Thoughts on Jews and society

EUGENE KAELLIS

My mother used to ask periodically, Was ist unser lage?, What is our (i.e., Jews’) circumstance? It was a rhetorical question. We all knew the answer; it was when the Holocaust had been uncovered. In my lifetime, however, our “lage” has gone from impotent anger and bitter mourning to pride in the ability of Israel to protect itself against its enemies.

While the overall casualties and destruction of the Second World War far exceeded those of the first, it was the First World War that had a deeper and more persistent demoralizing effect on Western Europe. This was partly because, while both sides had expected a quick victory, it turned out to be fought as protracted, largely static, trench warfare, more wearying, debilitating and demoralizing, certainly less decisive, than a war of movement. It was also partly because it followed closely on la Belle Époque, a period of relative peace and prosperity, whereas the Second World War came on the heels of the Great Depression.

While the second war was, for the West, clearly a fight for survival, the first had a significant element of unreality about it, its weak impetus a political assassination (a not-unusual event at the time). When it was finally over, the victors celebrated, but the joy was undermined by the persistent thought that the war and all its attendant miseries had not been worthwhile – it could easily have been avoided – and that the “benefits” of the peace, even on the Allied side, did not trickle down to ordinary people, who had, for the most part, suffered in silence, giving up their sons as cannon fodder.

After the initial Allied joy at the Armistice, remorse and anger took hold in the context of grand disillusionment. From then, until the outbreak of the Second World War 20 years later, the culture of the West showed signs of struggling to make sense of the Great War or simply to abandon any pretence of rationality in considering it. Many writers and artists concluded that not only had the war made no sense, neither did anything else. The old “rules” of social behavior, of literature, of art, were abandoned in favor of either presumably more appropriate and profound expressions of the “evident meaninglessness” of history and humanity – a cynicism leading easily to nihilism – or to the striving for sensual pleasures with little regard for consequences.

In art and literature, it was a time for Dada, the name given to a new cultural expression that denied the basic precepts of all earlier art, dating back to antiquity: “appropriate” content, composition, color and poetry. Even its name, which might be among the first pre-verbal murmurings of an infant, expressed its attitude: a new beginning unencumbered by the old, disastrous rules of civilizations, all of which had, collectively, conspired to produce the monstrosity of the war.

And, wouldn’t you know it, Dada was founded by Tristan Tzara (Samy Rosenstock), a Romanian Jew from a Yiddish-speaking family. Every previous art form, Tzara concluded, was bankrupt, degrading, even lethal, depicting a false world, a world that did not, could not, exist. It could depict beauty only by pretence, while reality spawned unmitigated, undeniable, irrepressible and enduring ugliness and tragedy.

Initially, Dada expressed itself in “outrageous” paintings and literature, but very quickly it went through the metamorphosis of all innovative forms: it did not displace, it influenced. Modern art – surrealism, cubism and abstract expressionism, from Matisse to Rothko – demonstrates the influence of Dada or, more precisely, the same (and ongoing) social dislocations that stimulated Dada’s arrival.

Tzara was not the only Jewish avant-gardist, Jews were and still are invariably found near the apex of new cultural and political developments. In the turbulent ’60s, it was Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allan Ginsberg, “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit, Bob Dylan, Mamma Cass, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce. Now, it is “neo-cons,” people like Ezra Levant, David Frum, William Kristol, Irving Howe, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter.

The reason is not difficult to postulate. Jews have sensitive antennae; they are constantly monitoring the surrounding environment because they know that their wellbeing, even their survival, may depend on recognizing and identifying whatever exists on the social-political landscape that threatens them.

The danger may come from anywhere on the political spectrum, left or right. The latter is based largely on the notion that it is not possible for Jews to assimilate and, therefore, they are beyond normal society; moreover, they don’t have the “right” religion and have only a qualified patriotism. For the traditional right, Jews are still associated with anything that disrupts the social order.

The antisemitism of the left is mainly the identification of Jews with capitalism – this is a left derived from earlier “lefts,” largely contributed to and led by the thoughts and actions of Jews when they perceived danger to themselves as originating from the right (for example, royalists, fanatic religionists, fascists). Jews, as everyone knows, were prominent in the Bolshevik leadership because, among all the political movements in Czarist Russia, the Bolsheviks alone specifically, vigorously and consistently decried antisemitism, seeing it more as a political issue – distracting workers and peasants from their real enemies – rather than as a moral issue. While leftists have for decades advanced the concept of self-determination, when Jews, for more-than-adequate reasons, took self-determination seriously, it turned out that the same leftists oppose them and anti-imperialist movements denounce Israel as a “tool” of American colonialism. For the left, antisemitism has morphed into anti-Israelism.

The old New Deal alliance of Jews, African Americans, workers and farmers, which provided so much of the reliable electoral support for Franklin Roosevelt, is long gone. With President Barack Obama’s chilly attitude toward Israel, in the likely event that he runs for a second term, his Jewish support may be considerably diminished. One can be sure that the Republicans are aware of this and, considering their substantial evangelical base, will seek to capitalize on it.

For Jews, while the “melting pot” is always boiling, they somehow persist as indissoluble matzah balls, floating fitfully but guardedly in the surrounding broth.

Eugene Kaellis has written Making Jews on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.

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