Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

Central Europe

Mitteleuropa is a geographic but above all a cultural entity. Central European Jewish intellectuals thought and wrote in German, not only in Berlin and Vienna but also in Prague, Budapest, and even Czernowitz. Adjacent to the Yiddishland—Poland and Russia, where the Jewish language and culture were Yiddish—was a Deutsch-Jüdischland, the Jewish German culture of Central Europe, that persisted in the years that follow World War I in spite of the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s witnessed an extraordinary upsurge of this German-speaking Jewish culture in all areas of cultural life: Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig, and Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin are only a few among the best-known figures of this golden age, comparable only to the Jewish culture in Spain during the Middle Ages.

The social condition of Jewish German intellectuals in Central Europe was quite different from their counterparts in Western or Eastern Europe. In Western Europe (France and England) Jewish intellectuals were at least integrated into bourgeois society in appearance (consider the Dreyfus Affair!), while in Eastern Europe (Russia and Poland) they were excluded and treated as social pariahs. In Mitteleuropa, the situation was an intermediary one: with an ambience of exclusion, Jewish intellectuals felt themselves to be semipariahs, in spite of their desperate attempts at assimilation to the dominant (German) culture.

The concept of pariah intellectual has been discussed by Hannah Arendt. Her proposition, inspired by the brilliant insights of the French romantic socialist (anarchist) Bernard Lazare, distinguishes the Jewish pariah intellectual, bearer of a critical (Jewish) viewpoint, from the parvenu Jews, who denied their identity and adapted themselves to the social dominant forces.[2] In a remarkable essay on Jews and Germany, Enzo Traverso discusses these two ideal/typical figures as defined by Arendt: on one side, the lineage of the parvenus, the Jews who had grown rich, utterly conformist and craving for respectability, from Bismarck’s banker Gerson Bleichröder and the Rothschilds to the businessman (and briefly foreign minister) Walter Rathenau; on the other side, the hidden tradition of the pariahs, excluded and persecuted, who rebelled against the bourgeois society, such as Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Rosa Luxemburg. Unlike Arendt, however, Traverso defines the rebel pariah by his social consciousness and not necessarily by a strong Jewish self-assertion.[3]

What were the differences among radical Jewish intellectuals in Central Europe? Rather than a classical political typology—anarchists, socialists, Communists, leftist Zionists, etc.—I propose a different approach, which begins by transcending these political distinctions. Radical Jewish intellectuals in Mitteleuropa were attracted by the two poles of German cultural life, epitomized by the two famous personae of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1922): “Settembrini,” the liberal, democratic, and republican philanthropist—in part inspired by his own brother, Heinrich Mann—and “Naphta,” the strange, romantic conservative and revolutionary Jewish Jesuit (!), probably inspired by Georg Lukács.

The first group consisted of Enlightened (Aufklärer) intellectuals—partisans of Western modernity and of rationalism, unreligious and believers in progress, whether they were social democrats, Marxists, or Communists: Eduard Bernstein, Paul Singer, Max Adler, Otto Bauer, Paul Levi, and Paul Frölich, among many other examples. Trying to understand why so many Jews supported socialism, Walter Laqueur wrote:

This hypothesis is certainly relevant, and it helps explain why so many Jews joined the Social Democrats in Germany, with even more in Austria. However, it is not an adequate understanding of the radicalization of the romantic Jewish generation, which distrusted rationalism, industrial progress, and liberalism and would be attracted by the anarchist utopia or by Communism rather than by Social Democracy.

The second main group, the romantics, shared a critical view of industrial/capitalist Zivilisation, the force they considered responsible for the disenchantment of the world. Their protest against bourgeois society was inspired by nostalgia for some aspects of the premodern past. Among the romantic radicals, the anarchist Gustav Landauer and the Marxist Ernst Bloch were perhaps the most influential.

In the specific context of Central European Judaism, a complex network of links—of elective affinities, to use a concept (Wahlverwandtschaft) borrowed from Johann Goethe by Max Weber in his sociology of religion—would be established between romanticism, Jewish messianism, antibourgeois cultural rebellion, and revolutionary (socialist and/or anarchist) utopias. This messianism was not the one of Jewish orthodoxy but a new highly political version, seen through the lens of German romanticism.

Within the romantic/messianic galaxy of the Central European radical Jewish culture were two poles. The first consisted of religious Jews with radical/utopian leanings: Rudolf Kayser, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hans Kohn, and the young Leo Löwenthal. The rejection of assimilation and the assertion of a religious and/or cultural Jewish identity was the dominant aspect of their thought. Most of them were Zionists but soon left the movement (Kohn and Löwenthal) or remained but were marginalized because of their antinationalist stance (Buber and Scholem). And all shared to varying degrees a universalist utopian perspective, a sort of libertarian (anarchist) socialism that they articulated with their messianic religious faith.

The other pole consisted of the assimilated, religious atheist Jews with anarchist and/or Marxist sympathies: Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, the young Georg Lukács, Manès Sperber, and Walter Benjamin. Unlike the others, they distanced themselves from Judaism without breaking all the links, especially with its messianic tradition. The term “religious atheism,” used by Lukács in reference to Feodor Dostoyevski, helps us understand this paradoxical spiritual figure, who seems to search, with the energy of despair, for the point of messianic convergence between the sacred and the profane. Some of those who represented this type received in their youth a religious Jewish education (Fromm and Sperber), but most of them discovered Judaism later in life. Apart from this individual trajectory, they had in common this strange and contradictory attitude that combined the rejection of traditional religious beliefs with a passionate interest in the mystical, heretical, and Chiliastic Jewish and Christian currents. They shared a messianic/revolutionary spirituality that wove together, in an inextricable way, the threads of religion and those of radical utopias. Sympathetic to the anarchist ideals during 1914–23, most would progressively be drawn to Marxism in the following years.

Eastern Europe

Three essential elements distinguish German radical Jewish intellectuals of Eastern Europe from those of German culture: Yiddish (instead of German) culture, a highly visible political leadership in radical movements, and the rejection of religion.

Within Eastern Europe a whole literature in Yiddish, deeply rooted in the life of the shtetl (the Jewish village) and of the Jewish communities, was widespread. Authors (most of them radicals of one kind or another) such as Mendel Moicher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, David Bergelson, I. L. Peretz, Moyshe Kulbak, and S. Ansky—and later in the United States Sholem Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer—created a literary universe, at the same time both authentically Jewish and of general significance, that had no equivalent in Central or Western Europe. Jewish German writers such as Arnold Zweig and Franz Kafka were fascinated by this culture, though their own literature was of a quite different kind.

The participation of Jewish intellectuals in revolutionary movements was much more important in Eastern Europe—that is, in the Yiddishland, which included the whole space of the old czarist empire—than in Central or Western Europe; a very large section, if not the majority, of the intellectuals linked to the various anarchist or Marxist groups were Jewish.

The best known are only the visible peak of the iceberg: among the Marxists Lev D. Trotsky (Bronstein), Julius Martov (Tsederbaum), Raphael Abramovich, Lev Deutsch, Pavel Axelrod, Mark Liber (Goldman), Fiodor Dan (Gurvitch), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld), Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), Gregory Zinoviev (Radomilsky), Jakov Sverdlov, David Riazanov (Goldendach), Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Adolphe Joffé, Michael Borodine (Grusenberg), Adolf Warszawski, and Isaac Deutscher, and among the anarchists Voline (Vsévolod Mikhaïlovitch Eichenbaum), Efim Yartchouk, Abba Gordin, Alexander Shapiro, Aron Baron, Senia Flechine, Olga Taratouta, and Emma Goldman.

In addition to this list, there are the intellectuals linked to specifically Jewish radical organizations, such as the Bund or the leftist Zionists, as well as the Jewish intellectuals from Eastern Europe who migrated to Germany and played an important role in its labor movement: Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches, Parvus (Israel Helphand), Arkadi Maslow (Isaac Tchereminski), August Kleine (Samuel Heifiz), and many others.

This massive commitment can be explained, at least partially, by the force and violence of anti-Semitism in the czarist empire and the much higher level of oppression and poverty among the Jewish communities—in a word, the pariah condition of the East European Jews, a favorable breeding ground for rebellion. A significant Jewish working class, moreover, played a pioneering role in the organization of the Russian labor movement.

These revolutionary intellectuals—whether Marxists or anarchists, Bundists or Communists, leftist Zionists or socialist internationalists—all rejected religion. The romantic current tempted by the reenchantment of the world, so important in Mitteleuropa, was practically absent among them. They held instead a rationalist, atheist, secular, Aufklärer, materialist worldview. The Jewish religious tradition, in particular the mysticism of the Kabbala, Hasidism, and messianism, were, in their eyes, mere obscurantist survivals of the past—reactionary medieval ideologies that one should get rid of as soon as possible, with the help of science and the Enlightenment. When a radical Yiddish writer addressed messianism, such as Moyshe Kulbak in his novel Monday (1926), it was in order to denounce the sinister role of false Messiahs such as Jakob Frank, who carried along his disciples into catastrophe.[5]

Exceptions to this schema are rare: Nachman Syrkin (1868–1924), an outsider, socialist and Zionist, Marxist and populist, Yiddish and Hebrew speaker, considered both socialism and Zionism to be modern forms of Jewish messianism. Another example is the strange case of Nikolai Maximovksi Vilenkin, religious socialist, member of the philosophic-religious association of St. Petersburg, and editor of the socialist journal Novaja Zizn (New Life) published by Maxim Gorki, but Vilenkin converted to Orthodox Christianity, changed his name to N. M. Minski, and thereafter had no link to Judaism.[6]

Western Europe

The West European situation differed dramatically from the Jewish intellectual experience in the other two regions. Much more integrated in the established society, Western Jewish intellectuals were not often radicals. They generally supported the dominant culture in its liberal and democratic version. This orientation stemmed from the great bourgeois revolutions in those countries—Holland, England, and France—that emancipated the Jews and permitted their economic, social, and political participation in society.[7] Upsurges of anti-Semitism, such as the Dreyfus Affair, were considered by Western Jewish intellectuals as survivals of the past, doomed in last analysis to disappear.

For example, in France one could of course find Jewish French socialist intellectuals, but they were usually moderate social democrats such as Lucien Herr, the influential librarian of the École Normale; Léon Blum, the prime minister of the Popular Front (1936); or Victor Basch, the president of the League in Defense of Human Rights who was murdered by Nazi collaborators in 1944. Such figures were liberal rationalists, men of the Enlightenment, with no inclination for romanticism or messianic/revolutionary utopias. The historian Marc Bloch came from a similar background but during World War II joined a Communist-inspired resistance movement; he was arrested and shot by the Nazis.

An exception is the symbolist (i.e., romantic) writer and anarchist thinker Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), one of the main leaders of the campaign in defense of Alfred Dreyfus. Lazare’s revolutionary ideas were rooted in romanticism, that is, the cultural protest against modern bourgeois/industrial civilization that spoke in the name of precapitalist communitarian values. He was radically antiauthoritarian, an enemy of the state in all its past, present, or future forms, and a libertarian romantic. Lazare was not religious, but he celebrated the libertarian and egalitarian value of the biblical prophetic tradition. As a consequence of this tradition, he wrote, “The Jews . . . not only believed that justice, liberty and equality could be sovereigns of the world, but they thought themselves especially entrusted with the mission of working for this reign. All the desires, all the hopes these three ideals gave birth to ended up crystallizing around one central idea: that of the Messianic times, of the coming of Messiah.” It is no wonder that many Jews who were involved in every modern revolutionary movement, from Leo Frankel (the communard of 1871) to Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Karl Marx, this “descendant of a long line of rabbis and teachers . . . inspired by that ancient Hebraic materialism.”[8]

Of course, one can find in the first half of the twentieth century several other Jewish radical intellectuals in France (and other countries of Western Europe), but most of them were immigrants from Eastern or Central Europe. Some of these figures would play an important role in French leftist culture, mainly after World War II: Lucien Goldmann, creator of an innovative Marxist sociology of culture, and Georges Haupt, historian of internationalism, both from Romania; André Gorz (Gerhart Hirsch), born in Vienna and the founder of a socialist ecology; Joseph Gabel from Budapest, a sociologist of alienation; and Maxime Rodinson, the most important Marxist historian of Islam whose Russian Polish parents immigrated to Paris in the late nineteenth century.[9] There were also a few distinguished writers among French Jewish radicals, most notably Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock), the founder of Dadaism; Gherasim Luca, the surrealist poet; and Paul Celan, one of the greatest poets in German language—all three of Romanian origin.

After Bernard Lazare, one of the first native-born Jewish radicals in France, was the brilliant surrealist photographer and essayist Claude Cahun, descended from an old French Jewish family. A lesbian living with her half sister, Cahun began as a symbolist writer but soon developed radical ideas and Trotskyist sympathies. In 1934, she was the first to formulate the surrealist views on the relation between poetry and politics and became, during the 1940s, the key organizer of the anti-Nazi resistance on the island of Jersey.

It was mainly in the 1950s (during the struggle against the French colonial war in Algeria) and in the 1960s (around May 1968) that a new generation of French-born Jewish radicals emerged. The well-known historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, descended from an old Jewish French republican family, was, together with his friend the mathematician Laurent Schwartz, one of the important anticolonial intellectuals in France during the years of the Algerian War. Some of central figures of the student rebellion of May 1968 were Jewish radicals, such as the anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit; the Trotskyists Daniel Bensaïd, Janette Habel, Alain Krivine, and Henri Weber; the Maoists Alain Geismar and Benny Levy; and the outsider Pierre Goldman. During the subsequent years, they would follow quite different courses: while many, such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, deradicalized, others such as Benny Levy became Zionists and converted to Orthodox Judaism. Some, such as Daniel Bensaïd, remained faithful to their revolutionary ideas yet also became interested in heretical Jewish messianism (often by way of Walter Benjamin’s work). Pierre Goldman, whose best seller Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France (1975) was written in prison, died at the hands of an unidentified fascist commando. There are few equivalent Jewish figures today. It should be noted, however, that a former Jewish resister and survivor from the concentration camp of Buchenwald, Stéphane Hessel, became an international icon of the recent radical youth movements against neoliberalism thanks to his booklet, Indignez-vous! (2010), which was translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies around the world.[10]

The Immigrant Jewish Left

The first group of Jewish radicals in the United States was composed of immigrants, several of whom had already been social or political activists in their home countries and tried to continue in the American territory similar intellectual or militant activities. Coming from the Yiddishland, primarily Russia and Poland, they arrived at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are illustrious examples of this group, as is Isadore Wissotsky, born in Latvia and a committed organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World. Their way of thinking and their political culture remained to a large extent those of their original East European milieu. They may have tried to adapt their socialist or anarchist principles to the American context, but one can hardly speak of a specific Jewish American radical culture. Abraham Cahan and the intellectuals around the socialist Forverts (the most widely circulated Yiddish daily in the world) fit this pattern as well. The same can be said of another group emerging a few years later: Moyssaie Olgin and his friends around Freiheit, the Communist Yiddish daily, as well as the leftist Yiddish writers such as Shalom Asch and, following him, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Immigrant backgrounds also affected the next generation. As Alan Wald has argued, the high proportion of Jews in the radical Left and especially among Communists—some 50 percent of its intellectuals—“had a solid foundation in Eastern European Jewish immigrant families; they brought to their new country . . . working-class and socialist loyalties.”[12]

One can develop a similar argument concerning the Central European immigrants entering the United States after 1933 as refugees from Nazism. Their residency may have been temporary—as in the cases of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Ernst Bloch—or permanent, for those who chose to stay in the United States after World War II such as Leo Löwenthal and Erich Fromm. In both cases, the culture, interests, and style of thinking that these figures manifested were those of German Judaism. This was true too for those such as Herbert Marcuse who tried to some extent to integrate themselves in American cultural and political life.

Communist and Trotskyist Milieus

It was only among the Jewish intellectuals born or educated in the United States that one could find specific American political/cultural manifestations and the constitution of a specifically Jewish American radical intellectual. This sort of radicalism bore some similarity to the East or West European types, but significant (perhaps obvious) differences also prevailed. While Jewish radicals have had a much greater cultural weight in the United States than in Western Europe, far fewer eminent revolutionary political leaders emerged among American Jews than was the case among East European Jews. The comparison to Central Europe is even more striking: the romantic, messianic, revolutionary Jewish culture of Mitteleuropa had very few equivalents among Jewish American radicals. Communist poet and writer Joseph Freeman was one of the rare exceptions in this regard. Born Yosef Yehuda Arye ben Yitzhak Aaron Halevy in Ukraine in 1897, Freeman was raised, after emigrating in 1904, in America. On March 1, 1951, many years after his exclusion from the Communist Party, he wrote a moving letter to his friend Floyd Dell. Discovered by Alan Wald, it contains a passage that Wald describes as “the clearest personal confession on record of the Jewish-American Messianic appropriation of Communism.”[13] As a child, Freeman recalled, he had daydreams of the Messiah

This moving passage has obvious affinities with the Jewish “religious atheists” of Central Europe, such as Ernst Bloch and others. In contrast to them, however, Freeman’s confession appeared in a strictly personal letter and not a public document that sought to develop a theoretical argument.

Yiddish culture or Jewish history may have been a source of inspiration for many Jewish American radicals, but very seldom did religion or messianism play that role. In a February 1930 article titled “Religion and the Good Life,” Felix Morrow argued that the dynamic element in Judaism could be characterized more as an ethical tradition than a religion, and on this point he probably spoke for many of his generation’s Jewish radical intellectuals.[15] Morrow’s article appeared in the Menorah Journal, a remarkable Jewish journal begun in the 1920s that drew around it a brilliant group of leftist intellectuals: Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Solow, Felix Morrow (Mayorwitz), Clifton Fadiman, and Tess Slesinger. Most of these writers, who bore a cosmopolitan sensitivity, became Communists or Trotskyists during the 1930s. Comparing this group with the European Jewish intellectuals, Wald grasps in very precise terms the specific situation of the radical Jewish American intelligentsia:

Together with Phillip Rahv (Ivan Greenberg) and William Phillips (Litvinsky), some of the Jewish radicals from the Menorah Journal went on to create Partisan Review, which became increasingly sympathetic during the late 1930s to Leon Trotsky. The members of this group, the so-called New York Intellectuals, were perhaps the most “European” of the Jewish American radicals because of their admiration for the great European literary modernists: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and even T. S. Eliot.

While Jewish religion was seldom relevant in their lives, American Jewish radicals, particularly (but not only) around the communist journal New Masses, demonstrated a certain romantic tendency not unlike that of the historic German Jewish community. An obvious example is the Communist writer Michael Gold, whose best work offered “a dazzling blend of proletarianism, bohemianism, [and] romanticism,” Wald writes.[17] Unlike other Jewish Communists, who often were “non-Jewish Jews” as Isaac Deutscher identified the type, Gold was deeply immersed in Jewish (Yiddish) culture.[18] His celebrated novel Jews without Money (1930) is a direct reflection of his romantic/populist commitment to his community. The social and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, who met the young Gold before World War I, recalled years later that he was “a passionate, brilliant, vehement youth . . . a romantic and an anarchist, closer to Rousseau and Stirner than to Marx.”[19] But even after his conversion to Communism, the romantic component remained alive—for instance in Michael Gold’s enthusiastic endorsement of a quintessential American romantic poet, Walt Whitman, to whom he dedicated his 1935 “Ode to Walt Whitman.”[20] There were also some messianic moments in Gold’s writings. One of them is a tender but ironic reference to childish hopes: brutalized by an anti-Semitic gang, a Jewish boy dreams of the Messiah as a sort of Buffalo Bill, riding on a white horse and using his guns to defeat the enemies of the Jews! Gold’s most important statement of secularized messianism, however, appeared as the conclusion of the first edition of Jews without Money (though it was suppressed in later editions): “O worker’s Revolution, you have brought hope to me, a lonely, suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.”[21]

Antifascism, commitment to the Spanish Republic, and connection with socialist, Communist, or Trotskyist parties were common to most European and American Jewish radicals. Similarly, a range of varied literary techniques from social realism to modernist experimentation, which sometimes appeared in creative combination, tied them together. What most distinguished the Americans from their European counterparts was the primacy of literary intellectuals among Jewish radicals in the United States and their focus on American themes such as race.

Primacy of Literary Intellectuals

Mike Gold is just one example of a surprisingly large group of Jewish American radical writers. With far fewer radical political leaders in the United States than in Eastern Europe—with the exception of the small Trotskyist groups, where a great many Jews played important roles (Max Shachtman, George Breitman, George Novack, Albert Glotzer, Albert Goldman, Martin Abern, and many others)—most Jewish American radicals belonged to the realm of the literary and artistic culture. Unlike in Central Europe, however, there were few philosophers, with one exception being Sidney Hook.

Gifted writers among the Jewish American radicals included Nelson Algren (Nelson Abraham), Ben Barzman, Alvah Bessie, Vera Caspary, Guy Endore (Samuel Goldstein), Howard Fast, Kenneth Fearing, Michael Gold (Irwin Granich), Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets (Gorodetsky), Tillie Olsen (Lerner), Dorothy Parker (Dorothy Rothschild), Abraham Polonsky, Muriel Rukeyser, John Sanford (Julian Shapiro), Irwin Shaw (Irwin Shamforoff), Budd Shulberg, Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid), Tess Slesinger, and Nathanael West (Nathan Weinstein), among many others.[22] There is no equivalent list of Jewish radical writers in any European country.

Unlike most of their European counterparts, many of these authors were willing to participate in popular culture, writing detective novels, pulp fiction, or film scripts. The impressive presence of Jewish radicals in Hollywood as screenwriters and filmmakers is a chapter in itself, with no equivalent in Europe. Six of the so-called Hollywood Ten persecuted by McCarthyism in 1950—all gifted screenwriters—were Jews: Alva Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole (born Lester Cohn), John Howard Lawson (Levy), Albert Maltz, and Samuel Ornitz.[23] Several blacklisted filmmakers would later be celebrated: Herbert Biberman for The Salt of the Earth (1954), about a miner’s strike; Abraham Polonsky for Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), a Western focused on Native Americans that Polonsky made into an allegory about racism, genocide, and persecution; and Martin Ritt for The Front (1975), a film about the television blacklist of the 1950s.

The American Themes

It should be emphasized that writers and artists were not the only Jews attracted to radical movements. Roughly 40 percent of Communist Party members in 1939 were Jewish, and one could perhaps find similar percentages among the smaller Trotskyist groups. Nonetheless, the field of cultural production in which Jewish American radicals flourished was further distinguished from the European scene by the specifically American topics that came to define their work. Paramount among these have been particular American heroes and positive American traditions—or, on the contrary, resistance to social injustice in American history, such as the extermination of the Native Americans and, above all, the oppression of African Americans by slavery and racism.

A striking example of a positive reception of American traditions by Jewish radicals is Noam Chomsky. He presents his anarchism, or libertarian socialism, as an ongoing pursuit of classical liberalism and Jeffersonian democracy. Like many other Jewish American radicals, Chomsky defines himself as a son of the Enlightenment, opposed to all forms of “irrational beliefs.”[24] He claims that an important and visible red thread leads from Cartesian rationalism and the Enlightenment (Immanuel Kant, Alexander Humboldt, and even Adam Smith) to the anarchist ideas he espouses.[25] But Chomsky also insists—and this is less obvious—that criticism of the state is “as American as apple pie”; many representatives of the “old American tradition,” such as Thomas Jefferson, denounced the “coercive power of the State,” and it is not an accident that anarchist thinkers have often responded favorably to the American experience and to the Jeffersonian idea of democracy.[26]

Other Jewish radicals have chosen a different set of heroes: rebel African Americans. In addition to antiracism, a passionate identification with the suffering and struggles of African Americans has long been a strong component of this Jewish American radical culture. One of the reasons was certainly the association between antiblack racism and anti-Semitism—between the lynching of African Americans and pogroms against Jews in Europe (and Nazi anti-Jewish atrocities). Also, as Wald aptly observes, “the view that anti-Black racism was the symptom of an inegalitarian capitalist economic order that was dangerous for Jews and other oppressed groups” was reinforced in the wake of the Depression.[27] Of course, Jews had no monopoly on American antiracism: internationalism and the solidarity with the oppressed were key elements of leftist culture generally. But the history of the Jews as a persecuted minority contributed to reinforcing this empathy, leading many Jewish radicals to write novels whose heroes were African American rebels. Indeed, this empathy was not one-sided but mutual: many leading African American radicals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, not only denounced anti-Semitism but also showed an active sympathy with the Jewish minority. As Nicole Lapierre writes in her book on common struggles borne by blacks and Jews in the world, empathy was not humanitarian compassion but a solidarity based on respect and reciprocity.[28]

Some writers, such as Guy Endore, celebrated slave rebellions in their novels, such as Babouk (1934); John Sanford praised the antiracist revenge of an African American female protagonist in The People from Heaven (1943). Interestingly, both novels were criticized by Communist Party officials for being ultraleft and too influenced by black nationalism.[29] Many Jewish Communists—such as the poet Aaron Kramer, author of a pamphlet-poem, Denmark Vesey (1952), celebrating the hero of a Negro slave revolt—felt that they had a “Black soul,” and not by accident; the founding editor of the famous African American magazine Ebony (1945) was a Jewish Communist, Ben Burns (Benjamin Bernstein).[30] Jewish radical poets such as Martha Millet and Eve Merriam wrote about African American struggles for Communist publications, and Ed Lacy (Len Zinberg) in his novel Room to Swing (1957) invented the first African American “private investigator,” Toussaint Marcus Moore—an obvious homage to Toussaint L’Ouverture, the great leader of the Haitian slave rebellion.[31]

Many Jewish red writers, such as Earl Conrad (Earl Cohen), author of Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist (1942), created rebellious blacks as their spokespersons. A fellow traveler of the Communist Party, Conrad worked for the New York office of the African American newspaper Chicago Defender and published popular books excoriating racism, such as Jim Crow America (1947) and Scottsboro Boy (1950). Conrad never depicted Jewish characters in his novels nor wrote about Jewish matters in his other books. However, in his notes for the autobiography he was completing when he died in 1986 (discovered by Wald), Conrad started by referring to himself as “a Twentieth Century Abolitionist.” He then made a startling statement, never appearing in any of his published writings: “My interest in the ‘underdog,’ the submerged or oppressed, in particular the blacks, had Judaic origins.” Wald adds the following insightful commentary:

Perhaps the most archetypical representative of the Jewish American radical intelligentsia was the writer Howard Fast, in whose books one can find all the non-European peculiarities I have mentioned. A member of the Communist Party from 1943 to 1956, blacklisted, persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and imprisoned, Fast authored many very popular novels, some of which (such as Spartacus) became motion pictures. He wrote three books on the American Revolutionary War period: Conceived in Liberty (1939), The Unvanquished (1942), and Citizen Tom Paine (1943). He also paid homage, however, to the struggle of American Indians in The Last Frontier (1941), concerning an attempt by the Cheyennes to return to their native land, as well as to the fight of African Americans against racism in the nineteenth century in Freedom Road (1944), prefaced by W. E. B. Du Bois. Freedom Road became a worldwide sensation; it has been called one of the most widely printed and read books of the twentieth century.[33] Based on a true story, it describes the life of Gideon Jackson, leader of a group of former slaves during Reconstruction. Abandoned by the federal government, Jackson and his friends take up arms to defend their families against the Ku Klux Klan, but they are defeated and murdered. Freedom Road fit perfectly into the specific radical Jewish American empathy with the ordeal of African Americans. News about Auschwitz affected Fast’s writing of this antiracist book: “Reports were beginning to filter out of Germany about the destruction of the Jews. All the notes and thinking that I had done for a novel about Reconstruction came together—and every moment I could steal from my work at the OWI [US Office of War Information] was put to writing the new book.”[34]

Like novels by Guy Endore and John Sanford, Fast’s Freedom Road celebrates ex-slaves who take up arms and fight for their freedom against white racism. And these ideas of African American self-defense and armed struggle put the authors at odds with the Communist Party, which did not advocate such radical policies either in 1934 (when Babouk was published) or in 1943 (The People from Heaven)—and even less so in 1944 (Freedom Road), when, under Earl Browder, the Communist Party USA was officially dissolved for the sake of “national unity” during the war. No party line but rather strong antiracist feelings and a profound identification with the destiny of African Americans nourished these unique Jewish American literary explorations.

Postwar Resurgence (New Left)

A new generation of Jewish radicals appeared in the 1960s around the New Left, the civil rights movement, and the protest against the Vietnam War. Among this generation’s best-known representatives were poets and musicians, such as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman), Phil Ochs, Adrienne Rich, and Philip Levine; feminist writers, such as Marge Piercy, Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, and Susan Brownmiller; and radical intellectuals, such as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Howard Zinn, Nathalie Zemon Davis, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Mark Rudd, Susan Sontag, Todd Gitlin, and the attorney William Kunstler.

To this, one could add that in 1962, one-third of the students who attended the Port Huron conference of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were Jewish. Jews made up a majority of the Steering Committee of Berkeley’s Free Speech movement in 1964. There was a disproportionately large number of Jews among the 1961 Freedom Riders, and of three civil rights martyrs in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, two—Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—were from left-wing Jewish families.

The Latest Wave

The most recent wave of Jewish radicalism among intellectuals emerged after the large Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in 1999. Although not as massive as the radical wave of the 1960s, this latest Jewish American radical cohort has developed a rather high profile. One can find several of its representative figures around the Global Justice movement or, more recently, the Occupy Wall Street initiative. Among the best known are several women such as Roseanne Barr, the popular television actress and presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party in 2012; Naomi Klein, social activist and author of No Logo (2000), a radical critique of corporate globalization that became an international best seller; and the feminist philosopher Judith Butler.

Far from being constant across time and space, the political cultures of Jewish radical intellectuals vary significantly according to the different generations and the distinct European and American contexts that have spawned them. The comparative approach I have offered, taking into account historical developments, cultural dimensions, and social-political conditions, may help us to understand, at least to some extent, these particularities. As one would expect, many questions remain unanswered. How and why did so many Jewish American intellectuals become radicals (at least until the mid-twentieth century and to some extent even today) when there existed in the United States no mass radical parties and no mass socialist or Communist parties of the sort that flourished in Eastern and Central Europe and to some extent Western Europe, as in France? To that question, as yet I have no answer.