#893 2/11/18 – This Week: ZOA’s “J Street Report” – A New Analysis of Views Not New Among a Wing of American Jews

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  This week the ZOA released the full text of its report on “J Street,” an organization espousing views on Israel long-held by a wing of American Jews.  I write this week of an earlier such organization and of how one of its founders later altered his views.  But I think today there is even less justification for anti-Zionism among American Jews.

This Week:  ZOA’s “J Street Report” – A New Analysis of Views Not New Among a Wing of American Jews

This week, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA, of which – for purposes of full disclosure – I’m a proud rank-and-file member) released the full text of its study J Street Sides With Israel’s Enemies & Works To Destroy Support For Israel. That report’s 146 pages make troubling reading for those whom J Street doubtless considers “right-wing extremists” like me.  I won’t pretend to have gotten through more than a few titled sections on aspects of J Street’s damaging-to-Israel activities that seemed particularly so-damaging to me.

You can download the report, if you like, from the ZOA’s site, but what I would have you focus upon for the next few minutes is context.  “J Street’s” Israel views are not new, but have been those of a succession of American Jewish organizations going back through pre-reborn Jewish State times.  By your leave, I’ll share with you here my fleeting encounter with one.

In the 1970’s, the fraternal order Brith Sholom’s Cardozo Lodge in its wisdom appointed me chairman of its “Israel” committee, charged with enhancing lodge members’ knowledge and support of Israel, with a whopping budget of $50, not to be spent all at once.  My son Jon suggested I visit the monthly used book sale of our Jewish-neighborhood library, where I could pick up “used” books on Israel for (in those days) for a buck and hand them out at lodge meetings.  With two unforeseen consequences, that stratagem worked.   Lodge members actually looked forward at meetings to my committee’s Israel-book-handout “report.”

The first unforeseen consequence was that the lodge member who really got hooked on Jewish history books, and collected for himself about a thousand through haunting “used” book stores and Jewish-neighborhood library book sales over the ensuing decades, was me.  I remember one such book at a library sale in particular.  It was a thin, less-than-new-condition, hardback I found on the “bargain” ten cent table one month, Sermons and Addresses by Rabbi Louis Wolsey, D.D.  Having myself been bar-mitzvahed at Philadelphia’s Congregation Rodeph Shalom in the fifties, and as an adult served for a term as a vice-president of its Men’s Club (mens’ clubs have more VPs than railroads and banks), I knew of course of Rabbi Wolsey, late long-serving rabbi there and co-founder of the old anti-Zionist “American Council for Judaism,” but so incensed was I that any rabbi’s life work should sell for ten cents, that I invested that sum, of my own, and never handed it out to the lodge.  (more about that battered ten-cent volume anon)

The second unforeseen consequence of my monthly Elkins Park library used book sale visits was a complaint that occasioned a short suspension of that activity.  One month I found that prices, but only on books on the Jews, had been raised.  “Anti-semitism!” I cried to the librarian, who patiently responded: “That’s not anti-Semitism.  It’s supply and demand.  Some nut is buying them all up.”

One of the used books I’d picked up on my own was Robert Silverberg’s If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem: The dramatic story of how American Jews and the United States helped create Israel.”  In a chapter describing activities of Zionist and non-Zionist American rabbis and lay Jews during the Second World War, the book covers in depth the rise and role of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, including that “Rabbi Louis Wolsey, one of its founders, told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1944, creation of a Jewish state would mean that ‘I am looked upon as a member of a nation whose headquarters is in Palestine, and that I am subject to suspicion, alienism, and perhaps worse.’”

Whether today’s J-Streeters are driven by dual-loyalty fears or by acceptance of propaganda that “Israel’s creation” wreaked unjust catastrophic displacement of “the Palestinians,” the consequence of either, aptly stated by Silverberg in his book, is the same:

“Organized Zionism was severely shaken by the establishment of the council – not because there was any chance that it would win mass support in the American Jewish community, but because it threatened to shatter the image of Jewish unity ….”

And then, a couple pages further on in Silverberg’s book, I read that the American Council for Judaism’s “zealous efforts” to block American support for Jewish statehood “struck most uncommitted Jews as strangely pro-Arab, and cost it much support.”  It went on that “Rabbi Louis Wolsey, himself a founder and officer of the council, resigned in a conspicuous way. . . . His disillusioned statement, ‘Why I Withdrew from the American Council for Judaism,’ became a keystone in the continuing Zionist attack on the organization.”

I rose from my chair and rummaged through my shelves, and there it was: Sermons and Addresses by Rabbi Louis Wolsey, D.D., page 12, “Address before Rodeph Shalom Men’s Club, May 15, 1948, ‘Why I Withdrew From The American Council For Judaism.’”

The rabbi begins with an explanation of his opposition to nationalism, which Zionism espoused, and with his aims for the council and then with his ultimate disillusionment with it.  But it is the final paragraph of Rabbi Wolsey’s statement to the Rodeph Shalom Men’s Club on May 15, 1948, that concerns us here:

“I am today neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist, but an objective student of the whole situation.  It is morally incumbent upon every fair-minded Jew to recognize what Mr. Austin calls ‘the realities’ of the Palestine claim.  That Jews have set up and proclaimed a government on the land partitioned by a decision of the United Nations on November 27, 1947, that to date six nations have recognized that government, chief of which are Russia and our own United States, that Jews defend it with their lives and with great courage – should move every Jew whether be nationalist or anti-nationalist to support Israel.  As Jews of every kind of conviction, we should hail with joy the present prospect of the migration of our distressed people into the Holy Land.  We would be less than merciful were we to do one thing, or say one word which would forbid or discourage their entrance into the land of Israel.  As one ceases to be a Zionist when he settles in the land of Israel, so should the Zionist movement likewise dissolve into a unity of world Jewry for the creation of a Jewish culture and a Jewish life in the land of Israel.  In spite of all the mistakes on both sides, Palestine offers a great possibility of freedom, decency and dignity for our suffering people.  Let us support it.”

Reading this three months shy of seventy years later, Rabbi Wolsey is entitled to a bit more credit than the ten cents his book with that men’s club address went for, for how far he had come.  But, with those seventy subsequent years’ hindsight, literally down till today, I think not far enough.  But for nationalism in its highest self-defense sense, Jewish culture and Jewish life would not have survived in Palestine, any more than in Arab lands or in eastern Europe.

But I think all this lacks something still.  That day – May 15, 1948 – that Rabbi Wolsey addressed his congregation’s men’s club, was one of a slim handful of three millennia-Jewish history’s most momentous of days – the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland of Israel.  Charles Krauthammer, 3/14/16:  “… the Jewish people are living through a miraculous age: the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty.”

Ben-Gurion put it to us, diaspora, especially American disapora, Jews, the previous day in these terms:  “Our call goes out to the Jewish people all over the world to rally to our side in the tasks of immigration and development, and to stand by us in the struggle for the fulfillment of the dream of generations for the rebirth of Israel.”

We see the State of Israel, and “Zionism,” more clearly today than did that rabbi and mens’ club in 1948.  There is even less moral and historical justification for “J Streets” than for their predecessor opposers of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish national home, including in historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria.