Over years of writing and blogging, I’ve been refining this message that I take from a holiday that I love. Other bloggers here have also provided their insights, but I like mine for its relative brevity:

History is of necessity an interpretive process, and these interpretations often spawn self-serving myths. National myths are not usually complete fabrications, but they tend to romanticize and sanitize real events.

The traditional Hanukkah story is a source of pride for the Jewish people. We are taught that a small army of freedom fighters, the Maccabees, led by the heroic priestly family of Mattathias and his seven sons, successfully resisted the cruel pagan tyranny of the ancient Greco-Syrian Seleucid dynasty. This is not untrue, but it’s only part of the story. We are usually not taught the far more complex reality that the Maccabean war of liberation was also a civil war between rural “fundamentalist” religious adherents of the old order and the more educated and cosmopolitan Hellenized Jews of the city, who voluntarily and eagerly embraced the Greek culture of the Syrian empire. The Maccabees surely killed many of these “liberal” Jews in their struggle.

Alvin Rosenfeld, an Indiana University professor of English and Jewish Studies, engaged in dialogue at the NY Museum of Jewish Heritage, Dec. 14, with David Harris, director of the American Jewish Committee, on his new book, The End of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2011). Prof. Rosenfeld had achieved a measure of notoriety with an essay published by the AJC in 2006, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Antisemitism.” The controversy that followed is admirably summarized in this Wikipedia article.

You also might wish to read “Shotgun Blast,” an analysis of this essay in The American Prospect magazine by Gershom Gorenberg. He praised Rosenfeld’s idea, but criticized his “sloppiness”:

…. While attacking vituperative opponents of Israel who call themselves “progressive,” he identifies their views with all who call themselves progressives – rather like letting James Dobson define what “Christian” means. He fires the shotgun of his criticism at such a wide flock of writers that his reader can wonder where he is aiming. Does The Washington Post’s pro-Israel columnist Richard Cohen really belong to the same ideological species as those who accuse Israel of genocide? [Cohen apparently went overboard in one column, cited by Rosenfeld, when he characterized Israel's creation as a "mistake"; in another column published not long after Rosenfeld's essay came out, Cohen complains (in much the same way that Rosenfeld would) about the left's outsized focus upon Israel, while often giving far worse human rights offenders (like China, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran) a bye.--R.S.]
The blurriness is a shame, because Rosenfeld has a legitimate argument. … his intended target is those Jews who reject the very existence of a Jewish state, and who express their opposition in shrieks that rise to equating Israel with the Nazis.

Another excellent critique was written by Andrew Sillow-Carroll, editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, in an editorial that I reproduced on the Meretz USA Blog. Since I share Rosenfeld’s concern for the more outlandish and unfair arguments against Israel that characterize too much of the left, and occasionally seep into mainstream liberal discourse, my response was rather mild.

Judging from this public appearance, Rosenfeld (as in the AJC essay) engages in overkill in his new book. He’s

Ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich (Reason.com)

With characteristic boldness, the G.O.P. front-runner du jour, Newt Gingrich, asserts that the Palestinians are “an invented people.” This was a telling moment at the pander fest that was the Republican Jewish Coalition’s candidates’ forum. Having carefully not invited Rep. Ron Paul, the RJC insured that it would be no less. From the little that I saw of it, only Jon Huntsman (albeit warm toward his audience) seems not to have gone overboard in this mode.

Although Gingrich’s comment, according to the JTA account, drew “rebukes” from some of his rivals, these were not anything like the points I’ll raise here. First off, all nations are “invented” in their formative stage. Whether due to geography, history, language, culture or religion, they obtain a level of self-consciousness as a distinct people and generally press their claim in some organized way. As the well-known Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi indicated in Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), “National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given….”

Arab-Palestinian identity was largely a reaction to the Zionist movement reestablishing Jewish nationhood in Palestine, the ancient birthplace of the Jewish people, as recorded in the Bible and remembered reverentially in the Jewish religion for two millennia. Just as Palestinian nationalism was born of the Arab struggle against the Jews in the early to mid 20th century, the Jewish national rebirth occurred in Palestine, with Jewish identity made over from what was primarily (but not only) a religious heritage — because of the tragic experience of Jews as a frequently reviled and downtrodden minority in Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East.

Bergson in 1940s & '70s (VarianFry.org)

Over this past weekend, the NY Jewish Week posted my article on a film and filmmaker dealing with the Holocaust-era controversy of the “Bergson Group” and whether American Jews were too passive. My article begins with a discussion of filmmaker Pierre Sauvage’s background as a child survivor in France and how pre-State Zionist divisions and the politics of that time (and ours) enter into the controversy, including a word from J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami. In a meeting with Sauvage, he told me that he is not right-wing and doesn’t understand why his sympathetic treatment of Bergson’s work would lead people to think this.

Yet this confusion surely arises because Peter Bergson (the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook), and his comrades from Palestine, were members of the right-wing Zionist underground, the Irgun. Together they worked tirelessly and ingeniously to rally a mass movement of American Jews to pressure the Roosevelt Administration to engage in meaningful rescue efforts for the trapped Jews of Europe. Jeremy Ben-Ami’s father, also an Irgunist, was one of Bergson’s core associates; his son writes of this in an afterword of the recent posthumously published memoir by another of Bergson’s close colleagues, Samuel Merlin (Millions of Jews to Rescue, published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies). Paradoxically, Ben-Ami points out that most Americans recruited into the Bergson Group– such as Ben Hecht, Stella Adler and Max Lerner– were liberals, whose efforts were augmented by varying degrees of support from such leftists as Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson.

It would be a very bad idea for either Israel or the US to attack Iran; today’s NY Times op-ed article by Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, a Norwegian security expert, reinforces this conclusion. But an article in Salon by Gary Kamiya, “The Boys Who Cry ‘Holocaust’,” conveys a wrong-headed notion that the crisis about Iran’s nuclear program is Israel’s fault. Yes, Netanyahu and the neocon hawks need to be countered, but not like this, in a way that removes all responsibility from Iran.

Jeffrey Goldberg (a liberal, not a neocon) is absolutely correct in this statement, quoted by Kamiya only to dismiss it:

I may be an outlier as a blogger on this site for fully supporting the NATO military campaign to oust Qaddafi. I was gratified that French aircraft stopped his forces cold as they closed in on Benghazi less than two months into the revolution. They would undoubtedly have exacted a terrible toll in death and suffering if they had been allowed to prevail and exact their revenge on the rebel capital.

Grafitti depicting Qaddafi as a Jew (for some reason, his head doesn't reproduce here).

NATO’s ability to help the rebels overthrow this dictator, without sending in an army on the ground, was a triumph for collective action in a humanitarian cause. It also may have inaugurated a new “Obama Doctrine,” which emphasizes some important principles: that the United States lends its military might in a collective effort (in this case, even taking a back seat to France, Britain and other allies) in a limited way, with the support of an international consensus, as expressed in this instance by the United Nations Security Council; the U.S. and its allies need to be aware of their limitations and cannot intervene everywhere. These are all points that would distinguish an Obama Doctrine from the hubristic and reckless overreach of George W. Bush, and make what happened very different from our tragic misadventure in Iraq.

It is very clearly the responsibility of the Libyans, who shed their blood in a revolution of their own making, to shape their destiny. Evidently, Qaddafi helped foster antisemitism so deeply within his country that Libyans are now reviling him as a “Jew,” playing up the rumor that his mother was Jewish. While this manifestation of bigotry is bad enough in itself, a freelance reporter for The Jewish Daily Forward reflects upon his recent visit to the new Libya that this marks an inability of most Libyans to admit that Qaddafi’s decades of misrule and tyranny were a product of their society, not a foreign import. Here are some highlights of Andrew Engel’s article:

…. During the course of my six days hopscotching over the 1,000-mile-wide country, I had the opportunity to listen to scores of Libyans express themselves freely for the first time in 42 years…. What I found, unfortunately, along with freedom of expression, was a virulent and ubiquitous anti-Semitism that looks likely to outlast the ruler who promoted it.

Photos by Hillel Schenker

The following is an eyewitness report by Hillel Schenker, an Israeli journalist and veteran peace activist who combines both of these pursuits in his current role as co-editor of The Palestine-Israel Journal:

50,000 rally to remember Rabin

No matter what, I planned to go to the 16^th annual memorial rally in memory of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Just as I have for the past 15 years. Just as I did on that fateful Saturday night, November 4^th, 1995, when I went to the mass rally For Peace and Against Violence that was organized to counteract the slander campaign being carried out against the Prime Minister. It was at the end of that rally that Rabin was shot three times by Jewish terrorist Yigal Amir.

….

Mahmoud Abbas

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has just made a significant stride toward reaching out for peace with Israel. As reported in thisHa’aretz newspaper column by Carlo Strenger (“Mahmoud Abbas’ crucial message to Israel”), and almost as if he’s directly responding to the columnist’s recent appeal for such an effort, Pres. Abbas has owned up to some important historical truths in an interview aired both on Israeli and Palestinian television. This is the core of Strenger’s new piece:

Joseph Stalin

[This is my third and final installment (applause?) on two recent programs at the YIVO Jewish research center in New York. Click here for its beginning, and here for Part 2.]

