-2-

kind enough to publish an unknown writer.

In the meantime, I would like to make some observations:

(1) I respect and admire Richard Nixon for having faith in you as Secretary of State. The country's treatment of him during Watergate was just shameful. (As you can see, not all Americans are fools!)

(2) Gerald Ford did an excellent job of preserving a certain stability and tranquility. With Carter, there will be chaos and turbulence.

(3) Nixon's trip to China was an historic masterpiece.

(4) Those Jews who were critical of you will eventually realize that you were the best friend the Jews could possibly ever have.

(5) Jimmy Carter's vicious campaign against you was anti-Semitic in tone. However, I see that day when he will come begging to you - for help.

(6) Within a year, Jimmy Carter will have a nervous breakdown. His inability to handle the press and foreign policy will break him emotionally and politically.

(7) The Democrats are a peculiar group. Many of us were in their camp some time ago but lately, they smack of totalitarianism. For example: they made an issue over Watergate but think it is perfectly fine for a young woman to be found dead in Chapparquiddick. They made an issue over Earl Butz and his racial joke but seem to be in love with Griffin Bell. A Strange group, these Democrats. Will somebody please tell them that this is not Nazi Germany?

(8) I would liked to have seen Solzhenitsyn at the White House. However, I do realize the complexities involved in Inter-

national Diplomacy. His "Cancer Ward" and "First Circle"
are exquisite. Indeed, a courageous man. And so are you.

(9) Your mother is charming and fiery. Your father is very lovable. Your wife is most gracious.

(10) Perhaps someday our paths will meet and I would be delighted to play the piano for you.

Mr. Secretary, I wish you health and happiness. It has been a privilege having you as Secretary of State. The best that we ever had. You have made it a safer world. You have made us proud of America.

Rose Ann Roth
1598 Columbia Turnpike
Castleton on Hudson
New York 12033

The Hitler Boom: What's Behind It?

(series starts—p. 4)

Jewish
Currents

60¢

OCTOBER,
1975

Benjamin Nones (1757-1826). From a miniature attributed to John Ramage (c. 1748-1802), owned by Miss Miriam Goldbaum, New Orleans. From Hannah R. London, Miniatures of Early Americans.

DIE HITLERWELLE ("HITLER WAVE") AND FASCISM

By CHARLES R. ALLEN JR.

* an original critique of the ominous "Hitler Wave" that has been sweeping over the West in books, plays, art, newspapers, radio, film and TV. . . . only in JEWISH CURRENTS

Jewish
Currents

Vol. 29, No. 9 (323) Oct., 1975

EDITORIAL BOARD

LOUIS HARAP, *Contributing Editor*

SAM PEVZNER

DAVID PLATT

MORRIS U. SCHAPPES, *Editor*

Carol Jochnowitz,

*Editorial Associate*

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COUNCIL: Charles R. Allen Jr., Max Gordon, A. B. Magil, Paul Novick, Isabel Pearlman, Billie Portnow, Sid Resnick, Max Rosenfeld, Dr. Annette T. Rubinstein, Dr. Jay Schulman, Yuri Suhl.

CONTENTS

<table><tr><td>THROUGH SINAI TO GENEVA</td><td>An Editorial</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>THE HITLER BOOM RISES IN THE WEST</td><td>Charles R. Allen Jr.</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>THE CLOUDS</td><td>Poem by Rose Ann Roth</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>IT HAPPENED IN ISRAEL</td><td>L. H.</td><td>14</td></tr><tr><td>WATERGATE AND OTHER CRIMES</td><td>Max Gordon</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>THE EDITOR'S DIARY</td><td>M. U. S.</td><td>22</td></tr><tr><td>"AGMES NEFESH"</td><td>Story by Moishe Nadir</td><td>26</td></tr><tr><td>SECULARISM AND OUR HERITAGE</td><td>Max Rosenfeld and Elsie Levitan</td><td>28</td></tr><tr><td>TWO POEMS</td><td>Neil Alan Marks</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>INSIDE THE JEWISH COMMUNITY</td><td>D. P.</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>CHILAN LOSES HIS WAY</td><td>Book Review by Edward S. Goldstein</td><td>35</td></tr><tr><td>LETTERS FROM READERS</td><td></td><td>39</td></tr><tr><td>AROUND THE WORLD</td><td>M. U. S.</td><td>46</td></tr></table>

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

To be sure you do not miss an issue, your change of address must be received by us no later than the 10th of the month. Changes received after that will not take effect for another month.

JEWISH CURRENTS, Oct., 1975, Vol. 29, No. 9 (323). Published monthly except July and August when bi-monthly, by Jewish Currents, Inc. Room 601, 22 East 17 St., New York, N.Y. 10003. (212) WAtkins 4-5740. Single copies 60 cents. Subscription $7.50 a year in U.S. ($14 for two years). Canada, Latin America, $8.50 per year; elsewhere, $9.50. Second class postage paid at the post office in New York. ISSN #US-ISSN-0021-6399 Copyright © 1975, by Jewish Currents, Inc.

412

# Through Sinai To Geneva

An EDITORIAL

Sept. 18

IS the Sinai agreement signed in Geneva Sept. 4 by Egypt and Israel a step toward a full settlement with all parties concerned, including Palestinian Arabs, or is it a shifty sidestep away from a final peace agreement? We must act to make the Sinai agreement a step toward peace. Therefore we must encourage peace initiatives from all sides—Israel, Arab states and Palestinian Arabs, the USSR and the USA—as soon as possible to maintain the momentum of Sinai. The idea of a three year general stalemate covered by the Egyptian-Israeli census not to resort to military instruments is a fantasy that can only quicken the pace to war. Nor will diddling at more step-by-step negotiations, maybe with Syria, maybe with Jordan, maybe then, at some time or other, with Palestinian Arab leadership, work now—for step-by-step operations are useful if everybody involved is in step. But Syria, Jordan, the PLO and the USSR are not bound to follow the Kissinger beat, and have clearly indicated that they prefer a different drummer, a different beat.

Despite questionable, perhaps even risky, elements in the Sinai agreement, the prospect of peace is worth the risk. The U.S. Congress, which in the post-Watergate world has to vote on the agreement, is alive to the dangers of a U.S. physical presence as civilian monitors of both the Egyptian and Israeli early warning systems, as proposed first by the Egyptians and asented to by the Israelis. It is not so much the physical presence as the context that has a seed of danger. For

in the past two years there have been 36 U.S. military men in the UN buffer zone in the Sinai, and no one has been worried about their presence there. The reason is that there are also 36 Soviet soldiers in the UN Emergency Force—and with that balance the “dangers” were negated.

The risk now arises from the Soviet absence rather than from the U.S. presence. As Anthony Lewis wrote in the *N.Y. Times* Sept. 9, “The exclusion of the Soviet Union from Mr. Kissinger’s diplomacy is one questionable element. Soviet support will be essential for any effective guarantee of Israel’s survival behind recognized borders. The leaks about Mr. Kissinger’s satisfaction in displacing the Soviets from the Middle East are troubling.” While it is true that the same day Mr. Kissinger said that “The U.S. recognizes that in the final settlement of the Middle East, the Soviet role will be important,” his conduct will have to do more than heretofore to assure that role. U.S. Cold War maneuvers there can only hinder peace.

Egyptian and Israeli delegations have been meeting daily in Geneva since Sept. 9 to work out the details of the Sinai agreement. Palestinian Arab terrorist escapades in Madrid are fruitless, irresponsible. The withdrawals agreed on Sept. 4 may take five months, but these should be months of peace initiatives. Nov. 30 the Israeli-Syrian agreement is up for renewal. By then there should have been more than one step toward the kind of settlement envisioned in UN Security Council Res. 242 plus provision for a Palestinian Arab state in coexistence with Israel.

OCTOBER, 1975

3

# The Hitler Boom Rises in the West

## An Expose and Analysis

By CHARLES R. ALLEN JR.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it," said Santayana. History simply as time past and recollected, however, is not enough; there must be rational comprehension of history so that the past's errors and tragedies are not repeated.

Manifestly this is so when the sub-

ject is fascism. Any study which fails to comprehend the fascist context of Nazi Germany and world politics during the 1918-1945 period will prove irrelevant to the central questions of that history. More important, it will fail to shed light on the threat of fascism today and tomorrow.

The media both in Europe and the United States aptly call it, *die Hitlerwelle* (the Hitler wave). In the last two years, its rise in the West—starting in West Germany, then racing across Western Europe and over the United States—has been nothing short of astounding. Consider these aspects of *die Welle*:

* Since 1970, literally millions of copies of scores of books about Hitler Germany have poured out of West Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain and the United States. Often they are massive tomes, with thousands of pages, crammed with photographs, set amid elaborate and large formats. They have been accompanied by an endless succession of plays, radio and TV programs and specials; feature and documentary films; tons of memorabilia, souvenirs and trivia dealing with every conceivable (and inconceivable) aspect of the Third Reich and its leading personalities. Generally, these materials are characterized by an obsession with detail, largely "psychological" and

CHARLES R. ALLEN Jr. is well known to our readers. Among his many original contributions to the literature of anti-fascism are: Heusinger of the Fourth Reich: The Step-by-Step Resurgence of the German General Staff (1964) and German Hand on the Nuclear Trigger (1966).

For JEWISH CURRENTS over the years he has authored such memorable articles as "McCarthy and Anti-Semitism" and "McCarthy: Enemy of the Negro People" (1953) and the series, "Nazi War Criminals Among Us," which was reprinted as a pamphlet in 1963. His Dec. 1974 article "Dr. HBertus Strughold, America's 'Father of Space Medicine': Nazi in the U.S.A.," was the subject of an advance feature story in the N.Y. Times Nov. 23, 1974 and has been disseminated widely both here and abroad. Mr. Allen is currently at work on a theoretical and historical exposition of fascism in the United States.

4

JEWISH CURRENTS

[LC]

## THE BOOKS OF DIE HITLERWELLE

*The Face of the Third Reich, Portraits of the Nazi Leadership*, by Joachim Fest. Ace Books, N.Y., 1970, 605 pages, $10 hardcover, $1.95 paperback.

*Hitler*, by Joachim Fest. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, N.Y., 1974, 844 pages, illus., $15.

*Eva and Adolf*, by Glenn B. Infield. Grossett & Dunlap, N.Y., 1974, 330 pages, illus., $10.

*The Evolution of Hitler's Germany, The Ideology, The Personality, The Movement*, by Horst von Maltitz. McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 1973, 479 pages, illus., $12.95.

*Hitler Legend, Myth and Reality*, by Werner Maser. Harper & Row, N.Y., 1973, 433 pages, illus., $12.50.

*The Reich Marshal*, A Biography of Hermann Goering by Leonard Mosley. Doubleday, N.Y., 1974, 394 pages, illus., $12.50.

*Inside the Third Reich*, Memoirs by Albert Speer. Macmillan, N.Y., 1970, 596 pages, illus., $12.50.

*Codeword Barbarossa*, by Barton Whaley. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1974, 635 pp., Illus., $10 hardcover, $4.95 paperback.

often coupled with the sex and violence of the Hitler era.

* Leading this veritable onslaught have been two books whose success paces the reach and breadth of *die Welle*. They are biographies of Hitler written by two West Germans—Werner Maser, director of the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Munich, and Joachim C. Fest, an editor of the daily newspaper, *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*. Both of these works are weighty, profusely illustrated, with a retail price of equal heft. Maser’s *Hitler, Legend, Myth and Reality* has already sold more than 50,000 hardcover copies in West Germany and has been serialized in its entirety by one daily newspaper. Fest has been made a wealthy man by his *Hitler*, which has sold more than 500,000 copies at $20 a piece in West Germany and more than 200,000 copies in France at the same astronomical rate.

Starting in late 1974, its press runs in the United States have exceeded a quarter million copies, reportedly, and appeared on several best-seller lists through massive radio, TV and newspaper advertisements and promotions. It has been made a Literary Guild selection for both the Guild's general membership and its special Military Library subsidiary, which expects to distribute a million copies before 1976.

* A bi-monthly magazine in the German Federal Republic, *Das Dritte Reich*, is an amazing enterprise. It issued its first number in mid-1974; it will cease publication 24 issues later in 1976. With obsessive attention to clinical detail, *Das Dritte Reich* sensitizes the political violence and sexual aberrancies of the Hitler days. Early editions seemingly have justified the anticipations of its underwriters: at $1.50 per 48-page copy, its first four numbers grossed in excess of $1.6 mil-

OCTOBER, 1975

5

DIE HITLERWELLE CONNECTION

THERE are some curious nexus regarding the Fest book, *Hitler*, and its publication which cannot be dissociated from *die Hitlerwelle* phenomenon. *Hitler*, its author told the N. Y. Post May 20, 1974, derives from the earlier, *The Face of the Third Reich*. In turn, *Face* was admittedly simply an expansion of a series broadcast over RIAS (Radio In American Sector) of West Berlin. Revelations in the U.S. Congress from 1967-1969 documented secret financial subsidization and control by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of not only RIAS but also Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty—all of which have powerful transmitters in West Berlin, some 100 miles inside the borders of the German Democratic Republic. (The latter two still receive $50 million a year from the U.S. State Department.) In 1953, Fest was RIAS's features and special projects director. He has spoken often of the part he played in the 1953 riots in East Berlin, in which it is also now known the CIA played a role.

"Some Americans came to me," Fest told *The Post*, "and asked me: 'How would you like to do a couple of features on Germany from Bismarck to the present?'" in explaining how he got started on his own Hitleriana. . . . A prominent reviewer for the Fest books has been one Eugene Davidson, who in his *The Trial of the Germans* makes no bones about his hostility toward the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. Davidson also wrote the introduction for the book by the convicted Nazi war criminal, Albert Speer, *Inside the Third Reich* (reviewed April, 1971, *Jewish Currents*). Many think Speer's apologia launched *die Hitlerwelle*. Davidson said, "Whatever [Speer] lost in his pact with Hitler, it was not his soul . . ." A final nexus: In his own afterword to *Inside the Third Reich* (pages 525-526) Speer wrote: "I am indebted to the editors who discussed many problems with me over two years, W. J. Siedler, head of the Ullstein and Propylaeen publishing houses, and Joachim C. Fest, members of the advisory board of these publishers. Their keen questions helped me frame many of the general observations in this book, as well as my treatment of the psychological and atmospheric aspects of events. My fundamental view of Hitler, his system and my own part in it as I had set it down 14 years earlier . . . was confirmed and reinforced by our conversations."

lion. Projected over its two year existence, *Das Dritte Reich* promises to realize some $20.8 million for its investors.

