At the Crossroads

It is true that we are at the cross-roads. We will either as a people tread the way of the auto-emancipation and cooperate with liberals and Christians toward the creation of the pluralist and pacifist state or be plunged for ages into chaos. But there is another and a false dilemma being placed before the Jewish people. For this second choice I deliberately use the shabby word dilemma, since it is indeed a choice having two murderous horns on either of which we are doomed to be gored to death. Crudely and briefly, that false dilemma runs thus: To escape Fascism we must embrace Communism.

The proposing of this dilemma and of this choice is defeatist and therefore un-Jewish; it is un-historical and an act of treachery against civilization itself and therefore un-Jewish; it is Jewish only in the low and grovelling sense that under Fascism we lose the body but may save the soul while under Communism we can save our skins but must sell out completely to a red assimilation. God knows that I, too, have literally passed sleepless nights of fever agonized over the fate of our people in Germany and in Poland and I am glad that the famine-stricken people, a few thousands at least, can go from Poland to Biro-Bidjan. Living Jews are better than dead Jews.

Where there is no hope, none at all, not of naked life, even a desperate remedy is a remedy. But it is inexcusable, it is an act of the most sordid treachery to the Jewish people, to America, to such hopes of a humane civilization as America still holds out, to propose that dilemma to the Jews and to the Jewish youth of America. (Once and for all let us nail to the door-post of history the lie that Marxian dialectic materialism and the society built according to it have anything to do with the innate prophetic radicalism of the Jewish people.

Our radicalism means peace within society and between societies; it means the widest flexibility and tolerance; it means justice in the form of a tireless understanding and mercy to all men as men, as sons of Adam.

What has the dark and rigid fundamentalist tyranny of the Soviets, with its proscriptions and “liquidations,” its brutal heresy-hunts, its complete annihilation of all the expressive forces of man to do with prophetic radicalism? We have not been brought so low in America that we must sell out Isaiah for a Soviet bread-card.

I Am moved to make these observations by an article in the January number of Harper’s Magazine called “Jews at the Crossroads” by William Zuckerman. The article is ably and carefully calculated to arouse Fascist anti-Semitism; it “saves face” before the Gentile world by a single kindly paragraph about “simple Jewish folk”; it re-stamps into the Gentile consciousness every subtle and deadly misunderstanding concerning the Jewish people and then proceeds to announce that the Jewish people is about to make common cause with those who would not only—that would be a bagatelle—substitute a cooperative for a competitive economy, but who would tear up by its very roots that historical civilization with all its values which still exists among us and for the defense of which thousands of pacifists and liberals and friends of mankind, both Christian and Jew. are dying in Italy and Germany and Poland and Russia. (I have been told that it is part of Communist tactics to hasten the coming of Fascism in order that the foretold subsequent dictatorship of the proletariat may also be hastened.)

Mr. Zuckerman sticks pretty closely to the common slanders. There is anti-Semitism in Poland because the Jews cling closely to their religion and their folk-ways; he admits the servile character of ultra-assimilationism but concludes that even in New York, London and Paris assimilationism hasn’t gone far enough. We still live within “invisible Ghetto walls.” (This after admitting to what extent the assimilationist will sell out. Who, then, keeps these invisible Ghetto walls in repair?) In italics he places the whole onus on us: We, we have broken the “natural laws of normal social relationship.”

That accounts, I suppose, for the cry: Juden raus! and for quotas in educational institutions and for the whole net-work of social and economic exclusion. We have caused it. But that is not all. According to Mr. Zuckerman we have invented and are responsible for Fascist “racism” because as a people we have opposed inter-marriage. He is, of course, perfectly aware of the entirely different kinds of motives which have caused that policy. If he is capable of this conscious perversion he will next begin to talk of a Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Last comes the saltus mortale which negates flatly all his previous arguments and substitutes a new fallacy for the old: “Anti-Semitism is but a form of economic unrest.”

But we thought it was caused by a separatism and by our breaking the laws of “normal social relationship”? When both Jews and Christians were slaughtered for not worshiping the busts of the deified emperors of Rome, was that also a form of economic unrest?

Our enemy in America today is less Pelley and fellows of his kidney than the Communist saboteurs who confirm the wrong suspicions of higher types and inflame the yokels’ passion for demonology.