely on individual merit and thus fell outside any racial category of classes in need. According to Glazer, Jews were only 3 percent of the national population, but occupied as much as 20 percent of the teaching and administrative positions. At the same time, an expanding social scientific and popular literature about race had carved out discursive space for a “new ethnic frankness” to account for the differential effects of social discrimination.

Most importantly, Glazer called on Jews to mobilize the broader American public to support Israel unconditionally, here figured as a country “threatened with elimination as a sovereign nation and its people threatened—how can anyone doubt it?—by massacre” (27). Glazer narrates how the tide of American public opinion toward Israel had recently begun to turn. One of the lasting (and in Glazer’s estimation, misguided) insights of the antiwar movement was that “the United States is imperialistic and counterrevolutionary, and that any nation which receives American support must be imperialistic itself” (30). Glazer argues to the contrary: “Israel is an open, democratic society with an almost unparalleled measure of social justice and with a remarkably good treatment of its Arab minority, even though this minority must inevitably be considered closely allied to the movements and states that are attempting to destroy Israel” (28). At the same time that support for a liberal democratic Israeli national project tokenizes Israel’s purportedly benevolent and self-sacrificing treatment of Arabs inside the 1948 borders, it also must remain silent on the matter of military occupation and the growing Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza. To mitigate the potentially dire effects of the Jews’ new exposure, Glazer offers “American freedom” as the liberal exceptionalist principle from which to derive an effective Jewish defense program. “One of the chief Jewish responses to this new and uncomfortable position must be to reeducate themselves and others in the principle that individuals and nations alike both have a right to freedom” (30).

As a reactionary defense of transcendent American values of individual liberty, Podhoretz and Glazer thus expressed hostility toward policy-driven structural interventions like affirmative action and welfare, a posture warranted all the more, in this narrative, by the Cold War challenge of Soviet tyranny and the specter of the Holocaust. In advancing free market ideologies of individual meritocracy as the properly American alternative to policies figured as “reverse racism” or “affirmative discrimination,” they framed ameliorative approaches as having adverse effects on precisely those Jews whose faith in meritocracy had enabled them to serve as model subjects of American professional managerialism. Structural interventions to address racialized disparities were understood as reverse discrimination that would negatively affect American Jews. Guided by the primary question “Is it good for the Jews?,” Podhoretz and Glazer participated in forging a politics of what the legal scholar Ian Haney-López calls “reactionary colorblindness”—with meritocracy and race neutrality seen as the enabling philosophical tenets for the inclusion of Jews in American national life. Such work obscured the structures of U.S. racial capitalism and Israeli settler colonialism, whose effects were not only intensifying in this period but being identified and contested by organizations, activists, and scholars embracing Palestinian critiques of Zionist colonization and Israeli military and administrative occupation. Structural critiques of American racism demonstrated how racial capitalism’s pervasive violence was neither impeded nor alleviated by nominal and even juridical civic inclusion but persistently saturated American institutions. This narrative was often coupled with a discourse of joint Israeli–U.S. exceptionalism underwriting the Israeli state as a foundational Jewish democracy, coding Israel’s existentially driven security measures as the unfortunate price paid for defending liberal democracy in a hostile world.

The Iron of Jewish Power

The corporealization of Jewish flesh into a masculinized tough Jew equipped to fight for Jewish freedom in both the United States and Israel was typified by the rise of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League (JDL). Kahane’s book Never Again! (1969) provided the JDL’s “program for survival.” The JDL styled itself a “Jewish Power” organization akin to the Black Panther Party; while Kahane expressed abhorrence for the Panthers’ support for the Palestinians, the JDL nevertheless mimicked both the organization’s performative political practice and its willingness to assert an ethno-nationalist violence as a legitimate tactic of self-defense. Some in Commentary’s milieu, like the AJC’s longtime director of information and research services Milton Himmelfarb, found the JDL’s actions and outlook contrary to Jewish American interests. Kahane himself found the religiosity of the “Jewish Establishment” exemplified by the AJC thinned out by assimilation into the purported secularism of American life. Nevertheless, the JDL extended the geographic coordinates of a sharp Jewish militancy.

The JDL first gained widespread notoriety following an action in May 1969. JDL members barricaded the well-known New York synagogue Congregation Emanu-el against the planned appearance of James Forman, former executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, then the spokesperson for the Black National Economic Conference (BNEC).38 Forman was slated to present the “Black Manifesto,” a document that he drafted and the conference adopted. The “Black Manifesto” contends that since Black people “have been forced to live as colonized people inside the United States,” churches and synagogues should be called to account for reparations.39 Articulating a reparations claim as a practice to redress internal colonialism put substantive pressure on the liberal lineaments of racial capitalism. Kahane narrated Forman’s demand as epitomizing “years of growing violence and Jew-hatred that had erupted among a significant section of the Black community.” For Kahane, Forman’s proposal was of a piece with Black radical organizations’ outward expression of Palestinian solidarity and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers’ strike. In Kahane’s estimation, the response of the “Jewish Establishment” to these events was dreadfully inadequate.40 “Coupled with their ghetto complexes and fearful neuroses was a liberal guilt feeling and inability to place Jewish interests over universal ones” (103).

Forman never ended up speaking at the congregation. The JDL framed his nonappearance as an early victory, the result of a masculinist defense against the demand for reparations. A June 1969 full-page New York Times advertisement headlined “Is This Any Way for Nice Jewish Boys to Behave?” shows six men in sunglasses wielding bats and pipes standing guard in front of the synagogue.41 “Maybe in times of crisis. [sic] Jewish boys should not be that nice. Maybe—just maybe—nice people build their own road to Auschwitz.” The “propositions” advanced by the JDL (all articulated in the negative) read like a more pointed version of Glazer’s and Podhoretz’s linkage of reactionary color blindness and Jewish self-defense. The JDL advocated that Jews “should not be victims of the quota systems and reverse discrimination”; they “should not become victims of totalitarian revolutionaries of the Radical Left”; and they “should not be forced to pay a penny to extortionists for crimes they never committed.” Following the action against the BNEC, Kahane and the JDL began to receive significant mainstream press coverage. They staged dozens of actions on behalf of Soviet Jewry, in the process getting arrested numerous times. Under the catchphrase “Every Jew a .22,” the JDL established a summer camp to teach Jewish youth how to engage in combat.

In 1971 Kahane moved to Israel and began advocating avowedly antidemocratic policies meant to ensure the “purity” of Jewish blood. For Kahane, there was a fundamental incompatibility between Zionism as a practice of Jewish exclusiveness and Western democracy as an expression of liberal pluralism. Kahane’s interpretation of “never again,” the JDL’s slogan, was that only Jewish militancy could prevent another holocaust: “never again would there be that same lack of reaction, that same indifference, that same fear” (5). Kahane established the Kach, or “thus,” movement, inspired by the slogan “rak kach” used by the hard-right Irgun movement of the 1940s, to advocate for total separation of Jews from gentiles worldwide, including within a post–civil rights United States and across the uneven political terrain of Greater Israel. Kahane envisioned sanctions on Jews marrying non-Jews, strenuously pursued Jewish settlement in the West Bank, and advocated the removal of Arabs from all of historic Palestine. He routinely cited his mentor, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose “Iron Wall” ideology known as Revisionism was grounded in what one scholar has called an “edifice of racial supremacy.”42 “Zionist colonization,” wrote Jabotinsky in 1923, “can continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”43 Kahane saw Jabotinsky’s investment in the total dispossession and removal of indigenous Arabs as the only legitimate practice of Zionism, one fundamentally at odds with any commitment to “Western democracy.” “There’s no question,” Kahane stated, “of setting up a democracy in Israel, because democracy means equal rights for all, irrespective of racial or religious origins.”44 Kach and other Kahanist groups were marginalized in the Israeli government—in the mid-1980s they were legally banned from participating in the political process for their overt racism. Nevertheless, influential leaders in the Israeli Knesset embraced the Revisionist commitment to Jewish settlement in strategic locales throughout the West Bank and Gaza while continuing to confiscate Palestinian territories.

