The Other New York Jewish Intellectuals

Carole S Kessner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780814763575
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Irving Howe. Saul Bellow. Lionel Trilling. These are names that immediately come to mind when one thinks of the New York Jewish intellectuals of the late thirties and forties.

And yet the New York Jewish intellectual community was far larger and more diverse than is commonly thought. In The Other New York Jewish Intellectuals we find a group of thinkers who may not have had widespread celebrity status but who fostered a real sense of community within the Jewish world in these troubled times. What unified these men and women was their commitment and allegiance to the Jewish people.

Here we find Hayim Greenberg, Henry Hurwitz, Marie Syrkin, Maurice Samuel, Ben Halperin, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Morris Raphael Cohen, Ludwig Lewisohn, Milton Steinberg, Will Herberg, A. M. Klein, and Mordecai Kaplan, and many others. Divided into 3 sections--Opinion Makers, Men of Letters, and Spiritual Leaders--the book will be of particular interest to students and others interested in Jewish studies, American intellectual history, as well as history of the 30s and 40s.

PART ONE
Opinion Makers

CHAPTER 1
Hayim Greenberg, Jewish Intellectual

Robert M. Seltzer

If an intellectual is a person who lives in the world of ideas, Hayim Greenberg represents the twentieth-century intellectual most at home in Jewish ideas. Caught up in the world of action, Greenberg thought about the destiny of the Jews, about Judaism in history, about the spiritual element in human life, and spoke and wrote of these ideas all his life. Like many intellectuals, he had liberated himself early on from the constraints of tradition. But he drew on the inner resources of having been raised in a coherent world so that there was no agonizing crisis to overcome a chaotic lack of identity, no periodic reinvention of himself to accommodate changing ideological fashions, no torrent of self-revelation to drown out uncertainty and doubt. Like other progressive Jewish intellectuals of his time, he had rejected formal religious observance and orthodox belief. Unlike the “non-Jewish Jews,” however, Labor Zionism provided him with a framework to direct his energies in behalf of his people in decades of crisis and, at the same time, this commitment enabled him to think about fundamentals freely without being the stereotypical “free-thinker” of his generation.¹

There were several waves of Jewish writers, artists, editors, and scholars after 1900 who settled in New York to comprise the “New York Jewish Intellectuals” in the broad sense. Hayim Greenberg belonged to a cohort born and raised in Eastern Europe before the Russian Revolution, at a moment when Russian and Jewish socialism and their non-Jewish equivalents provided an almost messianic sense of immanent transformation. The chains of exploitation and oppression were to be sundered, once and for all, and a great leap forward to the perfection of humankind taken very soon, after the next and decisive battle against the forces of darkness. In the Bund and Zionism this redemptive dream was attached to a Jewish self-discovery that involved a more complex relation to Judaism than merely marching alongside the burgeoning revolutionary parties of late Tsarist Russia. More insistently nonreligious than Western Jews (in this they imitated their non-Jewish contemporaries), Greenberg’s Russian-Jewish intelligentsia was far better acquainted with the world of traditional Judaism than were the Western Jewish intellectuals of those decades and more deeply rooted in the Yiddish language and literature and in modern Hebrew culture. The result was an idealism with a tone distinctively its own, at once cosmopolitan and ethnic, universalist and particular.

Forced to grapple with the seemingly endless emergencies of the interwar years, Greenberg was both a defender of his besieged people and of absolute ethical standards. Apart from an unshakable belief in the urgency of the Zionist project, Greenberg upheld until the end of the thirties a dogmatic pacifism like that advocated by Mohandas K. Gandhi, the world-renowned Indian nationalist and spiritual leader. While Greenberg was critical—sometimes devastatingly so—of Jewish attitudes and behaviors, there was no ambivalence about his Jewishness; he balanced ahavat Yisrael, love of the Jewish people, with a love of truth and fairness to all. To be sure, there were paradoxes in his life. He devoted his energies and intellect to Zionism during its decades of pioneering fervor, but lived in the Diaspora and loved the land of Russia and the idea of America as much as Eretz Yisrael. A secular Jew, he was troubled by the spiritual vacuum at the heart of modern secularism. A scintillating conversationalist, polished lecturer, and disciplined journalist, he was an intensely private person. Zalman Shazar characterized his reserve: “A certain refined solitude kept him apart and even when he was going with the stream, even when he was at the helm, many had the irrepressible feeling that he was somehow apart and alone.”² Writing not of himself but unconsciously revealing his own needs, Greenberg refers to “the consoling melancholy of aloneness and self-confrontation.”³ A distinguished public figure and an adroit diplomat (gregarious callings indeed), Greenberg was philosophical, reclusive, and drawn to the meditative way.

Marie Syrkin observed that many of the most perfect and touching of his reflections and anecdotes “share only the eternity of their hearers.”⁴ Greenberg’s literary output represents a fragment of what he created in moments of conversation. Shaping a reminiscence or a fleeting observation into a finished artistic product, he had that rare ability to translate the vagaries of life into symbols of the human condition. Greenberg the story-teller is represented by the “sketches” included in both volumes of the Inner Eye, each episode revealing its own pungent, fresh, ironic meaning: a chance encounter with a Panamanian Indian, a conversation in a Tsarist prison, a stay with inhospitable Karaites in the Crimea, and so forth. A Greek restaurant owner in Atlantic City wonders what will become of his children, detached from their own roots in the corrosive American melting pot. A proud Russian derelict in Washington Square will not deign to accept a cigarette from a Jew, but an Italian lad is more than grateful for the largesse, to the disapproval of a severe nun standing nearby. An “Assyrian” exile from Iraq asks Greenberg if a small piece of land could be set aside in Israel for his persecuted Christian people. And so on.

Greenberg the editor had to expend much of his literary energies on the immediate events of the day, but, a cultivated man of letters, he preferred where possible to develop his subject in the broad historical and ethical perspective, even sub specie aeternitatis. Growing up in a generation dominated by positivism and philosophical materialism, Greenberg knew from his study of literature and theology that these ideologies, together with the anti-ideological vulgarity and materialism of American society, produced an impoverishment of the Jewish soul. Greenberg was susceptible to the lure of transcendence. Moving from Russian to Yiddish to Hebrew to English with fluency and ease, he brought a distinctive type of modern Jewish intellectuality that was at once of the Old and New Worlds to New York Jewry, in what may eventually be seen as its golden age.

Born in the small Bessarabian town of Todoristi in 1889, Greenberg found in the Zionist movement an outlet for his considerable promise early in life. Already at the age of fifteen he was a correspondent at the 1904 Zionist Congress at Helsinki and a sought-after speaker at underground meetings. Zalman Shazar remarked that it was a time when “lecturers” played a unique and powerful role in East European Jewish life: “The lecture halls became spiritual laboratories where the dominant ideas of the time were forged. The law was laid down and defined orally by such masters as Borochov, Syrkin, Jabotinsky, Zhitlovsky, and others who wandered from one city to another and from meeting to meeting.”⁵ When Greenberg moved to Odessa in 1910, he was noticed in a community famous for its modern Jewish nationalists, Hebrew and Yiddish writers, and cosmopolitan style. He spent the First World War in Moscow on the editorial staff of the Russian-language Jewish periodical Raszvet. After the Revolution he was briefly instructor in medieval Jewish literature and Greek drama at the University of Kharkov and then taught at the Kiev Academy. Arrested several times by the Communist authorities for illegal Zionist activities (he protested the government’s suppression of Hebrew-language education and tried to rally support for Habimah, the Hebrew theater of Moscow),⁶ Greenberg was finally permitted to leave the Soviet Union along with a group of Russian-Jewish writers and scholars in 1921. Like many of these emigrés, he was a Social Democrat (the Mensheviks were one of the first parties to be repressed by the Bolsheviks after their takeover of November 1917, along with the Bund and the Zionists). Drawing on first-hand experience, he warned readers in the twenties and thirties of the repression of individual liberties by the Soviet dictatorship and the fundamental immorality of Communist tactics that justified any behavior, however brutal, by genuflecting to the eventual achievement of socialism.