Steven T. Usdin, a science writer and science policy editor, related the rather amusing story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, about whom he’s written in Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley (Yale University Press, 2005). Barr had become a Communist because of his family’s experience of being evicted during the Depression and his agreement with the CP’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, that the country was run by “bloody plutocrats.” Like Julius Rosenberg and others, he was inculcated in his Communist convictions as a student at the City College of New York; he and Sarant became part of the Rosenberg spy ring.

Joel Barr with Alfred Sarant

Both fled to the Iron Curtain after Rosenberg’s brother-in-law, David Greenglass, was arrested in 1950. They led adventurous and lucky lives, narrowly escaping arrest in the West and avoiding being purged in Prague and Moscow. Barr in particular was highly successful in romancing women. And at one point, the ‘Keystone Kops’ aspect of their story returned to American shores when they got their U.S. passports and Social Security numbers reinstated simply by asking.

During the 1960s, they created a micro-processing laboratory complex in the Soviet Union. Barr had “tens of thousands of scientists” reporting to him. Following Nikita Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964, they were assigned to a lab in Leningrad, working on torpedo technology. Their innovations are still in use by navies of successor states of the former Soviet Union, and the navies of Iran and India.

Hitler vs. Stalin

[Click here for part 1.] The closing panel featured fascinating portraits of individual spies. It began with historian and journalist Allen Hornblum (a former executive director of Americans for Democratic Action), the author of The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb (Yale University Press). A chemist, Gold was an industrial and military spy from 1935 until 1950; most importantly, he was the courier to Soviet agents of atomic secrets stolen from the Manhattan Project by physicist Klaus Fuchs.

Joseph Stalin

But Gold also is regarded by all who came to know him (including FBI agents and fellow inmates in Federal prison) as a complete altruist, a loveable and humane person. What drove him were the best of intentions: a concern about the rising power of Nazi Germany and a perception of the USSR as a progressive bulwark against this threat. Hornblum sees similar motives in Klaus Fuchs.

Next came David Evanier, the author of a novel on the Rosenbergs who is now writing a biography of Morton Sobell, convicted along with the Rosenbergs in 1951 and having served 18 years in Federal prisons. Evanier contends that the Communist left was blind to Soviet crimes, while the right tended to be blind to the suffering of African Americans and the dangers of fascism.

Sobell came from a Communist family and apparently held onto his loyalty to the USSR far longer than reasonable, but now is deeply disillusioned. The writer extrapolates from this that American Communists were not callous apologists for totalitarians, but rather that they held onto a naive faith.

Joseph Stalin

Most people on the left have some grasp of the odious nature of Stalinism and the fact that Communists — however sincere they were in opposing racism, militarism and the excesses of capitalism — served false gods in Moscow. With archival evidence uncovered after the downfall of the Soviet bloc, little doubt remains on the Kremlin’s role in utilizing Communist Party members as spies in the United States. Most Party members had nothing to do with espionage, but a small secret cadre did. That being said, there is such a thing as “reactionary anti-Communism” — using an exaggerated fear of Communism to oppose progressive reform.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the famed research center on Yiddish culture and Eastern European Jewry — originally established in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) but long centered in New York — hosted two programs in the past month that eagerly drew me in. One was a half-day conference on “American Jews and Soviet Espionage” (Sept. 20), and the other a lecture by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder on his book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, about the Eastern European territories which Hitler and Stalin rendered into great killing grounds in the 1930s and ’40s (Oct. 2).

The first program was a kind of reunion for YIVO’s executive director Jonathan Brent, who in his former post at Yale University Press as editorial director of “The Annals of Communism” series, had worked with some of the presenters. Dr. Brent opened the conference with a poignant talk on how Soviet Jews were sucked into spying on each other for a regime that had it in for them anyway. But first, unique for its time, Lenin’s reign had outlawed anti-Semitism and fostered a flowering of secular Yiddish culture. Many leading Bolsheviks– including one head of the secret police– were Jews, and other Politburo figures were married to Jews.

But after Lenin died, it was unhealthy to be a close comrade of his successor, Joseph Stalin. “In this world, nobody is innocent,” Brent explained. The most prominent Jewish literary figures of their time were executed on trumped-up charges. (Brent is the author of Stalin’s Last Crime — HarperCollins, 2003 — about Stalin’s apparent plan for a massive purge and deportation of Soviet Jews, just before his death in 1953.)

