The Jews in America Trilogy (161 page)

In the United States at the time, there were almost as many kinds of Zionists as there were Jews. There were religious Zionists, labor Zionists, Zionist moderates, Zionist militants. The splinter groups of Zionism operated with as much internecine conflict as with cooperation. Jewish Socialists tended to see the Zionist movement as competitive with their own—a distraction that would draw the attention and energies of American Jewry away from what the Socialists saw as a more important goal, the improving of living and working conditions of the masses. The Socialists saw the creation of the State of
Israel as an essentially bourgeois, capitalist enterprise.

In 1947, Palestine was in a state of siege as the days of the British mandate drew to a close, and it became clear that Britain had no intention of implementing the Balfour Declaration of thirty years earlier, which had stated that London and His Majesty's government would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” A civil war was raging between Palestine's Arabs and Jews, and there were terrorist incidents by both Arab and Jewish guerrillas against the British forces. One of the Jewish guerrilla groups, the Haganah (“Defense”), had been organized by David Ben-Gurion, and contained men who had been trained by the British in commando tactics during the war for missions behind enemy lines. Now this British training was being used as the British had feared it would be—in raids and forays against British troops, to attack and blow up bridges, railroads, and radar installations. The Haganah had been formed completely illegally; nonetheless, it considered itself the “legitimate” Jewish army.

Less legitimate guerrilla contingents were the so-called Stern Gang, and Menachem Begin's violent Irgun Tzevai Leumi. Between 1943 and 1947, Begin's Irgun had waged relentless war against the British rule, and Begin had begun to be seen—and perhaps to see himself—as a kind of personification of Jewish bravery, stamina, and military ruthlessness, a Jewish Attila or Genghis Khan. Ben Hecht, wrote Mickey Cohen, had come to see him to ask his help in raising funds for Begin and the Irgun terrorists.

At the time, Cohen admitted, he had not been paying too much attention to international affairs or to what was going on in Palestine. But Cohen considered himself a good Jew, and when he met with Hecht—and when Hecht explained to him in dramatic terms the Irgun's aims and considerable successes—Cohen quickly became excited and volunteered his services to the Irgun's cause. The violent nature of the Irgun's activities obviously appealed to the gangster in Cohen. As he wrote, “This guy got me so goddamn excited. He started telling me how these guys actually fight like racket guys would. They didn't ask for a quarter and they gave no quarter. And I got pretty well enthused with them.”

Cohen could also understand why some of Hollywood's
higher-ups showed less enthusiasm over the possibility of an independent Israel. “Jewish people,” he wrote, “are very complacent, particularly when they become high in their society walk of life, high in their field of endeavor.” It was true. The more the Russians moved upward socially and economically, the more they seemed to think and behave like the Old Guard, anti-Zionist Germans. (Though even the Germans had a Zionist concept of sorts. While they dismissed the idea of a Jewish state as an unrealistic fantasy, and though a resolution had been passed by American Reform rabbis declaring themselves “unalterably” opposed to such an idea, they had characteristically added, “America is our Zion.”)

By the 1940s, more and more prosperous Russians were abandoning the Orthodoxy, and joining the Germans' “more American” Reform temples. Orthodoxy had become synonymous with poverty, with lack of progress—the party line that the Germans had adopted more than a generation earlier. The writer Doris Lilly has put this phenomenon another way: “When one has ten million dollars, one is no longer Jewish.” This de-Semitization process, noticeable in the acquisition of wealth and status, has also been described as the Law of Diminishing Concerns.

