When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (7 page)

Rosenblum was perhaps more primed to ask these questions than others of his generation. He had recently gathered with a group of other young Jewish men in their early thirties, all professionals, doctors and scientists, who were groping toward a fuller understanding of Jewish history. They called themselves a social action committee but they were really a glorified reading group, meeting in the rec room of their small synagogue, Beth Israel, in a western suburb of Cleveland. Once they began exploring the role of American Jews in World War II, they became profoundly troubled.

They tore through
Perfidy,
an indictment of the Jewish leadership in Palestine during the war, written by Ben Hecht, the legendary playwright and screenwriter. Hecht was a fervent Jabotinskyite, and his book, published in 1961, was considered blasphemous. It centered on the story of Rudolf Kastner, a member of the pre-state Labor party Mapai, who had secretly negotiated with Adolf Eichmann over the fate of Hungarian Jewry. Hecht painted a picture of a Jewish establishment in moral collapse, unable to take a more aggressive, clear-sighted approach to the existential Nazi threat. His overwrought conclusion: "Everyone, Great Britain, the United States, and the leaders of world Jewry—traitors all! Murderers!"

The group followed
Perfidy
with "Bankrupt," a 1943 essay by Hayim Greenberg written half a year after the full scale of the genocide was made known in the West. Published in the pages of the
Yiddisher Kempfer,
the essay described the author's shock at the "epidemic inability to suffer or to feel compassion—that has seized upon the vast majority of American Jews and their institutions; in pathological fear of pain; in terrifying lack of imagination—a horny shell seems to have formed over the soul of American Jewry to protect and defend it against pain and pity."

What the men read sickened them. It stirred a bitter mix of guilt, shame, and anger. Whether American Jews deserved to take on this historical burden—the crisis of conscience that came with knowing they'd done very little while millions of their brethren were led to slaughter—is irrelevant. The point is that by the early 1960s, the seed of this feeling had taken root. And in the American Midwest, it found expression for the first time as an almost desperate need to help another community of European Jews who seemed to be facing, if not physical extinction, spiritual annihilation.

In the nearly twenty years that had passed since the war's end, American Jews had emerged as the most well-off of the three large communities of Jews in the world. While the identity of Soviet Jews was being stifled and Israelis were still engaged in existential battles, American Jews were thriving. The security that Communism had deceptively offered an earlier generation and that Zionism had yet to deliver could be found in the United States. It was both exhilarating and lulling. Even though the sense of ease and comfort could be disturbed—as it was for Lou Rosenblum—by the uncomfortable awareness of the Holocaust, the vast majority of Jews had remained oblivious. They were too busy becoming Americans. Until the emptiness of their Jewish identity itself became a motivating factor for action, this community held tight to America's promise, the chance to forget where they had come from and the cousins they had left behind.

By the early 1960s, American Jews represented something unique and unprecedented in American history: a minority group, only two generations removed from filthy, Lower East Side lives of impoverishment as garment workers and tenement dwellers, who had unequivocally and entirely made it. Multiple studies by local Jewish federations in the 1950s found that an overwhelming 75 to 96 percent of Jews held white-collar jobs. Compared with the American population overall, only 38 percent of whom were middle class, this represented a triumph. Even in New York City, the last enclave of poor Jews, two-thirds of the Jewish residents worked in professional or semiprofessional sectors. The factories where the grandfathers of Jewish doctors and lawyers had once toiled were now filled with blacks and Puerto Ricans.

With prosperity came social and geographic shifts. For one thing, as the fifties came to a close, the suburbanization of the American Jew was almost complete. Between 1948 and 1958, twelve million Americans left large cities and set down roots in suburbia, and many Jews were among them. In New York City, which had a Jewish population of two million in the late 1950s, geography told the story—the first generation, at the turn of the century, lived in the slums of the Lower East Side; the second generation in the lower-middle-class outskirts of Brooklyn and the Bronx; and the third in the firmly middle-middle-class neighborhoods of Queens, Long Island, and Westchester County. In 1923, only fifty thousand Jews lived in Queens, but by 1957 that number had increased to four hundred and fifty thousand. Similar self-imposed middle-class Jewish ghettos popped up outside other major cities: in Brookline, near Boston; Shaker Heights, near Cleveland; and Highland Park, near Chicago.

These new suburban Jews were comfortable in America. And not just because of affluence or the safe communities they created but because America seemed finally to accept and embrace them. They were normalized. They edged closer to being seen simply as "white people." The American Jewish Committee conducted a poll asking Gentiles if there were "any nationality, religious or racial groups" in the country that posed a threat to America. The results were unpublished but telling. In 1946, 18 percent of those polled named Jews as a threat. In 1954, that number was down to 1 percent. In the first decades after the war, laws against biased housing and hiring practices were established in most states. And even though few Jews worked as senior executives in big corporations or joined exclusive WASP country clubs, no measure of success seemed out of reach. Already in 1945 a Jewish girl from the Bronx, Bess Myerson, had become Miss America, and a Jewish boy from the Bronx, Hank Greenberg, had become a baseball superstar, hitting his famous ninth-inning grand-slam home run to win the American League pennant for his Detroit Tigers.

The Jewish community embraced the boundless optimism and strait-laced uniformity that characterized the postwar boom years in America. No one rocked the boat, certainly no one in this freshly integrated minority group. The darkest part of the collective Jewish conscience—the genocide of European Jewry—was rarely discussed, and even when it was it never challenged the feel-good ethos of the times. The Holocaust was Anne Frank. Her diary and the incredibly popular Broadway play that followed in 1955 (which won both a Pulitzer and a Tony), along with the movie in 1959, was as close as American society came to examining what had so recently happened to the Jews. Both the play and the film catered to the collective mood, downplaying Anne's Jewish identity as well as the horror that awaited her once the curtain fell. "We're not the only people who have had to suffer ... sometimes one race ... sometimes another," Anne tells us (in a line that was added to the play by the director, Garson Kanin, to avoid any appearance of "special pleading"). And of course, there is Anne's final line, so embraced at the time, that "in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." Partly because of the nature of the diary and partly because it was sanitized to fit audiences' tastes, Anne's story was never about Jewish suffering or even Jewish survival.

Indeed, the Holocaust as an event with historical and psychological implications for Jews was almost completely ignored during this period. Nathan Glazer, in his 1957
American Judaism,
wrote that the Holocaust "had had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry." The culture at large did not encourage examining this still open wound, and the Jewish community followed its lead. What happened during the war was seen as an offense against the free world.

What did animate the American Jewish community during this postwar period—from the 1950s through the early 1960s—was the issue of civil rights for blacks. The three major Jewish defense organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress, led the crusade for antidiscrimination laws. The liberalism of the Jewish community was, of course, a long-established fact, going back at least to the turn of the twentieth century with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European socialists. And famously, not even their growing affluence altered this political inclination. In 1960, for the first time, Jewish liberalism proved a major factor in the presidential election. The 82 percent of the Jewish vote that John F. Kennedy received was instrumental in his microscopic margin of victory over Richard Nixon (Kennedy, meeting with David Ben-Gurion a few months after he took office, startled Israel's prime minister when he said, "You know, I was elected by the Jews of New York and I would like to do something for the Jewish people").

But the fight for civil rights went above and beyond this seemingly genetic liberalism. There was of course an element of enlightened self-preservation—as late as the fall of 1958, one of the oldest and most prosperous synagogues in Atlanta was bombed by the same Ku Klux Klanners who were terrorizing southern blacks. An America that was safe for all minorities served the Jews' interests. But even this doesn't explain the devotion of those who helped fund breakthrough civil rights protest groups like the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; the commitment of Jewish lawyers who made up more than half the attorneys fighting for civil rights in the South; and the support of rabbis and Jewish students who joined sit-ins and marches in disproportionate numbers. The tragic apogee of this involvement came during the summer of 1964, the Freedom Summer, as it was called. More than half the young northerners who descended on the South to help blacks register to vote in the face of a violently opposed white population were Jews. The disappearance of three of these volunteers—two New York Jews, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, along with their black colleague James Chaney—caused national alarm. When their brutalized bodies were discovered in a shallow grave outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, it seemed tangible proof that Jews and blacks shared a common American fate.

Jews needed the civil rights movement because it gave them a new raison d'être. By the early sixties, they had found acceptance in American society. The majority of Jews had drifted far away from religion, with synagogues in those newly gilded suburbs resembling community centers more than sources of spirituality or identity—shuls with pools. The nascent Israel, which might have provided a natural glue for the community, was still viewed as an experiment, one that demanded respect but that had yet to inspire widespread love. Civil rights gave Jews purpose.

Even the Holocaust—in its Anne Frank version—was recruited for the black cause. The black experience of intolerance became an extension of the Jewish experience of intolerance, providing a kind of organic justification for the Jewish role in the movement. No one articulated this better than Joachim Prinz, a Conservative rabbi from New Jersey and then president of the American Jewish Congress. From the same podium where minutes later Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech, Prinz addressed the August 28, 1963, March on Washington with these words:

From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say: Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe. Our modern history begins with a proclamation of emancipation.

It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.

But despite all this success, something had fallen out of the center of Jewish identity, squeezed out by the American embrace and the single-minded devotion to freedom for blacks. There was increasingly very little Jewish about being a Jew. There was no passion about preserving a separate and unique identity, no care for spiritual or communal continuity. Very few thinkers at the time acknowledged this. Most did not see the hollowness. Those rare conservative Jewish critics who did gave voice to their concerns in the pages of intellectual journals like
Commentary
and
Jewish Frontier.
To them, watching Jewish leaders devote all their organizations' resources and energies to helping blacks while leaving Jewish education underfunded was infuriating. Seeing young Jewish college students clasp hands in the streets and sing "We Shall Overcome" while not knowing a single Jewish prayer seemed to be a disaster waiting to happen. Milton Himmelfarb, a leading sociographer of American Jews and a brilliant phrase turner (it was his observation that "Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans"), wrote in
Commentary
in 1960 that he was not sure if the American Jewish Congress was "a Jewish organization with a civil-rights program or a civil-rights organization whose members are Jews." About its membership, he lamented that they "have strong proud-to-be-a-Jew feelings, but the feelings are without content and in fact are more attached to civil rights rhetoric than to Jewish religion, education or culture—rhetoric, because in the lives they lead they are not different from the rest of the Jewish middle class."

This was a patently conservative critique arguing that the values of these middle-class American Jews actually worked against their own interests, against Jewish continuity and internal cohesion. In the eyes of the critics, this liberal worldview would tear apart, piece by piece, the foundations that girded traditional society. This creative destruction was everywhere, from the explosion of literary form that was the Beat poets to the introduction of the birth control pill to the quagmire in Vietnam and the ensuing mistrust of all government. But for American Jews, these upheavals came at the same time that they were losing the one element that had always helped to bind Jewish identity in the Diaspora: otherness. With the absence of persecution—the forced apartness of the ghetto no longer an issue—the young Jew coming of age in those years of tumult and transition grew more and more alienated from his own background.