Roosevelt Monument, Washington, D.C.

I struggled with how to entitle this piece. If we ask whether Franklin D. Roosevelt was influenced by anti-Semitism, the answer has to be “yes,” as the evidence is incontrovertible that this eminently talented political leader was sensitive to the prevailing winds of American public opinion — heavily biased against Jews until the horrors of Nazism became fully known. (It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that the quota bars to higher education and professional achievement, and the restrictive covenants in housing and at hotels & resorts were ended.) Alas, there is also evidence that Roosevelt shared, at least somewhat, the prevailing prejudices of his time.

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies held its ninth annual conference last month, Sept. 18, at Fordham University in Manhattan, on the theme of “While Six Million Lived: America and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1939.” This title is a play on While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, a searing book by Arthur D. Morse, first published in 1968.

The Institute is named for David S. Wyman, a historian who has dedicated his career to documenting the Nazi-era reactions and under-reactions of American Jews and the Roosevelt administration regarding the rescue of Jews. Wyman himself, showing signs of age at 82 but still very much alive, participated in the conference.

The Institute’s director, Dr. Rafael Medoff, co-author with Prof. Wyman of A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (New Press), led off with a lecture revealing that FDR apparently had some racist and anti-Semitic sentiments. But what is most damning is the failure of United States policies. As Dr. Medoff indicated, the very least that FDR could have done for the Jews was to order his State Department to fill the quota of legal immigration from Germany, as established by Congress after limitations were imposed in 1924. Instead, immigration policy was set by a political appointee, Breckenridge Long, who ordered U.S. consular officials to delay and obstruct Jewish visa applicants as much as possible. (I’ve written on how this policy almost cost my parents their lives early in 1941.) Approximately 190,000 slots from Germany and endangered or occupied European countries went unfilled.

Two years ago, Shlomo Sand, an Israeli professor of European history at Tel Aviv University, came to New York to promote the English-language edition of his book, “The Invention of the Jewish People” (Verso Press). I found his arguments infuriating. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in a serious study on the origins of the Jewish people, whether looking at this subject historically or even genetically, but I felt that Prof. Sand was making a totally tendentious case for ideological reasons, without examining the issue honestly.

Instead, Sand set out with a mishmash of evidence, including much with little or no merit, to invalidate the Jewish claim to Israel/Palestine as the historic homeland of the Jewish people. I hasten to add that I am not an advocate of an ethnically-pure Jewish state of Israel, nor do I believe that most Zionists (now or in the past) have ever advocated such a thing; Zionism has always included a broad spectrum of factions, including some on the extreme right who would deny non-Jews equal rights as citizens. I favor a re-partition of the old Palestine Mandate into a predominantly Jewish state alongside a predominantly Arab state.

What is missing from Prof. Sand’s work is that all notions of nationhood are “an invention.” In the words of Palestinian-American historian, Rashid Khalidi: “National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given….” It’s shocking that a left-wing scholar has to be reminded that what defines a “people” is political consciousness rather than biology. it’s also a profound disappointment that self-definition (usually referred to as “self-determination”) is a right generally accorded by progressive opinion to all peoples, but not necessarily to the Jewish people.

This debate over the nature of Jewish identity has again emerged with a long article by a highly respected Palestinian intellectual and political moderate, Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, arguing against the concept of a “Jewish state.” A refutation was written by Prof. Shlomo Avineri, an equally respected intellectual and a moderate on the Israeli side. I very much

Carlo Strenger

Carlo Strenger chairs the clinical graduate program in psychology at Tel Aviv University and is a liberal opinion writer for Haaretz and the Huffington Post. His latest post at HP, “Open Letter to Mahmoud Abbas for Yom Kippur,” asks Abbas to directly address the Israeli people, to convince them that he really believes in a two-state solution for peace with the Jewish state. Here is my abridged version of this excellent piece:

Dear Mr. Abbas,
…. [A] state of Israel that oppresses another people is an affront to my Jewishness and for that of the majority of Jews worldwide for whom human rights are an inviolable value — precisely because our people has suffered immensely from bigotry and racism. 

Given my sympathy for your cause, I hope you will listen to my call to you….

…. You must take the step Sadat took. You must come to the Knesset and tell Israelis that you recognize Israel as the Jewish people’s homeland. 

Tell Israelis that the Palestinian people demand that their tragedy of 1948 be acknowledged and recognized; but that you do not demand physical return of refugees to Israel; that individual Palestinians can claim compensation for the loss of their homes; but that… you recognize that physical return is no longer an option. 