But Cohen still saw himself as a member of the fighting Jewish underclass, and promised Hecht that he himself would toss a fund-raising affair for the Irgun. This was held at Slapsie Maxie's restaurant in Hollywood, of which Cohen happened to own a share. As a matter of course, the major studio heads like Goldwyn and Mayer were invited but, as Cohen had guessed they would, they declined, though Cohen's lawyer did come to him with a message to the effect that Goldwyn and the others might be more receptive if Cohen would switch his allegiance to the more moderate, less terrorist Haganah. But Cohen would have none of that. As a result, the gathering at Slapsie Maxie's was not of the elite that had met at the Fox commissary six years earlier. But there was a respectable contingent of film stars, including Betty Grable and Harry James, along with every important gambler in the area, plus a number of prominent judges, for in Mickey Cohen's line of work it was important to have friends among the judiciary. (Though gambling was illegal in nearby Burbank, Lansky-run gambling parlors flourished openly, and no wonder—the Burbank sheriff's office,
the police department, and even some state officials in Sacramento shared in the take.) One judge, who was not even Jewish, came all the way from Galveston to deliver his personal check for five thousand dollars. Unlike the Fox affair, at this gathering no pledges were accepted—only cash. And unlike the Fox affair, Cohen's evening was a resounding success, with more than half a million dollars collected for the Irgun fighters before it was over.

Soon Mickey Cohen was spending so much time and energy on behalf of the Irgun and Israeli independence that he was having to curtail his regular activities. But that was all right with Meyer Lansky, who was also throwing his weight behind the Israeli cause. Lansky's bailiwick was the East Coast, and in particular the docks of New York and New Jersey, where he wielded more than a little power. With the war in Europe over, shiploads of military hardware—machine guns, grenades, mines, explosives, and other matériel—were arriving in East Coast harbors from the European theater of operations to be put into mothballs. Some of this equipment had seen action in the war, but much of it was brand-new and had never been used. There were machine guns that had never been assembled, and were still packed in oil and straw. Lansky, with his influence on the docks, had no trouble seeing to it that these shipments got diverted from their intended destinations and sent directly to the Israeli fighters. Helping him were Albert Anastasia, who was in charge of the New York docks, and Charlie “the Jew” Yulnowski, who handled New Jersey.

It was a remarkably streamlined operation. At one point, for example, a large shipment of dynamite was smoothly rerouted from Newark to Haifa. Then word came back from Palestine that the Jewish guerrillas were not using the dynamite properly. Mickey Cohen had a solution. He had a friend known simply as “Chopsie,” whose specialty was blowing up things. Chopsie was immediately dispatched to Palestine, where he spent eleven months giving lessons to the Israeli troops on the fine art of handling explosives.

Meyer Lansky learned through his grapevine of informants that, while scattered Israeli armies were battling Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip and in the Sinai, certain American armaments dealers were somehow managing to smuggle arms to Egypt. This was illegal, since there was an embargo against shipping
arms from anywhere in the United States to the Middle East, supposedly to be fair to all sides in the conflict. But the law wasn't working. In fact, the Arab states had succeeded in buying more than fourteen million dollars' worth of surplus American arms. The British were also selling arms to the Arabs, and making a lucrative business of it, and the Arabs were able to buy arms from other European countries as well.

To correct this situation, Lansky, as usual, took the law into his own hands. One munitions firm in Pittsburgh was found to be the chief smuggling culprit, and, with the cheerful help of the New York and New Jersey longshoremen, a number of baffling accidents began to happen to this firm's Egypt-bound consignments when they reached the East Coast ports. Some shipments fell overboard as they were being loaded. Others mysteriously vanished. Still others got loaded on the wrong ships, and somehow those ships were usually bound for Haifa.

Meanwhile, Mickey Cohen, who loved anything to do with a party, was in charge of American fund-raising, and was tossing more affairs in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Miami, traveling with Ben Hecht as his principal speaker.
*

But sometimes Cohen had to turn his attention to less festive matters. When, in one incident, three young Irgun guerrillas were killed by British soldiers and strung up in a public square in Palestine, Cohen decreed immediate vengeance. Contacting his Irgun friends, Cohen ordered that the same number of British officers be killed and hung in the same square. It was done.

Just how aware, in 1947, American Jews were of the role of organized crime in the fight for an independent Israel is unclear. Probably most were not aware. Those who were, numbed by reports of the Holocaust that were at last appearing in the American media, preferred to look the other way, or to take the attitude that the end justified the means. But Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen would always insist that all their activities of this period had the tacit blessing of President Harry S Truman. Truman, both men believed, had to have been aware of what was going on. Of course, he could not publicly condone or endorse it. But he sympathized with the Israeli cause. And,
by simply doing nothing, he managed to lend his silent support to both the Israeli fighters and the work of the American men who were already being called the Kosher Nostra. “To me, he was the greatest man in the world, Harry Truman,” Mickey Cohen wrote in his hard-boiled English, “because of what he done for Israel and because he made it available for us to do.”

When, on May 14, 1948, Israel officially became a nation, and Britain withdrew its troops, there was cause for great celebration in that part of the Middle East. After nearly two thousand years of statelessness and dispersion, and a half-century after the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland, the image of the Jews as a “rootless” group of “lost” tribes seemed erased from history forever. The preceding ten years had been the most tragic decade in Jewish history. On the continent of Europe, out of a Jewish population of 8,255,000, an estimated 5,957,000 had been murdered by the Nazis. Now those dark years were ending on a note of triumph. The price had been enormous, but now the score seemed to have been settled. The old arguments between Zionists and anti-Zionists seemed now to be both behind the times and beside the point. So did the endless discussions as to whether the Jews constituted a race, a religion, a nation, or a loosely defined “people.” They were now a
nationality
, and would carry passports to prove it.

Throughout the new country there were parties, dancing in the streets, the waving of flags and the tooting of automobile horns. One sabra—a Jewish native of Palestine—now living in America recalls the first long evening of revelry, which, for her and her young friends, ended up on a beach outside Tel Aviv while the sun came up over the Caesarean hills and lighted up the Mediterranean on what would be the first full day of the State of Israel. “We had been talking about our new country as though it was going to be a new paradise on earth,” she said later, “a kind of magical Land of Oz, a new Eden, where there would be peace and freedom and happiness for Jews forever. But then we began to pinch ourselves, and to remind each other that we had to face reality. We had to remember that now that we had a country of our own, it would be a country like any other, with all the problems any country faces. There would be Israeli heroes, yes, but there would also be Israeli burglars, Israeli rapists, Israeli muggers, Israeli pimps and Israeli
prostitutes, Israeli policemen to chase Israeli purse snatchers, and Israeli soldiers to fight, kill, and be killed in—probably more Israeli wars.…”

Meanwhile, from the new State of Israel, its first premier, David Ben-Gurion, was throwing open his nation's arms to Jews of all nationalities, urging, beseeching them to “return home” to Israel. To make the return easier, no bureaucratic paperwork was required. All who considered themselves Jews were welcome. But to most American Jews the idea of going “home” to Israel had little appeal. Home was not there, but here, and it was difficult to envision Israel except in a very abstract way.

There was also some confusion—a complicated panorama of mixed emotions. For the Jewish socialist movement, for example, the fact of Israel took much of the wind out of its sails. What was the point, now, in complaining about the unfairness of the American capitalist system? If the Jewish socialists were unhappy with the state of affairs in America, they now had their own country to go home to, where they could ply their political wares.

For the affluent, the emigration from Eastern Europe to the United States had turned out to be the most golden of all diasporas—and the luckiest. The journey from the tumbledown
shtetls
and ghettos of Russia and Poland to two-car garages and Saks Fifth Avenue charge accounts had been almost miraculously brief. Whose babushka-wearing grandmother, or even whose unlettered mother, would believe the sight of her offspring driving Cadillacs and walking poodles in Central Park? Dogs as
pets?
The idea would have been unthinkable just one generation earlier, when the dog had been the ferocious sidekick of the
pogromchik
. And yet it had happened. Somehow, the Eastern Europeans had arrived in America at the precise moment when their particular talents and energies—in the garment industry, the film industry, broadcasting, publishing, the liquor business—had been most needed. Success, for even the halfway enterprising, had been downright inevitable, and this seemed more wondrous than the creation, in another part of the world, of a state called Israel.