During his three years in Berlin, Greenberg served as editor of Haolam, the weekly of the World Zionist Organization, and of Atidenu, a Zionist monthly. In 1924 he came to New York. At first he edited Farn Folk (For the People), the organ of the Zeire Zion movement. When the Zeire Zion merged with the Poalei Zion in 1932, Greenberg was made editor-in-chief of the Poalei Zion biweekly (later weekly) Der Yidisher Kempfer (the Jewish Militant), the outstanding Yiddish journal of its day on political and social themes. In 1934 he became editor-in-chief of the Labor Zionist monthly The Jewish Frontier and a member of the Central Committee of the Labor Zionist Organization of America. In the thirties and forties, Greenberg came to be regarded as one of the most distinguished guides of a Jewish public highly sympathetic to the ideals of Labor Zionism at a time when this movement attracted a whole panoply of outstanding leaders and spokespeople.

During World War II Greenberg served as head of the American Zionist Emergency Council; later he also became a member of the American branch of the Jewish Agency executive and director of its Department of Education and Culture. At the United Nations in 1947, he played an influential role in winning support for Israel from Latin American delegations and among Asian intellectuals. He died in New York in 1953.

Emblematic of the Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and English sources of his style were the instructions Greenberg left for his funeral. There were to be no speeches, only a psalm or two (“103, 23, 42”), chapter 28 of Job in praise of wisdom (to be read in the original, in Yiddish, or in English), a song dear to his wife and him in their youth which had as its text the Russian poet Lermontov’s “I Go Out Alone Upon the Road,” and, possibly, Chopin’s Funeral March. His last will and testament concludes with a statement that could have been in a Hebrew ethical will that medieval Jews left for families and friends:

There are a number of men and women who brought the light of their souls into my life. To each of them I send my deep blessing. There are also no doubt men and women whom I hurt and to whom I caused sorrow. Of them I ask forgiveness. I sinned not out of love of sin; I was guilty out of weakness and I did wrong without intent to do so.⁷

All his life, Greenberg called himself a socialist. To be a socialist was for many of his generation to believe that democracy be enlarged to its full meaning, to express sympathy for the working class, to seek fundamental reforms in a society that seemed to be permanently polarized between the rich and the poor, the owners of property and the exploited, the rulers and the oppressed. (Writing in 1935 of Marx’s thesis that “the friction of class interests in the course of centuries generated the heat needed to turn the wheels of history,” Greenberg remarked: “Everyone concedes the validity of the idea.”)⁸ Yet he devoted some of his sharpest polemics to attacks on the ideological basis of Marxist socialism, seeing in “Marxian philosophy” a false messianism that was a terrible simplification closed off from the subtleties and complexities of reality. Marxism “represents the naiveté of the human race scientifically decked out.”⁹ Marx’s atheism was not an act of courage but a dogmatic optimism that denied everything that Marx could not subsume into his system, in contrast to Nietzsche’s braver atheistic despair affirming the tragic individual despite everything. While the Marxists denied the earlier religious precedents of the socialist impulse—Greenberg himself observed that none of the ancient atheists were socialists¹⁰—they allowed the movement to take on the distorted character of a secular religion: “You are not only atheists, but you have also accepted the “atheistic faith.” You have become a church, created a dogma, and established a Vatican.¹¹

In a 1936 essay in the form of a letter to a “Communist friend” who called on Greenberg to return to Russia to help build socialism in the USSR, Greenberg accuses the Soviet system of having done evil in the name of good:

For almost twenty years you have been conducting a system of physical and moral terror for the sake of human happiness; you have been employing the unholy to achieve the holy. Is it so hard to understand that darkness is not the road to light, that dictatorship and paternalism are not the paths to freedom and independence, that terror is no express train to the golden age? Ends and means in politics are analogous to form and content in art. Form in art is not merely technique; means in politics are not merely instruments. The content must be felt in the form. The means must contain the basic elements of the end. When this minimal harmony between ends and means is lacking, we ...