When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (24 page)

Wiesel captured in his book this desire for identity mixed with a profound state of ignorance and fear.
The Jews of Silence,
published in the fall of 1966 and based on his
Yediot Aharonot
dispatches, offered an impressionistic account of what it meant to be a Jew in the Soviet Union, the first work to fully illustrate their strange state of limbo. It was an overdramatic report and one filtered through the prism of Wiesel's own ego ("I went to Russia drawn by the silence of its Jews. I brought back their cry"), but it began the process of chiseling a distinct form out of the rough slab that until then had been known simply as Soviet Jewry.

The Jews of Silence
was received as a potent illumination of a previously obscure problem. Reviewing the book for the
New York Times,
the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer deemed it a little too "emotional" for his taste but nevertheless felt that Wiesel captured a certain truth. "His account is as full of contradictions as is the life of the Jews in Soviet Russia," Singer wrote. A critic for the
Los Angeles Times
concluded that "if this is not the violent suppression, the genocide of Hitler's Germany, it is certainly, in terms of its ends, no less an affront to humanity."

But what most American Jews took away from the book, even more than a picture of a psychologically tortured population, was the sense that Wiesel was pointing an accusatory finger at them. In his closing pages, he makes his indictment explicit:

One may question whether we have any way of knowing that the Jews of Russia really want us to do anything for them. How do we know that our shouts and protests will not bring them harm? These are very serious questions, and I put them to the Russian Jews themselves. Their answer was always the same: "Cry out, cry out until you have no more strength to cry. You must enlist public opinion, you must turn to those with influence, you must involve your governments—the hour is late"...I promised I would do it, but I wept before them as I promised. I wept because I knew that nothing would help. Our Jews have other problems on their minds. When you tell them what is expected of them in Russia, they shrug their shoulders. It is exaggerated; or, we can do nothing about it; or, we must not do too much lest we be accused of interfering in the cold war. The Jewish brain has killed the Jewish heart. This is why I wept.... I believe with all my soul that despite the suffering, despite the hardship and the fear, the Jews of Russia will withstand the pressure and emerge victorious. But whether or not we shall ever be worthy of their trust, whether or not we shall overcome the pressures we have ourselves created, I cannot say. I returned from the Soviet Union disheartened and depressed. But what torments me most is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today.

***

If one event acted as an air-raid siren piercing this silence and complacency, it was at 7:45 in the morning on June 5, 1967, the moment when bombs dropped from Israeli jets destroyed nearly the entire Egyptian air force in just a few hours. Within six days the war in the Middle East would be over. The result would be a new map for Israel but also a new sense of Jewish identity. The war pushed Boris Kochubievsky to boldness, cut off as he was in the Ukraine from the larger Jewish world and receiving his news only from a small shortwave radio he kept tucked under his desk at the factory. For American Jews, part of a self-aware and organized community, the sense of collective pride and redemption was equally overwhelming. Or as Lucy Dawidowicz, the Jewish historian, put it a few months after the events in June, "American Jews, so frequently accused of indifference and passivity, turned into a passionate, turbulent, clamorous multitude, affirming in unprecedented fashion that they were part of the Jewish people and that Israel's survival was their survival."

The lead-up to the war that May had been as emotionally distressing as its outcome was exhilarating. As Nasser's pronouncements and actions became increasingly more bellicose, there was a deep sense of foreboding that he, together with Syria and Jordan, would make good on his word to bring about another holocaust. In New York, Jews rushed the Israeli consulate to offer their help. Before war broke out and travel to Israel was banned by the government, tens of thousands of young people, half of them in New York, applied to take over civilian jobs in Israel that had been left vacant by mobilized soldiers. The Jewish Agency, the Israeli body charged with immigration, could not handle the influx of requests. By most estimates, between the day Nasser closed the Straits and the end of the war, the Israeli Emergency Fund of the United Jewish Appeal collected over a hundred million dollars, with money coming in faster than the office could tabulate it. Several banks even loaned their employees to the United Jewish Appeal to help it keep up with the receipts. There were stories of people who cashed in securities and insurance policies so they could give larger contributions.

Arthur Hertzberg, the New Jersey rabbi and history professor, wrote about the phenomenon for
Commentary
in August 1967, two months after the war's end: "Many Jews would never have believed that grave danger to Israel could dominate their thoughts and emotions to the exclusion of all else; many were surprised by the depth of their anger at those of their friends who carried on as usual, untouched by fear for Israeli survival and the instinctive involvement they themselves felt. This outpouring of feeling and commitment appears to contradict all the predictions about the evaporating Jewishness of the American Jews."

That summer of 1967, while the counterculture and its colorful and suddenly robust protest against Vietnam burst into the mainstream and the civil rights movement devolved into violent riots that spread through the inner cities of Newark and Detroit, a certain kind of young American Jew was feeling a different stirring. The war had given these young people a renewed sense of Jewish identity, a connection, and even a new sort of moral compass by which to guide their political views. One college student's letter to the editor of the
Village Voice
captured this strange new identification:

I think it must have been this way for many of my generation, that the Israeli-Arab collision was a moment of truth. For the first time in my grown-up life, I really understood what an enemy was. For the first time, I knew what it was to be us against the killers.... I will never kid myself that we are only the things we choose to be. Roots count.... I was walking along the street listening to a transistor radio when I first heard that the Israelis, the Jews, had reached the Wailing Wall and with guns slung over their shoulders were praying there. No one was watching me, but I wept anyway. Sometimes even the tear-glands know more than the mind.

These feelings were echoed many times over. The American Zionist Youth Foundation asked 510 of the volunteers who signed up to go to Israel to fill out a questionnaire about their motivations. The answers show consistent bewilderment at the unexpected awakening of this sense of pride and duty. A man described as a twenty-one-year-old part-time college student with four years of Hebrew school who did not belong to a synagogue and was not affiliated with any Jewish organization wrote, "When I was driving to work I heard on the radio what had happened. I went to my office and could not work. Chills went through me and I knew that I must go and fight for my people. I am not very religious, but I knew that I had to try and help. I got my passport but I could not get a visa because of the State Department. Since I would have given up my life for Israel, I would like to spend my next vacation there. I bought Israeli bonds with my vacation money this year." A twenty-two-year-old college senior wrote, "I called the Israel Embassy to see if I could enlist to fight. I have never in 22 years felt a strong Jewish attraction. As a matter of fact, at times I even rejected my heritage. For the first time in my life I was forced to resolve this problem within myself. I still have doubts as to what the 'Zionist' movement stands for, but I felt obliged not just to sit back and see the State of Israel wiped off the map."

On the streets of Borough Park, Brooklyn, where the young Student Struggle activist Yossi Klein was finishing eighth grade, the excitement was no less palpable. Transistor radios blared the latest news all day long from every corner. And the victory was celebrated with the open waving of Israeli flags and public singing of "Hatikvah." Yossi wanted to emulate the rugged, vigorous Israelis, the new Jews who had, in the most dramatic manner, controlled the direction of history rather than been dragged along by its flow. Wearing blue-tinted granny glasses that he'd bought in a psychedelic shop on a street bordering his Orthodox neighborhood, Yossi watched the images of hippies dancing in the parks of San Francisco on his television that summer. And the happiness and exuberance they expressed seemed to be attached and akin to his own.

By the time of the Six-Day War, the civil rights movement had turned into a race revolution. The focus on black power and its attendant violence not only alienated the moderates like King and Rustin but also brought an end to the black-Jewish coalition. The tension had always been there. Younger militants in the movement resented and mistrusted the liberal Jews, who wanted to advise on strategy and direction. The definitive rupture occurred in the summer of 1966, when SNCC, the student wing of the movement, decided to exclude whites from leadership positions. There was growing frustration with the slow pace of change and a sense that white liberals were imposing too much moderation and compromise. Self-determination was the goal, not a few nice laws passed by Congress. They rejected the slow and painstaking path of building coalitions and acquiring political power that many of the Jewish activists, such as Allard Lowenstein, had been advocating. Jews as a group came to be perceived as obstacles, no different than any other whites.

The other divisive element was the start of the northern campaign in 1965. As interest turned to the deep poverty of the inner cities of Chicago, Detroit, and New York, it was clear that there might be a clash of interests between the blacks and the poor Jews who still shared those communities. The South was distant and the victories there obvious (the right to vote, the right to ride buses), but many Jews felt that they would be the casualties of any move by blacks to take power and privilege in the North. School busing, for example, made Jewish families worry about the impact of an influx of poor blacks on their children's education. Already in 1964, a
New York Times
article had found that almost half of Jewish New Yorkers felt the civil rights movement should "slow down." And from the black perspective, Jews were the nearest white symbols in their communities—the grocer setting the price on food, the landlord collecting money and refusing to fix a leak, the teacher disciplining their children, the social worker taking those children away. The fact that these Jews were socioeconomically only a few steps removed from poverty themselves was irrelevant. In the dozens of riots that spread across the country between 1964 and 1968, they were the symbols of a racist economic system.

The members of the Jewish community were turning inward, both because they were being ejected from the civil rights movement and because their own identity was shifting. They were becoming much more assertive and proud, in the spirit of the Six-Day War. Black power was another catalyst. While some Jews were reacting against the new militancy, others were emulating it. A new interpretation of the Holocaust emerged, one informed by all these different social forces but also by the extreme feeling of embattlement in those weeks before the war, when extermination stopped feeling like an abstract concept. It was a more tribal understanding of the genocide's meaning then the universalist and humanistic one that had been flowering since the fifties. The Holocaust now became a Jewish story and its lesson was that Jews had to be vigilant. The ax was always inches away from the neck.

Even progressive Jews began looking at their fellow travelers in the New Left differently, seeing a fundamental incompatibility between this new imperative to prioritize their communal concerns and the liberal demand that they fight for the wretched of the earth. After the war, Israel was viewed by this New Left as just another oppressive colonialist state keeping down a minority people. A real split ensued, causing liberal Jews to choose sides in a way they had never felt compelled to before. The argument that conservatives had been making since the beginning of the decade began to have wider appeal. Emil Fackenheim, the Jewish theologian, wrote in 1960 that "the liberal Jew of today is in a dilemma," because he will have to confront the "possibility that he might in the end have to choose between his Judaism and his liberalism; that, as critics on both right and left have charged, liberal Judaism is a contradiction in terms." In 1967, Fackenheim upgraded this idea to a 614th commandment (to add to the 613 of the Torah): "the authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory." Survival and commitment to Jewish continuity, Fackenheim was saying, trumped all other considerations. The world was still treacherous, and Jews needed to stop thinking about everyone else's rights and start defending their own.

In New York City, these currents crossed explosively in the fall of 1968, contributing to the break in the black-Jewish coalition and giving birth to a new type of militant Jewish power. It happened, predictably, in Brooklyn.

The neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville had undergone a dramatic demographic shift in the course of one generation. What was once a heavily Jewish area was now mainly black and Puerto Rican. The community had many black power activists who were eager to get rid of New York's centralized education system and exercise more control over their children's schooling. In the fall of 1967, Mayor John Lindsay decided to give in to these demands and create three experimental school districts that would be run by local community boards. Ocean Hill-Brownsville would be one of them.