Sammler and the Spectacle

Against the backdrop of a perceived crisis in Cold War liberalism, Podhoretz, Glazer, and Kahane’s writings in this period fused a domestic U.S. context riven by racial discord to a post–June war Israel whose masculinist embodiment of Jewish toughness against the perceived threat of annihilation was cause for celebration, if not emulation. The texture of this empassioned mix was vividly rendered in Saul Bellow’s National Book Award–winning novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, narrated through the worldview of Artur Sammler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who had immigrated to New York after World War II and traveled to the battlegrounds of the June war. Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly at the end of 1969, Mr. Sammler’s Planet thematizes the anxious nexus of racial, national, and sexual conversions that defined the early years of the post–civil rights era.45 The novel quickly achieved canonical status as a crucial work of post-Holocaust American fiction and for this reason has long warranted sustained scrutiny. It crystallizes in novel form ambivalences around the modalities of representation and knowledge production that render Palestine in the cultural milieu of the post–civil rights period.

The literary critic Ellen Pifer argues in an extensive study of Bellow’s literary corpus that Sammler was a watershed text in the writer’s own political trajectory toward neoconservatism.46 “Those loyal to the ideals of liberalism were sympathetic” to the novel, wrote the historian Allen Guttman in 1973, while “those inspired by the visions of the ‘New Left’ were antagonized.”47 Commentary’s review of the novel was especially laudatory, calling it “a beautiful defense of our common humanity against all the bogus idealism as well as the frank savagery that nowadays rejects it as ‘corn.’”48 By contrast, in Edward Said’s estimation, for Bellow “the doors of humanism had been left open to every sort of unruly individualism, disreputable modishness, and uncanonized learning, with the result that true humanism had been violated, if not altogether discredited.”49 Bellow’s sense of a violated humanism was epitomized in the iconic scene in Sammler, where, in Said’s evocative summary, a “nameless African American bus passenger pull[s] down his trousers and display[s] his pudenda to the saintly, and humanistic, Mr. Sammler.”50 Said references one of the most memorable moments of Bellow’s oeuvre, one that has generated an extraordinary quantity of interpretation.51 The scene exemplifies Irving Kristol’s definitional figure of a neoconservative—a liberal being mugged by reality—with “reality” a stand-in for a ribald form of hypersexualized Black masculinity. It likewise bound together the vexed relation of post-Holocaust Jewish survival to a racial liberal present under pressure from Black radical critique. For the novel, the question of Jewish survival in the midst of Western Civilization’s demise by the counterculture is condensed in the image of the Black phallus and the body to which it is attached. Yet while Podhoretz desired the “toughness,” “freedom,” and “superior grace and beauty” of Black men, and the “Jewish Power” of the JDL performed in mimic-fashion the Black Panther Party’s racial militancy, Artur Sammler figures as an ambivalent visual witness.

The novel stitches the June war to Sammler’s embodied experience of survival in Eastern Europe—he crawls out of a mass grave, he shoots an unarmed man for his clothing—only to be thrown into the racial and sexual excesses of New York City. In doing so, the novel ironizes Israeli toughness. Israel comes to figure less as civilization’s moral salvation than as a site of its kitschy objectification. This irony is embodied in Sammler’s Russian-turned-Israeli-turned-American son-in-law Eisen, or “iron.” Eisen, who had been injured during his service in the Russian army, moved to Israel soon after 1948 and became an artist. “I came to the Eretz a broken man,” Eisen tells Sammler. “But I wouldn’t die. I couldn’t shut my eyes—not before I did something like a human being, something important, beautiful.”52 Eisen had for some time worked as a painter, but after the June war his medium changed to sculpture, and he brings many of his newest pieces to New York in a “heavy green baize bag.” They are “crude-looking, partly bronze but also pale yellow, tinged with sulfides like fool’s gold” (170). In Sammler’s estimation they are the “usual” kinds of Israeli kitsch: “Stars of David, branched candelabra, scrolls and rams’ horns, inscriptions flaming away in Hebrew: Nahamu! Comfort ye! Or God’s command to Joshua: Hazak! [Strengthen thyself!]” (170). These objects are laden with metaphor, Eisen reminds his father-in-law. “Nothing is literal in my work.” For Sammler, these objects are ugly materializations of the tough Jew—rough and rugged and strong, but tinged with fool’s gold and so overburdened with meaning as to border on the farcical.

The end of the novel stages the collision between the text’s two overdetermined symbols—the Black pickpocket and Eisen with his sculptures. Sammler approaches a large crowd, which Eisen is in, with his heaving bag of carvings. The crowd looks on as the pickpocket fights with Sammler’s friend Feffer. Feffer had tracked down the pickpocket, snapped photographs of him in the act of thievery to give to the police, and the pickpocket had attempted to seize his camera. No one in the crowd would intervene: “They were expecting gratification, oh! at last! of teased, cheated, famished needs” (289). When Sammler pleads with the crowd to step in, he “felt extremely foreign—voice, accent, syntax, manner, face, mind, everything, foreign” (286). Given Sammler’s age, his “lack of physical force . . . he had to turn to someone else—to an Eisen!” (289). But in requesting Eisen’s forceful intervention, Sammler unwittingly unleashes an excess of physical violence, as Eisen strikes the pickpocket twice in the face with his bag of Israeli kitsch. “The blood ran in points on his cheek. The terrible metal had cut him through the baize” (291). “You can’t hit a man like this just once,” Eisen exclaims defensively (291). “If in—in. No? If out—out. Yes?” (292). Sammler hurries off, distressed and dismayed by Eisen’s simplistic morality and callous use of force against the very man who had confronted him at the novel’s outset. “How much Sammler sympathized with him—how much he would have done to prevent such atrocious blows!” (294).

Sammler’s ambivalent witnessing of Eisen’s brutality in New York City mirrors his own witnessing of the atrocities of the June war, one that registers a deep—if also unacknowledged—contrapuntal resonance between the war’s mass Arab casualties and embodied Holocaust memory. When the first inklings of war begin, Sammler “refused to sit in Manhattan watching television” and travels to Israel (142). (Bellow had himself been sent to Israel to report on the war for Newsday, and elements of his dispatches inform the texture of the novel.)53 Yet once Sammler arrives, the war’s action is experienced only as distant spectacle. Sammler views a tank battle from a far-off hilltop in the north: “He had seen. It was almost as if he had attended—among other spectators” (164). His vista is overrun by Italian paparazzi and a Swiss correspondent whose “chest hung with cameras” (165). But the action of war is so distant, it can be perceived only in “tiny war sounds” (165). Later, after the military violence had subsided, Sammler visits newly conquered Gaza, and the scale of description shifts rapidly to dwell on the minute details of “the dead, the unburied Arab bodies” (250).

There were dug positions, emplacements, trenches, and in them, too, there were hundreds of corpses. The odor was like damp cardboard. The clothes of the dead, greenish-brown sweaters, tunics, shirts were strained by the swelling, the gases, the fluids. Swollen gigantic arms, legs, roasted in the sun. . . . In the sun the faces softened, blackened, melted, and flowed away. The flesh sank to the skull, the cartilage of the nose warping, the lips shrinking, eyes dissolving, fluids filling the follows and shining on the skin. . . . The suffocating wet cardboard fumes they gave off. In the superhot, the crack light, the glassy persistency and distortion of the desert light, these swollen shapes were the main things to be seen. (251–53)

Sammler’s unsatisfying distance is here replaced with the overwhelming sights and smells of the war’s Arab victims whose embodiment is figured in their abject decomposition. Sammler’s visual practice of witnessing does not translate into overt identification with the victims, even though the protagonist himself had crawled out of a similar trench-turned-mass-grave twenty-five years earlier. Instead, the scene is left at the level of an abstract drama, a tragic spectacle of war’s necessary brutality, whose function was to prop up the discombobulated Sammler. The novel’s protagonist “had his own need for these sights, for which he mastered the trembling of his legs or the wish to cry which flashed through him” (253). In this sense, the scene functions primarily to satisfy Sammler’s need for self-mastery in a world descending into barbarity.

At the time of its publication, the novel’s thematization of a spectacular form of Israeli violence that decimates its Arab antagonists made for an ambivalent understanding of Bellow’s views on Israel. Eisen’s stark morality and farcical practices of beauty, the resonance of mass Arab casualties to Jews in the European trenches, and the yoking of spectacularized Black masculinity to the visual drama of the June war made difficult an easy allegorizing between the novel and Bellow’s political views. Sammler could triangulate post-1967 gendered racialization, Holocaust memory, and Israeli state violence in ways that invited readers to reckon with their structured ambivalence, an ambivalence that exceeded the reified frameworks that the novel also thematized. Bellow’s first major work of nonfiction, To Jerusalem and Back (1976), steadied such ambivalence. The extended essay was, in the critic Andrew Furman’s estimate, Bellow’s “attempt to revise and polish his, at times, elusive vision of Israel.”54 The battlefield scene in To Jerusalem and Back repeats language drawn directly from Sammler and Bellow’s own Newsday journalism. This imagery’s repetition reveals the persistent haunting spectacularization of Arab abjection and its resonance with post-Holocaust memory. Palestinian perspectives were represented only through pro-Israel discourse—a pattern in To Jerusalem and Back—and reiterated Bellow’s own representations of what he called in a different context “corpse-making” (dead and decaying Arab bodies). Active Palestinian subjects in history remained obscured. The book concludes with reflections on the dawning civil war in Lebanon with precisely such foreshortening. To understand Bellow’s Middle East is ultimately to come to grips with a transhistorical “cycle-of-violence” narrative. “In ancient times the walls of captured cities in the Middle East were sometimes hung with the skins of the vanquished. That custom has died out. But the eagerness to kill for political ends—or to justify killing by such ends—is as keen now as it ever was” (182). Against the backdrop of a perpetually war-torn region whose barbarity knows no end ascends Israel, if not as an exemplar of civilized Western liberalism, then at least as the West’s bulwark against the timeless tribalism of intra-Arab violence.

Anti-Imperialism as Settler Colonialism

What would come to be understood as U.S. imperial culture’s dominant neoconservative narrative was shaped by the gendered racialization of Israeli militancy represented as central to maintaining Jewish security in the United States. This narrative figured Jewish civic inclusion as part of a Cold War geopolitics invested in regulating a proper ethno-racial minority subject conducive to the lineaments of American capitalism. At the same time, expressions of American Zionism refused to reckon substantively with Black Power’s Palestine, whose disavowal of critiques of settler colonialism converted Arab and Palestinian political claims into racialized fears of Arab terror and dehumanization. In a world of totalitarian tyranny, the narrative ran, the exceptional spirit of American freedom and liberty would guide the way forward. These assenting deployments of a Cold War imaginary were central to the development of neoconservatism’s racial thinking of the 1970s.

Importantly, however, Jewish Left critiques of U.S. imperial culture were also triangulated with Black Power’s Palestine and the emergent postoccupation structures of rule in Israel and Palestine. Accounting for this shared orientation among otherwise bitter ideological antagonists requires recalling how Zionism had often historically been framed as an anticolonial and anti-imperialist movement for Jewish self-determination. As the historian Gabriel Piterberg compellingly elucidates, Zionism was “both a Central-European national movement and a movement of European settlers [seeking] to carve out for itself a national patrimony with a colony in the east.”55 This coalescence of nationalism and desires for territorial settlement resonated with a long-held American mythos linking manifest destiny and national independence struggles against imperial Britain.56 During the early Cold War, this mythos was expressed through figuring Israel’s 1948 founding as an anticolonial national liberation project. As the literary critic Amy Kaplan maintains, Leon Uris’s hugely popular novel Exodus (1958) and Otto Preminger’s cinematic epic of the same name (1960) fashioned a remarkably effective American narrative of Israel’s founding as an exemplary instance of anticolonialism suitable for U.S. Cold War geopolitics. Demonstrating how Exodus figured the Zionist struggle for national liberation against British imperialism as one oriented toward a broad American audience, Kaplan reveals the effects of the persistent structure of disavowal of Zionism’s settler colonial foundations. Such a narrative degraded Arabs and Palestinians, producing inhuman obstacles to the expression of a morally upstanding liberal modernity capably refracting America’s own exceptional promise.57 By the end of the 1960s the Israeli military’s remarkably swift victory in the June war further catalyzed the fusion of U.S.–Israel geopolitical imaginaries. The Israeli military, as Melani McAlister notes, offered an American public increasingly disheartened by the U.S. war in Vietnam an incontestable victory to celebrate and exemplify.58

For a Jewish Left forged in antiwar, anticapitalist, and antiracist struggles, a broad American exceptionalism of this sort had little traction. After 1967, avowedly Jewish radical publications routinely espoused a discourse of anti-imperialism as part of a critique of the forms of American racist and capitalist oppression. In publications like Commentary, chided Michael Lerner in a 1970 analysis of the Jewish New Left at Berkeley, “one can read the latest thoughts of the American ruling class, its best apologia for continued American imperialism and suppression of students and other protestors.”59 Jewish radicals criticized the suture between the massive intensification of U.S. state violence in Southeast Asia and the emergence of a repressive domestic law-and-order state; they identified the so-called Jewish establishment as aligned with the expansion of racialized state violence; they protested the paucity of a nominally inclusionary U.S. racial liberalism; and they formulated a solidarity politics with oppressed minorities as offering openings toward a different kind of radical democratic future.

At the same time, Jewish radical expressions of anti-imperialism also routinely narrated the exclusionary Jewish settlement of Palestine as the legitimate, at times even the radical, historical expression of Jewish national liberation, often figuring a romanticized desire for the socialist utopianism of the early twentieth-century kibbutz. Exile was often (though, importantly, not uniformly) belittled as an aberrant condition; the specter of the Holocaust served as an enduring sign of the precarity of Jewish existence; and aliya was routinely advocated as paramount for achieving Jewish radical aims. In this way, Jewish radical critics of U.S. imperialism drew on Zionism’s settler colonial mythos, fashioning disavowals and tacit silences around the forms and practices of Palestinian dispossession, exclusion, and resistance. After World War II and especially after 1967, it proved especially vexing for Jewish radical imaginaries to disentangle Jewish national liberation from Israeli settler colonialism.

Jewish Secularism, Jewish Socialism

In its early formation, the widely circulated magazine Jewish Life (founded in 1946 and retitled Jewish Currents in 1958), was a thinly veiled outlet for the cultural wing of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). In the magazine, socialist Jews elaborated a non-Zionist political imaginary that described Israel’s “inalienable right to exist” as central to a politics of secular Jewish progressivism. As one exemplary statement put it, Jewish secularism meant strategic nonalignment between capitalist and socialist systems, committed struggles for social welfare, social security, and social justice and against racism and anti-Semitism. Jewish secularism also meant supporting “struggles against colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America,” which importantly included an “affirmation that Israel is here to stay.”60 While the World Zionist Organization and some in Israel called on Jews in the diaspora to orient their politics solely toward the Israeli state, a committed non-Zionism of the sort expressed in Jewish Life and Jewish Currents recognized Jews as a “people on a world scale,” not solely a “single nation” susceptible to the “national nihilism” that had driven Zionism’s tactical alliances with imperialist powers like Britain and the United States.

Morris U. Schappes, one of the magazine’s lead writers and, after 1958, its managing editor, routinely criticized Zionism’s historical emergence as fundamentally counter to progressive desires for the future liberation of the working class. As a bourgeois nationalist ideology, wrote Schappes, Zionism only ever reflected the interests of a specific stratum of Jewish middle-class professionals allied with the ruling elite; thus, since the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism had of necessity undertaken what Schappes calls an “unswerving strategy of alliance with oppressive and imperialist ruling classes.”61 Louis Harap, another of the journal’s longtime editors and writers, agreed, investigating Zionism’s fundamental and enduring contradiction: a socialist-oriented communal structure in Palestine whose “conquest of Labor” approach to Jewish settlement in Palestine prohibited incorporation of indigenous Arabs into the structure of its economy. This exclusion constituted nothing less than a failure, in Harap’s words, of the “acid test for socialist internationalism in the region.”62

Such concerns about Zionism were never so intractable as to call into question the importance of Israel as a state-building project whose capacity to channel the liberatory energies of the Jewish people, could serve as an anti-imperialist force in the region. Contributors to Jewish Life and Jewish Currents contrasted the tepid support in the late 1940s within the United States and Britain for Jewish independence with the Soviet support for the partition of Palestine. The magazine emphasized how Soviet military support (via Czechoslovakia) was essential in the Jewish fight against British imperialism. Further, the November 1947 speech by Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN Andrei Gromyko signaled the Soviet commitment to the self-determining character of Jewish and Arab peoples. Ideally, such self-determination should be expressed in a single binational state, Gromyko argued. However, partitioning the territory between Jews and Arabs would be warranted if the national antagonisms between them proved unresolvable.

After its founding, Israel served authors in Jewish Currents as a pragmatic focal point for narrating a resolutely anti-imperialist struggle of Jewish national liberation. A July 1948 editorial underscored as much, quoting from the former head of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization in Mandate Palestine, that “British and American imperialism are like the two edges of a scissors. Sometimes they work together; sometimes apart. But their point is directed at us.” In contrast to these shared imperial forces, “American Jewry can carry out obligations to Israel only by a clear-cut anti-imperialist fight.”63 On the ideological level, this fight included advancing a persistent critique of the American Jewish Committee’s alignment with U.S. imperialism—understood here as impeding the expression of Jewish national liberation via the AJC’s consistent support of American racial liberalism, and its adherence to the U.S. State Department’s own historical ambivalence about a Zionist state in Palestine. In 1950, on the second anniversary of Israel’s founding, Jewish Life celebrated “the masses of Israel, who so heroically gave their lives in anti-imperialist struggle to achieve freedom and independence.” Such a struggle was hardly over, though, as the state’s nascent citizenry was “confronted with the increasing colonialization of their country” by U.S. and British geopolitics exemplified most prominently in the Ben Gurion government subordinating Israel’s sovereignty to “Anglo-American imperialist aims” to enfold Israel into “imperialist, cold war plans.”64

In the immediate wake of the June war, Jewish Currents departed from its Soviet predilection because of Soviet denunciations of Israeli aggression and the magazine’s support for Israel’s right to preemptive self-defense. Nevertheless, its resolutely non-Zionist outlook provided Schappes the space to critique what he called the American peace movement’s “disoriented” celebration of Israeli militancy while pushing back against those, like SNCC field secretary Julius Lester, who claimed that “any Jew who does not question Israel’s very existence nullifies any meaning his opposition to the war in Vietnam may have.” Taking Lester’s dichotomy as a false choice, Schappes pointed out that the Jewish Cultural Clubs and Societies’ program to end the war in Vietnam was entirely consistent with an anti-imperialist approach to the Middle East. Included in this program were a commitment to a region “freed from the tentacles of oil-colonialism and the Cold War” and an Israeli policy of “neutrality in the East-West conflict” that would enable the state to “become a part of the Middle East struggle against imperialism.”65 Harap centered his analysis on the perceived “threat to the life of Israel,” its “right to live.” It was true, in Harap’s opinion, that “in general Israel’s foreign policy has been allied to the West and that she is therefore aligned in a basic way with the policies of the neo-colonialist powers.” However, since “her very survival was imminently threatened,” the state was justified military in defending itself against a perceived threat of annihilation by Arab leaders whose own liberationist rhetoric was, in Harap’s estimation, more reactionary than anti-imperialist.66

In early statements and publications, the magazine’s authors elaborated how structural racism’s differential effects were predicated on a white supremacy woven into America’s post-Emancipation fabric. For instance, in May 1964, Schappes served as a discussant for a series of panels on Negro-Jewish relations in the United States sponsored by the journal Jewish Social Studies. Here he unreservedly proclaimed that “the abolition of white privileges is a continuation of the old abolitionist struggle against slavery.”67 Schappes invites Jews to “combat attitudes of white supremacy” as a mode of taking responsibility for, and then abolishing, the privileges that white people have claimed for themselves via Black people’s “brutalization, degradation and deculturation” (58). At the same time, Schappes also calls on Black leaders to recognize the deleterious effects of anti-Semitism as a “blind alley” (64) and “a diversion from the problem” (65). The need for white ethnics, and Jews in particular, to work toward abolishing the structured privileges accruing to certain groups in a climate saturated by white supremacy was pressing indeed. Avoiding engagements in such work would pose fundamental detriments to the Black freedom movement. “As the struggle goes into more intense forms,” Schappes presaged in 1964, “the Negro people will brook no brakes and will turn against allies, no matter what their services or past record, who seem to retard the struggle” (65).

By the early 1970s the structural critique of white supremacy converged with the existential anxiety around Israel’s “right to live.” Black Power’s Palestine had achieved a broad currency that necessitated substantive responses from the Jewish Left. In February 1971 Jewish Currents released a pamphlet, “The Black Panthers, Jews, and Israel,” which collected a series of articles printed in recent issues of the magazine.68 In an open letter to Huey P. Newton, Nobel Prize–winning scientist and antiwar advocate George Wald underscored how Jews in Israel are the “remnants of the biggest massacre in history . . . refugees with no other place to go” (13). The seemingly permanent precarity of Israel’s existence in the face of impending “massacre” had injurious effects on the state’s capacity to realize its properly socialist ideals. “Now all the things that most Israelis oppose are being forced upon them by the constant threat of massacre” (14). For Schappes, progressive Jewish support for the Black Panthers was an “unconditional duty,” even as, in practice, such a duty ran up against obstacles when “the Panther position on Israel allies it with those who call for its destruction” (20). Contrary to the analysis offered in the pages of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Israel was not a creation of Western imperialism, Schappes underscored; rather, it emerged from the “numerous non-Zionist Jewish refugees from Hitlerism” and was tangibly supported by “the anti-imperialist, democratic and socialist forces expressing themselves in the United Nations” (17). Rabbi Albert Axelrad, then director of the Hillel at Brandeis University, echoed Schappes’s caution against refusing engagement with the Panthers. Instead, Axelrad embraced the Talmudic and historical traditions of a Judaic “allergy to injustice.” He held out the importance of understanding the Panthers, not as a homogeneous singular entity, but as a “paradigmatic” reflection of a broader racialized constituency articulating survival strategies amid the saturation of state violence (52). “The violence of the government and of society, which provoked the Panthers’ posture, must be exposed and eliminated” (53). It was crucial, in Axelrad’s estimation, for Jews to ally with militant groups in their “domestic struggles for liberation and self-determination,” especially as those groups claimed the right to resort to what he calls “defensive violence” (52). The Talmudic concept of milchemet chova (defensive war as mandatory) warranted the ethical practice of violence by the Panthers and other militants against any “perversion of justice” (53). In a striking analogy, the same precept legitimated Israel’s use of violence in 1948 and 1967.

Jewish radical support for the Panthers at a moment of intense state repression did not automatically require supporting the Panthers’ pronounced identification with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Axelrad saw as plainly “unacceptable.” For Axelrad, Black Power’s Palestine was merely rhetorical and distinct from real material conditions of liberation struggles in the United States. At the same time, Axelrad saw the Panthers’ positioning not as viral anti-Semitism but as a “glib, mistaken notion of class identification in which the Palestinians are seen as the only oppressed, dominated people in the area” (55). This move sought to discipline Black Power’s Palestine by disconnecting what were framed as the proper material struggles against racial violence in the United States from the ill-considered and largely rhetorical affiliations with the Palestinians. Robert E. Goldburg, the rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden, Connecticut, and a member of the Coalition for the Defense of the Panthers, performed a similar analytical move. He used his April 1970 sermon, also published by Jewish Currents, to address the important role that Jews should play in contending with the imperial violence out of which, and in struggle against, organizations like the Panthers had emerged. “What we have done to Vietnam is coming home to haunt us. . . . The Panthers have dramatized our sins, our indifference and neglect.” Goldburg parsed the distinction between the righteousness of the Panthers domestic struggle and the wrongheadedness of their largely rhetorical alliance with the PLO. For Goldburg, the Panthers’ spokespeople’s distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism was “incorrect and muddled,” especially considering that the “Jewish minority has endured its own holocaust, as a culmination of 2,000 years of martyrdom, and feels rightly and correctly a sense of commitment to the nation and the people of Israel.” Nevertheless, such a positioning was understood as merely a “quarrel” with the Panthers, one to argue out as part of a shared commitment to social justice.69

Zionism’s Becoming Third World

While Jewish Currents emphasized a secular, non-Zionist anti-imperialism, younger activists in the Jewish Left drew significantly on Zionism as a proper movement of Jewish self-determination, often recalibrating its elements to figure alliances with anticolonial movements worldwide. The Jewish Radicalism anthology (1973), edited by Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreirer, exemplified this dynamic. The anthology offered what the editors call a “literary snapshot” of an outpouring of post-1967 print culture (student-run newspapers, manifestos, zines, etc.), in order to grasp hold of an emergent formation that might not otherwise recognize itself as such.70

One exemplary expression of such an outlook was fashioned by the Jewish Liberation Project (JLP), an organization that emerged in the late 1960s. The JLP concluded an early position paper with the phrase “Long Live a Socialist and Anti-Imperialist Middle East!” In recasting radical Zionism as an anti-imperialist Jewish liberation struggle, the JLP retained (even as it repressed) what Piterberg calls Zionism’s foundational myth, namely, an investment in the negation of exile, the return to the land, and the return to history, while struggling against U.S. capitalism and assimilation.71 In the United States, the self-determined expression of Jewish peoplehood was curtailed by an oppressive capitalist structure that positioned Jews as a cushion between the largely white capitalist ruling class and a range of oppressed racial minorities. The Jewish establishment was complicit in this process, figured, in a subtextual reference to Malcolm X, as “house Jews,” imputing to the broader American Jewish community “assimilation and an anti-Jewish life style.” Claiming a socialist Zionism as shaping its program, the JLP figured Zionism as a revolutionary Jewish national liberation movement that catalyzed a people whose bonds were forged out of “distinctive ethnic identity, communal institutions, and cultural life.”72 Jewish liberation was an autonomous revolutionary project, independent of other autonomous revolutionary struggles.

While the organization refused to articulate support for Israeli government policies, the existence of Israel as a Jewish state was “an absolute necessity for the liberation of the Jews.”73 Since the Jew is “nowhere regarded as a native, he remains an alien everywhere.” Exile and diaspora, from this perspective, required a territorial solution. Israel appeared as “a historical necessity to end the dispersed, abnormal, marginal existence of the Jews in the galut,” one that served to “create a historically normal existence.”74 Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, cofounder of the Jewish Liberation Project, emphasized exile’s “inherently oppressive nature,” one that “places Jews at the mercy of the ruling elite.” Israel’s “destiny,” Zuckoff’s argument ran, was “bound up with the elimination of imperialism” insofar as imperialism “intensifies antagonisms between nations and peoples and imperils the life of the Jewish nation.”75 Israeli identification with the third world was paramount, if for no other reason than as a way to sustain Jewish existence.

Another early organizer of the JLP, Itzhak Epstein, attended the United Front Against Fascism conference in July 1969, an event in Oakland organized by the Black Panther Party that coincided with the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. In preparing for the conference, JLP formulated the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism as twinned forms of an incipient fascism of the American power structure. They wrote in a prepared statement, “The Star of David and black skin are both the objects of reactionary wrath.”76 In returning from the event, however, Epstein took the Panthers’ pro-Palestinian politics as a sign of enmity toward his “people’s national aspirations.” They had allied themselves with “those who want to commit genocide against us. Whatever justice there is in the Panthers’ own struggle, I must view them from now on as my enemies” (69).

Tsvi Bisk articulated a complementary “radical-zionist strategy for the 1970s” in the Jewish Liberation Journal’s last issue of 1969, one that likewise offered an unsparing critique of those Jewish organizations affirming the concerns of Black radicalism. For Bisk, the discourse of Black anti-Semitism revealed the specter of genocidal Jewish insecurity. In response to those who say, “We must understand the sociological conditions that make these statements possible,” Bisk responded plainly, “Fuck sociological conditions! . . . To a Jew swastikas and anti-Semitic rhetoric means that someone out there has an oven, and fuck me where I breathe if I am going to allow a sociological analysis to inhibit my ability to defend myself when confronted with these symbols.”77 Bisk asserted the pressing necessity of driving a wedge between the Black freedom movement and the Arab cause. While Jewish national liberation is essential, and is centrally concerned with the survival of a Jewish state, Bisk averred that Black liberation has little to do with Arab–Israeli struggles. “The blacks have no real political interest (other than a temporary tactical one) in supporting the Arabs.” She echoed Epstein in her unsparing refusal to countenance Black identification with Palestine: “If you insist on acting as our enemy we will be forced to fight you as our enemy.”78

Here, Bisk’s comments also resonate with a widely read and cited short essay, published in a February 1969 issue of the Village Voice, “To Uncle Tom and Other Jews,” in which M. Jay Rosenberg, then an undergraduate at Brandeis University, reasserts what he calls “pride” in Zionism vis-à-vis the Black liberation struggles.79 For Rosenberg, the only way for the Jew to be an ally in such struggles is to “find himself” in the “inspiration” that is “the miracle of Israel, a national liberation deferred for two thousand years.”80 Investing in Zionism as a project of Jewish national liberation, one centered on Israel as its proper territorial expression, meant that the Panthers’ affiliation with the Palestinian struggle cast them as enemies: “And thus from this point on, I will support no movement that does not accept my people’s struggle.”81

The Committee for a Progressive Middle East (CPME), formed in the late 1960s by Michael Lerner and others on the Jewish Left, also framed its analysis in terms of capitalist imperialism, the common enemy to Israel and the Palestinians, though the anxiety (or vitriol) expressed toward Black identifications with Palestinians was much more muted. In its own founding statement on the Middle East, the CPME focused on the cycle of capitalist oppression circuited between the United States and “Arab Lands,” going back to the origins of Zionist settlement in Palestine. As in other expressions of the Jewish Left, the statement emphasized the revolutionary promise of the early settlement movement. The early twentieth-century Jewish settlers “were socialists, supporters of the Russian Revolution, and were in the process of setting up collectively owned and governed communes (kibbutzim) that could provide a model for their Arab friends who were still oppressed in feudal conditions.”82 This narrative rendered “inevitable” how, in the pre-state period, “Arab landlords,” facing a challenge to their legitimacy, “would try to stir up anti-Jewish sentiment amongst their followers” (484). The CPME suggested that in 1947–49 the perceived need for Arab reactionary leaders to maintain their legitimacy and “divert attention of their people from their real problems” was the animating force between the Arab, Zionist, and Israeli forces.

In the years that followed, according to the CPME statement, Israel’s necessary ties to the West served as a reaction to the “actual material threat” posed by the bourgeois leadership in the Arab world, even as such ties posed increasingly insurmountable challenges to the Jewish state becoming “a real indigenous third-world country” (485). Those ties, as necessary as they were, underwrote capitalism as the foundational system through which “racist notions” in Israel were used to “justify its class structure . . . [which would] militate against Arabs and Jews from Arab lands” (486). The CPME’s socialist impulse called for the elimination of Israeli capitalism and support for “the national liberation struggles of the Vietnamese, Arabs and other third-world peoples” (486). While the statement submits that in retrospect it might have been wise “to establish the Jewish homeland in some other, less populated area,” in the present “Israelis have become natives of the area.” As Jewish people there, they have a right to national self-determination and “will fight for their survival with as must [sic] determination as the Vietnamese fight for their own” (486). In his own nascent reflections on the CPME, Michael Lerner delineated a critical distinction between an anti-Zionism invested in the destruction of Israel and one whose “fundamental impulses” alert us to the problems of a “state which is enthusiastically supported by Goldwater and Reagan and which has failed to endorse the struggle of the Vietnamese against American imperialism.”83 Insofar as anti-Zionism could elucidate a critique of the Israeli state, the CPME underscored its promise, even as its anticapitalist politics drew from the utopian promise of the kibbutzim to naturalize what was narrated as the unfortunate truth of settler colonization and Palestinian dispossession.

Conversion Narratives and Revolutionary Diaspora

Like the CPME on the West Coast, organizations like Jews for Urban Justice (JUJ) on the East Coast figured the Jewish establishment as deeply imbricated in U.S. imperialism. Its synagogues were seen less as sanctuaries for Judaic spiritual practice or resources for communal support than as institutions of a blossoming bourgeoisie increasingly inoculated from and complicit with a sedimented structural racism. The vociferous anticommunism of some of the establishment’s media outlets translated into apologetic justifications for intensified U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia and the embrace of the Nixonian language of law and order. As a critical counterpoint, JUJ, founded in 1966 to stage fair housing protests in the Washington, D.C., area, was described as “the diaspora of the Diaspora.”84 While itself a small organization, JUJ nevertheless expressed, in the historian Michael Staub’s words, “yearnings that were much more widely felt and with which mainstream Jewish leaders were struggling as well.”85 Its last project was the “Jewish Campaign for the People’s Peace Treaty” in 1971, which articulated a Jewish stance against the U.S. War in Vietnam. “Jewishness at its best is a whole life process,” stated one of the campaign’s flyers, “and the war is part of our daily lives. . . . So if we’re committed to being Jewish, then dealing with the war is part of being Jewish” (182–83).

Arthur Waskow and Sharon Rose were among members of Jews for Urban Justice who made trips to Israel after 1967, meeting with Israeli Leftists and Palestinian representatives across the political spectrum. In the wake of their trips, JUJ fashioned a Jewish anti-imperialist platform in the spirit of the nonaligned countries. They conceived of Israel not as a Jewish national home but rather as a state inhabited by a native “Israeli people.” Echoing the CPME’s indigenization of Israel, in November 1970, JUJ drafted a five-point position paper for “peace and justice in the Middle East” founded on mutual commitments to self-determination for Palestinian and Israeli peoples. It also advocated a nonintervention policy for the Israeli, Soviet, and U.S. militaries, and opposed “acts of genocide, whether it be in the forms of cultural, physical, or psychological oppression.”86 An open letter to the New York Review of Books signed by prominent Jewish members of the New Left gave JUJ’s position wide circulation, emphasizing, irrespective of prior history, the contemporary existence of both Palestinian and Israeli peoples. In this thinking, 1948 became the de facto starting point for analysis and action. Intent on the “full liberation” of both peoples—liberation, that is, “from war, from the Imperial designs from the great powers, from exploitation of their labor and resources”—crucially involved refuting historical claims that Israel was an “extension of Western imperialism” (77). “Although the Israeli government has allied itself with the Western Empires,” notes the letter, “an Israeli people exists and they will not disappear, except through genocide” (78). At the same time, the letter acknowledges the need for Israel to be “prepared to negotiate with the whole range of Palestinian leadership on how to withdraw Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza” (79). Finally, it calls for “the American Jewish community and the American anti-war and radical movements” to study closely the situation with a keen eye on the “Imperial adventures of their own governments and huge corporations” (78). In enunciating its position, JUJ erased the powerful connection between the “Israeli people” and Zionism’s sacralized settler colonial logic, fashioning an anti-imperialist politics with its own foreshortened history.

Arthur Waskow’s own prolific writings of the period narrated the convergence of Black radicalism and anti-Zionism as an insuperable roadblock to his efforts at forging a broad New Left coalition. Rather than retreat into a militant defense of Jewishness in the guise of liberal pluralism, Waskow fused contemporary social justice struggles with Jewish principles as precisely what defined the best of diasporic Judaism. In his writings of the period, he aimed to solve the contradiction among a generation of post-1967 Jews who supported the existence of Israel and had “assimilated” into a post–civil rights America that had seen, in Waskow’s words, the “melting pot . . . cracked forever” by the failures of racial integration.87

Waskow had been a lead organizer of the August 1967 National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) in Chicago. There, as I note in chapter 2, a Black caucus effectively passed a thirteen-point resolution that, among other demands, included a condemnation of June’s “Zionist imperialist war.” Waskow’s response to the caucus had been publicly criticized in a lengthy New Yorker article for trafficking in “paternalistic white racism that would startle a South African plantation owner” by endorsing all the demands “regardless of the substance of the individual proposals.” Waskow proffered his own retort in the pages of the New York Review of Books.88 He had, he said, opposed the resolution to adopt the thirteen points, vigorously lobbied others to oppose the resolution, and offered his own resolution that “specifically differs from the 13 points on the Middle East, wars of national liberation, and how to organize among whites, and that ignores the ‘Newark resolutions’ which the 13 Points blindly endorsed.”89 When he had the opportunity to speak before the convention he “referred to the acceptance of the 13 Points as an act of self-castration by the white liberals present who were seeking, by this ill-conceived operation, to become radicals.”90

In his 1971 book The Bush Is Burning! Radical Judaism Faces the Pharaohs of the Modern Superstate, Waskow narrates the NCNP confrontation as another moment of conversion. The fragmentation at the conference incited him to diagnose the crossroads for American Jews using an especially evocative extended analogy:

As if the encounter of the Black and Jewish peoples was not sufficiently troublesome in itself—it coincided with another scenario—an international one—that often seemed to those engaged analogous, and that strengthened or deepened in the various respondents the different learnings they had absorbed at home. Imagine the whole encounter over again, but this time in Giant dress, and in hostility and danger the equivalent of about forty years further along the vicious spiral—and this time conducted on the nation-state level. With the Israeli government—once flexible and creative and insurgent, but by the late ’60s rigid and institutionalized, auditioning for the role of the American Jewish Establishment; Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular seeming to play the part of the Blacks; and the American Empire abroad adopting the role of the American Empire at home. (93)

Given this analysis of “future-history,” interwoven as it was with a U.S. imperial culture shaping racial politics both within and outside its borders, Waskow cast his lot with the radical Jews. He narrates how he discovered in the District of Columbia a more practically effective, if smaller-scale, outlet for his politics, one that embraced Judaism as a liberation theology predicated on social justice. Waskow’s elaboration exemplifies the conversion narrative that shaped much post-1967 American Jewish writing. For some, the post-1967 moment signified a transvaluation of the diaspora that crystallized American Jewish identification to Israel and bound the security of Jews globally to the existence of a Jewish state in Israel. In contrast, Waskow’s Bush Is Burning! narrates what he calls a “revivification” of a form of Judaism whose “fusion of religious and political feeling” (23) could animate a liberationist horizon. This was religion as a “form of insurgency” (14), and the Freedom Seder served as its most evocative illustration.

The Freedom Seder and a Revolutionary Diaspora

For Passover 1969 Arthur Waskow and Jews for Urban Justice produced an entire haggadah. Perhaps JUJ’s most high-profile social action, the Freedom Seder is clearly informed by Waskow’s experience at the NCNP. Waskow framed the haggadah as a response to the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s April 1968 assassination and the subsequent “uprising of Black Washington against the blank-eyed pyramid-builders of our own time.”91 In the face of increasingly repressive state violence in the District of Columbia, Waskow fashioned a political imaginary aimed at liberation from an “America of pyramids.”

The first seder to use the new haggadah was held in the basement of Lincoln Memorial Congregational Temple, an African American church in Washington, D.C. The service was conducted by Rabbi Balfour Brickner (then head of the Hebrew Congregations of New York and director of the Commission on Interfaith Relations for Reform Judaism), who was joined by the well-known antiwar activist Reverend Philip Berrigan. Eight hundred people attended the event. The seder gained significant publicity, garnering national and local newspaper coverage; the WBAI radio station provided a live feed for its New York listeners, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company filmed the event for a documentary.92 The following year, JUJ and Waskow organized numerous Freedom Seders across the Northeast. One, on the campus of Cornell University, drew several thousand participants and featured the return of Philip Berrigan’s brother, Reverend Daniel Berrigan, who was a Jesuit priest and peace activist prominent in the draft-resistance movement who had recently “gone underground” to protest his federal jail sentence. A large seder in Washington included a march that literally performed a politics of nonalignment by shuttling between the White House and the Soviet embassy. A much more intimate gathering in New Haven, Connecticut, coincided with preparations by Yale University faculty, staff, and students to join a May Day demand for the release of all political prisoners, in particular a group of Black Panthers soon to stand trial.

The Exodus narrative at the heart of the Passover haggadah held open a future internationalism especially attractive to the JUJ. It offered, in Staub’s words, a “utopian statement . . . and not a precise program for action.”93 Waskow considered the genre of the haggadah itself to be liberatory, inviting readers to “grapple with contemporary issues of liberation” while serving as a “liberating rather than a hierarchical ceremony” (19). The Freedom Seder privileged Black emancipation as a central strain of modern radicalism, one prominently juxtaposed with twentieth-century struggles against genocide. In this way the Freedom Seder theorizes a broad “multiparticularist” vision of diaspora whose relationality invited links to seemingly discrepant stories of liberation and confrontation. It offered a “liturgy . . . that asserted the liberation of the Jewish People alongside the liberation of other peoples—not theirs as against ours, or ours as against theirs” (19–20). “Multiparticularism” named a connective politics of adjacency to replace a zero-sum politics of competition. Waskow’s retelling of the story of freedom pays particular attention to the revolutionary impetus of Thomas Jefferson, Nat Turner, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Lincoln, and emphasizes the words of Eldridge Cleaver and King alongside the testimony of Emmanuel Ringelblum from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of the early 1940s. Its citational strategy juxtaposed histories otherwise cordoned off from one another. In doing so, the haggadah provided a compelling genre to move between the universally human and the particularly Jewish.

One passage in the Freedom Seder exemplified the haggadah’s logic of relationality by performing a litany that refused narrow spatiotemporal containment:

How much then are we in duty bound to struggle, work, share, give, think, plan, feel, organize, sit-in, speak out, dream, hope, and be on behalf of Mankind! For we must end the genocide [in Vietnam]* [sic], stop the bloody wars that are killing men and women as we sit here, disarm the nations of the deadly weapons that threaten to destroy us all, end the poisoning of our planet, make sure that no one starves, stop police brutality in many countries, free the poets from their jails, educate us all to understand their poetry, liberate us all to explore our inner ecstasies, and encourage and aid us to love one another and share in the human fraternity. All these!

* Insert any that is current—such as “Biafra,” “Black America,” “Russia,” “Poland,” etc.—depending on the situation. (26)

One critic lambasted this passage by chastising its relational approach: “Of all peoples in a world that has lived through Auschwitz, Jews ought to be the last to accept mindlessly the propagandistic black-militant usage of ‘genocide,’ yet for Waskow that terrible term seems an . . . appropriate rubric.”94 Yet the seder’s logic of relationality was animated by an ethical orientation toward various sites and social issues on behalf of worldly struggles against genocide. Its presentism embraces a connective political imaginary, one that aimed to articulate itself across discrepant sites of genocide and refused the dominant exceptionalist framing of the Holocaust as the sacralized paradigm par excellence.

In an appendix, “Free Associations,” Waskow includes a wide range of “songs, poems, and proclamations” that have “come freely and vagrantly to mind” (42). In this sense, the text performs its own excess by including “transient” excerpts and inviting the seder to be moved into unforeseeable locales for unforeseen purposes. One such vagrant excerpt is a poem from Marilyn Lowen, who writes, “This PASSOVER / we beseech thee O Lord / Deliver us back into Egypt / that we may join with our / brothers.” Lowen captures the desire by Jews for Urban Justice to trouble Israel’s narrative telos by returning to exile as a way for the state to emerge as an “anti-imperialist Israel at home in the Third World” (59).

Waskow’s theorization of the Jewish diaspora as exemplified by the Freedom Seder opened up a third space for the Jews of “Zion”—a deterritorialized world community—to advance claims for nonviolent liberation and self-determination. On the one hand, the American Jewish establishment were secular apologists for U.S. imperial violence in Southeast Asia, law and order policing, and a reactionary curtailment of social justice. This bourgeois order was in thrall to the pharaohs of American Empire. On the other hand, the “Ideological Hard Left” named a political position ultimately in thrall to a version of the Palestinian nationalist movement committed to what Waskow anxiously called the “abolition of the Israeli state” and the denial of self-determination for the “Israeli people” (56). To envision an “anti-imperialist Israel at home in the Third World,” Waskow disarticulates Zion from Israel. Israel comes to name a political entity encumbered with all the contradictions of sovereign power; Zion, by contrast, names the persistent imaginative kernel of the Jewish diaspora.

In a brief 1970 column in the New York Times, Waskow raised the question of the function and future of the Jewish diaspora in the United States. The wake of the June war, and especially the claiming of the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, marked a moment unprecedented in two thousand years of Jewish history. At last, writes Waskow, “the Diaspora is no longer a necessary evil.” Waskow makes legible a wide array of diasporic practices that exceeded or ran counter to the telos of state formation. He highlights the tradition of prophetic Judaism whose vocation, like that of the biblical prophet Jonah, is to warn “America to give up the war against Indochina, H-bombs, racism, and pollution of the earth.” He highlights the revival of Hassidism’s ecstatic tradition alongside the internationalist socialism of the Labor Bund, small study-groups and living-room congregations. The turn to a radical Judaism is an expression of an insurgent politics for a revolutionary Jewish diaspora that refuses Zionism’s state-centered telos: “if older Jews can make nothing of the new insurgencies younger ones can make nothing Jewish of anything else.”95

As a counterbalance to the telos of Israel as a political state, Waskow returns diaspora Judaism not to Jerusalem but to Egypt. Egypt’s Exodus resonance becomes a crucial intertext through which to imagine a permanent, liminal “long road from the Burning Bush to Sinai,” one that required the Mosaic struggles of “upheaval, agony, regret, as well as joy and triumph” (173). Such struggles leave permanently unresolved the tension between revelation and law. They maintain a wayward openness held out by the Freedom Seder’s appendix of “vagrant” associations and its footnote signaling the timeliness of an ethical commitment to move against genocide writ large. Against the territorializing claims of American liberal inclusion, the Freedom Seder stages how some post-1967 American Jews refused the desires of national incorporation into an imperial state by fashioning an appositional mode of liberation as a reflection of and in solidarity with the long arc of black freedom struggles.

Exilic Conversions and Decolonization

What, then, was Waskow’s revolutionary diasporism if not a refusal of Zionism’s negation of exile? It marked a movement between revelation and law whose open-endedness refused the territorialization of Judaic thought and the exceptionalist ascriptions of American liberal pluralism. Its openness as a praxis of adjacent as opposed to competing liberation struggles ensured that the loggerheads in which other Jewish radicals found themselves might be avoided. Mobilizing a permanent exodus in this way allayed the teleological narrative resolution in the Israeli state, even as practically and politically, the indigenization of Jewish democracy—and hence a reproduction of the exclusions of Israel as a settler state—served as its necessary point of departure.

Waskow’s revolutionary diaspora aimed to rekindle a sense of Zion in the theological vein, one with its own crucial resonances in the archive of Black freedom struggles. At the same time, the intercessionary theological return to wandering in the service of liberation, like much of the anti-imperialist Jewish Left, also tacitly obscured the settler structure of the Israeli people’s own becoming-native, one that persevered beyond the temporal markers of the Holocaust and the June war. In this sense, Waskow’s writings clarify the vicissitudes of American Jewish attachment to Israel as a settler state in the crucible of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Triumphalist color-blind meritocracy, anti-imperialism, recommitted ethno-nationalism, and a revolutionary diasporic ethic were all fashioned in this crucible, haunted by the past-present of Holocaust memory and, even in their silences, all confronting the absent presence of Palestinian subjects endowed with a complex personhood. The politics of comparison run deep in this archive, with imaginative modes of racial relationality providing form and substance to the contradictions of Israel as a liberal settler state whose military supremacy and existential vulnerability were increasingly drawn into the frame of U.S. imperial culture.

What, then, was the texture of a post–civil rights Jewish response to the structural conditions of Palestinian dispossession? Some scholars have turned to the Jewish anti-Zionism of Rabbi Elmer Berger,96 or the organization called Breira, Hebrew for “Alternative,” founded in 1973 in express counterpoint to the Israeli Labor Party’s slogan “ain breira,” “there is no alternative,” a purported justification for military occupation. Breira focused its organizing and advocacy on what would become thought of as a two-state solution, which included Israeli territorial concessions granted in negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization.97 The emergence of New Jewish Agenda in 1980 has likewise provided a robust point of departure, an organization whose slogan was “a Jewish voice among progressives and a progressive voice among Jews.”98 Here, though, I turn to the language of the Jesuit priest and peace activist Daniel Berrigan, who, in a much-discussed keynote address to the 1973 annual convention of the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), figured himself in America as the quintessential Jew. Having recently completed serving a prison sentence for acts of resistance against the U.S. war in Vietnam, Berrigan addressed the conference from the perspective of an exile—an American insider in perpetual opposition to institutionalized forms of religious and state power, and the forms of expert knowledge production that buttress them: “I am a western Christian,” he says, “in resistance against my government and my church. That position, as I read it, makes me something very much like a Jew.”99

The AAUG conference focused on a comparative analysis of settler regimes in Africa and the Arab world and their “illusions of endurance.” It was held in the midst of the October Arab–Israeli War, where the question of how to forestall the perpetuation of state-sanctioned kinetic violence was a pressing one. From this angle of conversion, Berrigan refuses the academic and governmental valuation of “expertise,” noting that the craft of experts in a “consuming and killing culture” is to “fiddle while the world burns” (223). Rather, the moral position of the Jew, in Berrigan’s hands, demands a foundational critique of militarism and dispossession in the explication of injustice, including, especially, in the context of Israel. From this oppositional exilic position, Berrigan narrates how during the first twenty-five years of the state’s formal existence, “the wandering Jew became the settler Jew; the settler ethos became the imperial adventure” (228).

The effect of this geopolitical conversion was that the moral and ethical imperative of Jewish compassion acceded to the tragedy of a settler state that of necessity “should legislate armaments and yet more armaments . . . evictions, uprootings, destruction of goods, imprisonment and terrorism . . . [and] a law of expanding violence” (229). What is to be done in this moribund context of expanding settler violence? Berrigan draws inspiration from Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Mahatma Gandhi: to imagine a nonviolent movement for Palestinians to claim en masse the right of return, to claim it in Israel’s harbors and in its embassies and the embassies of the global powers, and to claim it relationally by “welcoming Jews to a community of compassion” (233). Here, Berrigan figures a paradigmatically Jewish notion of exile as one not foundationally committed to the resolution of Jewish exodus but rather as inhabiting a comportment that invites Palestinian conviviality through the express accession to indigenous Palestinian claims. That is, Berrigan glimpses a comportment that American Jewish political imaginaries had so often foreclosed—an exilic practice of decolonization.

Following Daniel Berrigan at the podium at the AAUG convention was another theorist of exile and decolonization—Edward W. Said. It is to Said and the AAUG that I now turn.