Note: Alana Price contributed substantially to the composition of this post by adding details on intersex issues.

As preparations begin for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Nazis are in a quandary because their best female athlete in the high jump, Gretel Bergmann, is a Jew. In the 2009 German-language feature film, “Berlin ’36,” (commercially released in New York and LA in September 2011) the Nazis force Gretel’s father to fetch her back from England, where she has won a championship. To avoid a boycott of the Olympics by the American team, the Nazis engage in an elaborate scheme to have about 20 Jewish athletes, such as Bergmann, train but then be uniformly disqualified from the team.

Bergmann (Karoline Herfurth) tutors 'Marie' (Sebastian Urzendowsky); Courtesy of Corinth Releasing.

While the film’s main plot line is this anti-Semitic scheme, an important secondary focus is on the gender identity of the athlete recruited by the Nazis to displace Bergmann in the Olympics. Called “Marie Ketteler” in the movie, this athlete, Heinrich Ratjen, was born with an intersex condition — discussed in a 2009 Der Spiegel newspaper article that was prompted by the German debut of “Berlin ’36.”

The following detail is drawn from this article, not the movie: The midwife presiding at Ratjen’s birth was unsure how to categorize the baby’s ambiguous genitalia but finally decided to declare Ratjen a girl. As is so often the case in societies lacking sensitivity to intersex issues, the initial declaration of the baby’s sex was seen as a final and unchangeable fact, creating great pressure on Ratjen to fit into the assigned female role rather than express the masculine gender identity that he later told police he had identified with since age 10 or 11. As a result, Ratjen was raised as a girl named Dora and was competing in the women’s high jump as a 17-year-old in 1936 when the Nazis were looking to replace its Jewish athletes.

As the film progresses, Bergmann is knocked off the team despite winning a championship at a German meet they compel her to enter as a diversion from her training. The Nazis wished to prevent a superior Jewish athlete from undermining their racial ideology by defeating “Aryans.”

My post of a few days ago, “My experience of Sept. 11, 2001,” was a discussion of my emotional state at that time. This follow-up, while also emotional, is meant to be a more analytical reflection.

A few years ago, someone misunderstood my point for the following statement, meant not to denigrate what happened on 9/11/2001, but rather to provide some historical perspective and a new measure for grasping the magnitude of the genocide against Jews during World War II:

I made a rough calculation of the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Using the approximate start date of June 22, 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, for its beginning — the Einsatzgruppen began their mass shootings at this time — I calculated that an average of over 29,000 Jews were murdered each week until the war ended on May 8, 1945. This was over 4,000 per day; in other words, the European Jewish population of 11 million suffered the equivalent of more than one and a third 9/11-size catastrophes everyday for three years and ten months.

Still, there’s no gainsaying that the somewhat smaller number of people murdered in this country on Sept. 11, 2001 has had a singular effect on the world since that day, and not for the better. One thing which galls me is the proliferation of antisemitic conspiracy theories, incorporating the events of Sept. 11.

A scene of horror that day.

Although I’m not a direct survivor, the attack on my hometown hit me hard, one of several traumatic events that disrupted my life within the course of a single year.

First, my mother passed away. She died of lymphoma but also had a form of dementia which plagued her for a number of years. Rightly or wrongly, I’m haunted to this day by a feeling that my family and I should have done more for her.

In a shocking instance of the personal merging with the political, her death occurred almost exactly as the Second Intifada began in late September 2000. It is quite a coincidence that my father’s death occurred simultaneously with the onset of the First Intifada in December 1987. Still, the First Intifada helped give rise to the peace process of the 1990s. The Second Intifada, however–especially as it deepened and worsened for several years, costing thousands of casualties–was not only a material blow to the prospects for peace, but also an emotional blow for me as a passionate Zionist peace activist.

And then came the outrageous outcome of the 2000 Presidential campaign. Although I could not know how bad George W. Bush would actually be in office, I knew that he wasn’t up to the job. So, I felt myself in a deep funk even prior to Sept. 11, 2001. The events of that day compounded my sense of loss into what may have been a clinical depression. For example, I found it impossible to summon the emotional energy to file my income taxes for some years thereafter. Was this really depression? Who knows? Regardless, it was palpable and bad.

'Bibi, You're Fired!' (photo by H. Schenker)

Inspired by Tahrir Square (photo by H. Schenker)

Meretz USA (in the process of changing its name to “Partners for Progressive Israel”) has been benefiting from on-the-scene reports from our chaver (friend, comrade, colleague), Hillel Schenker, a veteran Israeli journalist and peacenik who is currently co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal: