4

Cold War Pluralism

The New York Intellectuals Respond to Soviet Anti-Semitism

    “The Sabbath is beginning,” Gedali pronounced solemnly. “Jews must go to the synagogue.”

    “Pan Comrade,” he said, getting up, his top hat swaying on his head like a little black tower. “Bring a few good men to Zhitomir. Oy, they are lacking in our town, oy, how they are lacking! Bring good men and we shall give them all our gramophones. We are not simpletons. The International, we know what the International is. And I want the International of good people, I want every soul to be accounted for and given first-class rations. Here, soul, eat, go ahead, go and find happiness in your life. The International, Pan Comrade, you have no idea how to swallow it!”

    “With gunpowder,” I tell the old man, “and seasoned with the best blood.”

    And then from the blue darkness young Sabbath climbed onto her throne.

—Isaac Babel, “Gedali”

Jewish artists, writers, and thinkers have been present in each of the preceding chapters, serving as an implicit vanguard within the Soviet-centered ethnic avant-garde. In the introduction, we saw Walter Benjamin and Horace Kallen visiting the USSR, the latter declaring it a Jewish “frontier of hope.” Mayakovsky’s American hosts were frequently Russian Jewish émigrés sympathetic to the Soviet Union—and two such characters figure prominently in Grebner’s Black and White script. Herbert Biberman of Roar China was one of the many Jewish American intellectuals who made the “magic pilgrimage” to Moscow. Two other frequently discussed examples are Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, both fixtures of interwar New York’s left literary scene.¹ I have yet to emphasize the central presence of Jews as ethnic avant-gardists partly because this is such well-trodden ground. Among Americanists, Slavists, and Jewish studies scholars alike, it is now widely accepted that Jews had a prominent place in the interwar left, and that Soviet Jewish culture drew the attention of Jews worldwide. In line with Kallen’s conclusion from his 1927 visit that the “new Russo-Jewish world” would be “far more Jewish than the Jewry of America” and “be the matrix of culturally far more significant Jewish values than the Jewry of America,” Moscow emerged as the center of what might be called a Yiddish world republic of letters, overshadowing New York and Warsaw.² In addition to English-language authors like Gold and Freeman, Moscow also drew Yiddish-language New Yorkers—for instance, the poet Moishe Nadir, who, during his 1926 visit, likened the USSR to a bride with red hair, “dearer to me with each passing day.” Meanwhile, back in the United States, pro-Soviet publications like New York’s Frayhayt (Freedom), which we encountered hosting Mayakovsky at Camp “Nit Gedaige,” enabled Yiddish poets to explore both revolutionary politics and literary modernism.³ Remarkably, these poets were then read in the USSR: a Moscow-based critic proclaimed one of them, Moishe Leib Halpern, the American Mayakovsky, able to merge literature with “real life” in the manner of the Soviet futurist poet.⁴

No other group better affirms the fact that, indeed, minorities were keenly interested in Soviet vanguardism and avant-gardism. However, this group’s subsequent, widespread disillusion suggests that, ultimately, such interest was misguided. Existing studies on Jews and the Soviet-oriented left tend to have a tragic, entropic register: if, as noted in the introduction, the USSR seemed a “frontier of hope” for Jews worldwide, this promise soon proved illusory. According to Kenneth Moss, while there was a brief Soviet Jewish “renaissance” after the revolution, it faded in the early 1920s amid ever-heightening state control. In subsequent years, several of the Yiddish authors who shuttled between Moscow and New York suffered horrible fates: the turn from experimental to “proletarian” literature led to bitter infighting in Yiddish literary circles, followed by purges and executions for many of those caught in the USSR during the late-1930s terror.⁵ Thus, the history of Jews and the Soviet Union tends to follow a well-trodden track from illusion to disillusion, one marked by several key dates for New York’s leftist Jewish literary world: In 1922, Abraham Cahan’s Forward came out against the Bolsheviks’ nondemocratic tendencies. Others lost faith in 1929, after the Kremlin blamed Zionists for an anti-Jewish riot in Palestine. And so on and so forth, with the first Stalinist show trials in 1936; the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact in 1939; the 1940 assassination of Trotsky; and the emergence of Stalinist anti-Semitism after World War II. The venture of this chapter is that the ethnic avant-garde has granted us a new way of seeing, one that allows us to rethink—if not quite unseat—such linear trajectories.

Just as in the previous chapter, the key here is competing notions of authenticity. If Hughes’s 1956 account of Black and White shows him navigating the authenticities of both ethnic identity and anticapitalism, in this chapter we will see how these came to heighten the Cold War divide between the United States and the Soviet Union. The chapter marks the weaponizing of cultural authenticity—how, through Jewish American responses to Stalinist anti-Semitism, an explicitly anti-Soviet authenticity emerged. Subsequently, in the United States, the USSR came to be seen as hostile to both particularism and experimentation, as a place where authentic cultural and ethnic expression had been quashed by totalitarianism. From this perspective, the United States was a place where authenticity could flourish via cultural experimentation and ethnic diversity. This distinction, I argue, opened one of the many fronts of the cultural Cold War—during which segregation in the American South remained a favorite topic for Soviet propaganda, to which American lawmakers could respond by highlighting anti-Semitism in the USSR. Thus, the Cold War was a struggle not just between the United States and the USSR but also between these countries’ two competing models of equality, liberal pluralism versus socialist internationalism.⁶ And in fact, much good emerged from this back-and-forth, namely, global scrutiny of Jim Crow and eased emigration for Soviet Jews.⁷

In short, this final chapter traces how ethnic avant-gardism came to be overshadowed by reified cultural boundaries and familiar Cold War binaries—the USSR versus the United States, socialist internationalism versus liberal pluralism, socialist realism versus high modernism. However, I then try to see beyond these binaries by identifying traces of the interwar ethnic avant-garde in postwar articulations of Jewish American authenticity. The chapter has three parts. The first backtracks to the interwar years in order to describe the attraction of the Soviet-oriented left for Jews in both the United States and the USSR. The focus in this part is on the Soviet Jewish avant-garde, which in the second and third decades of the twentieth century created striking combinations of Jewish culture and revolutionary politics—the preceding Isaac Babel quote being a case in point. Part two crashes the utopian allure of this interwar moment against the rocks of postwar Stalinist anti-Semitism. After detailing this development, I examine Jewish American responses to it, focusing on the “middle generation” of the influential group now known alternately as the New York Intellectuals and the New York Jewish Intellectuals. I show how owing to both the Holocaust and Soviet anti-Semitism this group came to eschew class-based solutions to “the Jewish question”—a shift that can be discerned in two critiques of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946). The final part then confounds the Cold War binarism of the previous part: first by noting a similar shift regarding the “national question” within the USSR, and second by noting how at least one New York Intellectual, Irving Howe, sought a “third way” of sorts—a combination of Jewishness, socialism, and modernism. This balance, I argue, points to the ethnic avant-garde’s postwar survival as well as to a shared experience of illusion, disillusion, and compromise that traversed but also reinforced descent-based divides.⁸

Socialism with a Messianic Face

Returning briefly to Hughes’s March 1953 testimony before Joseph McCarthy, we find one clear instance of an American official—here McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, himself Jewish American—using Soviet anti-Semitism to discredit Moscow’s earlier allure:

 

COHN: Have you received any disillusionment recently, concerning the treatment of minorities by the Soviet Union?

HUGHES: Well, the evidence in the press—I have not been there, of course, myself—indicating persecution and terror against the Jewish people, has been very appalling to me.⁹

 

As noted in the previous chapter, Hughes tries his best here to avoid explicit critiques of the Soviet Union, expressing disillusion with unverified “evidence in the press” instead. Indeed, this evidence must have been difficult for him to accept given that, as a high school student, his first exposure to leftist politics came through his Jewish classmates. According to Arnold Rampersad, though they were not all socialist, “some steered Hughes straight toward socialism” by lending him Max Eastman’s Liberator magazine and John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. As Hughes recalled in 1946, the Bolshevik Revolution prompted “much jubilation” among these students, “because, they said, the Soviets did not believe in anti-Semitism, and that there were Jews high in the government now.” His 1932 visit seemed to confirm this optimism: “In less than fifteen years, I found that Soviet Russia had gotten rid of the Jewish problem.”¹⁰

Jews were indeed well represented in the Bolsheviks’ ranks and were not merely persecuted by Moscow. As indicated by Grebner’s Black and White and Mayakovsky’s “Camp ‘Nit Gedaige,’” during the interwar years, many Jewish Americans looked to the Soviet Union with zeal and longing; they envied their Soviet relatives’ transformation from persecuted minority to revolutionary vanguard.¹¹ This is, of course, dangerous ground to tread, or at least once was. During the Cold War, the link between Jews and communism was a topic to be avoided, but more than twenty years after the Soviet collapse, worries about red-baiting and stereotyping have abated. In a 2004 article titled “Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Instead of Avoided or Mystified,” David Hollinger writes, “The more we understand how the conditions of the Jewish Diaspora in Europe fostered Jewish participation in the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state, the less credible become suspicions that this participation was caused by something else, such as a peculiarly Jewish will to power.”¹²

Two scholars—a Sovietist named Yuri Slezkine and an Americanist named Alan Wald—have independently answered this call for a nonessentialist, anti-anti-Semitic account of the Jewish left. Both affirm that Soviet and American Jews were disproportionately represented in communist circles. As Slezkine writes, while Jews constituted only about 4 percent of Russia’s population at the turn of the century, it filled a large number of leadership roles during and after the revolution:

 

At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917, at least 31 percent of Bolshevik delegates (and 37 percent of the Unified Social Democrats) were Jews. At the Bolshevik Central Committee meeting of October 23, 1917, which voted to launch an armed insurrection, 5 out of the 12 members were Jews. Three out of seven Politbureau members charged with leading the October uprising were Jews (Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Grigory Sokolnikov). The All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VtsIK) elected at the Second Congress of Soviets (which ratified the Bolshevik takeover, passed the decrees on land and peace, and formed the Council of People’s Commissars with Lenin as chairman) included 62 Bolsheviks (out of 101 members). Among them were 23 Jews…¹³

 

Slezkine goes on to find disproportionate Jewish representation in the secret police, among the early Soviet state’s leading artists and propagandists, and also in the ranks of European and American communists. In the United States of the 1930s, “Jews (most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe) accounted for about 40 to 50 percent of Communist Party membership and at least a comparable proportion of the Party’s leaders, journalists, theorists, and organizers” (90). Alan Wald confirms this figure: “There was possibly a Jewish American presence of close to 50 percent of the total of those who published regularly in Party- affiliated venues and joined Party-led organizations such as the John Reed Club, the League of American Writers, and the National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions. This is a remarkable aggregate; only 2 or 3 percent of the population of the United States was Jewish in the mid-twentieth century.”¹⁴

Both Slezkine and Wald concede that the majority of communists were not Jews, and that the majority of Jews were not communists—facts that confound any sheer equation of Jewishness and communism. Indeed, the authors also note that many Jews who were communists identified themselves as internationalists, seeking the elimination of all forms of inequality through world revolution, as well as an escape from the parochialism and persecution that they associated with Jewishness. More specifically, they both explain the Jewish-communist connection in Oedipal terms: according to both, young Jews in the United States and the USSR became communists in order to break from their upbringings. Slezkine argues that the 1917 Revolution was, in part, a “Jewish Revolution” against Jewishness, with Russian-speaking Jews in the cities rejecting their Yiddish-speaking parents back in the shtetl:

 

Wartime massacres and deportations accompanied by the militarization of apocalyptic millenarianism—anarchist, nationalist, and Marxist—transformed the decades-old rebellion of Jewish children into a massive revolution. During Russia’s Time of Troubles of 1914–21, most Jews hid, fled, or moved; tens of thousands were killed. But among those who took up arms, the majority did not stay to defend their parents’ lives and property. They had universal brotherhood to fight for. (167)

 

This is world revolution as family drama—generational strife, not dialectical materialism, as the locomotive of history. Jewish Bolsheviks apparently took quite literally the claim of young Marx that the “empirical essence” of Judaism was “huckstering and its conditions”—to be abolished by revolution, leading to the “social [i.e., not just legal] emancipation of the Jew.”¹⁵ According to Slezkine, this goal led Jewish Bolsheviks to renounce their “class alien” parents and Jewish-sounding names, embracing instead military adventure and Russian spouses. In both Soviet and American literature of the 1920s and 1930s—for example, Isaac Babel’s short stories and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep—he finds young secular Jews distancing themselves from their parents.¹⁶ This dovetails well with Wald’s account of the American scene:

 

The Communist movement in the United States had a solid foundation in Eastern European Jewish immigrant families; they brought to their country not only an abhorrence of czarist autocracy but also working-class and socialist loyalties. Moreover, the Communist movement exhorted its members to adhere to a cultural pluralist and internationalist universalism, a stance that was attractive to young Jews emerging from families still shaped by the experience of shtetl and ghetto isolation. (180)

 

Similar to Slezkine, then, Wald uses family ties (coupled with an escape from family) to explain Jewish communism, in the process blurring together the United States and Eastern Europe, pluralism and internationalism.¹⁷

Slezkine’s “Jewish Revolution” against Jewishness is useful in that it enables connections between the United States and the USSR, explaining how these two very different branches of the diaspora came to embrace communism and, as he goes on to show, came to see this as a mistake. And certainly we could go on and apply this model to other minorities drawn to communism, that is, to the Soviet-centered ethnic avant-garde as a whole—their common goal being to leap from parochial minorities to the “avant-garde of the world.”¹⁸ However, I am uneasy with the either-or relation that Slezkine draws between ethnicity and communism, and here again Wald comes in handy, telling us that, at least in the United States during the interwar years, “a Jew entering the Communist movement had a range of choices through which to express his or her identity. On one hand, there were clubs and organizations immersed in Yiddishkeit; on the other, one could also assume a non-Jewish ‘party name’ and a persona devoid of any ethnic attachment” (181). In short, a devotion to leftism did not necessarily entail a rejection of Jewishness.

FIGURE 4.1 “And the Holy One, Blessed be He, came and smote the Angel of Death,” scene 10 from El Lissitzky’s illustrations for Had Gadya (1918–1919).

 

Collection of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, donated by Israel Pollak, Tel Aviv, with assistance from the British Friends of the Art Museums in Israel, London, 1979.

Indeed, perhaps the most striking examples of the merging of the two can be found in the Soviet Jewish avant-garde through the early 1920s. For instance, in 1918 El Lissitzky—the suprematist painter who connected Tatlin’s Tower to ancient Assyria—cofounded a support organization for Yiddish writers and artists in Moscow.¹⁹ Around that time he also produced several illustrations that aimed “to persuade the Jewish public of the justice of the Communist cause by using a traditional language, Yiddish, symbols, and characteristic Jewish values.”²⁰ One was “a boxed scroll resembling the traditional Scroll of Esther,” with ornate Hebrew calligraphy that Lissitzky described as “wonderful Assyrian script.”²¹ Another included abstract shapes that anticipated his more famous suprematist works. It featured a “divine hand” striking down the Angel of Death, upon which Lissitzky affixed a czarist crown. In these illustrations, the Bolshevik Revolution merges with Jewish messianism, the hand of Soviet power with the Book of Daniel’s hand of God.²² Here there is no “Jewish Revolution” against Jewishness but rather a vision of Jewishness that is alluring despite—or perhaps because of—the revolutionary violence connected to it. A 1918 essay by the prominent Soviet Jewish critic Abram Efros helps to explain this pairing of ethnicity and revolution:

 

The global crisis, the senseless cataclysm which is shaking the life of the world at the present time, cannot but see the simple reflection of what it has itself brought into being; for it is that crisis which has dislocated and shifted all the cultural strata so as to expose the most ancient layers of folk existence. Yet it is also the force which goes driving forwards, shaping the dynamic of history into completely novel “modernistic” “arch-left” nation-state and socio-economic alignments.

 

In short, war and revolution could benefit Jewish folk culture. Amid this apparently universal push and pull between ancient and modern, Efros expresses confidence that each group would be able to maintain its uniqueness, that “strange complexities” would emerge “through which sings the national blood and its artistic predilections.” He anticipates that the Soviet Jewish avant-garde would be celebrated for “our ‘modernism,’ our leftishness, youth” as well as for “our ‘populism,’ our tradition, old age.”²³

Such visions and hopes should be perfectly legible to us—further instances of an avant-garde reimagining the movement of history and time. Lissitzky recasts revolution as a messianic event, evoking Vladimir Tatlin’s protoconstructivist iteration of the Tower of Babel, that is, a vision of revolution oriented toward both future and past. In the introduction I brought to the fore precisely this notion of the avant-garde through Walter Benjamin’s “now-time” and “dialectical image,” and though I did not emphasize this there—not wishing to confine Benjamin to any single tradition—it seems relevant to discuss here the messianic undercurrent of his thought, which many have linked to his Jewish identity. Thus, for example, his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” describe revolution not just as arrest but also as “messianic arrest,” and now-time as the secularized version of messianic time. Indeed, the theses assert messianism as the crucial ingredient for revolution’s success. As Benjamin writes,

 

A genuinely messianic face must be restored to the concept of classless society and, to be sure, in the interest of furthering the revolutionary politics of the proletariat itself.²⁴

 

This is socialism with a “messianic face,” drawing inspiration from pre-Marxist utopias and secularized religion, the goal being to reactivate the “conscious and unconscious memories, hopes, and longings” banished by history as progress.²⁵

Again, Benjamin spelled out this vision of revolution in his 1940 theses, making all the more remarkable the fact that the Soviet Jewish avant-garde expressed the same vision, only twenty years earlier. This is evident in El Lissitzky’s illustrations but also in a 1920 Yiddish play, The End of the World, which the Russian Jewish American anarchist Emma Goldman saw during a visit to Kiev:

 

The wrath of God rolls like thunder across the world, commanding man to prepare for the end. Yet man heeds not. Then all the elements are let loose, pursuing one another in wild fury; the storm rages and shrieks, and man’s groans are drowned in the terrific hour of judgment. The world goes under, and all is dead.

Then something begins to move again. Black shadows symbolizing half beast, half man, with distorted faces and hesitating movements, crouch out of their caves. In awe and fear they stretch their trembling hands toward one another. Haltingly at first, then with growing confidence, man attempts in common effort with his fellows to lift himself out of the black void. Light begins to break. Again a thunderous voice rolls over the earth. It is the voice of fulfillment.

It was a stirring artistic achievement.²⁶

 

The (apparently lost) play captures precisely Benjamin’s revolutionary messianism and past-present constellation. The revolutionary subject is not the proletarian but these beast-man cave dwellers who somehow survive the Great Flood. The revolution itself is imagined as divine retribution for all past injustice, beginning and ending with that thunderous voice—perhaps spoken in the single divine tongue sought by Tatlin and Marr in their Tower of Babel renditions. And from the chaos of revolution, a new and unified people emerges, marked only by black shadows and shared encounters with the void of judgment day. In short, if in the introduction, we saw the Bolshevik Revolution as an Asian revolution (waged, for instance, by Blok’s Scythian cannibals), here we see it as a Jewish revolution—not against Jewishness, as Slezkine would have it, but instead harnessing Jewish messianism to advance universal equality.

The point of this excursion back to the 1910s and 1920s has been to show how figures like Lissitzky articulated a Jewish culture in harmony with Benjamin’s secular Jewish messianism. This is a version of Soviet Jewishness that disturbs the well-established rise-and-fall narrative alluded to earlier: that a brief Jewish “renaissance” gave way to growing state control through the 1920s and 1930s, followed by state-sanctioned anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Indeed, based on this narrative, one might say that The End of the World had it wrong: the moment of terror had not passed. However, the foregrounding of messianic arrest in Lissitzky’s paintings and Benjamin’s writings opens the possibility of using such works to derail the track to Stalinist disillusion. True, the window for such visions proved quite narrow, but they present articulations of ethnicity and avant-gardism too striking to dismiss or forget. They generate a charge, an energy that, via the writings of the New York Intellectuals, I will now try to smuggle into the postwar years.

“Authentic” and “Inauthentic” Jews

In order to accomplish this, I must first discuss how, exactly, Jewish vanguardism and avant-gardism gave way to Stalinist anti-Semitism—or, as official organs put it, “anticosmopolitanism.” Anticosmopolitanism is not quite synonymous with anti-Semitism but is the exact antithesis of ethnic avant-gardism. In Slezkine’s account, Jewishness (in the form of hostility to Jewish stereotypes) initially went hand in hand with Soviet ideology (namely, the right to become more Soviet than Jewish), but all this changed during World War II. First, the Holocaust brought the “Jewish Revolution” against Jewishness to a close. In Dovid Katz’s words, with six million gone, “there could be little appetite for pursuing the old ‘anti-clericalist’ line any longer.”²⁷ Then, in 1948, the USSR became the first country to recognize the state of Israel (if only to drive the British out of the Middle East), inadvertently stripping Soviet Jews of their saving grace. During the Great Terror, they had largely escaped persecution as a group, for there had been no other state to divide their loyalties. In contrast, many other diaspora nationalities, such as the Koreans and the Poles, had suffered mass deportations in the late 1930s. With the establishment of Israel, however, Stalin suddenly came to see Soviet Jews as yet one more “ethnic Diaspora potentially loyal to a hostile foreign state,” an “alien element” that had successfully infiltrated all strata of the Soviet elite.²⁸ This yielded predictable results already unleashed on those other “suspect” nationalities: the executions of top Jewish party members, the purges of many more, and the liquidation of state-sponsored cultural organs. Meanwhile, popular anti-Semitism, which the Soviet state had actively suppressed in the 1920s and 1930s, spiked after the war, with Jews targeted alternately as capitalists and communists.²⁹

This background helps us to understand the March 1953 exchange between Roy Cohn and Langston Hughes on those troubling reports coming from the USSR. Just two months earlier, Pravda had announced the arrest of nine doctors, mostly Jews, for assassinating two members of the Politburo: “They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence—the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called ‘Joint.’ The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of kindness, is now completely revealed.”³⁰ “Joint” refers to the American Joint Distribution Committee, a charitable organization with a long history of aiding Eastern European Jews. The alleged point men in this conspiracy were two members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), a group of prominent Soviet Jews who, at the Kremlin’s behest, had solicited overseas funds for Moscow’s war effort, particularly from Jewish Americans.³¹ The following day this “Doctors’ Plot,” as it became known, made the front page of the New York Times, which in turn connected the arrests to the 1952 executions of prominent Jewish communists in Czechoslovakia.³² Commentary’s lead article for February 1953 followed suit and drew two further connections—between this new crackdown and the 1930s terror, and between the Soviet Union and fascist Germany:

 

World Communism’s adoption of open and organized anti-Semitism and genocide as means of national and international policy has not only erased the last moral difference between the Nazi and Soviet rulers, it is also proof that totalitarian regimes, regardless of their ideological origins, find themselves driven along the same fatal course.³³

 

There is indeed evidence that Stalin planned a “final solution” for Soviet Jews, namely, mass deportation to Central Asia and the Russian Far East.³⁴ With his death in March 1953, however, large-scale anti-Semitism came to a halt. The surviving doctors were released, their forced confessions withdrawn. Two had died in custody.

This explosion of anti-Semitism spelled the end of what Slezkine calls the special relationship between the Jews and the Soviet state, and not only for Jews in the USSR.³⁵ After all, the basis of the charges was the connections forged between Soviet Jews and Jewish Americans, in the form of the “Joint” and the JAC. The Doctors’ Plot made it clear that, in the eyes of Moscow, Jewish American leftists were not to be trusted, that they were intelligence agents bent on sabotage through their Soviet Jewish contacts.³⁶ To be sure, by this point many Jewish Americans had already parted ways with Moscow, and many had been anti-Bolshevik all along.³⁷ However, until the Doctors’ Plot, most had agreed that, at the very least, Soviet power had improved the lot of (secular) Jews. Though information from Moscow was spotty and incomplete, it suddenly became clear that anti-Semitism was alive and well in the Soviet state. Indeed, the Doctors’ Plot evoked the rumors of blood ritual that had fanned pogroms before the revolution. While no one in New York fully understood what had gone wrong, Horace Kallen’s “frontier of hope” had most certainly proven a mirage. And gradually one mirage was replaced with another.³⁸

The new line became that the Soviet Union was (and perhaps always had been) a false Jewish promised land—a line articulated most forcefully by the New York Intellectuals. Again, just as in the previous chapter, the key word here is “authenticity,” usefully bearing ethnic, political, and aesthetic connotations. Represented by such influential postwar thinkers as Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, and Irving Howe, almost all the New York Intellectuals covered here had Eastern European immigrant roots. However, they were distinct from other Jewish American writers in that they rejected Yiddishkeit, choosing instead “to declare themselves citizens of the world” and “to look upon social problems in terms extending beyond local or even national interests.”³⁹ In doing so, they followed the lead of Trotsky, who, like them, was “both Jewish and Russian” and provided a model for combining a “life of action” with belief “in the power and purity of the word.”⁴⁰ That is, in addition to a model for being discreetly Jewish, Trotsky provided political and aesthetic guidance, bolstering this group’s commitment to both socialist revolution and high modernism. This led to the 1934 founding of the journal Partisan Review, envisioned as an alternative to Mike Gold’s New Masses and its turn to socialist realism by the early 1930s. In a further departure from New Masses, Partisan Review was implicitly and, after the 1936 Moscow Trials, explicitly anti-Stalinist, thus helping to make 1930s New York “the most interesting part of the Soviet Union”—“the one part of that country in which the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky could be openly expressed.”⁴¹

The New York Intellectuals can be regarded as outlier members of the interwar ethnic avant-garde. Unlike, for instance, the writers around Frayhayt and despite their focus on Moscow, they were never so enamored with Mayakovsky and LEF but instead shared Trotsky’s belief that a truly socialist culture would be achieved only after the realization of a socialist society. They also shared Trotsky’s view of literature as intrinsically hostile to ideological control. From this perspective, Mayakovsky and his cohort were too hasty in their calls to merge art into life, too quick to denounce the art and literature of the past as passé.⁴² Thus, though one New York Intellectual, Clement Greenberg, was an early American theorist of the avant-garde, he detached this term from revolutionary politics and the external world. He instead forwarded a rarefied avant-gardism that pursued art for art’s sake, rejecting as “kitsch” mass art and socialist realism. Accordingly, this group remains known for its commitment to high modernism over revolutionary art and politics.⁴³

In other words, one would be hard-pressed to describe this group as avant-gardist, at least as I have been using the term. But I focus on the New York Intellectuals because, after news of Stalinist anti-Semitism descended on “the most interesting part of the Soviet Union,” this group won the debate. Far leftists who had embraced Moscow during the interwar years—the Frayhayt group, for example—never fully recovered from the Doctors’ Plot and, later, Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” on Stalin’s excesses.⁴⁴ In contrast, the standard narrative for the New York Intellectuals goes as follows: After World War II this group came to embrace their American and Jewish identities and to use them to reinforce their anti-Stalinist positions. This development was the result of the Holocaust but also of a perceived “failure of radicalism” that was hit home by the Doctors’ Plot.⁴⁵ In short, this group helped to set the terms for a postwar turn from Soviet-centered internationalism to descent-based identity. They advanced the notion that socialism and ethnicity were incongruous with each other—just as Harold Cruse would go on to do in his The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.⁴⁶

Let us now unpack this (paradoxically cross-ethnic) turn from socialist internationalism to ethnic particularism. A good starting point is a 1946 essay by Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated.” At the age of twenty-six, Howe paints a portrait of a Jewish intellectual who feels no “sense of kinship with Jewish activities” but also “has not succeeded in finding a place for himself in the American scene.” As a result, he feels “all of the restless, agonizing rootlessness that is the Jew’s birthmark.” He chafes at the observance of tradition, religious or otherwise, preferring radical politics instead but nonetheless cannot help longing for “a feeling of continuity.”⁴⁷ Eight years later, Howe would assert this continuity by coediting A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, featuring English translations of Sholem Aleichem, David Bergelson, and other Jewish writers from Eastern Europe. However, in “The Lost Young Intellectual,” he concludes that the solution to his alienation rests not in Jewish introspection but in society at large:

 

My personal opinion is that any conclusion which affirms the necessity of “returning home” to the ways of one’s people is—like it or not—unrealistic and unlikely to be effected: the Jewish intellectual cannot, even if he wished to, return to a world no longer his. Possibly he can find some alleviation in individual psychotherapy, but even that can only ease individual problems without touching the cause. Ultimately the problem can only be solved if an American society appears in which both the Jewish intellectual and his people, along with everyone else, can find integration, security, and acceptance.⁴⁸

 

While this is far from a call for revolution, the suggestion here is that American society is still rife with racism and anti-Semitism and that the solution to Jewish quandaries lies in structural changes benefiting all peoples. Meanwhile, Jewishness is portrayed only negatively, as something that might be abandoned if only society permitted. In short, at this point, Howe still fits Slezkine’s Jewish revolutionary mold but has yet to accept “individual psychotherapy”—has yet to come to terms with Slezkine’s Oedipus-complex diagnosis.

Indeed, earlier that same year, Jean-Paul Sartre had cast a similar mold, in an article most certainly read by Howe, “Réflexions sur la question juive,” the first part of which appeared in the spring 1946 issue of Partisan Review.⁴⁹ Written in 1944, this controversial essay was remarkable in that it provided a socialist internationalist explanation of the Holocaust in a national (French) context, at a time when socialist internationalism was officially defunct—that is, one year after Stalin dissolved the Comintern to appease his World War II allies. As such, it presented a last stand of sorts for a class-based line on Jewishness. By critiquing Sartre—himself a staunch defender of the USSR until the late 1950s—the New York Intellectuals were able to articulate both a break from this line and a (skewed) framework for subsequently understanding Soviet anti-Semitism. In short, here we get an in-depth look at the supposed socialist-to-Jewish transition.

Sartre’s essay is based on four economic and psychological profiles: the anti-Semite, the democrat, the “inauthentic” Jew, and the “authentic” Jew. At the root of anti-Semitism, he argues, is class: the anti-Semite belongs to the lower-middle class and denigrates Jews in order to feel less insecure; anti-Semitism is “a poor man’s snobbery.”⁵⁰ From this perspective, there is nothing distinctive about anti-Semitism; in other contexts, the anti-Semitic type “will make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin” in order to persuade “himself that his place in the world has been marked out in advance, that it awaits him, and that tradition gives him the right to occupy it” (54). Sartre’s second type, the “good democrat,” tries to respond to this situation by proclaiming equal rights. However, by neglecting both class and race distinctions—“‘There are no Jews,’ he says, ‘there is no Jewish question’”—he fails to comprehend the anti-Semite and the function of anti-Semitism (57). The response of Sartre’s third type, the “inauthentic” Jew, is also inadequate. He reacts to anti-Semitism by trying to escape his Jewishness, though others still see him as Jewish. The “authentic” Jew, in contrast, understands the cause of anti-Semitism but chooses not to flee: he is “the one who asserts his claim in the face of the disdain shown toward him” (91). Ultimately, however, the solution to anti-Semitism is beyond the reach of Jews, even the brave “authentic” ones. Instead, the burden rests on all Frenchmen to forge a society without classes, united by “mutual bonds of solidarity” (150). In this circumstance, Sartre predicts, anti-Semitism would disappear, and Jews would cease being Jews; they would assimilate into Frenchmen.⁵¹

It is necessary to elaborate what Sartre means by “authentic,” for it is on this axis that the New York Intellectuals articulated their rebuttals. “Authenticity,” Sartre writes, “consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate” (90). By “situation” he refers to the structural causes of anti-Semitism, namely, class division. According to Sartre, this situation and its attendant persecution have destroyed Jewish history, culture, and tradition—obviating, as the young Howe puts it, a return to “the ways of one’s people.” Amid such destruction, the “inauthentic” Jew tries to flee Jewishness, but this leads only to self-loathing and hyperrationalism, traits the anti-Semite then associates with all Jewish people. Thus, the “inauthentic” Jew only reinforces anti-Semitic stereotypes, which in turn reinforce the boundaries of Jewishness.

In this light, both the young Howe and Slezkine’s Jewish revolutionary can be seen as “inauthentic”—abandoning Jewishness for the “myth of the universal man” and, in the process, confirming the stereotype of the radical Jew who flees Jewishness (136). However, the two also possess the spirit of revolt that, for Sartre, is key to “authenticity.” They understand their “situation” as one in which anti-Semitism is merely the displacement of class inequality, and they seek the equitable society that Sartre predicts will solve such troubles. Of course, until that society is forged through socialist revolution—forged by and liberating all peoples—the Jewish radical might seem “inauthentic,” both to himself and to others. But there lies an implicit ray of hope from the world’s first workers’ state: no one fit Sartre’s cramped “authenticity” better than the postwar Soviet Jewish communist—survivor, by then, of multiple messianic “Ends of the World” and still waiting for Moscow to grant a viable territory so that Jews could finally become just another Soviet nationality.⁵²

It therefore seems fitting that the New York Intellectuals attacked Sartrean “authenticity” just as Soviet anti-Semitism was stepping up. In a January 1949 Commentary article titled “Does the Jew Exist?”—which Howe would later call a personal “turning point”—art critic Harold Rosenberg rejected Sartre’s notion that Jewishness was a mere by-product of anti-Semitism.⁵³ Instead, he asserted a Jewish history not bound to external circumstance:

 

The continuity of the modern Jew with the Jews of the Old Testament is established by those acts that arise from his internal cohesion with his ultimate beginnings, in which his future is contained as possible destiny—the acts of turning toward the Promised Land in his crises. And these acts, not deducible from his surroundings, make the Jew’s situation and reveal who the Jew is.⁵⁴

 

In contrast to Lissitzky’s Had Gadya and The End of the World, this is a kinder, gentler Jewishness, one that emphasizes continuity rather than arrest. Here we find an uninterrupted connection between past and present, with future crises to be remedied via recourse to the nation, that is, the newly established Israel, itself rooted in the past. Rosenberg’s notion of Jewishness exists independently of social relations, regardless of anti-Semitism and Sartre’s “authentic” or “inauthentic” distinction. He goes on to expand the notion of “situation” to include not only social relations but also “the fact of being alive as a unique individual” (16), and from this metaphysical perspective, Sartre’s Jews—both “authentic” and “inauthentic”—become identical in their abnegation of selfhood:

 

The Jew who wills to make himself nothing-but-a-Jew (and as a Jew nothing) does not thereby become more authentic than the Jew who wills not to be a Jew. Both have taken the way of despair, since they have willed to transform themselves from what they are, as given, into what they conceive the situation to demand them to be. (16)

 

To remedy such despair, Rosenberg concludes, the Jew can “rediscover” his “unique identity which springs from his origins and his story,” an identity which includes, at times, assimilation (18). In effect, Rosenberg posits a singular (but implicitly secular) Jewish identity to override Sartre’s blurry “authentic”-“inauthentic” distinction—an identity bent, again, on historical continuity rather than messianic arrest.

Four months later in the Partisan Review, philosopher Sidney Hook further critiqued Sartre’s “authentic”-“inauthentic” distinction but without abandoning it as Rosenberg does. In his article “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” Hook simply redefines “authentic” and “inauthentic,” imparting to these terms their now common-sense meanings:

 

In describing the psychology of what he calls the “inauthentic Jew” among Gentiles, Sartre does not distinguish between the psychology of what I call the “inauthentic” Jew—the Jew who desires, so to speak, to pass himself off as a Gentile, and the psychology of what I call “the authentic Jew” who accepts himself as a Jew for any reason whatsoever…. The “inauthentic Jew,” in my sense, is afflicted with an additional dimension of self-consciousness. No matter how impeccable his conduct, he is always on guard in predominantly non-Jewish company, exquisitely conscious of the possibility that at any moment something he says or does will be regarded as a telltale sign…. There are very few inauthentic Jews of this kind. They are really inauthentic people. The main problem of the authentic Jews is to find some rational basis or ideal fulfillment of their authenticity. Sartre is no guide here.⁵⁵

 

Thus, Hook refocuses attention from society to the individual. His “inauthentic Jew” is simply in need of psychological help. Meanwhile, the tautological key to becoming an “authentic Jew” is to find some basis of authenticity. Hook himself is reluctant to define this basis, worried about essentializing Jewishness and thereby capitulating “to the muddy metaphysics of the antisemite” (480). He offers only this guideline:

 

Far wiser, it seems to me, is to recognize the historic fact of Jewish existence, the plural sources of Jewish life, and its plural possibilities. No philosophy of Jewish life is required except one—identical with the democratic way of life—which enables Jews who for any reason at all accept their existence as Jews to lead a dignified and significant life, a life in which together with their fellowmen [sic] they strive collectively to improve the quality of democratic, secular cultures and thus encourage a maximum of cultural diversity, both Jewish and non-Jewish. (480)

 

In effect, Jewishness is to become synonymous with diversity for diversity’s sake; the “authentic Jew” is to be Sartre’s “good democrat,” only with an added commitment to pluralism. As for Sartre’s goal of “universal democratic socialism,” Hook calls this a “dream” that “still has its uses as a guide in some ways but not as a home” (481). And despite past ties and travels, “home,” of course, is the United States, where all can enjoy “the democratic way of life.” To be an “authentic Jew” means to be a loyal American, which in turn means to embrace Jewish and non-Jewish cultures—assuming that these are democratic and secular.⁵⁶ In contrast, to be a Sartrean “authentic Jew,” one must perceive the economic causes of anti-Semitism and continue to wait for socialist revolution, drawing meager hope from the French philosopher’s qualified observation, “We find scarcely any anti-Semitism among workers.”⁵⁷

These competing understandings of “authenticity”—one aimed at structural equality, the other aimed at cultural diversity—reveal a fork in the road, a choice between Soviet socialist internationalism and American liberal pluralism. By the 1950s, Hook’s embrace of the latter over the former seemed vindicated by all that was happening in the Soviet Union. Indeed, at one point in his article, he chides his opponent’s ignorance of the USSR, and in fact, according to an American diplomat in Paris, Sartre was “crushed” by the Doctors’ Plot and its blatant anti-Semitism.⁵⁸ This is not to pronounce winners and losers in this exchange, though certainly Hook’s “authentic Jew” is much happier than Sartre’s—allowed a “dignified and significant life” without having to await revolution. Rather, the point is to recapture this moment in which two competing models of equality were still in dialogue—arguing over terms like “authenticity” and “situation”—right before history pulled them apart.

As disturbing reports continued to emerge from Moscow, particularly after Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech, the dialogue between liberal pluralism and socialist internationalism turned into an outright clash. This is evident in American responses to Soviet anti-Semitism, which was typically framed as an assault on Jewish culture and on cultural diversity in general. The elimination of Yiddish schools, publications, and theaters; the fact that no new books were being issued in Yiddish; and, most especially, the executions of thirteen Yiddish writers and JAC members on August 12, 1952—all this spelled “cultural genocide” analogous to Hitler’s actual genocide. To be sure, the elimination of cultural figures and organs was indeed one aspect of Soviet anti-Semitism, and yet something did not quite fit: What about the fact that most of those executed were “Communist true believers who had dedicated most of their lives to promoting Stalin’s ‘socialist content’ in Yiddish ‘national form’”?⁵⁹ What of the countless literary works in Yiddish praising socialist internationalism, many penned outside the Soviet Union? And what about the Soviet Jewish avant-garde of the late 1910s and 1920s—artists like El Lissitzky and plays like The End of the World?

For left-leaning Jewish Americans, answering these difficult questions entailed revisionist takes on the interwar years. State-sponsored Yiddish schools and publications notwithstanding, the determination was that Soviet power had corrupted Jewish culture from the beginning. In their 1953 introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, Howe and Eliezer Greenberg wrote that from the end of 1924 onward, Soviet Yiddish literature had become “Neanderthal party literature,” yielding “party propaganda in emasculated Yiddish.”⁶⁰ A 1958 pamphlet distributed by the AFL-CIO’s Jewish Labor Committee asserted, “Soviet-Yiddish literature was not and could not be independent. It was more a part of Soviet than of world Yiddish literature. It was under the absolute control of the Communist Party and the Communist dictatorship.”⁶¹ Isaac Bashevis Singer confirmed these accounts in a 1962 Commentary review:

 

The inner dissolution of Yiddish in Russia began as early as the 1920’s at the very time when Yiddish was supposed to be flourishing there. Writers like David Bergelson and Moshe Kulbak, who were settled in Russia at that time and had harnessed themselves to the revolution, quickly lost their talent and their linguistic charms. It may sound mystical, but some of these writers were actually no longer able to construct a Yiddish sentence; their language had lost its soul.⁶²

 

What we see here is Hook’s notion of authenticity gaining legs: aside from that vaguely religious charm and soul, Jewish culture is defined in purely negative terms, as all that is non-Soviet and nonrevolutionary. Singer suggests that all loyal Soviet Jews had betrayed their Jewishness, including Bergelson (one of the twelve executed in August 1952) and Kulbak (executed in 1937). Accordingly, it is with a mixture of scorn and pity that Howe and Greenberg present these translated lines of Itzik Feffer—onetime visitor to the United States as cochair of the JAC, good friend of Paul Robeson, and, it turned out, a Soviet informant responsible for many Jewish deaths:

 

When I mention Stalin—I mean beauty,

I mean eternal happiness,

I mean nevermore to know,

Nevermore to know of pain.⁶³

 

Feffer’s writing career emerged during the heyday of the Soviet Jewish avant-garde; he was part of a literary group bound by “enthusiasm for Yiddish, modernism, and the revolution.”⁶⁴ As indicated here, his work subsequently veered from innovation; however, this did not prevent him from being among those executed on August 12, 1952. In Jewish American accounts of that day, his name was sometimes excluded, meaning we have arrived at a belated comeuppance for Slezkine’s Jewish revolutionaries—murdered in Moscow and excised in New York. Likewise, prominent Soviet Jews who escaped persecution were denounced as traitors and lackeys in Jewish communities around the world.⁶⁵

There is something undeniably potent about this take on Soviet Jewry, which could only lead to the conclusion that Moscow-centered internationalism was a sham. This conclusion was supported not only by Stalinist anti-Semitism but also by the reduction of a figure like Feffer to a much-maligned informant, one who had abandoned avant-garde poetry for Stalinist paeans.⁶⁶ Accordingly, just as some New York Intellectuals were embracing American liberal pluralism over Soviet socialist internationalism, another prominent member, Lionel Trilling, was arguing for the need to disaggregate culture from politics. The lead essay of his 1950 volume The Liberal Imagination asserted that “the form of [a culture’s] existence is struggle, or at least debate—it is nothing if not a dialectic. And in any culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions; they contain within themselves, it may be said, the very essence of the culture, and the sign of this is that they do not submit to serve the ends of any one ideological group or tendency.”⁶⁷ Trilling here separates the essence of culture—what one might call authentic culture—from ideological tendency, though as others have observed, his vision of culture was itself ensconced in postwar American liberalism.⁶⁸ This tendency is revealed more overtly by the writings and activities of Sidney Hook. In 1958 he echoed Trilling by proclaiming, “Where genuine cultural and political democracy are absent, where there is no recognition of the right to be different and to develop authentic and autonomous forms of culture, ‘ethnic democracy’ is a hoax, really a contradiction in terms.”⁶⁹ And yet Hook’s invocation of “authentic and autonomous” culture was a bit disingenuous. His ties to the U.S. government are now well known, with the State Department and CIA secretly funding his Congress for Cultural Freedom—an organization he cofounded to counter Soviet propaganda via scholarly exchange.⁷⁰ Meanwhile, Washington seized on the opportunity to expose the “false claims” of “Communist nondiscrimination against racial minorities.”⁷¹ In 1954, the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Communist Aggression held public hearings on the “Treatment of Jews Under Communism.” It concluded that the “totalitarian Communist regimes oppress all national and religious minorities because in their drive for totalitarian ‘gleichschaltung’ [the Nazi term for “bringing into line”] and world expansion they cannot tolerate any expression of independent spiritual and communal life.”⁷² The committee’s chair hinted that he would press the United Nations for further investigations, leading us back to the start of this chapter: the exchange between the USSR and the United States about minority rights—the Doctors’ Plot versus Jim Crow. Also in 1954, the USSR proposed a UN resolution against “the propaganda of racial and national exclusiveness” in Western countries, which an American official denounced as “brazen effrontery” in light of Soviet anti-Semitism.⁷³

However, another essay by Trilling complicates his earlier assertion about a dialectical essence of culture that could thrive only amid liberalism. In a 1955 introduction to Isaac Babel’s short stories, he identifies in the Soviet Jewish author—who was published by LEF, served as a onetime Cheka agent, and was shot in 1940 as an alleged Trotskyite and foreign spy—a dialectic at odds with that permitted by the “liberal imagination.” Particularly in the Red Cavalry cycle of stories—based on Babel’s own participation in the 1920 assault against Poland and including the previously quoted “Gedali”—Trilling finds a “forbidden dialectic” between violent brutality and formal precision, Jewish spirituality and socialist revolution, bookish Jew and Cossack soldier. For Trilling (here echoing Efros), this vision of Jewishness has everything to do with the liberation of perception brought by revolutionary violence. That is, it bears no relation to Hook’s “democratic way of life,” and yet for Trilling, this vision still has the power to disturb and transfix, years after Babel’s own execution and the emergence of Soviet anti-Semitism. Although, as Trilling concludes, the USSR ultimately refused the forbidden dialectic, Babel presents a path not taken—a violent, messianic vision in line with the Soviet Jewish avant-garde of El Lissitzky and The End of the World.⁷⁴ Of course, such estranging visions—incongruous with the New York Intellectuals’ “authentic” liberal pluralist Jew—came to be overshadowed by Cold War binaries. As we will see, however, traces of this avant-gardist “third way” could still be found through the 1950s and 1960s.

The Battle for Sholem Aleichem

A wonderful man, Irving Howe. He’s done so much for Yiddish literature and for me. But he’s not a youngster anymore, and still, still with this socialist meshugas!

—I. B. Singer

To recap, as World War II was coming to a close, Sartre wrote a class-based explanation of anti-Semitism. Several New York Intellectuals criticized this explanation, countering Sartre’s socialist internationalist notion of Jewishness (stripped of history and culture) with a liberal pluralist notion of Jewishness (secular culture plus American democracy).⁷⁵ Against the backdrop of the Cold War, Soviet anti-Semitism seemed to affirm this binary, allowing us to see the heightening struggle between the USSR and the United States as a struggle between socialist internationalism and liberal pluralism. However, having raised it up, we can now pick apart this divide, first by noting that Sartre was no Soviet spokesman, despite his pro-Soviet leanings. Consequently, the framework used to understand Soviet anti-Semitism—one forged in criticisms of Sartre—was somewhat off target. As noted, Soviet Jews suffered because they constituted one more “diaspora nationality” with strong non-Soviet ties—indeed, ties that had been promoted by Moscow through the JAC. Once these ties no longer served Soviet interests, they became potential sources of disloyalty. In short, the dark years from 1948 to 1953 had little to do with “authentic and autonomous culture” and everything to do with Stalinist paranoia.

Indeed, Stalin would have disagreed with Sartre on exactly the same grounds as Rosenberg and Hook. In 1948, the year before they published their responses, Stalin declared before a Finnish delegation that

 

every nation, whether large or small, has its own specific qualities and its own peculiarities, which are unique to it and which other nations do not have. These peculiarities form a contribution that each nation makes to the common treasury of world culture, adding to it and enriching it. In this sense all nations, both small and large, are in the same position, and each nation is equal to any other nation.⁷⁶

 

Though at first glance simply affirming his 1913 statement on the fixed nature of “national character,” these words marked a sea change in Soviet nationalities policy—unknown to Jewish American intellectuals given their limited sources on the USSR. In effect, Stalin declared that national identities were primary, trumping any class or ideology; nationhood provided the basis for individual identity and access to “world culture.” On the ground, what this meant was that anyone who denied their national identity—that is, anyone who embraced assimilation—immediately became suspect. Such people were condemned as “rootless cosmopolitans,” “cosmopolitan” here implying foreign contamination leading to disloyalty.⁷⁷ Jews could readily be targeted as such since their status as a Soviet nationality was questionable, especially given their lack of a substantial national territory.⁷⁸ In short, the campaign against “cosmopolitanism” can be seen as part of Stalin’s own rejection of interwar socialist internationalism. Soviet anti-Semitism targeted Jews not only for their ethnic particularity but also for being so active in defunct, “cosmopolitan” bodies like the Comintern.⁷⁹

This leads us to the provocative conclusion that Sidney Hook and Joseph Stalin rejected socialist internationalism simultaneously, and that the New York Intellectuals opposed “anticosmopolitanism” without grasping or even disagreeing with one of its bases—a belief in discrete, eternal cultures. Indeed, amid de-Stalinization in 1956, Soviet Jewish culture became acceptable again: once-purged Jewish writers began reappearing in journals, and state publishing houses issued hundreds of thousands of copies of Sholem Aleichem’s translated short stories. With the 1959 centennial of Sholem Aleichem’s birth, he was honored with a forty-kopeck postage stamp, a commemorative “collected works” series in six tomes, plus a volume of his works in Yiddish, the first Soviet Yiddish publication since 1948.⁸⁰ Arguably these were half-hearted gestures done just for show, but they nonetheless demonstrate that a few years after the New York Intellectuals set about reclaiming Jewish culture, the Soviet state did the same.

However, it would be a mistake to link too closely the New York Intellectuals’ turn to Jewishness and Stalin’s embrace of national peculiarity. In the United States and the Soviet Union, Jewish culture assumed very different molds: most notably, Jewishness in the Soviet Union maintained a primary emphasis on class, as evident in a critical study of Sholem Aleichem by I. A. Serebrianyi. Published during the 1959 centennial and dedicated to Serebrianyi’s family members who perished during the war, the book’s opening pages chide American Yiddishists for their “aestheticist” approaches to the writer. Serebrianyi cites, for example, this passage from Maurice Samuel’s The World of Sholom Aleichem (1943): “When Sholom Aleichem becomes the satirist, as in his descriptions of new Kasrielevky, he invites us to look down on others, and he is the less Sholom Aleichem. When he is the humorist, and identifies us with his characters, he is himself, and incomparable.”⁸¹ According to Serebrianyi, American Yiddishists thus deny Sholem Aleichem’s social satire—namely his send-ups of the wealthy enclave in the fictional village of Kasrilevke. Serebrianyi goes on to credit Soviet literary scholars for

 

“discovering” Sholem Aleichem as one of the most democratic and best Jewish folk [narodnykh] writer–realists, as a defender of the interests of the working masses, as a writer whose work reflected the material sides of the general social and political life of Russia at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.⁸²

 

This echoes the Sartrean approach to Jewishness, here combined with an emphasis on realism—the author’s satire as a precursor to socialist realism. The Soviet Sholem Aleichem emerges as a critic of class inequality, in contrast to the American Sholem Aleichem, a mere humorist.⁸³

Indeed, a few years later, this second Sholem Aleichem debuted on Broadway, his Tevye the Milkman stories adapted into the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964). According to Seth Wolitz, Fiddler “Americanizes” Tevye, transforming him from a patriarch resistant to but swept along by modern life into a “progressive grandfather figure” who accepts his wayward daughters’ “individual rights” and “freedom of association.” Meanwhile, “the class conflicts, which riddled the shtetl and which Sholem Aleykhem considered destructive of Jewish communal interests, are sidestepped in the musical. Fiddler posits, in fact, Jewish adaptability as the key to Jewish continuity.”⁸⁴ In short, we find here further affirmation of Hook’s understanding of secular Jewishness—“identical with the democratic way of life” and bearing no relation either to class or to the occasional criticisms of American society in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye.⁸⁵

However, not every New York Intellectual accepted this adaptable, marketable Jewishness, helping us to confound further the socialist internationalist–liberal pluralist divide. I specifically have in mind that previously “lost young intellectual,” Irving Howe. Note, for instance, his scathing 1964 review of Fiddler on the Roof: “Sholem Aleichem is deprived of his voice, his pace, his humane cleverness and boxed into the formula of a post-Oklahoma musical.” Tevye’s Anatevka—a predominantly Russian village in the original stories—is transformed into “the cutest shtetl we’ve never had”:

 

Irresistible bait for the nostalgia-smitten audience, this charming little shtetl is first shown in the style of Chagall—itself a softened and sweetened version, sharply different from Sholem Aleichem—and then prettified still more. It all bursts with quaintness and local color, and the condescension that usually goes along.⁸⁶

 

Likewise, though intended as “touches of realism,” the musical’s Jewish elements—Sabbath candles, wedding dances, Tevye’s talks with God—strike Howe as “sentimentalism and exploitativeness.”⁸⁷

Here we find vestiges of the Sartrean socialist authentic, expressed as a protest against Jewish culture as mass culture. Howe himself put forth another Sholem Aleichem—a “third way” of sorts between Moscow and Broadway. In an essay titled “Sholom Aleichem: Voice of Our Past,” Howe figures the writer, who died in 1916, as standing on the cusp of revolution, serving as a bridge between Jewish identity and leftist ideology:

 

Sholom Aleichem came at a major turning point in the history of east European Jews: between the unquestioned dominance of religious belief and the appearance of modern ideologies, between the past of traditional Judaism and the future of Jewish politics, between a totally integrated culture and a culture that by a leap of history would soon plunge into the midst of modern division and chaos.⁸⁸

 

This passage reveals Howe’s enduring socialist outlook—the notion of history as evolving from the religious and traditional (precapitalist) to the secular and modern (capitalist and postcapitalist). By this understanding, history progresses through stages but is also capable of leaping and plunging into chaos. He goes on to suggest that Jews are particularly suited to resolve this crisis through their distinct view of history, one we have encountered both in this and previous chapters:

 

Sholom Aleichem believed in Jews as they embodied the virtues of powerlessness and healing resources of poverty, as they stood firm against the outrage of history, indeed, against the very idea of history itself. Whoever is unable to conceive of such an outlook as at least an extreme possibility, whoever cannot imagine the power of a messianism turned away from the apocalyptic future and inward toward a living people, cannot understand Sholom Aleichem or the moment in Jewish experience from which he stems.⁸⁹

 

Though not conscious of it, Howe in effect presents Sholem Aleichem as prefiguring the Soviet Jewish avant-garde—specifically, its iconoclastic visions of Jewish messianism sparking socialist revolution, itself understood in the Benjaminian sense as the messianic arrest of history. Howe here uses Sholem Aleichem to carry forward the ambitions of the interwar ethnic avant-garde, albeit stripped of its cross-ethnic promise.

If he presented Sholem Aleichem as a precursor to this avant-garde, Howe himself advanced this group’s aims by similarly trying to balance Jewishness and revolution. Even as many of the New York Intellectuals turned from Marxism to neoconservativism, he founded the left-liberal journal Dissent, anthologized Trotsky, and wrote critical histories of the American left. At the same time, he became a leading translator-anthologist of Yiddish literature and poetry and went on to win a National Book Award for World of Our Fathers, a study of Jewish American immigrants from Eastern Europe. Of course, he was also a prominent critic of modernist literature in the mold of Trotsky.⁹⁰

Nonetheless, this balance of ideology, identity, and modernism was a tenuous one, which became evident when Howe tried to apply it to African American literature—leading us yet again to the black-Jewish opposition that began this chapter. In a 1963 essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” he criticizes James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for their criticisms of the black protest novel and, more specifically, of Richard Wright. According to Howe, African American literature is inextricably bound to injustice and oppression—“the violence gripping Negro life.”⁹¹ As a result, any attempt to move beyond the naturalistic protest novel—to seek shelter in high modernist literature—is wishful thinking. In response to Ellison’s desire “to see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom,” Howe exclaims, “As if one could decide one’s deepest and most authentic response to society!”⁹²

Howe here evokes once more Sartrean authenticity—blacks as defined by external oppression. Several have since noted that he was projecting Jewish American anxieties onto Ellison and Baldwin, and Howe himself would later comment that

 

I found myself cast, to my own surprise, in a Sartre-like position. I had written an essay on the fiction of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ellison, stressing the dominance—indeed, the inescapability—of the “protest” theme in their work. Ellison objected that I had locked the black writers into an airless box—what Sartre would call their “situation.” Ellison claimed for the blacks, as Rosenberg had for the Jews, an autonomous culture that could not be fully apprehended through the lens of “protest.”⁹³

 

Thus, in the space of just fifteen years, history was repeating itself, setting in place a dreary hierarchy: whites (Frenchmen) were to Jews as Jews were to blacks, all under a socialist banner. Or maybe this was already the second, farcical repetition: in the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s, the Russian people had been named “first among equals” given their role in the “Great Proletarian Revolution.”⁹⁴ After the war, those who failed to acknowledge this hierarchy—this inequality integral to the Soviet “friendship of peoples”—were tagged “cosmopolitans.”

I would like to conclude by suggesting that, had Howe himself been attuned to the existence of the interwar, Soviet-centered ethnic avant-garde, he would have been able to provide less-condescending advice to Baldwin and Ellison. That is, he would have been aware of earlier efforts to combine ethnic particularism, political radicalism, and artistic experimentation, which would have allowed him to see Jewish and black literature as part of an interrelated creative and political undertaking. During the interwar years, this undertaking was foreclosed by Stalinist terror and socialist realism, leading to similar experiences of illusion and disillusion that reverberated both around the world and across ethnic lines. As such, these similar experiences—this shared sense of failure and loss—point to another potential source for thinking across the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nation. They offer a basis, I think, for new iterations of an internationalist, cross-ethnic avant-garde.

To be sure, there are important distinctions to be made between Jewish American and African American encounters with the Soviet Union and the Soviet-centered left. For instance, Langston Hughes was largely cooperative before Joseph McCarthy, even as Howe berated intellectual “conformity” to Washington. Meanwhile, the New York Intellectuals (Howe included) were far more willing than their African American counterparts to favor Washington over Moscow as the Cold War intensified.⁹⁵ This makes perfect sense in light of Soviet anti-Semitism, as well as the fact that the USSR remained a loud, though opportunistic, champion of African American equality. In the decades after World War II, it continued to host such luminaries as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and James Baldwin. However, the very mention of Robeson allows us to confound anew the distinctions between black and Jew, American and Soviet. Robeson, who, like Hughes, had “discovered Russia, the Soviet Union, and socialism through the Jewish and Yiddish left,” made one of several visits to Moscow in 1949, during the height of the anticosmopolitan campaign.⁹⁶ There, alarmed by rumors and indications of Soviet anti-Semitism, he demanded to see his good friend Itzik Feffer, already in prison at the time. Soviet officials tried to conceal this fact by cleaning him up and having him visit Robeson’s bugged hotel room, but through notes and gestures, Feffer made it clear that he

 

was in serious trouble, and many of the most outstanding Jewish cultural figures had already been arrested. They would come for the rest of them soon. There was little hope for any of them, including Feffer (here Feffer drew his finger across his throat). And there had just been a massive purge of the Party in Leningrad—like the awful days of 1937…. When Feffer rose to leave, he and Paul embraced like brothers; both of them had tears in their eyes, because they knew that they were probably seeing each other for the last time.⁹⁷

 

In a bold show of solidarity with Feffer, Robeson included revolutionary Yiddish songs in a Leningrad concert soon after. However, upon his return to the United States, he denied the existence of Soviet anti-Semitism, maintaining the party line over all other considerations.⁹⁸ In 1959, soon after the U.S. State Department returned his passport (revoked in 1950 because of his communist ties) Robeson was in Moscow again. Most certainly relieved that the worst of Soviet anti-Semitism was over (though it would never disappear completely), he arrived just in time for the Sholem Aleichem centennial, stating at one celebration, “The life-span of Sholem Aleichem paralleled that of my father, and the lives and experiences of their peoples were also very parallel.”⁹⁹

In the Cold War’s wake, it is now possible to discern a further parallel, encompassing Feffer, Robeson, and all those around the world who once looked to Moscow for inspiration. What I am pointing to here is a grouping, a community drawn from many different places and backgrounds, connected through the failed Towers of Babel of the interwar years. Amid the ruins of their efforts to enact historical cessation, this becomes a people connected through a shared revolutionary pathos—a phrase that I expand upon in the afterword, so as to push the ethnic avant-garde beyond a now-defunct Soviet center.