* A highly popular West German TV series called "*Ein Herz und Eine Seele*" (One Heart and One Soul) reduces Hitler to an Archie Bunker. The program's creator told the *N.Y. Times* (April 23, 1974) that "*Ein Herz*" un-

doubtedly confirms everyone's fears "that Hitler has risen again . . . anti-Semite, xenophobe, nationalist, brute, anti-democrat, reactionary tyrant . . . (but) this time wearing slippers, smoking a cigar and married."

* The combined wire services—AP, UPI, Reuters, Jewish Telegraphic Agency—reported from Bonn, West Germany, that a retired judge who had

6

JEWISH CURRENTS

THE "NEW" WAFFEN SS

THROUGHOUT the Nuremberg war crimes trial, the Nazi defense strove to make the "distinction" between the "regular, professional Army"—(the Wehrmacht)—and the SS and its various elements—the SD, Einsatzgruppen, Gestapo and the Waffen SS—which was found to have been, per se, "a criminal organization." At the trial, it was demonstrated that the April 4, 1941 "Agreement" between the Wehrmacht and the SS laid out the specific procedures for Wehrmacht/Waffen SS/Einsatzgruppen cooperation for the deliberate, systematic extinction of "Jews, Commissars, Communists and Gypsies" during the invasion of the Soviet Union. This "unique partnership," as the Nazis themselves called it, resulted in the murder of 1.6 million Jews alone on the Eastern Front from 1941-1944, as well as the slaughter of many more non-Jews. In tracing the origins of the Waffen SS, Gerald Reitlinger, in his authoritative study, SS: Alibi of a Nation, stated that its first tasks were to "lick into shape the killers of Stadelheim and Gross-Lichterfelde," infamous Nazi prisons. Half of the dreaded Totenkopf (Death's Head) Division, Waffen SS—some 8,000 troops—was recruited from concentration camp guard units. It was the Waffen SS that committed the Malmedy Massacres of American, British and Canadian prisoners of war in the Battle of the Bulge in 1945.

claimed that the crematoria at Auschwitz had been used for baking bread, not exterminating people, was reprisled by his peers and penalized by having his pension reduced 20% over the next five years (JTA, Chicago Sentinel, July 17, 1975).

Judge Wilhelm Staeglich (he still retains his title) had been a "former official of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDP)" when he resigned in 1973, the JTA said. Actually, Judge Staeglich's writings and activities considerably antedate this recent incident. A member of the SS during the war, he became a judge only afterwards. In 1965, he publicly described Auschwitz as a "rest camp." His remarks caused a public outcry because of his judicial position, but his fellow jurists at Hamburg declined to remove him following a cursory investigation!

Then in 1972 it was revealed that he was not only a member of the NDP but served on its "court of honor"

which reprimanded and expelled members for not being sufficiently neo-Nazi. Despite repeated public demands for his dismissal, Staeglich's peers again decided that he should remain a judge.

In Oct., 1973, however, his by-lined article "My Impressions of Auschwitz in 1944," appeared in the West German magazine, Nation Europa, an openly fascist sheet widely circulated in Western Europe.

Denying that prisoners were gassed or shot at Auschwitz, Judge Staeglich wrote: "The camp made a cultivated impression, and . . . was excellently organized. On none of my visits could I see that the prisoners were badly, let alone inhumanely, treated." He described "mild-tempered SS guards," prisoners "free of any fear" and the "bakeries" which had "falsely" been called crematoria by the Allies after the war.

It was the Nation Europa article which forced the Hamburg jurists to

OCTOBER, 1975

7

dock Staeglich's pension payments by one/fifth for the next five years. Staeglich—who is still in the NDP—has appealed the penalty in the West German courts. Nation Europa, one of the major Far Rightist arteries of die Hitlerwelle, has, according to the JTA, announced “an international campaign” to win “justice” for Judge Wilhelm Staeglich.

* A reporter in Europe dug up some striking statistics about the otherwise mundane subject of West Berlin automobile license plates. He discovered that more than 500 automobile owners had specifically requested and had imprinted on their plates such lettering combinations as SS (Schutzstaffel), SA (Sturmabteilung), HJ (Hitler Jugend) and KZ (concentration camp).

* Films, plays, night club comics and serious art shows have been prominent in die Welle as its sweeps out of West Germany. After a two-month showing of paintings and sculpture of the Third Reich, some 36,000 visitors broke all attendance records at the Kuntsverein gallery in Frankfurt-on-Main. Apparently organized intentionally by the Left to show the “banality” of Nazi “art,” the attempt backfired, according to The Wall Street Journal April 8, 1975. One avowed Nazi “thanked the Kuntsverein for this opportunity . . . to see my beloved Führer again,” reported the paper. “There is also the question of whether Nazi art anticipated any current trends,” the Journal’s critic commented. “To some, it may seem as if the vacuous and plastic quality of the Third Reich art resembles contemporary American realist painting”; and, perhaps, one might read something political into that insight. “But even at its most shoddy and bourgeois . . . [Nazi art] remains part of a political program engineered by some of the most nefarious minds this century has to offer.” Such an exhibit,

## NAZI PROPAGANDA (MADE IN US)

Dusseldorf, W. Germ.—The district court here has ordered the seizure of 20,000 records because they contain Nazi propaganda . . . and the record sleeves bear swastikas and photographs of Hitler. The sleeves were produced by a local firm while the records were made in the United States and imported into West Germany via Lichtenstein.”

—Jewish Week, New York, June 21, 1975

he felt, “should only be allowed to reappear in a structured framework.” It is not without significance that several similar art shows elsewhere in West Germany have been attended by violent demonstrations of both pro- and anti-Nazi sentiment.

* On Jan. 24, 1975 the Associated Press reported from West Berlin that an estimated audience of some 45 million in West Germany viewed a TV series titled *The Men Under the Death's Head*—the Waffen (or Armed) SS, declared a criminal organization for its innumerable war crimes at Nuremburg. “The documentary,” reported the AP, “said a distinction should be made between the Waffen SS which fought with the Wehrmacht, or regular army, and the other organizations of the SS which helped run Nazi concentration camps.” The TV documentary's director called the majority of the “young Waffen SS soldiers the victims of criminal fascism” rather than “fascist criminals.” The film also insisted that despite the Nuremburg Tribunal rulings, the Waffen SS “remains an object located somewhere between abhorrence and administration.” The wire service reported that most of the critical reaction in the

8

JEWISH CURRENTS

Federal Republic of Germany was "positively receptive." One dissent was reported in the West Berlin newspaper, *Tagespiegel*: "To put it mildly, I do not find it too good," wrote the critic. "The former SS presented their views with no rebuttals to an audience probably still not sophisticated enough to make a critical or detached evaluation. It is, I think, dangerous." The press agency said that the entire adult population of West Germany and most of its youth had seen at least one of *The Men Under the Death's Head* segments. TV and movie rights have already been sold to British, French, Spanish—and American interests for viewing some time in 1976.

**The direction of die Hitlerwelle** stands in meaningful contrast to the immediate post-World War II years of assessment of the fascist experience in Nazi Germany.

In the late 1940s through the early 1960s some of the finest writing and keenest insights into that experience were achieved by Western historians, economists, political scientists and philosophers. Among others, the contributions of Bullock, Wheeler-Bennett, Trevor-Roper, Reitlinger, A.J.P. Taylor and General Telford Taylor were important; the early 1960s were marked by the efforts of Shirer, Hilberg, Schweitzer, Fromm and T. H. Tetens. Regardless of their various, often disposable, interpretations, each in some useful measure contributed new data or advanced novel, valid insights toward a rational understanding of the geneses of the fascist experience in Germany. Taken as a whole, these writings—which are frequently referred to throughout this present critique of *die Hitlerwelle* and Fascism—constitute a documented literature. By and large, they derive from empirical, independently verifiable data, and reflect the economic, political and social

forces of the time. Thus the recollection of the past is a critical one, a dynamic and material one, which provides a base of understanding so that future generations, if they are of a mind, may go well armed against the myths which would contribute toward a repetition of that past.

Furthermore, it is significant that each of the above-named authors, as well as the present writer comes under attack from several leading elements of *die Hitlerwelle*.

Thus the question arises: does *die Hitlerwelle* extend and raise to new levels the scholarship, the viewpoints

## SCHOOLS GET ANTI-SEMITIC BOOKLET

*London*—"The blatantly anti-Semitic booklet, 'Did Six Million Really Die?—The Truth At Last,' has gone into a second printing and copies are being sent to schools by members of the British Movement.

"History departments of at least six schools in London alone are known to have received unsolicited copies, some of them accompanied by stickers 'Britain Awake: Real British Patriot' (the organ of the British Movement).

"The booklet first appeared a year ago. It described the death of six million Jewish martyrs in Nazi-occupied Europe as 'the most colossal piece of fiction' and 'the most successful of deceptions' invented by Jewry for political blackmail (to gain the world's sympathy for a Jewish State) and for financial gain (compensation from Germany).

"The board had several complaints from headmasters and teachers at schools which had received [it]. . . ."

—London Jewish Chronicle,

June 6, 1975

OCTOBER, 1975

9

and instruction of these earlier beginnings into what is possibly the most crucial of all questions facing mankind: will we relive a fascism of the magnitude of another Hitler Germany? Will history repeat itself, with all the terrible finality that is implied?

There is no arguing the success—financially and in sheer quantitative impact—of the Hitler Boom. There has probably never been such an outpouring about a single era in all history. Moreover, it appears that the preponderance of response from critics has been virtually unrelieved approbation, welcoming especially the lead elements of *die Welle* as contributions toward the expurgation—especially in West Germany—of the Nazi past.

Yet *die Welle* has stirred disquiet in some places. Dr. Hugo Marx, a scholar at Heidelberg University and a survivor of the camps, sees a “real danger” in the current revival which, he espies, “combines a romantic nostalgia and the millenial German faith in authoritarian rule as the solution to all problems” (*New Republic*, June 8, 1974).

Concern of a general nature, not solely limited to alarm about anti-Semitism, has been voiced by what remains of the Jewish community in West Germany (which, it must not be forgotten, has been rendered virtually *Judenrein*). The Dusseldorf *Allgemeine judische Wochenzeitung* took stock of *die Welle*: "It means," said the publication, "nothing less than an obscene memorialization of Hitler and his accomplices" (*N.Y. Times*, Oct. 28, 1973).

Such apprehensions have been re-inforced by developments over the past two years in Austria. There a nationally publicized series of newspaper articles on the Jewish people and the Holocaust triggered what the *N.Y. Times* called "a major controversy" whose end was not in sight. The author of the series is Viktor Reimann, a

## IMPERIAL EAGLE WITH SWASTIKA: FOR SALE

"Imperial Eagle of the Reich with swastika (h.1,20m, wingspread, 1,25m. copper for sale. Offers not under $2,000 may be sent to Friedrich S. . . . W. Germ."

—Classified Ad., *N.Y. Times*,

May 29, 1975

*(Note: The *Times* carried innumerable classified ads for Nazi and Hitlerian memorabilia throughout 1974, 1975 such as the sample above.)*

—C. R. A.

columnist for the mass daily *Kronen-Zeitung*, which has a circulation of 1.1 million in a country of seven million people! Reimann is also the author of a flattering biography of Goebbels and helped to found the Union of Independents, "a political party that was used by former National Socialists to re-enter political activity in Austria," according to the *Times*.

The *Kronen* series was launched with intensive national promotion on Palm Sunday, prompting the accusation that the paper "had deliberately . . . created the subliminal 'murderers of Christ' association in the minds of Christian readers." Predictably, a spate of "outrageously anti-Semitic letters—many anonymous" followed.

The Austrian Press Council, a national organization of both publishers and working journalists, denounced the *Kronen* series as having "activated anti-Semitism." A prominent Monsignor in Vienna stated that, at the same time, the *Kronen* unintentionally showed that, under the surface, Austria's "true national character" was still racist, one which would "welcome" another *Anschluss*.*

Yet these comments and forebodings reflect the exceptions of a small minority. The Hitler Wave has risen in the West with alarming alacrity and force.

10

JEWISH CURRENTS

# The Clouds

By ROSE ANN ROTH

THE clouds are Hashemite laughter and Jewish tears. The moonlight falling is an orphan belonging to no one.

Dark sighs
roam the desert
bleeding and beyond.
Arabs cry, too.

The wind is a harp gone mad.

ROSE ANN ROTH, appearing here for the first time, is a Juilliard graduate who has done graduate work in psychology at Columbia. Her poems have been published in Everywoman, Cardinal Poetry Quarterly, the Shameless Hussy Review and other periodicals.

about 50% academicians, perhaps only
10% students." While Maser's 50%
figure may be on the high side (it
would mean that virtually every single
academic in West Germany has the
book!), other reports consistently bear
out a seeming preoccupation with the
Hitler past.

A lengthy survey filed out of Bonn
by the Los Angeles Times Mar. 15,
1974 tends to corroborate this key
point when assessing the overall mean-
ing of die Hitlerwelle. "Only the afflu-
ent," reported the paper, can afford
the "inordinately high prices" of the
leading books, magazines, plays and
other productions of die Welle; the
generations with the money-"those
who had participated as adults or
youth in the hey-day of Hitler Ger-
many"-finance the Hitler wave. At

—DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH—

(Sept. 25, 1906—Aug. 9, 1975)

His death at 68 at the height of
his creative powers was widely
felt for he was acknowledged to be
one of the greatest of 20th century
composers. Venerated in the Soviet
Union despite occasional criticism,
he had in 1966 on the eve of his
60th birthday received two of the
highest awards, Hero of Socialist
Labor and the Order of Lenin.

True to his internationalism,
Shostakovich showed a creative in-
terest in Jewish life and culture.
After World War II he wrote a
musical suite based on Yiddish folk
songs. When Yevtushenko expressed
the Soviet internationalist con-
science in his poem on Babi Yar,
Shostakovich in 1963 produced his
Symphony No. 13, using Yevtu-
shenko's text. His espousal of the
Jewish cause led to the virtual
blacklisting of this work, which is
rarely performed in the Soviet
Union. Nevertheless, Shostakovich
retuned to Jewish subject matter by
issuing a collection of Yiddish folk
songs, with the music and texts
both in Yiddish and Russian.

At his funeral Aug 14, the Soviet
Armenian composer, Aram Khacha-
turian, called Shostakovich "the
conscience of Soviet music, a man
who expressed our epoch in music
better, fuller and deeper than any
of his contemporaries."

the same time, the current generation
of youth becomes a captive, uncritical
audience of the massive revisionisms
of die Welle by default; this is, said
the Times, "a generation utterly un-
concerned about crimes committed in
the name of Germany 40 years ago."

Yet what are called "generational
gaps" alone do not explain die Hitler-
welle: fiscal ability to afford it does

12

JEWISH CURRENTS

BENJAMIN NONES, MARCH 9, 1757—FEB. 9, 1826

Bordeaux, France was such a hotbed of pro-American sentiment that the citizenry, Jews included, raised a fund to buy a warship to present to our embattled country. And it was from Bordeaux that 20-year-old Benjamin Nones came here in 1777 to enlist in the revolutionary army. As a soldier, his Capt. Verdier of Pulaski's Regiment certified in Dec., 1779 that "bravery and courage" marked Nones' "behavior under fire in all the bloody actions we fought..." Captured in 1781, he was banned from Charleston by the British Commandant for refusing to obey his orders. Coming to Philadelphia, the center of the Revolution, Nones, the young immigrant veteran, May 2, 1782 married Miriam Marks (1764-1822), already a third-generation American; from 1783 to 1805 she bore him between 13 and 15 children, five of them daughters. In business as a broker and merchant, Nones became involved with the most democratically advanced circles, in Sons of St. Tammany, in the French Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality, in the Democratic Society (Jeffersonian), and in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Freeing his own slave in 1793, Nones often helped secure the freedom of other slaves, persuading even French Jewish refugees from the 1793 slave revolt in Santo Domingo to free the slaves they had brought with them. An active and pious Jew, Nones was president of Mikveh Israel Congregation from 1791 to 1799. By 1783 he was also a member of Lodge No. 2 of the Masons, which Haym Salomon joined in 1784.

Among all the Jews of his day, Nones was unique in giving un-
forgettable expression as a Jew to the most revolutionary democratic
sentiments of the Jeffersonian movement, the most politically advanced
of its day. In the election campaign of 1800, Nones attended a Jeffer-
sonian party nominating convention. In a scurrilous account of this
convention, the Federalist journal, spitting anti-Negro, anti-labor, anti-
intellectual and anti-democratic venom, ended with an anti-Semitic
sneer at Nones. Nones' reply, published in the Jeffersonian press, is
a historic document. To the Federalist charge "of being a Jew; of
being a Republican; and of being Poor," he proudly pleaded guilty.
What is new in this is his response to the charge that he is a
"Republican," a term of the worst abuse at the time, meaning that
he was an extreme radical. Nones proclaimed his duty as a Jew thus
to be in the forefront of the fight for progress. "I am a Jew, and
if for no other reason, for that reason am I a republican." Having
enlisted in 1777 to fight in the Revolution, "for three and twenty years
I felt no disposition to change my political, any more than my re-
ligious principles. . . . How then can a Jew but be a Republican? . . ."
—Indeed a creed to inspire, to guide us.

not suffice in itself as an explanation.
Rather, these insights lead to the
broader political, economic and class
interests on which *die Hitlerwelle* has
risen in the West. It is on this basis

that both its success and its "real dang-
ers" may be understood, as a careful
analysis of this major premonitory
development demonstrates.

*(To be continued)*

OCTOBER, 1975

13

ISRAEL

Pinhas Sapir, one of the most powerful men in Israel and a leader of the Labor Party, died in Beersheba Aug. 12, aged 68. He served in Israeli cabinets and was at the time of his death chairman of the Jewish Agency. Sapir was a dove because he considered that Israel's character as a Jewish state would be destroyed if large numbers of Arabs became citizens by absorption of the occupied lands. He immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1929.

Former Premier Golda Meir filed suit July 25 against Commentary for $3 million damages for publishing (and refusing to retract) a statement in an article in Aug., 1974 by Soviet Jewish emigré Lev Navrozov about an alleged event while she was Israeli ambassador to Moscow. The writer charged that she handed over to the Russians at the request of Stalin a list of Soviet Jews who would enlist to fight in the Israel War of Independence in 1948-49, and that these Jews subsequently were arrested and died in the Soviet camps. Mrs. Meir charged that the article was "false and malicious" and without "a grain of truth." If she won any financial award, she said, she would turn the money over to help Soviet Jews in Israel.

The religious establishment of Israel was scathingly attacked in the Knesset at the end of July by Labor Party Knesset member Rabbi Menahem Hacohen. He especially criticised the rabbinical courts for hard-heartedness and "perversion of justice," the administration of kashrut and the remoteness from problems of society of the yeshivot. In an editorial July 29 the *Jerusalem Post* commended the rabbi for his candor and agreed that "The state of religious life in Israel is deplorable."

Arab-Jewish relations . . . An attempt by Jewish residents of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, to increase their presence there by taking over another building late in July was prevented by Israeli soldiers. (Kiryat Arba has 38,350 Arabs and some 1,000 Jews.) After the cabinet granted easier access to Jews to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, which is also sacred to Moslems, a Moslem attempt at a mass demonstration in protest Aug. 15 was blocked by Israeli patrols. . . . When Arab students at Technion refused to do guard duty in July, the administration allowed them to inspect visitor's bags instead. . . . A new organization of Jewish immigrants from Arab lands, numbering about one million, was formed late in July to inform the world about their

14

JEWISH CURRENTS

rights as emigrants and their claim to be considered "refugees."

*The merger of Maki, former Communist Party with mainly Jewish membership, and Moked, coalition of new left and left socialist Zionist elements, was officially concluded in July. Membership in the new party, Moked, led by Knesset member Meir Pa'il, is on an individual basis, and Maki is in effect dissolved. The long-time leader of Maki, Shmuel Mikunis, resigned from Maki and joined Aki, the Israel Communist Opposition, which is led by former Maki leader Esther Vilenska. At a meeting of about 100 activists July 5, Aki met in national conference and Vilenska and Mikunis defined their left program, including collaboration with Zionists on issues.*

*News briefs . . . A senior Histadrut official stated early in Aug. that during the 1960s the CIA may have used the Histadrut to train Asian labor leaders sponsored by the AFL-CIO. After CIA involvement was revealed, this practice was stopped and all trainees were recruited directly by the Histadrut. . . . Israeli newspapers reported July 14 that an underground reservoir was being built to house oil reserves to last one year. . . . Reports persist that Israel has already, or can very quickly make, up to 10 atom bombs of the power dropped on Japan. . . . Israel has the highest per capita exploitation of solar energy in the world. Fully 20% of Israel's population use this form of energy to heat water—about 100,000 solar heaters are in domestic use. . . . During the first half of 1975, the number of immigrants, 8,792, was about half the number in the same period in 1974, largely owing to the 56% decrease in immigrants from the Soviet Union. . . . Louis Vega, former head of Chile's security services in the Allende government, and a former friend and political associate of Allende, immigrated to Israel in May. Mexican Pres. Luis Echeverria ended a four-day visit to Israel Aug. 3 after also visiting Egypt and other Arab states, and meeting with Yasir Arafat, PLO head.*

*Two promising Yiddish theaters presented plays in Israel recently. They look forward to establishing a stable, permanent Yiddish theater of high artistic quality. One of these is Ida Kaminska's group. There are also frequently evenings of music and Yiddish literature at the five-year-old Leivick Theatre in Tel Aviv. . . . At the 50th anniversary celebration of the Hebrew University, an honorary doctorate was presented to the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who suggested that Yiddish was not a rival of Hebrew but a partner in pre-serving Jewish culture. . . . Trumpet virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie and his group toured Israel in July. He reveres Israel as the world center of his religion, Bahai. . . . A visitor to Israel, New York stockbroker Morton Leventhal, stumbled on an extremely rare bronze head of Emperor Hadrian, who ruled at the time of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 A.D.*

L.H.

OCTOBER, 1975

15

Watergate
And Other
Crimes

By MAX GORDON

Within the past four years our country has experienced two documentary exposures of internal government manipulations which are probably unparalleled in history—the Pentagon Papers and the Nixon tapes.

The two are linked in several ways. Both revealed extensive crimes committed by the White House and its agencies, and a pattern of broad lying and deception to mask these crimes. In the Papers case, the lawlessness was international and the lying took the form of deliberate propagation of cold war myth. The Nixon tapes, as the books under review show, unfolded domestic crimes corrupting politics and subverting democratic processes; the deception was designed to prevent

MAX GORDON last appeared here in Sept., 1974. Formerly on the editorial board of the Daily Worker, he has recently been published in The Nation and Science and Society, while his monograph on Vietnam and the UN charter appeared in a volume edited by Richard A. Falk for the Princeton University Press.

*Watergate: Crime in the Suites*, by Michael Myerson. International Publishers, N.Y., 1973, 182 pages, paperback, $1.75.

*All the President's Men*, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1974, 336 pages, indexed, $8.95.

*The Presidential Transcripts*, With Commentary by the Staff of *The Washington Post*. Dell, N.Y., 1974, 693 pages, paperback $2.45.

*The Senate Watergate Report*, introduction by Daniel Schorr. Dell, N.Y., 1974, 2 vols. paperback, Vol. 1, 761 pages, $2.75; Vol. II, 515 pages, $2.25.

*The Fall of a President*, by the staff of *The Washington Post*. Dell N.Y., 1974, 232 pages, paperback $1.75.

further exposure of lawless behavior following the bungled Watergate break-in of June 17, 1972.

Both documentary exposures were the result of internal tensions generated by the enormous concentration of corporate wealth following World War II and the consequent corporate capacity to harness the White House to its global designs. The resulting accretion of executive power and the purposes to which this power was put came into increasing conflict with congressional and popular opposition. The tensions over Indochinese policy in the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, and over domestic policy in the Nixon years explain, I think, the explosive events which led to publication of the Pentagon Papers and to revelation of the Nixon tapes. The anti-Nixon campaign, and the publication of the Papers by the *New York Times* and *Washington Post*, appear to have been the consequence of differences in upper class circles, following the defeats suffered in Vietnam and the emergence of a powerful peace movement. The finan-

16

JEWISH CURRENTS

cial, political and moral price of the war had become too great to be accept-able to some major corporate interests, chiefly those of the Eastern Establish-ment, whose views are expressed in the *Wall St. Journal*.

The chief message of the *Pentagon Papers*, that Washington's entire ra-tionale for the Vietnam war was a massive falsehood designed to cover up the criminal lawlessness, was never fully presented to the country and the effects of their publication were quick-ly dissipated. The lessons of Watergate were more forcefully thrust upon the national consciousness, but the signs suggest that this was momentary and these lessons too are rapidly being dissipated.

An indication of this dissipation is Nixon's evident preparation for return to openly active political life. It is also startling to note that a major piece of legislation now before Congress pro-poses to tighten the criminal laws so as to prevent not the crimes of Viet-nam and Watergate but their exposure. I refer to S. I, entitled "The Criminal Justice Codification, Revision and Re-form Act." It is useful, then, to keep reminding the country of the Water-gate experience.

*The central material factors giv-ing rise to the massive deceptions re-vealed in the Nixon tape transcripts and *The Senate Watergate Report* are the enhancement of corporate wealth interlinked with political power and Washington's post-war empire build-ing, which led to a massive "national security" bureaucracy operating in secret and providing the "national security" rationale for Nixon's grab for unrestrained power. These were also the primary factors behind Wash-ington's Indochinese policy. But in the case of Watergate, there was the added active ingredient of Nixon's character. The specific crimes associated with the*

term "Watergate" were a function of Nixon's make-up and methods of oper-ation, but they could not have been committed were it not for the environ-ment created by concentrated corpo-rate wealth allied with government and the ideological distortions of the cold war.

Except for Michael Myerson's *Watergate: Crime in the Suites*, the documents and commentaries under review deal largely with Nixon, his per-sonality, aides and modes of opera-tion. But the corrupting effects of corporate wealth upon government do receive recognition. Thus, in *The Senate Watergate Report* a statement by two Democratic members of the investigating committee—Montoya of New Mexico and Inouye of Hawaii— takes note of the committee's efforts to overcome the "inherent potential" for corruption in electoral financing methods in a system dependent on large private contributions. The two senators argue that the entire frame-work of election campaigning must be changed because current financing modes are "an illness . . . that goes to the heart of the democracy."

Substantial aspects of the Senate Committee's report are concerned with the impact of large-scale corporate payoffs to Nixon Administration and the *quid pro quo*, but the chief concern is with illegal campaign funding and the remedy is sought in the reform of electoral financing procedures. Since the congressmen and commentators involved are committed to our existing capitalist system, they naturally do not suggest—in the manner of the early U.S. agrarian philosophers and later Marxists—that both corporae concen-tration and its political power are sys-temic. The current tortuous, rather pitiful, efforts to find some means of eliminating the corrupting power of money in shaping elections are a con-fession of this.

OCTOBER, 1975

17

The impeachment process necessarily assumed that the president was *per se* an abberation; if he were not, how do you rationalize impeachment procedures against him and not against previous presidents? Neither could his policies be the butt of impeachment proceedings except as they were illegal, since policies are supposed to be determined by normal political procedures. Hence the stress of the documentary materials and commentaries under review is on the abberational aspects, on Nixon the individual, his philosophy and the criminal acts committed by him and his staff.

He is a "loner," an "insulated man" obsessed by visions of his early defeats, by insecurity, by a lack of confidence in the workings of democracy without manipulation, by a lust for power, by an inability to perceive the world in any terms other than "enemies," by an absence of restraint in the uses of entrusted power for personal ends. The fears, suspicions and lack of confidence in democracy led him to construct his own personal power base independent of the GOP and the national bureaucracy, and to surround himself with people with no political experience outside of their prior service to him. They were his creatures, for whom Nixon's personal power was synonymous with "national security."

*While these Nixonian characteristics are doubtless accurately described, they do not tell us how such a man could become president. The fact of his presidency and his ability to operate as he did can be accounted for only by reference to the postwar social environment described above. Myerson centers attention on this environment, citing for example the many instances of intertwined corporate and state apparatus, the six-figure contributions to Nixon's reelection campaign by large corporations, Nixon's aid to*

the corporate interests through military budget expansion, favorable tax measures and similar favors, etc.

He does not quite resolve, however, the relationship between Nixon's individual characteristics as an element in the Watergate crisis and the social factors which facilitated the crisis. In part, this is due to his tendency, at a certain point, to cover Nixon and Watergate with a blanket indictment embracing every evil in the system and country. The explicit evils defining the crisis, and Nixon's unique contributions, thus blend into a general anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Myerson describes Nixon and his staff as the "executive committee" of the great corporations and their political spokesmen. This, I believe, requires qualification. A perusal of the corporations that contributed large funds to Nixon's campaigns or were otherwise associated with him suggests that while powerful ones are among them, mainly Southern and Western industrial and oil corporations, still more powerful ones, such as the great financial institutions of the East, are not. This, plus the massive persistence demonstrated by press and major political figures in pursuing the Watergate affair and its ramifications, lead one to suspect that many top corporate interests were not overwhelmingly concerned with protecting him.

The persistence of the journalistic pursuit is the significant point of the Bernstein-Woodward book, apart from the fascination of their account. As two young reporters for *The Washington Post* assigned to cover a routine break-in at the Watergate complex, they developed their search for leads to the source with amazing tenacity, thoroughness and ingenuity. What struck them, and surprised me, was the pervasive terror they encountered very early in the game among workers they sought to question on the White

18

JEWISH CURRENTS

House staff, in the Justice Department and the Committee to Reelect the President.

From the outset, there was at the top an almost hysterical fear of exposure and a rigid silence imposed upon staffs on pain of dire punishment. Events well after the book's publication confirmed the presence of this early fear of exposure but the public never did get an inkling of anything amiss until months after the 1972 elections.

Essential to the two reporters were the tips obtained in underground meetings with "deep throat," an unidentified leading official apparently familiar with intimate developments everywhere at the top and anxious to get the story out. His identity could provide a clue to the Establisment forces arrayed against Nixon. Also significant was the ability of the two young reporters and the paper to pursue their investigation of the Administration over many months with little to go on, and with pressures on them exerted only by the Administration itself. I suspect that if the nation's major corporate powers really considered Nixon a desirable political spokesman, they would have found the means to persuade the paper to do its investigating elsewhere.

**The Presidential Transcripts** contain the first batch of 48 edited tape transcripts released publicly by the White House, on April 30, 1974; commentaries on the tapes by *Washington Post* newsmen; and Nixon's April 30 televised statement protesting his innocence and announcing the departure of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Dean. Later comparison of the transcripts with the actual tapes by members of the House Judiciary Committee revealed several significant discrepancies. The released transcripts embraced conversations from Sept. 15, 1972, to April 27, 1973, though Special Prosecutor Jaworski had subpoenaed tapes

going back to June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in. The June 20 tape contained the famed 18½ minute gap.

The first transcripts to be publicly released shocked the nation more for revelations of the tawdry, crude personalities of the country's rulers, their utter absence of moral or ethical values, than of the specific Watergate issue, significant aspects of which had been carefully excised in any case. My own reaction was surprise that anyone should have been surprised; Nixon, after all, had been around for a long time. The country may not have heard the last of the tapes' revelations.

The transcript of the June 23, 1972 tape, which finally did Nixon in, appears in *The Fall of a President*. It revealed beyond all slippery rationalization that he had discussed cover-up plans, including use of a phony "national security" pitch, six days after the break-in. Nixon was forced to release the transcript following a unanimous Supreme Court decision that he surrender the tapes, on the insistence of his special counsel, James St. Clair, who knew by then—early Aug. 1974—that the game was up.

*The Fall of a President* also contains the House impeachment resolution and articles by *Washington Post* staff members recapitulating Nixon's career, including the record and impact of his presidency and a summary of the Agnew resignation events. An interesting report by Herbert Rowen on Nixon's domestic policies makes a couple of significant points usually slurred over. First, the wage and price controls imposed by Nixon in 1971 (phase II) did keep inflation in check. Only when he lifted the controls after the 1972 elections did prices soar. Second, Nixon made a pervasive, sharp right turn following his re-election. This involved virtually all phases of his

OCTOBER, 1975

19

domestic policy and, a point Rowen
does not make, his war policy as well.
Whereas he proclaimed his readiness
to sign the peace treaty negotiated with
the Vietnamese just before the election,
soon after it he resorted to the murder-
ous carpet bombing of Hanoi. The
point here is that his overwhelming
victory was not a popular mandate
for what he did after the election.

The extensive *Senate Watergate Report*, released after publication of the initial tape transcripts, received little public attention in the face of the more dramatic exposures contained in the tapes. This is unfortunate because the Senate investigation went far beyond the Watergate break-in and cover-up which were its starting point, delving into various corrupt aspects of our national politics. Out of the committee's investigation came revelation of the existence of the tapes which in the end tended to overshadow the committee's work. Among the many desperate steps taken by Nixon and his associates to block the Senate investigation was the appointment of a special prosecutor, thereby doublin Nixon's woes. The Senate Committee hearings developed the materials essential to the Special Prosecutor, the House Judiciary Committee and writers like Myerson, while televisin the hearings undoubtedly educated the public to the point of making Nixon's resignation or impeachment a virtual certainty.

The Committee's report not only
provides a coherent, detailed account
of the break-in and cover-up, but it
describes the various other "White
House horrors" turned up in the inves-
tigation, including the widespread elec-
toral dirty tricks used to influence
Democratic primary results, the means
used to frame "enemies," the misuse
of governmental agencies for Nixon's
private purposes, and a variety of
other illegal acts by the White House

and Re-election Committee staffs. The
report details corporate contributions,
primarily for Nixon's campaign but
also including the Associated Milk
Producers' contributions to Sen. Hum-
phrey's and Rep. Wilbur Mills's 1972
election drives.

*Nixon's widely discussed remark*
indicating concern over his daughter
Julie's propensity for visiting museums
("The arts you know—they're Jews,
they're leftwing—in other words, stay
away") occurs in the June 23, 1972,
transcript, released shortly before the
resignation. While Jews were the
target of the remark, more generally
it projected the crude chauvinist men-
tality upon which racism and fascism
feeds. In transcripts made public
earlier, the "expletive deleted" report-
edly included a fair number of "Jew-
boy" characterizations but these had
not appeared in the published versions,
and the reports were denied or ex-
plained away as "harmless."

America's Jewish community was
embroiled, however, in its own dis-
tinctive debates over Nixon, involving
primarily Israel. The Yom Kippur,
1973, War took place during the heat
of the developing Watergate scandal.
Before the war Nixon had been ranked
as Israel's chief foreign supporter. The
proportion of Jews casting ballots for
him was estimated to have grown from
about 16% in 1968 to 33% in 1972.

In the words of the Chicago Jewish
*Sentinel* editor, "History will have to
record that a good portion of the
Jewish Establishment, under pressure
from Israel . . . did all it could to
promote the candidacy of the
'savior'". Israel's highly vulnerable
position immediately after the Yom
Kippur War led many Jews to em-
brace Nixon fervently as its sole hope.
in Tel. Aviv in April, 1974, Israelis
asked me why we Americans were per-
secuting "the greatest president Amer-

20

JEWISH CURRENTS

REP. ABZUG MUSTERS SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL IN U.N.

At the request of Rep. Bella S. Abzug (D-L, Man.-Bronx), Israel's right to remain in the United Nations was affirmed by 10 Black Congressional leaders (Yvonne Burke, William Clay, Shirley Chisholm, Cardiss Collins, Walter Fauntroy, Harold Ford, Barbara Jordan, Ralph Metcalfe, Charles Rangel and Andrew Young), by Vernon E. Jordan, head of the National Urban League, Audrey Colom, head of the National Women's Caucus, and by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Women Strike for Peace.

The latter sent the following communication July 24 to the 40 nations seeking to expel Israel from the UN:

"On the basis of our strong support for the principle of universality of membership in the United Nations, and for Israel's right to remain within that body, we deplore your country's threat to remove Israel from the General Assembly and/or the United Nations.

"We strongly oppose the misuse of power by any bloc of nations for the purpose of punishing any nation with which it has a quarrel.

"The United Nations is the only international body in which differences between nations can be arbitrated. We therefore feel that your threatened action will further weaken that organization at a time when greater unity is needed if the hope of world peace is to be realized."

ica ever had." Some of this attitude in the U.S. doubtless accounts for the role played by Rabbi Baruch Korff in defense of Nixon and the substantial number of wealthy Jews among his heavy election donors.

Yet a perusal of the Jewish press and results of opinion polls reveal a substantial majority of anti-Nixon Jews, and indicate that Jewish spokesmen and organs of opinion were among his earliest and most uncompromising critics in the Watergate affair. Their opposition stemmed largely from moral and ethical considerations, as well as their concern for democracy, which they quickly saw as under threat. Since Jewish opinion had long been overwhelmingly opposed to Washington's course in Indochina, Nixon's continuation of the war and the revelations of pro-

longed secret bombing of Cambodia intensified the criticism. Opposition to Nixon came very easily and quite naturally.

In Aug., 1973, the National Commander of the Jewish War Veterans put the question well, and not only for Jews. Referring to Watergate as the culmination of a decade of moral delinquency in high places, he said: "We have sent 50,000 boys to their deaths, and hundreds of thousands to hospitals for a dubious war without end that continues to this very day. We have rained bombs in quantities unheard of in modern warfare on countries still emerging into the age of technology. . . . We have disgraced our children by our moral laxity and throttled them when they dared to speak out against the excesses of our ignorance."

OCTOBER, 1975

21

● The

● Editor's

● Diary

## "Topics in Jewish-American Heritage"

Having published *The History of Black Americans* and *Puerto Rican History and Culture*, the United Federation of Teachers has now issued the above-named volume, subtitled "A Study and Curriculum Outline" (131 large, two-column pages, 98 illustrations, 15 of which are reproduced on the back and front board-covers, indexed, $5). UFT Pres. Albert Shanker explains in the preface that "It is our hope that this book . . . will help teachers and students of all groups gain an awareness of Jewish-American contributions in the context of a broader understanding of the nature of ethnicity."

The Topics treated are three: "Jewish Migration to America" by Evelyn Becker of the George Washington High School; "The Development of the Jewish Community in New York" by Harvey Goldenberg of Intermediate School 152, the Bronx; and "Jews in the American Labor Movement" by Beverly Sanders of Seward Park High School. Nine "specialists" are credited with reviewing and editing the text.

Printed in curriculum outline form, each section contains the Aims, Motivating Questions, Content of the "topic," Approaches and Activities (Questions for Discussion, Read and Discuss, Reports, Debate, Discovery Lesson, Guest Speaker, Visit, Research, Role-Playing, See, Listen, Write, Dramatize, Map, Graphs and Tables, Statistical Study, Summarize), Textbook Evaluation, Bibliography, and Selected Sources of Educational Materials. This formidable apparatus will undoubtedly be helpful to the teacher.

Recently the Organization of American Historians lamented that the study of history is being dissolved, in the high school curriculum, into something vaguely known as social studies. This book is an example of that trend. While each topic is treated in some rough historical sequence, the result is hardly a historical survey and analysis on any level. Now all the authors often make good use of available textual material, including that in books by Max Rosenfeld, Yuri Suhl and the present writer, and the bibliographies are good, but too often the contents of these books have not been mastered. Thus errors abound, big and small. Even a partial listing would be too extensive for our space, but here are examples:

Ms Becker has a section, "The Sephardic Migration to America, (c. 1654-1815.)" But the fact is that by the middle of the 18th century most of the Jews in the colonies were Ashkenazim even though they used the Sephardic ritual. Furthermore, Stuyvesant did not only *seek* "instruction from the Dutch West India Company regarding Jewish settlement." In fact he urged the Company to let him *exclude* the Jews on the ground that they were usurers, deceitful traders, poor and blas-

22

JEWISH CURRENTS

phemers of Christ. Omitting this stance guarantees that the teacher will miss an opportunity to discuss anti-Semitism, its causes and falsehoods, with economic reasons wrapped up in the explosive Christ-killing charge.

Again, on p. 16 the number of Jews in 1776 is given as 2,000, on p. 17 as 2,500, when it was closer to 1,000, since by 1790 the U.S. Census listed only 1,300-1,500 Jews. Nor is it accurate to say that N.Y.C. Jewish communal life began in 1654, since there was not a minyan among the 23 who arrived in 1654. And it is not true that "by 1733 Jews were present in varying numbers in all the 13 colonies" for they were not in Md., Va., N.C., Conn., Mass. and N.J. And Arthur and Joel Spingarn were not among the four Jews who helped found the NAACP, although Joel became active shortly after the founding. And Brandeis was not the first Jew to sit in the U.S. Supreme Court (Cardozo having sat there, 1932-1938).

And what does one make of a heading, "Eastern-European Jewish Migration, from Russia and its annexed territories: Poland, Lithuania and Austria-Hungary," the latter of which was an empire in its own "right" and never annexed to the Tsarist empire? After this, can one be surprised when a major event is *covered* in one sentence, thus: "After the Revolution of 1917 Jews were murdered by Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks during the Civil War"? Or at the nonsense that "After Stalin's death . . . Jews were dispersed throughout the country . . ."? And Jonas Salk was native-born and not an immigrant child who made good, any more than was Casimir Funk, "who discovered vitamins" three years before coming to the USA. And Allan Nevins is *not* Jewish. And so on and so forth . . .

Sloppiness is everywhere: Chaver Paver becomes "Chaver Forever"! the sculptor Herbert Ferber becomes Farber! and on p. 27 "mews" becomes "news" and renders meaningless a quotation from Leopold Klompert. Even the good index is scrambled on p. 127 and pages 124-125 should be transposed.

The section on labor is as riddled with errors as the others, but is more tendentious. We have Gompers, Dubinsky, Hillman—and Shanker. There is no Jewish labor movement, only "Jews in American labor . . ." The furriers, bakers, painters unions and such-like don't exist. We are told that "Dubinsky was the first head of an AFL union to demand action against organized racketeering," while the heroism of Ben Gold and Irving Potash in driving the Lepke gang out of the fur industry and putting some of them in prison is not mentioned. The book is unfair to Hillman, ignoring his dynamic stress on industrial unionism, misrepresenting the birth of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and saying this of him: "Though an immigrant, Hillman quite early shed his East European radical ideas and became an American-style pragmatist." Well, when Hillman met Lenin in Russia in 1919 and embarked on a joint project, that may have been pragmatism, but it was not Gompers-pragmatism or Dubinsky-pragmatism.

In sum, teachers who use this book will have to be wary of misinformation and unacknowledged bias; they will be served best by using the books in the bibliographies.

OCTOBER, 1975

23

## Chekhov's "Ivanov"

Again the ETC Theater (152 5th Ave., N.Y. 10011) came up with an admirable showcase production of a little known play, *Ivanov* (1888) by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), directed by Gus Kaikkonen in a translation by Alex Szogyi. Chekov's first full-length play, *Ivanov* has the mood, milieu and types of characters that have become classically familiar to us from his four great plays of 1898-1904, *Sea Gull*, *Uncle Vanya*, *Three Sisters* and *Cherry Orchard*—with one significant difference: in *Ivanov*, a Jewish woman is the hub of the drama. For Sarah Abramson had become converted into Anna Petrovna to marry *Ivanov*, who may have been interested primarily in her reputed wealth. But disowned by her wrathful parents, Sarah-Anna is an irritant now to *Ivanov*, who bursts out to a young doctor with the advice, “Don’t marry a rich, neurotic Jewess.” Sarah-Anna is pathetic, loving *Ivanov*, rejected by him, wondering “how much longer will my father and mother keep on hating me? They live only 50 miles away—but I can feel their hatred.” Much of the endless Chekhovian conversation centers on this unhappy mismatch. The production was adequate and the play meaningful. Sonya and I hope the “showcase” will attract a producer for a real run.

## Bicentennialia

For the Bicentennial, B'nai B'rith Women has cooperated with the Anti-Defamation League to produce a 40-minute film-strip, *Jews in America*, with a sound-track and narration by Norman Rose of a text written by Millard Lampell (ADL, 315 Lexington Ave., N.Y. 10016, $35 with record, $40 with cassette). Having read only the text, I had the feeling of having scanned 198 headlines covering 300 years, the effect being spotty and superficial. Apart from a dozen errors of fact, the impact is to inject "pride" with little understanding. The labor movement is slighted, Yiddish literature and theater omitted, the immigration restrictions of 1921-24 not mentioned (although Lampell does include that important development in a parallel script for a film-strip, *Italians in America* also issued by the ADL), the struggle for the New Deal is left out of the Jewish script (although touched on in the Italian script, produced in collaboration with the Columbian Coalition). Showing such film-strips can be valuable only if there is a systematic follow-up. . . . Such follow-up is facilitated by two annotated bibliographies issued by the Jewish Book Council and the American Jewish Historical Society: (107) *Selected Books on American Jewish History* and (69) *Selected Books of American Jewish Biography*, both compiled by Dr. Nathan M. Kaganoff, librarian-editor of the Society. The Council also has published a list of (51) *Selected Books* (in print) of *American Jewish Fiction*, compiled and intelligently evaluated by Harold U. Ribalow, and (38) *Selected Juvenile Books on American Jewish Life* by Deborah Brodie, which includes Howard Fast's mythical book on Haym Salomon but also lists the authentic works by Suhl on Ernestine

24

JEWISH CURRENTS

Rose and Eve Merriam on Emma Lazarus. (For 25¢ each list is obtainable from the Council, 15 E. 26 St., N.Y. 10010). . . . From the American Library Association (50 E. Huron St., Chicago, Ill. 60611) one may obtain free of charge a list of 279 books, films, records and other materials, selected for use with the serious Bicentennial 36-week program of discussions with the American Issues Forum (or for private reading or any group discussion). There are books on labor, immigrants, civil liberties, politics, foreign affairs, history, sociology and culture—a really stimulating compilation. The direction of the selection is realistic and analytical, to lead to thought and to work for change.

## Vol. 1, No 1

A New America, newsletter of Ethnic Millions Political Action Committee (EMPAC, Box 48, Bayville, N.Y. 11709, six times a year), began to appear in Feb., 1975 and has had four issues of its eight-page publication by Sept., 1975. Edited by Michael Novak (of The Unsinkable Ethnics), it is informative, challenging and in many ways heartening, whatever our dissents may be. EMPAC describes itself as "a national civil rights committee, dedicated to a politics of family and neighborhood, to equality and fairness, to a new America" in which ethnic and cultural pluralism will be recognized and encouraged. In an editorial in No. 1, "The New Ethnicity," EMPAC declares it "supports the progressive, courageous instincts of the descendants of the immigrants . . . we draw strength from the progressive traditions of our parents and our parents' parents. . . . Without us, there is no successful progressive politics." Emphasizing the working class character of the bulk of the white ethnics, Novak scorns (somewhat too much) the white liberal's condescension to blue collar mores. In the first four issues there is talk of Greeks, Poles, Jews, Italians, Slovaks, Romanians, Irish, Czechs, "Latinos," Germans, Dominicans, Syrian-Lebanese, Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Slavs, French and Democrats. One of EMPAC's aims is to develop in Congress a White Ethnic Caucus, a la the Black Caucus. Try a sample copy.

Face to Face, an Interreligious Bulletin published by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, began its quarterly publication this summer in 16 pages, and is now being distributed to Christian and Jewish clergy, academicians and educators (ADL, 315 Lexington Ave., N.Y. 10016, $2.50 per year). For progressvie Jews who have too long underestimated the religious factors in the history of anti-Semitism, Face to Face can be particularly instructive. This first issue contains the "Guidelines and Suggestions" published in 1974 by the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews to implement the Vatican Council II declarations of 1965. The Guidelines are then discussed by a Catholic, president of the Paulist Fathers, and by Rabbi Leon Klenicki, one of the editors of Face to Face. The tone is one of mutual respect coupled with frank definition of differences that need to be examined and, if not reconciled, understood and tolerated. There is much to be learned here.
M.U.S.

OCTOBER, 1975

25

MOISHE NADIR (1885-1943)

THE 90th birthday of this out-
standing American Yiddish
writer is being commemorated by
lovers of Yiddish literature through-
out the world. Yet to the English
speaking Jews he is still too little
known. Will we have to wait for
his centennial to see a collection of
his satire, poetry, drama publish-
ed? The following stories are avail-
able in English:

*   Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., *A Treasury of Yiddish Stories*, N.Y., 1953, paperback, Schocken, N.Y., 1973, 630 pages, $4.50. The editors declare Nadir "made a major contribution to Yiddish literature . . ." Published are "My First Love" and "The Man Who Slept Through the End of the World."

* Henry Goodman, ed., *The New Country*, Ykuf, N.Y., 1961. Published are "I-An Echo" and "Where Folks Go Promenading."

* Jewish Currents, July-Aug., 1963, "My First Deposit."

Born in Narayev, Galicia as Yitzhok Reiss, he came to New York in 1898 and began to publish in 1902. His first book of poems, *Wild Roses*, appeared in 1915. That year he joined the staff of *Der Tog* and left it in 1922 for the *Freiheit*, where he stayed until 1939, when he quit because of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.

Prof. Itche Goldberg, in *Unzer Dramaturgie* (Ykuf, N.Y., 1961), says of Nadir, "In the subtlest way he expressed all the perceptions, zig-zags and sense of being lost of the (Jewish) intellectuals of his time. He always vacillated between rebellious bohemianism and socially conscious protest . . ."

The translator is a Yiddish poet.

"Agmes
Nefesh"

A Story

By MOISHE NADIR

Tr. from the Yiddish
by Martin Birnbaum

ON Saturdays we play a game
with nuts.

We gather at Haitche's little "club-
room" on Greblie St.—and we play
this nut-game, rolling the nuts down
from a board that leans against a wall.
We eat chick-peas, and Haitche's
young daughter, "Agmes Nefesh" we
call her, walks about the room wear-
ing a little apron with an embroidered
flower in front and two large pockets.
Green ribbons decorate the shoulders
of her dress. We call her "Agmes
Nefesh" (heart-ache), but her real
name must be Agnes.

"Agmes Nefesh" had just recently
returned from Vienna, where she
worked as a waitress—she speaks a
bit of German and can say "Jawohl."
She exudes the charming impertinence
of a person whose vices are still like
a blossoming tree, the fruits of which
are lovely, tempting poison. . .

"Agmes Nefesh" has a small, kernel-
like face, full of warts and freckles.
Everything about her has the agility
of a mouse—the arms, the legs, the
breasts, the eyes.

26

JEWISH CURRENTS

"Agmes Nefesh" chose me as her victim. She calls me "Sport."

"Listen here, handsome, do you want something cute?" When she utters these words, "Agmes Nefesh" seems as beautiful as the world, bright as the sky, appetizing as a little radish with fresh water. ...

We play our game—one nut collides with the other. The player wins the nut that was hit by the nut he had let glide down the board. The nut that comes gliding down and hits nothing loses—her own self. ...

(Shall we say that man, too, is like that? That what he fails to touch is something he had lost, something for which he eternally yearns?)

Through the little window held secure with hardened clay and framed in white-wash, a well-rested shabbiesun comes shining through. From far away, where the dams are, a silver-like stillness comes seeping into the room and—beyond is the great world —the road to Vienna. ...

The game goes on. There is laughter and excitement and we get tired. We drink kvas made out of dry pears, eat chick-peas. ... "Agmes Nefesh" sings a little song she had brought from Vienna. It is a silly song, but it has charm. It tells us that life is a game, that all is superficial, light and playful.

The sun is setting, painting the dreary little windows with a bit of bright red. On a window-pane a green fly is frolicking—she wants to drill through the glass with her speck-like head.

We have to go to the lake—we toss things into the water and practice making "Katshkalekh"—skimming the water-surface with flat pebbles. We dissolve singly or in pairs—sometimes a boy with a girl, sometimes a boy with a boy, who in turn talk about a boy with a girl. There is a wickedness in the twilight, in the

## ATTENTION: CAMPUSES

Yugntruf, Yiddish student publication and movement, has established a Yiddish Resource Center with Ms Sheva Zucker, a Master's candidate in Yiddish Literature at Columbia University, as its field worker. She is ready to visit college campuses to stimulate setting up Yiddish study groups. The new Center is located at 69 Bank St., N. Y. 10014. She will lecture on Yiddish lore and culture—with a full range of audio-visual support.

croaking of the frogs—both sun and moon are hanging in the sky.

At the lake shore miracles in color form themselves. Something burns and takes shape, something dissolves and burns. Warm breezes come sweeping by pregnant, gay, pointing towards fruits and grain-fields and towards—there, there, everything moves towards there. . . there is the will, the desire, the hope, the rising of an intoxicating moon. ...

I am walking arm in arm with "Agmes Nefesh" and I feel a quivering in my heart. My fingers shiver and somehow come to touch something which is like wine, like moons and like sky and all the wonders in the world combined.

Then I arrive home, mother is ill, she has the hiccups and a headache. Later she faints. They try and try to revive her and finally do. I am certain—it's because of my sins, because I touched a girl's breast—it is all my fault that mother faints. I am the guilty one, only I, I, I. ...

I run outside and bite my hand until my blood starts flowing; I pinch my flesh and torture myself. ...

Yet, while I inflict pain upon myself, I feel on my finger-tips the blessed joy of the first touch and my heart is weeping and singing. ...

OCTOBER, 1975

27

Secularism
and
Our Heritage

More on
Tevye

By MAX ROSENFELD
and ELSIE LEVITAN

Dear Max:

If there's room at the table and a bit more tea in the pot, I'll invite myself over to join the discussion about Tevye that you and Dr. Wm. Glicksman have locked words about. And if there's a drop of raspberry jam, I won't resist.

What may be needed in this polemic regarding Tevye and Various Conceptions of the Phenomenology of His World is a third voice to introduce some historical perspective for everyone. On the one hand, was Tevye totally bound within the circle of divine revelation as would befit any upstanding inhabitant of Anatevka, circa 1890?

On the other hand, was Tevye, slyly, though unconsciously, bending to the winds of daring to question divine authority? Remember, those words being blown by the Haskala, Zionism and Socialism were reaching into far corners in Poland and Czarist Russia. Could it be that even unknown to Tevye himself he was beginning to translate the Holy Scriptures into "quaint" Yiddish phrases because that was the only way he could allow his secular proclivities to surface?

Or was Tevye still holding pristine to a long tradition that allowed him to complain to God, to recall to Him some of the *heymishe* aspects of living under the twin yokes of Jewish-

ness and poverty? Or, was the infusion of some humor, as Tevye groaned and toiled, only another manifestation of inching toward secularization? If Tevye made God a more comfortable Presence, if he whittled Him down to encompassable size, was there precedence for his behavior? Or was this a super-subtle move to strip Him of His ineffability?

Moreover, let us consider this additional dimension before we attempt to reach a conclusion. I think we should examine Tevye's immediate, personal world and continue to ask further questions. How was Tevye educated? How far did he go in the texts? What was his class position? How did he define himself? Did he ever have an identity crisis? Did he ever have feelings of alienation? Did the new voices of change and revolt confuse him? How did he react to his confusion? When his children *shushked zikh* in the corners, was he angered, hostile, sorrowful?

Next, we should turn to the world of Sholem Aleichem and ask the same kinds of questions. But here, we must ask many more searching questions because Sholem Aleichem was a far more sophisticated person and a creative artist, to boot. So, we must analyze the many worldly influences that bore down on him. What in Sholem Aleichem's childhood made

28

JEWISH CURRENTS

him so vulnerable to pain, that he sought to bury his true feelings from himself by transferring those vulnerabilities to other people?

Above all, we must try to understand Sholem Aleichem's purpose in wanting to make his readers laugh. Was it to be frivolous? diverting? subverting? comforting? devious? How come he permitted, nay encouraged, Tevye to make so free with God's Words?

Finally, there is a third dimension that must be taken into consideration. And that is the reader. If he is European born and approaching his or her three-score years or more, there is one set of questions to ask as to possible assumptions that they bring to the printed page. If, on the other hand, the reader was born in this country, then another set of assumptions follows. That latter reader's Jewish education was probably spotty, non-existent, belated, a thing of bits and patches. That reader's secular outlook is so pervasive and complex that it even accompanies him to the synagogue.

In order to get a picture of how any reader interprets Tevye's relationship to God and the universe, we would have to carefully construct a wide-ranging questionnaire, choose a controlled sampling, and analyze the results with the aid of a computer. Then we might emerge with answers; sodden but triumphant.

Thanks for the tea. By the way, how do you translate the word *pilpul*?

With kindest regards,

ELSIE LEVITAN

Dear Elsie:

Glad to have you join the discussion. Your very last question sent me to the dictionary, just for fun. Guess what I found? When it comes to the definition of *pilpul*, the "goyim" are much kinder to the Jews than the Jews

are to themselves. Listen:

*Random House* (unabridged): "subtle or keen disputation among rabbinical scholars regarding the interpretation of Talmudic rules and principles as applied chiefly to religious and moral questions."

*Weinreich:* "subtle argumentation, hair-splitting, casuistry"

*Harkavy:* "sophistry, casuistic debate"

*A. H. Heller (Vocabulary of Jewish Life):* "A method of Talmudic study; dialectic: The essential characteristic of *pilpul* is that it endeavors to penetrate into the essence of a discussion through comparisons and contrasts until there is apparent agreement. This method of study, carried to extremes, was in vogue in many Eastern European Jewish academies of learning. At times it degenerated into mere sophistry. Therefore the term *pilpul* came to imply 'hair-splitting.'"

Which proves that there's more to the meaning of words than what you read in the dictionary. Anyway, I know you had your tongue in your cheek when you put the query about *pilpul* in your letter, but I'm going to take advantage of it to raise a subtopic in our discussion. I don't agree that the differences between Dr. Glicksman and me on the subject of secularism constitute *pilpul*. He and I—and you, too—are active practitioners in the art of applied secular Jewishness. And we're trying to define what it is we're doing. His definition is narrower than mine, I think, but you put your finger on a vital difference in our outlook. His is Polish Jewish and mine is American Jewish. Surely that has something to do with the way we each see Jewish tradition.

The problem of defining secular Jewishness came up on the floor of the last Conference of Secular Jewish Organizations (note the name change) in May of this year in Cleveland. The great majority of the delegates there

OCTOBER, 1975

29

MORE ABOUT SOLZHENITSYN AS FALSE PROPHET

* Jack Siegel, Seven Arts Feature of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, used in many English-Jewish weeklies July 31: "... are the American writers staying away because the Russian was a hawk on Vietnam and was ready to sacrifice American blood in his crusade to overthrow the Soviet regime? ... what should be the attitude of the American Jewish community? To stay away, obviously. Not because of Solzhenitsyn's mission here or his own war against the Soviet Union, as if there weren't already conflict enough, but because his dissidence, while creamed with human touches, is basically political. ... Solzhenitsyn wants the Soviet Union changed. To what? To the old Holy Mother Russia with its progroms, murders of Jews in small but multiple acts of genocide? He wants us to ride his wave of the past. ...

* Boston *Jewish Advocate*, editorial, "Assessing Solzhenitsyn," July 31: "... The central weakness in Solzhenitsyn's speeches was his avoidance of the prime rationale for detente, a flaw incisively etched by political activist Jerome Grossman in the July 22 *Phoenix*. "At the heart of the matter of detente," he wrote, "is the attempt to avoid military confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers and thereby to reduce the risk of provoking World War III." If mutual survival is the interest of the U.S. and Russia, then irrelevant are Solzhenitsyn's catalogue of Soviet perfidy in treaty obligations, reminders of Khrushchev's 'We'll bury you!', extrapolations of Leninist dogma to its outer limits of imminent threats to the West. Nor can we afford to take seriously his advice to force Russia into more pacific ways by withdrawing from economic relations. ..."

were not concerned with formulating an all-inclusive definition, and they were in no mood to theorize the topic to death, but they did want some ongoing discussion that might help delineate at least a common denominator of all the groups in the Conference, and which could serve as a guide for activity.

The Conference in 1976 will take place in Philadelphia (where else?) and the Program Committee for that Conference hopes to generate a year-long discussion on theoretical and practical questions relating to secular Jewishness. (More on this in later columns.) So I do think we ought to try to get an expression of as many points of view as possible on the subject, and from various angles.

And, as you and I have agreed many times, it's much easier—and more productive—to discuss it around some specific point, rather than in general terms. Tevye's famous misquotations (and Sholem Aleichem's treatment of them) are a good example of such a specific point. My own thinking on the "polemic" thus far centers on a notion that secular Jewishness is an *approach*, rather than a category. Tevye was not a secularist, granted; but I've learned from him—and from Sholem Aleichem—how to fashion a "secular-humanist approach" to Jewish traditional texts.

Does anyone out there care to join us in our *shmuess*, on any aspect of secular Jewishness—with or without tea?

MAX ROSENFELD

30

JEWISH CURRENTS

[Lc]

They claimed the Jewish Quota just could not be abused
They cried that some Jews might be Axis spies
And visas could not be based on painful cries
From below.

The Turks seemed sympathetic, but claimed neutrality:
No one allowed to leave the ship: strict security:
Suggestions that the children be sent overland
Were ruled by the Turks to be out-of-hand
And weeks went by.

Orders finally reached the ship that it must leave Turkish port.
The British still refused entry. The Jews were finally caught
In a web of sinister dimensions:
The Allied claims: just pretensions
Of Freedom.

The morning that it left the Port, the Struma did explode.
Some say Turk torpedoes destroyed the human load.
Yet if that boat did symbolize man's fate
Then the lesson's to act before too late.
And still we wait.

BEYOND THE PALE

I SIT alone:
Alone on Ludlow Street.
With food stamps and relief,
I get just enough to eat.
Still it's better here than old Poland
Where my Shmuel sold cloth.
And sometimes we ate chicken
And sometimes just plain broth.

One son he's a doctor;
He lives well in L.A.
Another son sells real estate
In a place called Montego Bay.
Still back way back in old Poland,
I remember the Sabbath Queen.
Ah but forgive me I'm just an old bubi.
And bubis love to dream.

I also had a daughter
Who was killed by the mob gone wild.
And the devil hasn't invented yet
Revenge for the blood of a child.
Still who am I to say what's right.
The Lord has mysterious ways.
Yet sometimes I just sit and wonder
Why he prolongs my days.

32

JEWISH CURRENTS

INSIDE

THE JEWISH
COMMUNITY

Hadassah Convention

Rose E. Matzkin, re-elected president of Hadassah told the closing session of its four-day 61st annual National Convention in San Francisco Aug. 20 that $23 million (same as last year) was raised this year for its network of medical, social, vocational and educational services in Israel and for programs in this country. Hadassah is the largest women's voluntary organization in the U.S., with 340,000 members in some 1,500 chapters and groups in almost every community where there is a large or small Jewish population.

Quotas for Hadassah's health, educational, rehabilitation and land recclamation services are as follows: In Israel-Hadassah Medical Organization maintenance—$7,000,000; HMO Building and Development—$3,333,333; Youth Aliyah (270 Children's Villages and Day Centers caring for over 16,000 wards)—$2,100,000; Hadassah Israel Education Services (Community College, Seligsberg/Brandeis Comprehensive High School and the Hadassah Vocational Guidance Institute)—$1,000,000; Jewish National Fund—$700,000.

In the United States, the budget for programs here is $3,000,000. This includes Hadassah's adult and youth education programs, and leadership development.

Mrs. Frieda S. Lewis, Hadassah Treasurer, called the 1975 fund-raising drive a "remarkable feat in the light of the recession, inflation here and in Israel."

The 2,500 delegates approved seven resolutions dealing with domestic and foreign issues, including one calling upon the United States to "use its influence in the establishment of secure, recognized and defensible borders for Israel, open frontiers, trade and communications." Another resolution urged the U.S. "to eliminate all discriminatory practices within Government agencies and departments dealing with Arab states." A resolution on domestic affairs was concerned that the U.S. "has fallen short" in coping with inflation, rising unemployment, poverty, health insurance, government secrecy and poor education standards.

* "Israel Lobby" Myth: In her opening remarks Hadassah's president criticized what she termed "distortions and misconceptions" about the "Israel lobby" in the U.S., pointing out there is a difference between a "paid lobbyist . . . who registers and openly represents a government, and a loose, ad hoc coalition of citizens who come together from time to time to advance a cause or a point of view." Such groups, she said, "should not be confused with powerful, special-interest groups who operate with great wealth and . . . great subtlety" such as "the oil lobby and huge multi-national corporations . . . governments within governments," by contrast with which "the Jews were not powerful either in money or in numbers: American Jews do not control the huge utilities, banks or corporations of this country."

Disputing the charge that the

OCTOBER, 1975

33

American Jewish community's concern for Israel was "the action of a mono-lithic bloc," Mrs. Matzkin said: "If there is 'one voice' by Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, it was in support of Israel. And when the Senate and the House vote aid to Israel it is not because they are coerced by a powerful Jewish lobby. It is because they are representing the convictions of the American people who are concerned about Israel's survival."

## Free Luis Corvalan

The Jewish Cultural Clubs and Societies Aug. 1 called on UN General Secretary Kurt Waldheim to "issue a strong appeal for the freedom of Luis Corvalan, head of the Communist Party of Chile, and all other political prisoners." The Clubs' officers, Gedalia Sandler and Sam Pevzner, wrote to Waldheim: "The persecution, murders, mass jailings and atrocities committed by the Chilean junta are a crime against the Chilean people and humanity; and with special force against the human rights principles of the UN. Immediate action is needed for we understand that Luis Corvalan's life is threatened by the junta. You have acted in the past. Your voice is urgently needed again to save Corvalan's life and the other political prisoners in Chile."

## Oberammergau's New Text

The American Jewish Congress said Aug. 14 that it was "gratified" that the 1980 revival of the Oberammergau Passion Play would be based on a script that ascribes the crucifixion not to the Jews but to the fallen angel Lucifer. The Congress statement said the recent change voted by the elders of the Bavarian mountain village was a welcome climax to the organization's nine-year campaign to eliminate a text, in use for 115 years, that was

"replete with violent anti-Semitic material not to be found anywhere in Scripture."

The American Jewish Committee 16-Jewish Currents ERNIE—3 also termed the proposed new text a "significant breakthrough in the decades-long struggle to uproot prejudice and anti-Jewish hatred." Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, AJC national director of interreligious affairs, said "this repudiation of anti-Semitism by German officials" is particularly significant because it takes place on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Declaration by Vatican Council II, which officially condemned the ancient Christ-killer charge against the Jewish people "and called for mutual respect, friendship and cooperation between Christians and Jews."

## Housing for Aged Slowed

B'nai B'rith, the 500,000-member Jewish service organization, which now has five fully occupied low-rent housing developments for senior citizens and a sixth on the way, says that it is blocked in its efforts to speed up the nonprofit, nonsectarian program by a lack of Government mortgage loans. Although Congress appropriated $215-million to encourage the program of housing for the elderly among community organizations, B'nai B'rith officials say that because of red tape in the Department of Housing and Urban Development "little or none" of the money has been released. The result is that seven more B'nai B'rith projects in various cities are virtually at a standstill, while the need for decent housing for the elderly with low income increases. The organization's policymaking Board of Governors Aug. 7 appealed to the Government agency to "implement with all possible speed" use of the appropriated funds.
D. P.

34

JEWISH CURRENTS

BOOK
REVIEWS

# Ghilan Loses His Way

By EDWARD S. GOLDSTEIN

*How Israel Lost Its Soul* by Maxim Ghilan. Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1974, paperback, 290 pages, $2.50.

THIS book is being touted in the peace community as an important investigation of Israel (WIN, Nov. 28, 1974). Its author, now editor of the monthly *Israel and Palestine* in Paris, was a marginal man during his 25 years in Israel, with the accompanying advantage of perspective and disadvantage of alienated feelings alternately illuminating and clouding his work.

Ghilan was secretary-general of the Israeli New Left Party in 1961 and subsequently an assistant editor of Uri Avnery's *Haolam Hazeh*, Israel's combination *Playboy-Ramparts* magazine. He was jailed in 1966 for ignoring government censorship when publishing articles about the Israeli secret service. Ghilan returned to France, his native land, in 1969.

EDWARD S. GOLDSTEIN, a Harvard graduate, obtained masters' degrees both at the University of Michigan and NYU (at the latter his thesis was a study of Jewish Life and JEWISH CURRENTS from 1946 to 1958). He is now pursuing a doctoral program in Jewish history at Brandeis. He has done sociological research in Israel. He appears here for the first time.

The book's subject, the cover blurb announces, is "the evolution of Israel into an aggressively nationalistic, paramilitary and essentially undemocratic nation" bearing heavy responsibility for the Mideast crisis. Israel, Ghilan believes, should cease to exist as a Jewish state.

Ghilan opens with a history of Zionism and, to a lesser extent, Arab nationalism until 1948. He then surveys anti-Establishment, that is anti-Zionist, cultural and political movements in Israel and catalogs the shortcomings of Israeli life under headings like "Racialism" and "Class Structure." The closing chapters present Ghilan's conception of Jewish identity, for him the root cause of Israel's problem, and an account of the latest high schoolers' "counter culture," which he sees as the best, though unpromising, hope of avoiding military dictatorship in Israel.

This book should not be read for its central argument but for three other things: a glimpse of a breed too little known outside of Israel: the Israeli dissenter; an introduction to non-Zionist groups in Israeli history; important information on various subjects basic to Israeli life.

Ghilan's central argument appears in his chapter "The Racialism of Belief," in which he explains the workings of group identities, particu-

OCTOBER, 1975

35

larly Jewish identity. Here Ghilan loses his way in anthropological theory in which, we suspect, he is not expert: Driven by fear, groups develop identities rooted in racialism, that is, beliefs of distinctiveness or superiority. Further, the organized group, society, "supports itself on the irrational props of 'culture'. . . .'

Racism and what Ghilan insists is the irrationality of Jewish and Arab cultures lead only to conflict between the two peoples. Ghilan correctly senses that the heart of the Mideast conflict is between Jews and Palestinians. The "obvious answer," he writes, is "the creation in Palestine of a completely new entity, cut off from both the Arab and Jewish spheres of influence." This is the closest Ghilan comes to describing what he wants.

Ghilan's solution is not a bi-national state. He does not envisage, as the PLO claims to want, a new state of Christians, Moslems and Jews. Ghilan wants a new nationalism and culture in Palestine divorced from Judaism and World Jewry and from Islam and pan-Arab nationalism, uniting former "Jews" and "Arabs" in a rationally planned, politically neutral and socially progressive Palestine democracy. The reader is never told how such a state can be established or preserved.

Had Ghilan specified some of the fears behind Israeli and Arab behaviour—Jewish fear of another Holocaust or Arab fear of being duped and humiliated by Westerners—he could have suggested appropriate assurances. But his sweeping perception of the problem, culture itself, leads to an impossible conclusion. To wish for the abandonment of Jewish and Palestinian cultures is largely, to paraphrase a horrible Vietnam-era statement, to destroy the two peoples in order to save them. In any case, the assumption that Jews and Pales-

tinians can divorce themselves from the values, inspiration or even hang-ups of their cultures in order to join in creating a new one, is both theoretically and practically mistaken.

Cultures rarely extinguish or radi-cally modify themselves. The French cast out Catholicism during the Revo-lution but restored it under Napoleon. Few examples of genuine rationally planned, thorough-going cultural trans-formation come to mind: the Soviet Union, Ataturk's Turkey, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba. But those cultural revo-lutions are helped along with doses of authoritarianism, which Ghilan abhors!

Rather than wishing away cultural differences, we might remember Felix Adler's comment that the secret of genuine human relations is not to submerge differences but to respect them. Assuming good will on both sides, why is it any less desirable to have Israelis and Palestinians living side by side as neighborly, independ-ent nationalities than to mix them, especially when mixing will be by force? In other words, a West Bank Palestinian state, probably including Gaza and perhaps Transjordan, is in order.

However, before such a state can emerge and peacefully coexist with a predominantly Jewish Israel, Jews and Palestinians have to recognize the similarities between themselves. Both are vulnerable, homeless people for whom national sovereignty in Pales-tine represents both refuge and return to cultural origins. Palestinian re-fusal to forget Palestine is the mirror-image of Jewish refusal to forget Eretz-Yisrael. Either side's denial of the other's argument is actually de-nial of its own. Only when the conflict is seen as one of colliding cultural attachments and nationalisms does the obvious solution, compromise and co-existence, present itself.

36

JEWISH CURRENTS

Tragically, few Israelis under-
stand their Palestinian opposites while
Arabs in the scholarly *Journal of*
*Palestine Studies* (III, No. 4, 1974)
write that although a Palestinian state
on the West Bank “is a likely pros-
pect,” the eventual solution must not
be “coexistence of states,” but “co-
existence of peoples” in *one Palestine*.
In other words, Jews are to become
a minority in yet another country,
with all that such status means even
under the best circumstances.

Yasir Arafat, at the UN, specifically rejected the notion that the conflict is one of colliding nationalisms and persisted in describing it as a simple question of theft and aggression. Nothing since suggests that his thinking has changed so that he is ready to announce his acceptance of a Jewish State of Israel.

*The question of the hour is wheth-
er Palestinian extremists and Israeli
annexationists can be pushed aside and
responsible leaders brought together
for constructive peacemaking. To this
question, Ghilan offers no real answer.*

Ironically, Ghilan himself contrib-
utes to Mideast misunderstanding by
characterizing Israel as a "settler's
society" or settler state. This notion
should be laid to rest once and for
all. "Settler state" describes a specific
kind of overseas European colony such
as French Algeria or Dutch Indonesia.
The basis for such colonies is the
existence of a Mother Country which
supplies European settlers, armed
force, governmental bureaucracy and
economic management. The European
settlers usually remain citizens of the
Mother Country, enjoy the right to
return "home" and often do. The
Mother Country assumes the political
and military obligation of defending
its settlers abroad. The colonial
economy is designed to enrich the
Mother Country. Finally, the Mother

Country's culture is the parent cul-
ture of the European settlers.

Israel is not a settler state. Less
than half its Jewish population is of
European stock. Israel itself is the
only country where Jewish culture has
majority status. Most important, Israel
has no Mother Country. Israelis op-
pose the dismantling of Israel not be-
cause it is a settler state but because
it is their home.

Among the thought-provoking high-
lights of Ghilan's book is his argu-
ment that before 1948, Socialist-
Zionism violated proletarian solidarity
by excluding Arab labor from Jewish
enterprises. The question of whether
the policy of "Jewish labor only" was
racist or anti-colonialist reflects the
entire problem of interpreting Zion-
ism. The policy undoubtedly caused
hardship to many Arabs yet the
alternative, as we see today, would
have been a typically colonial and in-
tolerable situation in which Jews be-
come managers supervising Arab
labor.

Ghilan provides a rare compara-
tive account of anti-Zionist groups in
Israel such as the Canaanites, Semitic
Action, Matzpen and Haolam Hazeh.
Some, like Semitic Action, were
cultural and ideological efforts by in-
tellectuals which caused quite a stir
—but only among other intellectuals.
In 1958 Semitic Action wrote: "The
Land of Israel is the fatherland of
two nations — Hebrew Israelis and
Arab Palestinians. The Palestinians
should become independent." Other
groups, such as Matzpen and Haolam
Hazeh, are political. Except for
Haolam Hazeh, they have hopelessly
isolated themselves by questioning the
legitimacy of a Jewish State of Israel.
Ghilan believes the anti-Establishment
groups have failed to shake Zionist
control or to bring about reconcili-
ation with Arabs because they have

OCTOBER, 1975

37

not included Arabs organizationally in
their efforts; they have been re-
pressed and their leadership has been
unstable.

The account of Israeli racism in
governmental minority policy, the
legal system, land expropriation and
censorship even of Arabic poetry is
damning and disturbing. The account
includes little-known details which
should be pondered by honest friends
and honest critics of Israel. Socialists
will be interested in Ghilan's percep-
tive remark that Zionism prevents the
emergence of Jewish-Arab proletarian
solidarity by dividing working-class
people along religiously inspired na-
tionalistic lines. Thus, for many years
the Histadrut, Israel's General Fed-
eration of Labor, barred Arabs from
full membership. (For discussion of
Ghilan on Israeli racism, see our
Feb., 1975 issue.)

Appearances aside, this is not a
carefully analytical, well-documented
book but rather a piece of lengthy
journalism based on reminiscence,
hearsay, newspaper articles and only
four or five scholarly sources. Factual
errors appear throughout: Rabbi
Baruch Korff of Watergate notoriety
is mentioned, in connection with an-
other matter, as "an eccentric na-
tionalist Rabbi known only as 'Rabbi
Korf.'" Ghilan treats "Korf" as a
code word because, apparently, he
does not know that it is the rabbi's

real name. The UJA, which collects
philanthropic contributions, is mis-
takenly cited as sales agent for Israel
Bonds. The book is further marred
by wild generalizations and far-
fetched assertions: "Israel's parasitic
ruling class is without par in either
the communist or the capitalist world."
Israel's agriculture, had it developed
properly, "could have taken on and
beaten the . . . industrialized agricul-
ture of Europe and America." It is
unfortunate that Ghilan's dissent leads
him to despair of Jewish and Arab
cultures. Rededication to what is
humane and creative about those cul-
tures is the Middle East's best hope.

The Management Committee
congratulates

BEN AXELROD

Life Subscriber and Volunteer
on the birth Aug. 13
of his great-grandson

Evan Matthew Cofsky

We mourn the untimely loss of

JOSEPH ZAPUN

Clara, his wife
Helen and Julius Meyerowitz,
brother and sister-in-law

Hari and Selma Dharan,
nephew and niece

Ruth Meyerowitz, niece

The Editorial Board

mourns the loss of
SAM BLOOMFIELD

died July 18, aged 83
and condoles with his wife

Miriam and their son Victor.

A lifelong subscriber, Sam wrote
for us in 1958, and continued to
study and teach, while working as a
chicken farmer, the meaning of Jew-
ish literature and culture. He lec-
tured on the Yiddish classics at
Sonoma State College, and on
modern Jewish literature at the
Petaluma Jewish Cultural Club.

38

JEWISH CURRENTS

[LC]

Opinions expressed in letters are not necessarily those of the magazine. Letters will not be published unless accompanied by the name and address of the writer. Names will be withheld from publication on request.—Ed.

## Student Subscribes

Almost under the wire, but here it is: a check for a student subscription for 1975. I hope you make your subscription and fund-raising goal for '74.

I have been reading JEWISH CURRENTS at the Hillel House at the University of Texas. But as I believe we must support what we believe in with time, energy and money, you have a new subscriber instead of a reader.

AARON HOWARD
Austin, Tex., Dec. 12

## From a Poet

I want to thank you for the copy of JEWISH CURRENTS that you sent to me. Your articles were fascinating, as usual, but I was particularly impressed with the Solzhenitsyn controversy by Louis Harap.

ROSE ANN ROTH
New York, Jan. 11

## Renewal

I had intended to let my subscription lapse because of what I considered to be your bias against Israel and in favor of the Arabs. Lately, you seem to be seeing things more impartially.

While you criticize Israel for its treatment of minorities, how about some information about the life of Jews and other minorities in the “socialist” and other Arab States.

On balance, it seems to me that Israel treats its minorities better than the Arab countries treat theirs.

SIMON FELLNER
Long Island City, N.Y., Jan. 14

## Daniel Friedman's Poem

My good friend and neighbor Frank Kessler read to us Daniel Friedman's poem, "Rabbi Joshua ben Levi And the Angel of Death," published in your Dec., 1974 issue.

I would appreciate your sending me a copy of that issue.

Hallandale, Fla., Jan. 7

M.T.

## To "Burn the Debt"

Enclosed please find a check for $100 to lighten your Debt burden.

I may differ with you at times, but always admire your political courage and fully recognize the importance of JEWISH CURRENTS.

Your supporter as ever,
New York, Jan. 9 SAM SHAPIRO

OCTOBER, 1975

39

JEWISH CURRENTS
STUDENTS ESSAY CONTEST

Subject: "Jews and the American Revolution"

Eligible: Any one regularly enrolled as an undergraduate or graduate student in an accredited college or university in the USA.

Length: 2,500-3,000 words

Deadline for papers to be received: April 1.

Prizes: First—$125
Second—$75

The Prize money is being advanced by Mr. Joseph Shachnow of Los Angeles

Judges: The Editorial Board of Jewish Currents

Awards will be presented at the Jewish Currents Annual Dinner, May 16, 1976

The Editorial Board reserves the right to publish the prize essays. Essays should be submitted with a pen-name; the author's real name should be in a separate sealed envelope enclosed with the essay. The decision of the judges will be final.

Our Profound Sympathy To
ROSE HALPERN

on the death of her devoted
husband Irving

We share your loss.

We shall miss his talent, friendship, generosity, progressiveness and quiet service

Concourse Emma Lazarus Club

JERRY TRAUBER

Monument Designer & Builder
142 Langham St.

Brooklyn, N.Y. 11235

Tel.: (212) 743-9218

Memorial work in all cemeteries

PETALUMA REPORTS

that Sat., Aug. 16, the Jewish Cultural Club had a gathering for the benefit of Jewish Currents that netted $250. With Sam Vast, Club Secretary, presiding, Sam Goertzel spoke on the role of the magazine in enlightening its readers on the most important issues facing the Jewish people on the home front and in the world, Esther Newmark read a Yiddish poem by Haim Schwartz, Jack Gershenson played songs by the late Sidor Belarsky on a tape recorder, and Dora Wromsky made the fund appeal, with results noted above.

The Management Committee deeply appreciates the continued solidarity of the Petaluma Jewish Cultural Club, of which Joe Rapoport is the Chairman, and thanks all its members and friends for their support.

TO BURN-THE-DEBT

the 44th to contribute $100 was
SOL FISHBEIN, New York.

We need six more!

Rent Strikers Attention!

I want to get in touch with anyone who was a member of a tenants' organization or who took part in a rent strike in New York City between 1890 and 1970. These interviews are for a history of tenant organization from 1890 to 1970, sponsored by the Center for Policy Research.

John J. McLoughlin, Center for Policy Research, 475 Riverside Dr., Room 828, N.Y. 10027, (212) 870-2282-3.

OCTOBER, 1975

41

John Kenneth Ackley:

Best wishes for your
70th Birthday
Oct. 21, 1975
in friendship
and
fellowship

Sonya and
Morris U. Schappes

## A "DREIDEL FACTORY"?

Actually, it's more like a home workshop, but we do make beautiful, handcrafted dreidels out of redwood—large (2 1/2 inches high), with the letters burned into the side.

At first we (2 families) made them for ourselves. (We wanted a nice dreidel for our own kids like those we played with at Hanukah years ago—not the cheap plastic ones you get nowadays.) Then our friends wanted them, so we made more dreidels . . . and more. Last year we advertised our dreidels nationally. The response was wonderful: thousands of people ordered them and many wrote from all over the world to say how much they liked our old-fashioned dreidels.

Every order is personally filled the same day and sent out by first-class mail. Each dreidel comes complete with playing instructions and the story of the dreidel. Only $2 each (3 for $5) plus 50c on each order for handling and postage.

### ORGANIZATIONS AND GIFT SHOPS

We have a special offer with a no-risk, money-back guarantee on quantity orders (min. 24) at a low price. Write us for details.

Send all orders and inquiries to:

THE DREIDEL FACTORY
Dept. G, 2445 Prince St.
Berkeley, California 94705
(Calif. res. add 6% sales tax.)

Happy 50th Wedding Anniversary

**Edka and David Seltzer.**

We wish you many more healthy, happy years with your family.

Fannie and Sam Borum
W. Palm Beach, Fla.

Best wishes to
Max Bender

on his 70th birthday

We wish you many years of good health and happiness together with Tania and Henry.

Bessie Steinberg
Fannie and Sam Borun

Century Village
W. Palm Beach, Fla.

Heartfelt Condolences To

FANNIE KAUFMAN
on the loss of her husband Eddie,
a progressive and great human being
And to Sadie and Sam Klein

on the loss of her sister Sara
a fine human being
Friends in Century Village, Fla.

In loving memory of
my husband
HUGO LOHDORF
died Oct. 23, 1973

Sophie Lohdorf
Miami Beach

## IN MEMORIAM

Rubin Zeldes
died, Aug. 22, 1975

A friend and
humanitarian

I. J. Shappin
Los Angeles

42

JEWISH CURRENTS

THE MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE
congratulates

SAM BORUN
on his 80th birthday

Oct. 18, 1975
and wishes him and his

beloved wife Fannie

good health and happiness in their progres-
sive work. Sam Borun was a member of our
Management Committee for many years
until he moved to Century Village, West
Palm Beach, Fla., where he serves as our
representative. Fannie Borun and he are
individual Life Subscribers.

L'HAIM! To 120!

THE FLATBUSH CULTURAL CLUB

GREETS

SAM BORUN

On The Occasion of His 80th Birthday

HIS ENERGETIC ACTIVITY IN
BEHALF OF SOCIAL ADVANCE
AND PROGRESSIVE JEWISH LIFE
BELIE HIS YEARS—ALL OF
WHICH HAVE BEEN FRUITFUL
IN THE CAUSE OF PEACE,
FREEDOM AND BROTHERHOOD.

THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

We salute our good friend
SAM BORUN

on his 80th birthday, Oct. 18.

May he and his loving wife Fannie
have many, many more, doing the
work that makes them happy!

Sophie and Jack Nathan

In Memoriam

DANIEL N. STONE

Dec. 7, 1907 — July 19, 1975

The Bensonhurst Fraternal
Society

mourns the premature loss
of our esteemed co-worker
who over the years has served us
as Cultural Director
Legislative Director
Vice-President and
President.

A refined and creative human
being, he made many contributions
by his writings and his photography.
He was a soldier-patriot in the true
sense, an anti-fascist fighter for
peace, democracy, brotherhood
for all peoples, and
progressive Jewish culture.

We condole with his beloved
wife, Sandra, and their
children, Hilda and Alan.

WE WILL MISS HIM.

OCTOBER, 1975

43

[c]

Thank You

FEIGEL and JACK GOLDWORTH

for requesting that your undersigned friends,
in lieu of a personal gift to you,
make a contribution to

Jewish Currents

one of your most favorite magazines

PAULINE DEN

MARTIN DUCHAN and BELLA GOLDWORTH

DINA and YASHA FISHER

SHEINDL GOLDSTEIN

MOLLIE and MORRIS GOLDSTEIN

IRENE GOLUB

SARA and IZZY GUKOWSKY

EDNA and IRVING KAPLAN

FANNIE PECK

ANNA and RUBIN RABIN

GUSSIE and HENRY WALKER

SONIA and LOUIS ZIMMERMAN

44

JEWISH CURRENTS

[LC]

HONOR ROLL
of those who have given us $25 or more for our 1975 Fund Drive

No. 5—through Sept. 10

Jerome S. and Hassie Weiman,
Philadelphia ($100)

Rickie Roth, Los Angeles

Jerry Trauber, Brooklyn ($50)

Jewish Culture Club,
Petaluma, Calif. ($250)

Irene Land, Berkeley, Calif. ($50)

Eva Landau, Bronx, N. Y.

Dr. Harry Bloch, Forest Hills,
N. Y. ($100)

William and Anna Tatelbaum,
Miami Beach ($30)

SUB HONOR ROLL

<table><tr><td>Abe Boxerman, Van Nuys, Calif.</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>Max Noon, Brooklyn</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>Harry Jaglom, Hollywood, Cal.</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>Bess Katz, Philadelphia</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Kathleen Winsor, La Jolla, Cal.</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Dora Bayrack, Los Angeles</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Murray Berland, Los Angeles</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Mollie and Morris Goldstein, Bronx</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Irving Weissman, New York</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Paul Basch, W. Hartford, Conn.</td><td>3</td></tr></table>

FOR BEQUESTS TO JEWISH CURRENTS

in your will: The following form is suggested for those who wish to include a bequest to the magazine in their wills:

I give and bequeath to Jewish Currents, Inc., a stock corporation of the State of New York, or its successors, the sum of $______ for its general purposes.

Our attorney will be glad to consult with anyone wanting to make such a bequest.

Please look at our Goals below. Have YOU contributed?

We Report

Jan. 1-Sept. 10

<table><tr><td>Greater New York</td><td>$14,874.10</td><td>87</td></tr><tr><td>Los Angeles</td><td>3,203.05</td><td>75</td></tr><tr><td>Upper Calif.</td><td>1,639.00</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Miami Beach & Fla.</td><td>1,074.50</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>West Palm Beach, Fla.</td><td>975.75</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Chicago and Ill.</td><td>740.95</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Great Neck, N. Y.</td><td>542.25</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Philadelphia & Pa.</td><td>506.00</td><td>14</td></tr><tr><td>Elsinore, Calif.</td><td>323.00</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Connecticut</td><td>314.00</td><td>26</td></tr><tr><td>Wash. D.C.Md.</td><td>307.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Michigan</td><td>262.10</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>New Jersey</td><td>181.00</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Canada</td><td>178.00</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Upper New York</td><td>151.00</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Massachusetts</td><td>132.00</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Arizona</td><td>40.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Maine</td><td>45.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Puerto Rico</td><td>45.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Oklahoma</td><td>25.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Wisconsin</td><td>25.00</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Georgia</td><td>25.00</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Utah</td><td>25.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Minnesota</td><td>19.40</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Ohio</td><td>15.50</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Oregon</td><td>11.50</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Delaware</td><td>10.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Nevada</td><td>10.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Virginia</td><td>7.50</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Vermont</td><td>5.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Kentucky</td><td>1.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Nebraska</td><td>1.00</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>New Mexico</td><td></td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Kansas</td><td></td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Texas</td><td></td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Indiana</td><td></td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Israel</td><td></td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>W. Germany</td><td></td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Totals</td><td>$25,714.60</td><td>274</td></tr></table>

OUR GOALS

Fund Drive $50,000
Received to date $25,714
New Subs 1,000
New Subs to date 274

Someone Needs You
Donate Blood
Call UN 1-7200
The Greater N. Y.
Blood Program

OCTOBER, 1975

45

[Lc]

AROUND
THE WORLD

AT HOME

"A drastic reduction in new nuclear power plant construction" was urged by over 2,400 scientists in a Declaration to the President and Congress released Aug. 6, "the 30th anniversary of Hiroshima." About one-fourth of the scientists are Jewish. The declaration also urged "the nation to suspend its program of exporting nuclear plants to other countries pending resolution of the national security questions associated with the use by these countries of the by-product plutonium from U.S. nuclear reactors." The signatures were collected by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 1208 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02138, which will send free its bibliography of books, periodicals and films on nuclear problems.

Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, addressing 25 foreign journalists brought to him by the U.S. Information Agency March 3 while touring the South, declared, "I think we were fighting the wrong people maybe in World War II . . . our true foreign policy in those years ought to have been cultivating the friendship of the Japanese and the Germans instead of being antagonistic." When the Washington Post broke the story May 8, Wallace tried in vain to weasel out of his statement by saying that he was referring to the years before World War II, but observers noted this statement as quoted is consistent with his racist, anti-Semitic pattern of reaction. Why the USIA brought the visitors to Wallace in the first place has also been asked.

**Amnesty for illegal aliens is being**
urged by the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born (799 Broadway, Rm. 239, N. Y. 10003) and other organizations that oppose the Rodino Bill, HR 982, which would fine an employer $10,000 for each illegal alien hired. To identify these "undocumented" workers it has been proposed that all workers carry registration cards! Pres. Henry Foner of the Joint Board Fur, Leather and Machine Workers Union, in a letter in the N. Y. Times Jan.

8, pointed out that illegal aliens are being made "economic scapegoats" in the depression. In Los Angeles Feb. 15 the I.L.G.W.U. announced it was going to begin organizing illegal aliens into their union to prevent employers from taking advantage of them by cutting wages. The Hospital Workers in L.A. had just announced such a drive to unionize illegal aliens. Leon J. Davis, president of Local 1199 of the Hospital Workers, said, "Let's place the blame for unemployment where it belongs. Most of these people have been imported to this country by employers who wanted a cheap labor force. The aliens are the victims, not the villains, in the situation. Responsibility for joblessness rests with the Nixon-Ford Administrations. The only jobs foreign-born workers can get are under-the-counter deals. Let's not make them the scapegoats." In 1199 News, April, he opposed the Rodino Bill, despite its endorsement by the AFL-CIO. Outstanding in advocating amnesty has been Monsignor George C. Higgins of the U.S. Catholic Conference.

**After a stay at the National Gallery of**
Art in Washington, D.C. July 30-Sept. 9, the Soviet loan exhibition of 30 master paintings from the Hermitage in Leningrad and 13 from the Russian State-Museum will be seen in New York Sept. 16-Oct. 29, Detroit Nov. 4-Dec. 9, Los Angeles Dec. 16-Jan. 27, 1976 and Houston Feb. 3-March 16. Two of the works from the Russian State Museum are by Jews: Isaac Ilyich-Levitan (1861-1900) has one of his famous "mood landscapes" of 1898, "Silence"; and Leon Samoylovich Bakst (né Lev Rosenberg, 1866-1924) has a 1906 "Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) with his Nurse." Also of Jewish interest is an 1887 "Portrait of Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) Conducting" by Ilya Efimovich Repin (1844-1930), and, from The Hermitage, one of the paintings on Biblical subjects by Rembrandt (1606-1669), tentatively titled "The Condemnation of Haman" (c. 1665). The loan exhibit is part of a cultural exchange with the USSR and is related to the Bicentennial. The illustrated Catalog is $9.

46

JEWISH CURRENTS

ABROAD

**Romania: The Federation of Jewish**
Communities has issued its annual Jewish calendar (Luach) in Romanian, Yiddish and Hebrew, for the year 5736 (1975/76). The booklet, 4"x5½" in size, contains 128 pages and a 4-color cover with a Star of David.

**Poland: In Warsaw in July the much-**
debilitated Yiddish State Theater celebrated its 25th anniversary in a three-day festival during which it performed two-act adaptions of Peretz Hirschbein's *A Pitcherful of Sunshine*, S. Ansky's *The Dybbuk* and Peretz' *At Night in the Old Market Square* under the direction of Hevel Buzgan. There are now only some 4,000 Jews left.

**The 14th World Scouts Jamboree for**
eight days early in Aug. in Norway was attended by 17,000 scouts from 24 countries, including 13 Arab delegations and one from Israel of eight Jews and two Arabs. The Tunisians were the only Arab delegation that responded to Israeli overtures for fraternization and held a communal sing-song one night with the Israelis. At the parallel World Youth Forum, when Danny Kochav of Haifa was elected secretary of the English-speaking group of the Steering Committee, nine Arab delegations withdrew but those of Lebanon, Libya, Algeria and Tunisia stayed.

**Argentina: The July issue of Freie**
*Shtimme*, progressive Yiddish monthly, looks forward editorially to the possible lessening of the anti-Semitic wave with the ousting, in the reorganized government, of Lopez Rega, Minister of Social Welfare. It was this ministry that virtually subsidized through large ads such anti-Semitic publications as *El Caudillo*, *El Fortin*, *Patria Peronista*, *Cabildo*, *Semana Politika*, etc., some of which have already ceased publication, while others have changed their names. Arab-financed anti-Semitism was also encouraged by Lopez Rega's machinations. . . . *La Razon*, Buenos Aires' largest circulation afternoon daily, has been advertising a book by Prof. Walter Beveraggi Allende of the Buenos Aires Law School, *Argentine Inflation*, on the title pige of which Argentina is shown crucified on a cross whose nail heads are Stars of David, with a hook-nosed figure sitting at the base of the cross, hammer in hand. . . . In June a new chauvinist movement emerged, "Caudillo" (strongman), to combat Marxism and Zionism, using the slogan, "the best enemy is a dead enemy." Party emblems recall those of Hitler.

**USSR: In Moscow there appeared in**
Yiddish a collection of stories by Rivka Rubin, *Es Shpint Sich a vodem* (Winding a Thread). The book contains 326 pages, in an edition of 1,300. . . . In the first seven months, 4,691 Jews emigrated to Israel. In July, 818 Jews arrived in Vienna, but only 490 went on to Israel, the others going mainly to the USA and Canada. . . . Sept. 4 Soviet News Agency Tass reported that in 30 postwar years to June, 1975, 115,000 Jews emigrated, 5% of the Soviet Jewish population. Only 1,973 applications were denied in that period, 1.5% of applicants. Currently, applications for emigration have fallen to about 850 a month compared with some 2,200 or 2,300 a month before the Oct., 1973 war. . . . In Minsk, Byelorussia, the Central Art Gallery had an exhibit of the work of Lazar Ron, which included many anti-Nazi paintings about World War II as well as portraits of Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz and the martyred Soviet Yiddish writers Peretz Markish (1895-1952) and Izzy Harik (1898-1937). . . . July 2 in Odessa, Ukraine, Lev Roitburd, 39, was arrested at the airport as he was about to leave for Moscow to meet U.S. Senators there. He has been trying to emigrate for three years. Aug. 25 he was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly striking a policeman trying to search him. Roitburd, an engineer, denied the charge, insisting he himself had been roughed up. . . . In July, the Moscow popular weekly *Nedelya* (Week) scored U.S. tourists who come to meet local Jewish activists: "Zionist emissaries are trying to penetrate the Soviet Union like cockroaches, through all the holes. . . . Tourist-Zionists appear in various forms. But their aim is the same—to fan nationalist and emigration fever." Following this, the Soviet travel agency, Intourist, announced "Tourist-Zionists" will be treated as "interfering in Soviet internal affairs." . . . Aug. 26 in Moscow, Anatoly Malkin, 20-year-old former metallurgy student, was sentenced to three years in a labor camp for refusing induction into the Soviet armed forces following his applying to emigrate to Israel. Trial judge Valentina Tsygankova denied to Tass that the case was evidence of "discrimination against persons of Jewish nationality in the USSR." . . . In Kiev in mid-Aug. Yakov Vinarov was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing induction. A student in a polytechnical institute, he had in 1973 applied to emigrate. He refused to enter the army because, after serving, he could be denied emigration as having security information. M.U.S.

OCTOBER, 1975

47

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
411 South Graham Street,
Miss Josephine Roviles,

to me.
and appreciate your taking the time to write
I am heartened by your generous words
letter.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful
Dear Miss Roviles:

December 22, 1976

Atlanta, Georgia.
652 Wynaucney Drive, N.E.,
Mr. R. G. Rowan,

Henry A. Klaarner

Best regards,

to me.
and appreciate your taking the time to write
I am pleased to write by your generous words

letter.

thoughtful

Dear Mr. Rowan: