A diplomacia dos EUA e o fim do século americano - Biografia de Richard Holbrooke - George Packer

The Fog of Ambition

Thomas Powers

The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2019 Issue

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

by George Packer

Knopf, 592 pp., $30.00

Richard Holbrooke and Kofi Annan at the United Nations, New York City, October 2000

“Almost great” is George Packer’s measured judgment on the life and character of the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who was trying to broker an end to the war in Afghanistan when he died suddenly in 2010. Holbrooke left the war pretty much as he found it, and peace is no closer now, nearly a decade later, but that isn’t what explains the cruel precision of Packer’s judgment. It’s the man. Holbrooke had the serious intent, the energy, the friends, the wit, and even the luck needed to accomplish great things, but he fell short. Packer circles the question of why in his new biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, but the force of the man survives the interrogation. Holbrooke spills out in all directions in the manner of Walt Whitman, who waved aside the contradictions that others saw, saying, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Holbrooke was not only physically big but had an emphatic personality, could dominate a room, made friends and kept most of them, read widely and greedily, and was a bit overwhelming when he turned his attention on you. It is evident that Packer got the full treatment. They met when Holbrooke had been hovering at the edge of great for decades. As a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam he knew the war was lost before General William Westmoreland took command of US forces there in 1964. He told early bosses he would be an assistant secretary of state by the age of thirty-five and was (for East Asian and Pacific affairs), and later under President Bill Clinton he served as the American ambassador to Germany and to the United Nations.

The accomplishment cited in the first paragraph of all his obituaries came in the mid-1990s, between his two ambassadorships, when he was an assistant secretary of state for the second time (for European and Canadian affairs). His writ included the warring states of the former Yugoslavia, which were led by intransigent men waging a genocidal war. In the fall of 1995 Holbrooke reasoned and coaxed and threatened these men into signing a peace agreement named for the Ohio city where he achieved what many considered a miracle—the Dayton Accords. That peace has been kept for twenty-three years, and Holbrooke was trying to do the same in Afghanistan in 2009 when Packer published a profile in The New Yorker of the man he already considered a friend.

“What I’m thinking about,” Packer wrote fifteen months later, on the day Holbrooke died,

is not Holbrooke’s role on the world stage, but Richard on the phone for six minutes, or seated across the table, eyebrows lifted and mouth slightly open with barely suppressed mirth. He was the most excellent company. My wife and I were supposed to have dinner with Richard and Kati [Marton, his wife] this Friday. I’ll always wish that evening had come sooner.

It was the warmth, energy, and big presence of Holbrooke that put Packer under his spell, the way a man might fall in love with the city of Rome, all at once and forever. In the first lines of his prologue, Packer puts aside the usual stern mien of a biographer. “Holbrooke?” the writer begins. “Yes, I knew him. I can’t get his voice out of my head.”

But who is this writer? It’s Packer’s book, so it must be him—but the voice is not quite 100 percent Packer’s. This prologue is a risky start. Its writer doesn’t cite anything that Packer in his diligence has not learned for himself, but he knows it the way a guy at the next desk, or an early boss, or a sometime rival for a big job might know it. We may think of this writer—this narrator—as the kind of person, perhaps even a composite of all the people, who told Packer what he knows. Packer is a late arrival; the narrator has been there from the beginning. “Do you mind if we hurry through the early years?” he asks the reader early on. Later he remarks, “I haven’t told you about Holbrooke and women.” It’s the narrator who places Holbrooke in time and explains why Holbrooke is our man—the perfect example of “our feeling that we could do anything…our confidence and energy…our excess and blindness…. That’s the reason to tell you this story. That’s why I can’t get his voice out of my head.”

Holbrooke was not without blemish. He could be abrupt, dismissive, vain, and self-absorbed. Packer is frank about all that but remains in thrall. His Holbrooke is a man who wins, who holds and returns regard. The inevitable question, then, is whether Packer can write a six-hundred-page book about Holbrooke that sees him whole, blinks at nothing, and reaches a judgment we can trust.

Efforts to portray the life of Richard Holbrooke hinge on its major disappointment—his failure to become secretary of state. How we explain that—not the ambition but the failure—can tell us the sort of man he was. Holbrooke himself traced the first murmur of his ambition to the diplomat Dean Rusk, the father of his best friend while he was growing up in Scarsdale, New York. He spent a lot of time in the Rusk household after the death of his own father in 1957. A year later, at a breakfast gathering of the senior class at Scarsdale High School, the elder Rusk made a suggestion. “When you’re thinking of careers,” he said, “think of the Foreign Service.” Holbrooke remembered that in his junior year at Brown University when President Kennedy chose Rusk to be his secretary of state.

After he wangled a dream job with The New York Times that summer, he told college friends that he knew what he wanted to be: managing editor of the Times or secretary of state. When the Times declined to offer him a job after his graduation in 1962, he took the Foreign Service exam, passed it, and was sworn in a month later. In June 1963, following basic language and area training, he departed for Vietnam just as the long-simmering war was about to spin out of control.

From the moment Holbrooke’s plane touched down in Saigon, his career was swept along by events. The career lasted almost fifty years, but the three Saigon years were the ones that fixed his view of America in the world. Holbrooke arrived when the Kennedy administration was making up its mind that the Saigon government of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his family had to go. The last straw was Diem’s sister-in-law making barbecue jokes about Buddhist monks who had burned themselves alive to protest the war. Holbrooke was too far down the ladder to know anything of Washington’s plotting to get rid of Diem, but something was clearly brewing. “In that strange Saigon atmosphere of ritual suicide and tennis,” Packer writes, “the tension gathered like the saturating air before the afternoon rain.”

Holbrooke’s education began on his second day in-country, when a former military officer, George Melvin, took him north on “Bloody Route 13”—so named for the frequency of attacks on American vehicles. They were heading into the countryside where the official program was to challenge the Hanoi-controlled Vietcong for the allegiance (later invariably referred to as “the hearts and minds”) of rural South Vietnamese. Land reform and rural development were only part of the plan. The unofficial program, Melvin told Holbrooke, also included “certain things that he should never tell anyone,” and “other things that he wouldn’t understand and shouldn’t know or ask about, things on the dark side of the fight that it was wise to keep from higher-ups.” Melvin believed the challenge in Vietnam was political, not a matter of maneuver and firepower. “We have to take the revolution away from the VC,” he said repeatedly.

The rest of Holbrooke’s education, which continued until his departure in the spring of 1966, brought a steadily deepening sense of just how improbable was the plan to take the revolution away from the Vietcong by Ivy Leaguers fresh out of college like Holbrooke, Boston Brahmins who worked too little and drank too much like Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and Hollywood-handsome generals like Westmoreland who thought the Vietcong would be crushed by American firepower. Holbrooke soon grasped the hopeless nature of the task. In a letter to his wife, Litty, from the Mekong Delta, he mocked officials who imagined that “one division of Americans would clean this place up.” He had already learned that “a division of Marines would be bled to death in the swamps and paddies…and never make a dent.” Take that observation, cube it, and you have a good idea of what Holbrooke learned about the limits of American power.

Packer’s hundred pages on the American failure in Vietnam tell the story as forcefully as any hundred pages ever written about the war. The CIA-backed overthrow and murder of Diem and his brother left the Saigon government in tatters, and it never recovered. The war grew steadily bigger but never moved closer to victory. Packer charts Holbrooke’s progress through the four stages of disillusion about the war—learning to be skeptical of official assessments, doubting the tactics, questioning the strategy, and finally admitting that “the United States could never win.” What’s shocking is not how quickly Holbrooke grasped the futility of American efforts, but how readily he concluded there was nothing he could do about it. “The fight sometimes doesn’t even seem worth it,” he wrote in a letter home before his first year was up. “But there is no choice, really, is there?”

Here the reader rebels. Of course there was a choice, but Holbrooke couldn’t square it with a career in the Foreign Service. This is the line he never crossed. As late as the spring of 1969, he wrote to his friend Anthony Lake, who had just joined President Nixon’s National Security Council, “We have to get out of Vietnam. The war has already spread a poison through our nation.” Holbrooke was willing to tell Lake something they both knew, but he was not willing to wreck his career with futile efforts to tell everybody else. Give his honest opinion on the best way forward, yes; go public with disagreement or even resign, no. That realism, in Packer’s view, was the poison spread by the war. “Vietnam fixed [Democratic doves] with the dreaded label ‘soft,’” he writes; “in government that label could destroy you.” Staying on the safe side of the line was the price Holbrooke paid to keep his professional hopes alive.

Holbrooke’s ambition to be secretary of state was never casual and sank its teeth in deeper as he read history and made powerful friends. He admired secretaries of state like George Marshall (1947–1949) and Dean Acheson (1949–1953) for deserving the job, getting the job, and doing something world-changing with the job—the Marshall Plan, which helped Europe recover from World War II, followed by Acheson’s success in building a grand alliance to defend the West in the early years of the cold war.

In the late 1980s Holbrooke spent four years writing an “as-told-to” memoir for Clark Clifford, who had held a string of high-level jobs close to great events over a twenty-year period—exactly the sort of career Holbrooke wanted for himself. Holbrooke was an able writer, and Counsel to the President is arguably his most revealing work. It builds to the moment in Clifford’s career that gave him a firm place in history—what he did as President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense in 1968.

March 1968, when Clifford took office, was the great either-or moment in modern American history after World War II. General Westmoreland had just requested 200,000 more troops following the countrywide attacks by the Vietcong known as the Tet Offensive. That would have brought the total number of American troops in Vietnam to more than 700,000. The choice was bleak: telling Westmoreland no in an admission of failure or digging in deeper with no end in sight. Johnson was ready to give Westmoreland what he wanted, and at the outset Clifford was ready to go along. But he didn’t. He asked questions, got others involved, forced Johnson to face facts, and pushed him, decisively in Holbrooke’s view, to choose peace talks over endless war. Clifford rose to the moment in 1968, and Holbrooke believed, given a comparable challenge, that he could do the same. Packer tells us that Holbrooke wrote “every damn sentence” of the Clifford memoir, and he infused it with the passion and focus he hoped someone would bring to a similar account of his own life someday.

Vladimir Lehovich

Richard Holbrooke in South Vietnam, 1960s

Packer strains to isolate the exact thing that set Holbrooke apart and gave him a chance at the greatness Clifford achieved. Holbrooke certainly had ability, and he was given at least two moments of opportunity. The first came in the summer of 1995, when he and three aides headed for Sarajevo to try to end a war. Packer tells us a good deal about these aides, who shared all the dangers of work in a war zone, put in as many hours as Holbrooke, knew as much, and were just as smart. He describes all three as “the kind of career officials who commuted to their offices from the Virginia suburbs in suits and ties…worked long hours and might receive a department award now and then but were unknown outside their circle of colleagues.”

There was no ceiling, but they rose no higher. “If they didn’t make it to the treetops,” Packer observes, “it wasn’t for lack of ability or dedication but want of that demon ambition.” That’s where he comes down: it’s the sheer wanting that brings the most important jobs within reach. This wanting is something colleagues notice early. Packer remarks that in 1972, when Holbrooke’s first marriage broke up, “he had accomplished nothing of importance, yet people began to talk about him as someone destined for great things.”

“But ambition is not a pretty thing up close,” Packer also notes:

It’s wild and crass…. It brings a noticeable smell into the room. It’s a man cajoling a bereaved widow to include him among her late husband’s eulogists, then rearranging name cards so that he can chat up the right dinner guest after the service.

In Packer’s view the “wild and crass” element is what gives ambition its force. To go far, a man or woman has first got to be noticed, then kept in mind and taken into account. “If you cut out the destructive element,” Packer says of Holbrooke, “you would kill the thing that made him almost great.”

In 1995 Holbrooke’s ambition brought him to Bosnia. There to help him were the three able officials Packer has described as unknown outside their own circle of colleagues. They were all middle-aged with wives and two kids each, and they were all in the group with Holbrooke on August 19, 1995, that was forced by fate and politics to take the more dangerous of two routes down into the city of Sarajevo for a round of peace talks. Two military vehicles set out on the steep, winding road over Mount Igman—a Humvee in front with Holbrooke and General Wesley Clark, followed by an armored personnel carrier (APC) with Holbrooke’s three aides.

The disaster that ensued can be recounted in a sentence or two, but Packer devotes twenty pages to his narrative of what happened that day, beginning with his careful introduction and naming of the aides: Robert Frasure, Joseph Kruzel, and Nelson Drew. “It was the most dramatic story of Holbrooke’s life,” he says. He offers two versions of the story: a brief, semiofficial account centering on Holbrooke and Clark; and a second, much longer version in “absurd detail,” which he believes “comes as close to the fleeting truth as we are likely to get.”

In Packer’s first version of the story, the Humvee with Holbrooke and Clark is halted in mid-trip by some French trucks pulled up at the side of the road. A soldier is shouting. Holbrooke and Clark are told that a vehicle has gone off the side of the mountain back up the road. “Then it hit us. They were talking about our armoured personnel carrier!” The rest of that version relates what Holbrooke and Clark did next.

In Packer’s second version of the story, the Humvee sets off down the mountain and the APC follows a moment later. Both are soon going too fast but the Humvee is lucky: it speeds along. The heavier APC is unlucky. It is trying to catch up. As the road winds down the mountain with a cliff wall on one side and a steep drop on the other, the turns are too tight, the road too narrow, patches of gravel make slippery going, and the heavier APC in the rear, trying to keep up with the Humvee, hits a bump, skids to the right, and goes over the edge of the road onto a steep wooded slope, rolling over and over down the mountain as many as thirty or forty times, crashing finally into a big tree a thousand feet down. Some of the occupants are thrown out, some crushed inside. Finding out what happened, seeking and bringing help, and reporting the accident all took time. By day’s end it was known that Frasure, Kruzel, and Drew had all been killed.

Responsibility for the disaster was never established in any official way, but Packer in his second version of the story offers the reader his own take on “the fleeting truth.” The Humvee taking Holbrooke down into Sarajevo started off too fast; the heavier APC, trying to keep up, went off the road. “Holbrooke was the mission leader,” Packer writes, “and he loved speed.”

Packer’s tone in delivering this judgment is restrained; he is not looking for someone to blame but trying to establish what happened. The horror of the accident helps to explain what followed: Holbrooke’s forceful demands to the warring generals in Sarajevo that led a couple of months later to the Dayton Accords. That impressive success put him on President Clinton’s shortlist of plausible candidates to replace Warren Christopher as secretary of state at the beginning of Clinton’s second term. While the president was pondering his choice, Vice President Al Gore urged Holbrooke to fly home from a trip to Bhutan to make his case. Holbrooke imagined, hoped, and may even have allowed himself to believe that his dream was within reach. But Hillary Clinton had something different in mind; she wanted Bill to be the first president to nominate a woman as secretary of state. Other factors played a part, but that was the big one; the job went to Madeleine Albright instead. Holbrooke told his State Department friend Strobe Talbott, “For the first time in my life I feel old.”

Other moments of hope followed. In 2004 Holbrooke was one of John Kerry’s principal foreign policy advisers in his campaign against President George W. Bush, but Packer thinks Kerry had a different candidate in mind for secretary of state. “Joe Biden,” he writes, “had the inside track.”

In 2008 Holbrooke fought hard for Hillary Clinton, but she lost to Barack Obama, and Holbrooke wasn’t on any list of Obama’s, short or long. There was never any warmth between the two men. When Hillary became secretary of state, she engineered a position for Holbrooke as the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The last two years of Holbrooke’s life were spent trying to square that circle. By the end, Obama was exasperated and close to firing Holbrooke, but the real source of the distance between them had come much earlier, in the aftermath of September 11, when President Bush made up his mind to invade Iraq. Obama was disgusted by the way pushover Democrats had joined the parade. “By the time” Obama was elected, Packer writes, “Iraq was the letter ‘I’ stamped on the foreheads of Democrats like Holbrooke.”

George Packer joined The Atlantic as a staff writer last fall after fifteen years with The New Yorker. His book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America won a National Book Award in 2013. The prologue’s writer says he is content to be “a member of the class of lesser beings who aspire to a good life but not a great one,” but that is not Packer speaking. No book could achieve the intensity, completeness, and narrative depth of Our Man without the author’s belief that he had been put on this earth to do it. The strength of the book is its focus on Holbrooke’s character, which Packer pursues much as James Boswell pursued the human truth of Samuel Johnson. The point is not to analyze things—why Yugoslavia flew to pieces, or what Johnson did for the English language with his dictionary. The point is to winkle out and bring to light the whole truth of the man: what he was like in all his contradictions.

Iraq is the issue that explains how Holbrooke fell short, and it provides an illuminating moment when the lives of Holbrooke and Packer unexpectedly veer close. They were both agnostic on the question of Saddam Hussein’s alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, and they both thought he was a cruel, warlike, and unpredictable head of state, but neither seriously argued, and it is probable that neither believed, that the United States had a genuine cause for war or a legal right to invade. That being the case, why did they both support the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003?

Packer’s belief in the war lasted just long enough for him to defend it in his book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, published two years after the invasion. “The Iraq War was always winnable,” he wrote; “it still is.” But eight months later, in December 2005, he told an interviewer for a San Francisco website that he had changed his mind since he had written that line. “Now,” he said, “I’m quite grim.”

“You were ‘just barely’ pro-war when it started,” the interviewer said.

“It was just hope winning out, by a whisker, over fear,” Packer responded.

That was slicing it pretty thin. Over the next decade Packer reached a far stronger and clearer judgment on the war. “The war was a disaster for Iraq and the US alike,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 2013. “It was conceived in deceit and born in hubris, a historic folly that took the American eye off Al Qaeda and the Taliban, while shattering Iraq into a million bloody pieces.” Packer had to learn that; Holbrooke already knew it when he stood up to be counted for the war in 2003.

Packer does not skirt this moment in Our Man, but his account is brisk and soon concluded; it receives nothing like the intense twenty pages devoted to the APCcrash on Mount Igman, much less the hundred-page account of what Holbrooke learned in Vietnam about the limits of military power. In the fall of 2002 Kerry told Holbrooke over dinner that he was thinking of running for president in 2004. It was a tricky moment. President Bush was pressing Congress for authority to attack Iraq, and Kerry, like every other Democrat, was on the spot. “Holbrooke told him point-blank that he had to vote for the resolution if he didn’t want to be seen as weak on national security,” Packer writes. “Holbrooke didn’t add that the same was true for himself in his quest to become Kerry’s secretary of state.”

“It might have been better,” Packer suggests, “to be stupidly, disastrously wrong in a sincerely held belief like some of us.” By this I don’t take Packer to mean practically better—more likely to win plaudits—but better for the soul.

Friends at the time told Holbrooke he was making a mistake to support the war, but he chose the road of realism. To be against that war in that moment, he felt, would mark a man as soft forever. Maybe. But that was a moment when the United States needed bucking up to say no to a rush to war. It was the moment when Holbrooke fell short in Obama’s eyes. Packer cites a whole lifetime of serious work to balance against Holbrooke’s decision to hold his tongue, but it’s hard not to feel that this was the moment that put the almost in almost great.

Um historiador da escravidao americana - David Brion Davis (Drew Gilpin Faust, NYRBooks)

The Scholar Who Shaped History

Drew Gilpin Faust

MARCH 20, 2014 ISSUE

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

Knopf, 422 pp., $30.00

The Scholar Who Shaped History

Drew Gilpin Faust

The New York Review of Books, March 20, 2014 Issue

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation’s history. And that revolution has taken place largely because of a remarkable generation of historians who, inspired by the changing meanings of freedom and justice in their own time, began to ask new questions about the origins of the racial inequality that continued to permeate our segregated society nearly a century after slavery’s end.

Published in 1956, just two years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Boarddecision called for school integration, Kenneth Stampp’s pathbreaking The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South turned prevailing wisdom on its head. His history, written with a premise of fundamental black and white equality, yielded insights about slavery quite unlike the conclusions of earlier writings based on unquestioned assumptions of black inferiority. The leading early-twentieth-century historian of slavery, Ulrich B. Phillips, had portrayed a benevolent system designed to uplift and protect benighted Africans. Stampp, deeply affected by the emerging civil rights movement, painted a very different picture. With vivid archival detail, he demonstrated that slavery was harsh and exploitative of those who, he explained in words that rather startlingly reveal both the extent and limits of midcentury white liberalism, were after all “white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.”

But the outpouring of research and writing about slavery in the years that followed went far beyond simply changing assumptions about race and human equality. It yielded as well an emerging recognition of the centrality of slavery in the American experience—not just in the South, but in northern society too, where it persisted in a number of states well into the nineteenth century. It also fundamentally shaped the national economy, which relied upon cotton as its largest export, and national politics, where slaveholding presidents governed for approximately two thirds of the years between the inaugurations of Washington and Lincoln.

At the same time, the burgeoning study of slavery was revolutionizing the practice of history by significantly expanding the kinds of sources scholars thought to employ in their effort to illuminate the elusive past. In order truly to understand slavery, it seemed imperative in the post–civil rights era to have a far richer understanding of the experience and perspectives of the slaves themselves. Yet by law throughout the South, slaves had been prohibited from reading and writing and thus prevented from leaving the written records on which history traditionally so largely depended.

In order to create the new history of slavery, scholars ventured into unaccustomed fields of research—demography, quantitative analysis, which came to be dubbed “cliometrics,” oral history, folklore, music, material culture, archaeology, and comparative history, to name a few. These modes of inquiry have now become staples in historical fields well beyond the study of America’s peculiar institution. In developing a new history for slavery over the past half-century, scholars have at the same time contributed to fundamentally changing the ways history is done, significantly expanding the kinds of remnants of the past that might be tapped as sources of historical understanding.

The new scholarship that placed slavery at the heart of American history and that recognized race as a central and enduring dimension of the American experience was the creation of prodigiously talented scholars who both argued and collaborated, at once learning from and disputing with one another, at times bringing especially vehement scholarly debates to prominent attention in the national media, to magazine covers and television talk shows. For me, a southern historian, a graduate student and assistant professor in the 1970s, it was a heady time, when history mattered so intensely to contemporary life and when brilliant scholars produced a stream of weighty volumes, each one of which required revised understanding and prompted—even mandated—new directions for research. They included such individuals as Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, John Hope Franklin, Lawrence Levine, Leon Litwack, John Blassingame, Orlando Patterson, Robert Fogel, and Stanley Engerman. And prominent among them, David Brion Davis. Davis did not focus his primary attention on the experience of slaves or the details of the institution of slavery, but about what he defined in the title of his influential Pulitzer Prize–winning 1966 book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (PSWC): slavery as a problem and contradiction in human thought and human morality, not just in American history but across both world history and geography from the Greeks onward.

Davis’s book and his subsequent work would become a major influence in the emergence of a comparative history of slavery and abolition, in essence a global history well avant la lettre. It would, among other achievements, powerfully influence traditional approaches to intellectual history by embedding ideas in social and political action and institutions. This was historical writing with a scope and ambition that would shape scholars and scholarship for decades to come.

Now, in 2014, David Brion Davis, age eighty-six, has published the final volume in the trilogy he inaugurated with PSWC and continued with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (PSAR) in 1975. In the years since, he also has written or edited twelve other books, and he has published in these pages a continuing account of slavery scholarship, contributing some three dozen essays since the 1970s. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, which he began in 1980, completes the trilogy and is, he writes, “the fulfillment of a career.” This career has produced not just extraordinary scholarship and numbers of graduate students who are now leading historians in their own right. Davis has also been dedicated to extending and disseminating a true understanding of the place of slavery in American history by founding and then leading the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale and by offering a course on slavery for high school teachers each summer for nearly a decade.

Davis came somewhat indirectly to slavery studies. An undergraduate philosophy major at Dartmouth and then a graduate student in Harvard’s program in the History of American Civilization, he was interested in how ideas are refracted through real human problems in the everyday world. History, Davis believed, could serve as a “source for disciplined moral reflection.” In his dissertation and first book, the problem he chose to consider was homicide—how a human being can come to deny and obliterate the humanity of others. But his inquiry into the nature of dehumanization soon shifted its focus to the injustices of race and slavery that had been under increasing academic and public discussion in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Davis had himself experienced something of an epiphany on these issues during his military service at the end of World War II. A peripatetic childhood had taken him to five high schools across the North, yet he had never shared a classroom with an African-American. A training camp in Georgia introduced him to the injustices of southern segregation, but an incident on a troop ship carrying him to Germany at the very conclusion of the war made an even more forceful and lasting impression. Ordered to descend into the hold and enforce the prohibition against gambling among those quartered below deck, Davis discovered with dismay hundreds of black soldiers—whom he had not even known were on board—segregated in conditions he believed not unlike those of a slave ship. Davis’s experiences in the army introduced him to the realities of racial prejudice and cruelty that he had never imagined existed in America’s twentieth-century democracy. The shock of recognition rendered these impressions indelible, but it was a chance circumstance of his graduate school years that seems to have transformed them into a scholarly commitment.

In his time at Dartmouth and Harvard, slavery and race occupied almost no place in the curriculum. The work of the great scholar W.E.B. DuBois, for example, Harvard’s first black Ph.D., was not a part of the historical training offered by his own alma mater. But during Davis’s last spring in Cambridge, as he was finishing his dissertation, he encountered Kenneth Stampp, a visiting scholar on the verge of publishing The Peculiar Institution. Davis came to see that slavery and its abolition offered an extraordinary vehicle for examining how humans shape and are shaped by moral dilemmas and how their ideas come to influence the world.

Historians are interested in change, and the history of slavery provided Davis an instance of change in human perception of perhaps unparalleled dimensions and significance. Understanding and explaining that change became his life’s work. Why, he wondered, did slavery evoke essentially “no moral protest in a wide range of cultures for literally thousands of years”? And then, “what contributed to a profound shift in moral vision by the mid- to late eighteenth century, and to powerful Anglo-American abolitionist movements thereafter?”

PSWC launched Davis’s inquiry with a focus on the “problem” at the heart of the institution in all its appearances across time and space: “the essential contradiction in thinking of a man as a thing,” at once property and person, object and yet undeniably an agent capable even of rebelling against his bondage and destroying the master who would deny his agency. Grappling with this contradiction vexed every slave society, but only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did these inconsistencies begin to yield substantial opposition to the institution itself. After tracing the cultural heritage of these ideas from Plato and Aristotle, through the evolution of Christianity, into the thought of the Enlightenment and the seemingly paradoxical strengthening of both rationalist and evangelical impulses in the course of the eighteenth century, the first volume of Davis’s trilogy introduces the origins of modern antislavery thought.

In PSAR, Davis then explores the implications of this intellectual legacy and emerging antislavery consciousness in the social and political milieu that both enabled and circumscribed their impact. The second volume of Davis’s trilogy seeks to demonstrate the “points of intersection between ideals and social action” and succeeds in situating intellectual history in a world of action and consequence. It is hard to think of any scholar who has made a better case for the proposition that ideas matter and can even override power and wealth, as Davis makes clear in his oft-repeated point that emancipation ultimately triumphed even though slavery was in fact flourishing economically in the nineteenth-century world that abolished it.

During the three decades he worked on The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, Davis altered its original plan as he took up parts of the story in other books, most notably in a study of the changing relationship of slavery to ideas of human progress and in a volume based on his lectures to high school teachers that chronicles the rise and fall of slavery in the New World. These projects have permitted him to craft PSAE as a “highly selective study” focused on abolitionism in Britain and the United States, while employing what he has characterized elsewhere as “a wide-angle lens” on bondage more broadly. Unlike its predecessor, PSAE does not include dates in its title, but the “Age” Davis discusses reaches from the 1780s and the post-Revolutionary emancipationist impulse in the United States to the 1880s and the abolition of slavery in Brazil.

Davis begins by introducing what he identifies as the “central theme” of the book: “dehumanization and its implications,” a theme that has indeed been central to his work since he was writing about homicide long ago. The debates over slavery in the era of the American Revolution, he had shown in the preceding volume of the trilogy, had left a perception of black “incapacity for freedom” as the fundamental justification for the perpetuation of slavery. These assumptions of black inferiority, variously characterized as innate in a discourse that allocated increasing importance to race, or acquired through the oppressions of the slave system itself, were held not only by whites. They deeply affected blacks as well, Davis writes, in a form of “psychological exploitation” that yielded “some black internalization and even pathology” but also “evoked black resistance.” As escaped slave and black abolitionist Henry H. Garnet described the “oppressors’ aim”: “They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind,” then slavery has “done its perfect work.”

Davis’s emphasis on the centrality of dehumanization and his treatment of the internalizing of these notions of inferiority in a form of “black self-contempt” evoke historians’ bitter battles of the 1960s and 1970s over Stanley Elkins’s highly controversial portrait of “Sambo” as a model slave personality, a docile being whose psychological oppression had emasculated and infantilized him and left him without culture or community.

Objecting to such a characterization, a generation of historians set about to discover—successfully—evidence of black culture, community, family, creativity, and identity thriving within slavery. But Davis reminds us that cruelty and injustice necessarily take a powerful toll on their victims, and he cites numerous statements by nineteenth-century African-Americans—both slave and free—that acknowledge the withering and lingering effects of slavery on the heart and mind. A half-century beyond Elkins’s book and the controversy it generated, Davis asks us to embrace a more nuanced understanding of both the damage slavery inflicted on individuals and communities and the extraordinary resilience marshaled against it.

The force of these conceptions of black incapacity and their salience for the progress of emancipation lead Davis to explore how they were related to three realities that proved of critical importance for the coming of freedom: the influence of the Haitian Revolution, the movements for colonization and emigration, and the leadership and example of free blacks, who represented the “most killing refutation of slavery” and served as “the key to slave emancipation.”

When Davis began his study of the Age of Emancipation, he was struck by how little historical attention had been directed at the Haitian Revolution. His own writings have helped generate a level of scholarly interest in Haiti that has done much to mitigate that neglect. In this volume, Davis builds on that work to consider the ways Haiti influenced emancipationist efforts from the British Parliament’s 1792 consideration of outlawing the slave trade to Brazil’s abolition nearly a century later. Haiti was, in the words of Frederick Douglass, the “pioneer emancipator.” But, as Davis recounts, Haiti’s experience sent contradictory messages about the meanings of black freedom. Certainly the uprising demonstrated that slaves had not been so dehumanized as to lack the initiative and capacity to organize effective military forces and win independence. Yet at the same time, the violence and terror of the revolt reinforced white images of blacks as brutes.

In the short run, the Haitian Revolution “seriously damaged” the worldwide antislavery movement. But in the longer term, Haiti became the symbol of a polity and a society in which blacks could fully claim and exercise their freedom. In the eyes of free blacks, Haiti represented a harbinger of hope for universal emancipation in its demonstration that “bondage was not an inevitable or eternal fate.”

The obstacles that dehumanization of slaves posed for emancipation played out as well in the movements for colonization and migration that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Davis believes that colonization, the effort to free blacks and return them to Africa, has been poorly understood by modern historians, and he seeks to introduce a more complex view of its character and appeal. The founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816 was deeply influenced by fears that Haiti aroused about the potential for violence inherent in an oppressed black population, and Davis finds among colonization’s advocates the same preoccupation with the dehumanization of slaves that he identifies in discussions of the meanings of the Haitian Revolution.

Spokesmen for the American Colonization Society argued that removing blacks from the degradations of American slavery would enable them to prove their capacity for civilization and thus combat the prejudices that had grown up in response to slavery’s oppressions. White proponents of colonization, David argues, were genuinely perplexed about how to deal with racism and the conditions that had produced it. But their ideas were greeted with “vehement hostility” by free blacks who perceived the colonizationists’ purposes as racial removal rather than benevolent uplift, a conclusion encouraged by the racist remarks of such prominent advocates of colonization as Henry Clay, who called the free black population “a dangerous and useless part of the community.”

Yet some black leaders, such as Henry H. Garnet, proposed emigration schemes of their own, stressing Africa’s glorious past and envisioning an escape from white oppressions in a kind of proto–black nationalism. Davis underscores the “complex dynamic…between the white desire to expel and the black quest for independence.” But the bitter opposition of African-Americans, conveyed by publications like Samuel Cornish’s Freedom Journal, founded in 1827, and David Walker’s stirring 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, characterized colonization as itself a new form of oppression and thwarted any alliance between the movement and committed antislavery forces.

By the early 1830s a new biracial mobilization for “immediate” emancipation of American slaves emerged with the establishment of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator in 1831, with his “all-out attack” on colonization in 1832, and with the founding of the New England Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and 1833. Significantly, Davis points out, it was the financial support of free black Philadelphia merchant James Forten and a subscription list of which 75 percent were black readers that kept The Liberatoralive. And significantly, too, it was the accomplishments of the free black community, of men such as Forten, Douglass, and Walker, that best refuted the efforts to dehumanize their race.

The “free colored man’s elevation,” Frederick Douglass remarked, “is essential to the slave colored man’s emancipation.” The “first emancipation,” the wave of manumissions that followed the Revolution, together with the ending of slavery in the North, created a substantial free black community that became the core of the abolition movement. At the same time the lingering anomaly inherent in being at once black and free sharpened the contradiction between the prejudices of race and the new nation’s commitment to citizenship and equality.

In the repudiation of gradualism, Davis sees “a token of a major shift in intellectual history.” Garrison’s voice, as Forten observed, “operated like a trumpet call.” Although Garrison himself remained committed to pacifistic “moral suasion,” there emerged what Davis describes as a “very slow and gradual acceptance of violence,” encouraged by the outrages that followed the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and exemplified by the end of that decade in John Brown’s raid, which pointed the nation toward the violent end of slavery in the Civil War.

Davis, however, underscores the contingency of ultimate emancipation. The North could have decided not to fight; the South could have won—in which case, Davis believes, slavery would in all likelihood have continued into the twentieth century. Instead, the Emancipation Proclamation and, especially, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments established freedom and citizenship as the “culmination of the Age of Emancipation.”

Although the American Civil War ultimately proved the most significant instrument of liberation, Britain served throughout the Age of Emancipation as a “model” and “global leader,” combating the oceanic slave trade and freeing 800,000 slaves in its colonies. Its powerful abolition movement emerged in a different setting from that in the United States, however, and Davis uses the contrasts between them to illuminate each. With no slave population at home, British opposition to slavery did not stir up the kinds of fears of racial “amalgamation” and violence that challenged the American antislavery movement. The persistence of class hierarchies in Britain and its colonies made race seem a somewhat less necessary form of social division and order. Gradations of power and status contrasted with the starker American dichotomy of slave and free sustained by the boundaries of racism and legal bondage.

In both Britain and the United States, however, antislavery forces helped create the conditions for an emancipation that was, as Davis describes it, “astonishing…. Astonishing in view of the institution’s antiquity…, resilience, and importance.” Hailing this example of human beings acting so decisively against both habit and self-interest, Davis proclaims abolition to be “the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.”

David Brion Davis has spent a lifetime contemplating the worst of humanity and the best of humanity—the terrible cruelty and injustice of slavery, perpetuated over centuries and across borders and oceans, overturned at last because of ideas and ideals given substance through human action and human agency. He concludes his trilogy by contemplating whether the abolition of slavery might serve as precedent or model for other acts of moral grandeur. His optimism is guarded. “Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate.” Davis does, after all, describe the narrative of emancipation to which he has devoted his professional life as “astonishing.” But even in his amazement, he has written an inspiring story of possibility. “An astonishing historical achievement really matters.” And so does its history.

Letters

Thackeray & American Slavery May 8, 2014

O mito do judeu-bolchevismo: book by Paul Hanebrink - Christopher R. Browning (NYRB)

Gostaria de destacar dois trechos deste review-article, porque geralmente não se conhece o papel dos governos aliados ao hitlerismo na Europa centro-oriental, e o papel que eles tiveram na eliminação dos seus próprios judeus, algo deplorável sob todos os aspectos. Isso explica a xenofobia ainda reinante na Hungria, e certos comportamentos execráveis de sua atual classe política: 

"Hungary allied with Germany for territorial gain (Hitler’s return of northern Transylvania), sent troops to the Eastern Front, intensified its discrimination against its Jewish population, and expelled foreign Jews to the killing fields of Ukraine, but did not surrender its own Jews to the Final Solution until the German overthrow of the Hungarian government in March 1944. Romania not only fought alongside Germany and gained territories to the east but directly killed more Jews (over 300,000) than any other of Hitler’s allies, stopping only when its leaders sensed that German victory was no longer inevitable."

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism

Christopher R. Browning

The New York Review of Books, February 21, 2019 Issue

A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism

by Paul Hanebrink

Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 353 pp., $29.95

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘Behind the Enemy Powers: The Jew’; a poster created by the Reich Propaganda Administration and displayed in the Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition in Nazi-occupied Belgrade, which focused on the alleged Jewish-Communist-Masonic conspiracy to achieve world domination, 1941

One of the great merits of Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe is its demonstration of how Europe’s most pervasive and powerful twentieth-century manifestation of anti-Semitic thought—the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—emerged before the rise of National Socialism and has continued to have a curious life long after the Holocaust and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Hanebrink’s approach is not to repeat what he considers an error of the interwar era—the futile attempt to refute a myth on the basis of historical facts and statistical data. A small kernel of truth underpinned the stereotype of the Jewish Bolshevik: a number of well-known early Bolshevik leaders (Béla Kun, Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek, and others) were of Jewish origin. That Stalin killed almost all of them, that overall a very small percentage of Jews were Bolsheviks, and that many prominent non-Jewish revolutionaries (Lenin and Karl Liebknecht, for example) were mistakenly identified as Jewish had no countervailing impact, because, Hanebrink writes, the Jew as “the face of the revolution” was a “culturally constructed” perception.

Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks instead to understand the historical background and the “cultural logic” of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through different phases. Ultimately Judeo-Bolshevism embodied, in the form of “Asiatic barbarism,” an imagined threat to national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and Western civilization conceived as traditional European Christian hegemony. It fused, in short, political, racial, and cultural threats into a single “specter haunting Europe.”

Hanebrink notes that amid the exhaustion, defeat, and political dissolution of many European countries at the end of World War I, the threat of the spread of Bolshevik revolution from Russia into Europe caused not only widespread fear and loathing but fear and loathing that identified Jews as the real cause of Bolshevism. He is correct, I think, to point out that this pervasive identification required more than the prominence of Jewish revolutionary leaders, and that Judeo-Bolshevism was constructed from the “raw materials” of earlier anti-Semitism. For Hanebrink the “three venerable pillars” of anti-Jewish thought were the attributions to the Jews of social disharmony, conspiracy, and fanaticism, which made Judeo-Bolshevism both a coherent idea and a ubiquitous, self-evident assumption.

Here I think that Hanebrink could have been more concrete; in particular he could have shown how easily the negative stereotype of the Jew that had originated in the Middle Ages could be updated for the twentieth century. Even before the crisis of 1918–1919, which combined the experiences of defeat and revolution for many Europeans, Jews were invariably disproportionately represented in liberal and socialist parties because they were not welcome to participate in conservative and Catholic political parties. The tendency to stigmatize anything to the left of conservative as Jewish was already evident in 1912, when the electoral victory in Germany of the liberal democrats, Social Democrats, and Catholics—who also made up the “Weimar Coalition” of 1919 that was largely responsible for drafting the Weimar Constitution, so despised by German conservatives—was dubbed the “Jew election.”

The Jew of the Middle Ages, an infidel, became the Jew of the twentieth century, a political subversive. With emancipated Jews being the most visible beneficiaries of the modern commercial and industrial economy by the end of the nineteenth century, the medieval epithet of Jewish usury had already been replaced with that of rapacious Jewish capitalism, and after 1914 the image of the Jew as an economic threat was only intensified by accusations of Jewish war profiteering and black marketeering. The Jew as a clannish outsider in medieval Christendom was easily transformed into the Jew as an unassimilable minority and alien internal threat, at a time when other European nationalities were striving to construct new nation-states out of the ruins of multiethnic empires.

As a result of the postwar flood of refugees and the return of prisoners of war (like Béla Kun) from a Russia wracked by revolution and civil war, the “wandering” Jews among this mass of dislocated people were easily seen as an invading horde and source of revolutionary contagion. With the Bolsheviks in Russia preaching the primacy of international revolution over loyalty to one’s own nation-state and threatening social revolution and nationalization of property, the basis for the “cultural construction” of Judeo-Bolshevism, Hanebrink argues, was all too readily available. In April 1919 Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio in Munich (and future Pope Pius XII), reported to the Vatican that the communist-led Bavarian Soviet (which existed for less than a month before it was crushed by the counterrevolutionary Freikorps) was composed entirely of Jews. One of its leaders, Max Levien, was described as “also a Russian and a Jew,” “dirty,” “vulgar,” “repulsive,” and “sly.” Levien was in fact a Russian émigré to Germany, a four-year veteran of the German army, and a non-Jew. This did not, as Hanebrink observes, signify an exceptionally anti-Semitic disposition on the part of Pacelli but simply reflected the “utterly typical” consensus of virtually all European conservatives at that time.

From the beginning of World War I, tsarist Russia had treated its Jewish subjects as unreliable and potentially disloyal. Its military forcibly displaced some 500,000 to one million Jews from combat zones. The very approach of the Russian army thus also instigated the flight of many other Jews from the eastern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the presumed safety of cities like Vienna and Budapest. The Russian Revolution erupted amid already existing fears about Jewish loyalty and floods of displaced Jews, and intensified those fears. The “panic” over Judeo-Bolshevism, Hanebrink argues, “flourished in ground that had been prepared by wartime paranoia about Jewish loyalty.” In what Hanebrink calls the “long World War I” in Eastern Europe, including the Russian civil war, the Soviet-Polish war, and the Romanian ouster of the Béla Kun regime and Miklós Horthy’s subsequent White Terror in Hungary, “sovereignty panic” intensified the catastrophic consequences for Jews, particularly in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine.

Atrocities against Jews led to Jewish appeals to the Allies and the subsequent imposition of minority rights treaties on Eastern European nations. In a vicious circle, these regimes in turn resented Jews as the cause of this infringement on their sovereignty, which they saw as further evidence of Jewish disloyalty. They insisted even more vehemently on the Judeo-Bolshevik connection to justify their past mistreatment of Jews and successfully exploited the Allies’ desire for a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe to prevent the further spread of Bolshevism. For instance, the Polish army received crucial military aid to help it resist the Soviet invasion of 1920 even as it interned many of its own Jewish soldiers. All of this, it must be emphasized, took place before history’s most notorious purveyor and champion of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism had emerged from obscurity on the streets of Munich.

Adolf Hitler combined his belief in that myth with a race-based theory of history and a vision of German Lebensraum in the East, which culminated in his war of territorial conquest, ideological crusade against Bolshevism, and campaign of genocide against Jews. As Hanebrink notes, adherents of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth now had to reconcile themselves with Hitlerian and German hegemony. They did so in different ways. Hungary allied with Germany for territorial gain (Hitler’s return of northern Transylvania), sent troops to the Eastern Front, intensified its discrimination against its Jewish population, and expelled foreign Jews to the killing fields of Ukraine, but did not surrender its own Jews to the Final Solution until the German overthrow of the Hungarian government in March 1944. Romania not only fought alongside Germany and gained territories to the east but directly killed more Jews (over 300,000) than any other of Hitler’s allies, stopping only when its leaders sensed that German victory was no longer inevitable.

For Poles the situation was much more complicated. Having turned down Hitler’s offer before the war of a junior partnership based on shifting Poland’s borders eastward, they were partitioned by Germany and the Soviet Union. However, the experience of both Polish and Jewish victimization under the Nazi occupation did not alter predominant Polish views about their Jewish neighbors. The flight of many Jews from western to eastern Poland, the obvious relief of Jews in eastern Poland that they had been occupied by Stalin rather than Hitler, and ultimately the desperate hope of Polish Jews for rescue and liberation by the Red Army only confirmed for many Poles their belief in Judeo-Bolshevism.

Within Germany the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism was crucial for cementing the complicity of the military in Hitler’s “war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union, portrayed as a “preventive defense” of German and Western civilization. The myth also played “a crucial role in the origins of the Final Solution.” Hanebrink cites the notorious order of General Walter von Reichenau, the commander of the Sixth Army on the southern front, less than two weeks after the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine in 1941: “The fundamental goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the total defeat of its means of power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in the European sphere of culture.” Thus the “hard but just punishment” meted out to “Jewish subhumans” was necessary “to free the German Volk from the Asiatic-Jewish danger once and for all.”

British Library‘Trotsky gets kicked out of Kuban’; a poster created for the anti-Bolshevik White forces during the Russian civil war, 1919

Reichenau’s order did not simply reflect the unhinged rantings of one ideologically zealous Nazi general, and Hanebrink could have offered far more evidence of the impact of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth on German military thought and behavior, if this had been the main point of his book. For instance, further north, sixty-one German army officers were invited to meet with top SS officers (including Arthur Nebe, commander of Einsatzgruppe B, and Higher SS and Police Leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski) in Mogilev on September 24–26, 1941, for orientation on the partisan threat. The gist of the presentations was the equation Jew=Bolshevik=partisan, accompanied by a demonstration killing of thirty-two Jews in a nearby village by members of Police Battalion 322. Subsequently, military units behind the central front were among the Wehrmacht’s most lethal killers of Jews. And the fatal linkage between Jews, Bolsheviks, and partisans was most catastrophically demonstrated in Himmler’s December 29, 1942, report to Hitler on the results of the “anti-partisan campaign” for the preceding four-month period of August–November. It listed the killing of 1,337 “bandits” in battle, 737 immediately after battle, and 7,828 after interrogation. Furthermore, it listed the execution of 14,256 “accomplices and suspects” and finally 363,211 Jews.

The total defeat of Nazi Germany and exposure of its crimes did not entirely discredit the notion of Judeo-Bolshevism. One of the most fascinating aspects of Hanebrink’s book is his discussion of its strange post-1945 afterlife. In Western Europe, anti-communism, a term that increasingly supplanted “anti-Bolshevism” beginning in the 1930s, took a new direction, but in Eastern Europe the Judeo-Bolshevik myth continued to shape how local populations remembered the war and understood the Soviet imposition of Communist regimes.

The Allied occupation, the war crimes trials and denazification, but above all the division of Germany and the onset of the cold war led to the emergence in Western Europe of an anti-communism that was pro-democratic, pro-American, and not anti-Semitic. Underlying this transformation were two concepts. The first was that of totalitarianism, by which discredited and defeated fascism was equated with communism. The German churches in particular—previously highly nationalistic, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic, and thus all too often fellow travelers of the Nazi regime’s campaigns against liberalism, Marxism, and Jews—now portrayed themselves as resisters to and victims of that regime, which like the Soviet Union had manifested the evils of the secular, materialistic, ungodly state run amok. West Germany’s new self-image of Christian Democracy pitted against totalitarianism dovetailed with the second concept—the American notion of Judeo-Christian values as the basis of both democracy and Western civilization in its cold war opposition to godless communism. By embracing the cold war, assimilationist American Jews finally severed the old identification between Jews and Bolsheviks, but at the cost of giving priority to anti-communism over Holocaust memory. It was not until the late 1970s that the Holocaust began to obtain the position it currently holds in American consciousness.

In the countries of Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army and subjected to communist regimes, a very different dynamic occurred. The populations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary in particular continued to see what happened after 1945 through the lens of Judeo-Bolshevism. The installation of Communist Party rule was seen as bringing the Jews to power, and the trial and punishment of Nazi collaborators was seen as Jewish revenge, not justice.

Both Moscow and local Communists were eager to shed the stigma of identification with Jews. Most of the remaining Polish Jews, for instance, were allowed to leave the country after the Kielce pogrom in July 1946, so the regime would not have to protect them. Prominent Jewish Communists, like Rudolf Slánský and his colleagues in Prague, were tried and executed; Ana Pauker in Romania and the non-Jewish but philo-Semitic Paul Merker in East Germany were purged. Only Stalin’s timely death in 1953 prevented the “doctors’ plot” from exploding into anti-Jewish terror in the USSR. A communist anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-cosmopolitanism was employed both in intraparty rivalries (most famously by Władysław Gomułka in Poland in 1968) and as international propaganda. Public memory of the Holocaust was silenced.

In the 1970s and 1980s an emerging consciousness and memory of the Holocaust transformed it in the West into the paradigm of radical evil and the civics lesson that toleration, human rights, and respect for religious and racial difference were essential values of liberal democracy. The resulting “hegemony of Holocaust memory,” which eclipsed the concept of totalitarianism by giving primacy to the crimes of Hitler over those of Stalin and the suffering of Jews over that of the victims of Communism, was challenged from two directions. The German scholar Ernst Nolte tried to portray the horrors of Asiatic Bolshevism as the factor that elicited a rational defensive response in the form of National Socialism. The American historian Arno Mayer tried to portray communism as the primary target of Nazism, with the Holocaust (or “Judeocide,” as he termed it) as a secondary aim—a byproduct. Both were dismissed as attempts to relativize or trivialize the Holocaust.

Post-1989 Eastern Europe took a different turn, however, with many countries resisting the “hegemony of Holocaust memory” as the ticket of admission into the Western European community of liberal democracies. In that memory, Jews were the quintessential innocent victims, while the populations of Eastern Europe, afflicted by anti-Semitism and the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism that they shared with the Nazis, had been accomplices and beneficiaries of the Holocaust. But in the memory of many Eastern Europeans, they were the innocent victims of the “double occupation” of Hitler and Stalin, while the not-so-innocent Jews had been the accomplices and beneficiaries of Communist rule.

In short, Judeo-Bolshevism had returned as an essential component of the memory wars, and the Holocaust scholarship and civics pedagogy of the West were seen as national defamation in countries like Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the Baltic States. The explosive impact in Poland of Jan Gross’s book Neighbors (2000), which documented the participation of Polish villagers in the massacre of the Jews in Jedwabne, the bitter public debate and discomforting historical research by younger Polish scholars that followed, and the notorious 2018 law banning the attribution of Nazi crimes to the Polish nation illustrate this dynamic of reacting to Holocaust scholarship as national defamation.

In his conclusion Hanebrink argues that the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism is no longer a threat driving Europeans to panic, but rather has been relegated to the politics of contested memory. Unfortunately, I fear that the rantings and conspiracy theories disseminated by the likes of Viktor Orbán against George Soros and the allegedly Jewish forces of globalization, and the chants of “Jews will not replace us” by white supremacists in Charlottesville, demonstrate that anti-Semitism, even if not specifically in the form of Judeo-Bolshevism, still has traction. But Hanebrink is correct, I think, to argue that the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism has been supplanted by another perceived threat likewise constituted from a fusion of race, culture, religion, and political ideology. This is the “Islamization of the West,” embodied in the influx of Muslim immigrants who are considered dangerous, alien, disloyal, extremist, and unassimilable, and thus once again threaten the survival of national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and Western civilization. In place of Judeo-Bolshevism, a new hybrid specter—“radical Islam” or “Islamic terror”—is haunting Europe.

Bund: a liga dos socialistas judeus, um século atras - Molly Crabapple review of Sam Rotborth paintings (NYRBooks)

Transcrevo a apresentação da New York Review of Books, e recomendo leitura do artigo de Molly Crabapple sobre as pinturas quase naïves de Sam Rotborth sobre a luta do Bund, a liga dos socialistas judeus da antiga Rússia e da Europa oriental de mais de cem anos atrás...:

"Today on the NYR Daily, we published Molly Crabapple’s “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist,” an expansive story—part family history, part radical politics, part visual arts—about Crabapple’s great-grandfather Sam’s membership in the nearly forgotten Jewish Labor Bund, a revolutionary socialist movement of late-nineteenth, early-twentieth-century Russia and Eastern Europe. (Crabapple’s account intersects, interestingly, with Mark Mazower’s recent book about his grandfather’s Bundist past, which Eva Hoffman reviewed in our pages.)
When Crabapple saw that Sam Rothbort, a painter, had captioned one of his works with the word “Bundist,” she Googled it. “I had been fascinated by the Bundists and Sam’s connection with the group for several years prior” to starting work on this story, she told me, “but, given the current political climate in America, it started to feel more urgent.” Before beginning her research a year ago, she said, “I’d first imagined they were some sort of Old World Jewish revolutionaries, like Perchik in Fiddler on the Roof.”
There’s been a lot written recently about how younger people, who’ve grown up in a post-cold war era, are rediscovering socialism. I wondered if she saw her research into Bundism through that frame. “Absolutely. And many people are looking towards groups that combined socialism with a respect for diversity and human rights—something the Bund absolutely did. In the Democratic Socialists [of America], there’s a small group called The Jewish Solidarity Caucus that is deeply inspired by the Bund.”

Crabapple emphasizes in her essay how Bundism offered a very different sort of political identity and purpose for diaspora Jews than Zionism did. “Hereness [a Bundist concept] is about living in your home, loving your culture, and fighting for your freedom and dignity, as well as the freedom and dignity of others,” she said. “Of course, this is relevant in a time of mass migration and resurgent fascism. Meanwhile, many Jews in the diaspora see Israel as an apartheid state, engaged in land grabs and the murder of Palestinian protesters.”
The history of the Bundists offers an alternative. “They are examples of Jewish heroism that reject, and always rejected, violent ethno-nationalism,” Crabapple said."

===============

The New York Review of Books, October 7, 2018

My Great-Grandfather the Bundist

My Great-Grandfather the Bundist

Molly Crabapple

Volkavaisk Bundists, 1905

“There, where we live, that is our country.”              —Motto of the Jewish Labor Bund

During his elder years, my great-grandfather, the post-Impressionist artist Sam Rothbort, tried to paint back into existence the murdered world of his shtetl childhood. Amid the hundreds of watercolors that he called Memory Paintings, one stood out. A girl silhouetted against some cottages, her dress the same color as the crepuscular sky above. A moment before, she’d hurled a rock through one now-shattered cottage window. On the painting’s margin, her boyfriend offers more rocks.

“Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows,” Sam captioned the work.

I may have been fifteen, seventeen, or twenty when I saw the watercolor, in my great aunt’s sunbaked living room or my mother’s apartment; I don’t recall exactly. What sticks with me is the Old World awkwardness of the heroine’s name. Itka. I turned the Yiddish syllables on my tongue. And Bundist. What was that?

This question became a thread that led me to the Bund, a revolutionary society of which my mother’s Grandpa Sam had been a member, whose story was interwoven with the agonies and triumphs of Jews in Eastern Europe, and whose name has all but been erased.

Founded in 1897 in Vilna (Vilnius in modern-day Lithuania), and reaching its height in interwar Poland, the Bund was a sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish. Bundists fought the Tsar, battled pogroms, educated shtetls, and ultimately helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Though the Bund was largely obliterated by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the group’s opposition to Zionism better explains their absence from current consciousness. Though the Bund celebrated Jews as a nation, they irreconcilably opposed the establishment of Israel as a separate Jewish homeland in Palestine. The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others. Instead, Bundists adhered to the doctrine of do’ikayt or “Hereness.” Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.

Sam Rothbort: Itka the Bundist Breaking Windows, 1930s–1940s

When the Bund is acknowledged at all today, it is often characterized as naive idealism whose concept of Hereness lost its argument to the Holocaust. But as I watch footage on social media of Israeli snipers’ bullets killing Palestinian protesters, I think that Bundism, with its Jewishness that was at once compassionate and hard as iron, was the movement that history proved right.

*

When thirteen Jews founded the Bund at a Vilna safe house, Sam Rothbort was a teenage orphan in Volkavisk, five days’ carriage ride away. His was a typical town in the Pale of Settlement, the impoverished Western provinces of the Russian Empire to which Jews were confined by Tsarist diktat. In the Pale, their lives were horribly marred by childhood military conscription, bans on employment, education,and landownership, and, most devastatingly, by state-sponsored pogroms. These, too, made their way into Sam’s memory paintings. In his watercolors, Russians slash feather-beds and burn houses: the whirl of goose down and fire stand in for the rape and murder taking place out of frame. Stylized violence alternates in these images with more quotidian humiliations. “Jew, take off your hat,” the Russians bark in the title of one watercolor. The Jews, submissively, comply.

Sam lost his mother at a young age in a cholera epidemic, and his sole education came from the synagogues where he used to sing; after his voice broke, he was forced to apprentice himself to a leather worker. While he wrote of his hometown’s beauty with a sensuous nostalgia, the photos of turn-of-the-century Volkavisk that survive in archives don’t support that rosy view. His childhood shtetl was a warren of wooden buildings and dirt streets, bisected by the Neimen river, and governed by a council of pious notables who beseeched the gentile authorities on behalf of poor Jews, whom they themselves often exploited.

Yiddish was the language of the shtetl, and the synagogue the town’s intellectual center. Hierarchy was all. Man above woman. Old above young. Life moved to the cycle of holidays, harvests, and Shabbat. Americans know this world best from the sentimentalized portrayal in Fiddler on the Roof, but the Bund had little patience for Tevye and his Tradition. In his memoir, The Stars Bear Witness, the Bundist Bernard Goldstein decried the shtetl’s “ignorance,” its “ancient religious superstitions.” Theirs were “the new ethics of the brotherhood of man, of mutual respect, and of the dignity of the individual.” 

Months after the Bund’s founding, its agitators traveled to Volkavisk, where they spread the doctrine of labor rights among the young apprentices like Sam. Under the Bundists’ influence, the apprentices went on strike. The bosses brought in strikebreakers. Running battles spilled from the streets into the synagogue itself, where Bundists and the employers’ goons went after each other with clubs, in scenes Sam later reimagined in watercolors. Not that Sam stayed on the sidelines, simply looking on. “I took part in strikes and sabotage,” Sam later wrote. “I became a revolutionist.” The violence won the apprentices a radical new right: Saturday evenings off of work.

Sam Rothbort: Violence During a Strike, 1930s–1940s

Buoyed by this success, Volkavisk’s Bund grew into a conspiracy of some eighty members, many recruited through the group’s Yiddish library. Anyone could read the Jules Verne translations, but promising visitors were loaned banned copies of Karl Marx’s works. Despite their status as an illegal political party, in summer they gathered beneath a red flag in Samokoven Forest and sang Di Shvue (The Oath), the Bundist anthem: “The red flag is high and wide. It waves in anger. It is red with blood.”

There, they plotted more ambitious exploits. They robbed a government alcohol monopoly in Izabelin. During strikes, they slashed phone lines, smashed up factories, beat scabs. They ambushed prison convoys, threw powdered tobacco (like improvised pepper spray) into the faces of the drivers and liberated their arrested comrades. They sawed through the cell bars of their friend Berl Dzhukin, and when the cops came looking for him at a comrade’s house he stole out, dressed as an old woman, into the open night. 

In 1902, the year one of its members shot and wounded the hated governor of Vilna, the Bund was Russia’s only Jewish revolutionary party. No other group could compete with its illegal printing presses, its smuggling networks across the Pale of Settlement, its pogrom-fighting militias funded by contributions from the diaspora. At that time, Bundists made up a third of the prisoners in the tsar’s camps in Siberia, and the organization grew as its members traversed the Russian Empire, on the routes of forced exile and escape.

By 1904, the Bund had 35,000 members. That February, the Japanese fleet torpedoed Russian battleships in Manchuria, the tsar’s first humiliation in what would become the Russo-Japanese war. Strikes broke out, and with them retaliatory roundups. In Białystok (in what was later Poland), armed police massacred Jewish workers with impunity. Keen to avoid either a prison term in Siberia or death as cannon fodder in the tsar’s navy on the Yellow Sea, Sam fled the Russian Empire for the New World. When his boat docked at Ellis Island, my great-grandfather signed a declaration stating that he was not an anarchist and had no loyalty to the tsar. While the second is true, I have my doubts about the first.

He got out just in time. Foolish wars have a way of stirring sedition, and across the empire the tsar’s subjects decided his time was up. The Bund was one of many radical groups that swore to “drive the decrepit monster into the abyss.” When the revolution broke out in January, the Bund rose up across the Pale. Bundist brigades battled street to street with police and soldiers from Łódź in Poland to Odessa in southern Ukraine.

In 1905, Sam’s friends sent him a photo from the old country. In the manner of old studio portraits, the ten Bundists line up in front of a luxuriously painted backdrop, each wearing the black peasant blouse that was then the height of revolutionary chic. Chaim Shalke looked too young to grow a beard. Moshe Katriel stared off into space. Israel the Locksmith cocked his handsome head. 

What happened to these wild ones? Did they even live out the year? After the revolution failed, a wave of pogroms broke out. Russians and Ukrainians—the Bund’s gentile brother workers—murdered hundreds of Jews. Another 125,000 fled to New York. 

Like Sam, many of these refugees found their way into New York’s Jewish counterculture, on which Bundists were a leading influence. If you know the Vladeck Houses on the Lower East Side, you may be interested to learn that they were named for the Bundist revolutionary Baruch Charney Vladeck, once sentenced to Siberia in his youth many years before he got a job in Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s Housing Administration. How about Amalgamated Housing in the Bronx? It was sponsored by the Amalgamated Garment Workers’ Union, whose president, Sidney Hillman, got his start in labor activism as a Bundist organizer, leading the first May Day march through the streets of Kovno, Lithuania. A famous journalism award also carries Hillman’s name. Immigrant Bundists also led the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Jewish Socialist Federation. They dominated the Workmen’s Circle, a secular Jewish mutual aid society that exists to this day, and whose banners still appear at protests against President Trump.

This milieu eased Sam’s integration into the New World. He joined the Workmen’s Circle and began each morning reading the red Yiddish of The Jewish Daily Forward. He became a vegetarian, a pacifist, and an artist. 

*

With my great-grandfather safe in Brooklyn, we must turn elsewhere for the next chapter in Bundist history. Enter Bernard Goldstein, head of the Warsaw self-defense militia, and author of the memoirs Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto: The Stars Bear Witness and Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund. 

Comrade Bernard Goldstein never knew Sam Rothbort. He was seven years younger, and in many ways Sam’s opposite. He was a party man, not an incorrigibly individualistic artist, and a street brawler, not a pacifist proto-hippie. Born in a village outside Warsaw, Goldstein joined the Bund in 1902, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen, he had survived one stint in jail; for a keepsake he had the scar from a prison guard’s saber on his chin. He spent the next decade escaping jails and organizing unions, then fought in the Revolution of 1905 that Sam so narrowly dodged. In 1915, during a stint in Siberia, he earned his place in legend. A commissioner condescended to Goldstein. Goldstein slammed a kerosene lamp over the commissioner’s head. The commissioner retaliated harshly. But like most Bundists, Goldstein had a compassionate streak. When the January Revolution broke out, the prisoners overthrew their guards, tied the commissioner to a tree, and presented him to Goldstein to execute. Goldstein refused. The revolution, he declared, must be humane. 

Sam Rothbort: Volkavisk on Fire, 1930s–1940s

Thence to Kiev, where he led a militia in 1917, and obtained a post on the municipal council. But the utopian bloom soon came off the revolutionary rose, as Russia descended into terror, repression, and civil war. “The day is not far off when we will see revolutionary tribunals in which the more kosher Bolsheviks will execute the more suspect; the circle of ‘kosher’ or ‘authentic’ socialists grows narrower,” Bundist leader Vladimir Medem wrote at the time. In 1921, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Bund, along with all other political parties. Disgusted, Goldstein returned to Warsaw. His group may have been dead in Russia, but it flowered again in the newly independent Poland.

In Warsaw, Goldstein moved among a Jewish working class, the memory of which has gradually disappeared among their upwardly mobile American descendants. These Jews were butchers, droshky drivers, seamstresses, prostitutes, and porters—the goods of the city strapped to their backs. These were tough, ill-educated, often violent men and women who drank with gangsters, settled scores with knives, and gave each other mob-style nicknames like Yankl Scar and Shloyme the Bone. Goldstein and his comrades organized these rough proletarians into Bundist unions, which by 1939 represented nearly 100,000 Jews. Not content with economic justice alone, the Bund created a parallel culture of progressive newspapers, theaters, libraries, and secular Yiddish schools. A Bundist could send their child to SKIF, a socialist scout group, then to the Bundist youth league, Tsukunft. Athletic young people built their physiques at the Bundist sports club, Morgenstern, while less fortunate slum kids were treated for tuberculosis in the humanistic, rural beauty of the Medem Sanatorium.

“We were a nation within a nation, formed and tested in a thousand years of struggle, cherishing our heritage and the rights that we had wrested from our unfriendly hosts,” Goldstein wrote. Archival photos bear testament to this world’s richness: Bella Shapiro, one of the Bund’s countless women leaders, addressing a May Day demonstration in Lublin in 1936; red flags fluttering with gold fringe and elegant Yiddish letters; unionized workers raising their fists; jaunty girl gymnasts in shorts, hearts pinned to their middy blouses; young men, boxing at the beach, grinning and tanned. These images of the bucolic wholesomeness are so poignant because we know how, for so many of them, the story ends.

The Bund always had plenty of enemies. Organized crime was one; Hasidic Jews angry at their anti-religious provocations were another. Then there were the factory owners, of course. And the card-carrying anti-Semites. The Bund’s enemies were not only on the right; Soviet-backed Communists attacked the Bund with campaigns of infiltration, sabotage, and murder. But while Bundists and Communists battled in the streets, the group’s main intellectual adversaries were the Zionists who saw their Eastern European home as exile from the promised land. Knowing that new nation-states were always created atop the blood of others, the Bund foresaw the fatal conflict involved in establishing Israel, which would lead to perpetual war with its neighbors and those it had dispossessed. “Zionism means a fight against the Arab masses,” wrote the Bundist intellectual Moishe Olgin in 1929. “They are to be deprived of their land, and the Arab working masses enslaved.” 

The Bund also saw how Zionism could play into the hands of Polish racists. In 1937, the political party Oboz Zjednoczenia Narodowego (Camp of National Unity) called for the expulsion of 90 percent of the country’s Jews, whom it regarded as aliens. When Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, visited Vilna that year, the Bund organized protests against the man they denounced as “the Spiritual Father of Jewish Fascism.” Whereas the OZN wanted to deport millions of Polish Jews, Jabotinsky called for their “evacuation”—a fine distinction the Bundists did not appreciate. “We are citizens with equal rights in this country!” one flier read. “We shall fight for work and for bread, for life and for rights here in Poland! We shall not permit charlatans… to speak in our name!”

Inspired by Hitler’s racial laws and the rising persecution of Jews in next-door Germany, and goaded by the local variety of Brownshirts, the Polish government turned to vicious anti-Semitism. Sometimes alongside the Polish Socialist Party, the Bund fought the public beatings, pogroms, and the segregated university seating arrangement known as “ghetto benches.” Polish fascists bombed the Bund’s headquarters. May Day demonstrations turned into street battles. “We struck back at Polish anti-Semites, believing that the Jews would retain their civil rights only if they showed that they could protect themselves,” wrote Goldstein. At the same time, they appealed for international intervention against fascism, “but our efforts were too puny to turn back the powerful forces that were pushing an indifferent and unresisting world toward precipice.” Though the Bund’s appeals abroad went unheeded, its resistance earned it the love and loyalty of the Jewish community at home. By 1938, the Bund was the most popular Jewish party in Poland.

In 1939, Goldstein reports in his memoir, police had just led a pogrom in Bretz, and Goldstein smuggled himself into the city. He finds a Jewish community paralyzed by the knowledge that, at any moment, the pogrom will explode again. In the deserted Jewish quarter, Goldstein meets a Polish comrade. As the two work out a battle plan, they see the glow of Sabbath candles in a window.

“I explained to Dąbrowski the meaning of the Sabbath candles… deep in somber thought, we both walked silently through the pogromized, empty streets… a Jewish and a Polish Socialist. Perhaps, I thought, hope resides in this, that we two, Dąbrowski and I, walk here together with a single purpose.”

I agree with Comrade Bernard, despite everything that happened next.

*

There is a myth that, before Israel, Jews did not fight. Even Hannah Arendt, making her controversial claim that Jewish leadership collaborated across the board with Nazis, falls into this error. The Bund, the elected leadership of Europe’s largest Jewish community, fought from the first day of the occupation to the last.

In September 1939, during the last-minute defense of Warsaw, half of the Jewish battalions were organized by the Bund. Only when Warsaw fell did the Bund’s leaders, Victor Alter and Henryk Erlich, flee east, seeking safety behind Soviet lines. Both were soon murdered by the NKVD.

Goldstein, meanwhile, re-entered Warsaw covertly to organize his old labor union friends into an underground. The Bund created youth groups, newspapers, illegal schools, and a courier service that transmitted news across occupied Poland; the latter’s operatives exchanged information at soup kitchens that the Bund set up as cover. Money came from New York-based organizations like the Jewish Labor Committee (founded by Vladeck), smuggled by Jewish girls pale enough to pass as Polish gentiles. Later, that money paid for hiding places and guns. After October 1940, when Nazis began herding Warsaw’s Jews into the Ghetto, the Bund organized the teeming tenements into committees dedicated to cultural, as well as physical, survival.

Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement, New York

A gathering of the Bundist Youth Organization, Warsaw, June 1932

Given the privations and repressions, it is not surprising that so few of the ghetto’s traumatized inhabitants could imagine taking up arms. But it says something about the endurance of sectarian political divisions and the tragic difficulty of overcoming them that the few hundred people willing to fight could not unite in the face of their inevitable liquidation. On July 23, 1942, after mass transports began, the Bund finally joined with Communists and leftwing Zionists to form the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB). But in their memoirs, surviving Bundists would ridicule the Ghetto’s other armed group, the right-wing Jewish Military Union (ZZW), because it was led by a Revisionist Zionist. Some grudges never fade. 

The Bund’s long relationship with Polish socialists allowed them to breach the ghetto walls, sneak in Polish resistance soldiers, and provide the world with some of the first accounts of the Nazi genocide, through the testimonies of Zalman Freidrych and Jan Karski. Through these networks, news filtered out, and weapons flowed in. In April 1943, three months after the first brief battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one final arms shipment smuggled by Bundists got through the Ghetto walls.

How many Nazi troops died in that doomed revolt is still disputed. Three hundred, according to Bundist Marek Edelman, who assumed command of the ZOB, after its first leader committed suicide to avoid surrender. Sixteen, claimed the SS commander Jürgen Stroop, who had every reason to suppress the true figures. What is known is that it took the most feared military force in Europe three weeks to subdue 750 starving, inadequately-armed captives. Even then, the ghetto fell not to fighting, but to fires, set by German flamethrowers and incendiary bombs. Some 13,000 Jews died in the rebellion. In London, Artur Ziegelboim, the Bund’s representative in the Polish parliament in exile, took poison in a futile attempt to rouse the world from its indifference. The words of his suicide note read: “I love you all. Long live the Bund.” 

On May 10, with the Ghetto reduced to a smoldering ash-heap, a band of fighters led by Edelman, the Bundist Abrasha Blum, and the ZOB’s only female leader, the labor Zionist Zivia Lubetkin, escaped through the sewers. On the Aryan side of the wall, Goldstein wrote, “a large crowd watched incredulously as human skeletons with submachine guns strapped around their necks crawled [out] one by one… The look in their leaden eyes assured the crowd that they would not hesitate to fire.”

Shortly after his escape, the Gestapo killed Blum. Lubetkin and Edelman fought as partisans until Poland’s liberation. Lubetkin moved to Israel in 1946. She spent the rest of her life in a kibbutz for former Jewish partisans, built on the ruins of an Arab village whose inhabitants were driven out by the Haganah, a militia that was later absorbed into the Israel Defense Forces, a day before the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Edelman stayed in Poland. As an old man, he took part in the Solidarity movement that led in 1989 to the peaceful end of Poland’s communist dictatorship. When he died, in 2009, mourners sang the Bundist anthem over his coffin. He received no honors from the Jewish state.

*

Once, thousands of Jewish communities were laid like lace across the map of Eastern Europe. They had made the “here” in the Bundist concept of Hereness. By 1945, this world had vanished, along with its inhabitants. Gone was Bernard Goldstein’s Warsaw. Gone was Sam’s Volkavisk.

On January 16, 1945, Goldstein crawled from one of the bunkers where he’d spent most of the last two years virtually entombed and found his city reduced to rubble. Ninety percent of Polish Jews had been murdered, and most Poles treated the rest with a feverish sort of racism. Meanwhile, the Soviet occupiers busied themselves hunting down anyone who’d worked with the Polish resistance. “This was not the liberation for which I had waited five long, heartbreaking years,” Goldstein wrote. “Under the Nazis we had lost the lives of millions upon millions of men, women and children… But now we had lost the faith that… after the nightmare of helplessness in the murderers’ grasp, would come a new day of justice, human decency and brotherhood.” Using phony papers, Goldstein smuggled himself to a displaced persons camp in Czechoslovakia, then made his way to the United States, where he devoted the rest of his life to two volumes of memoirs in tribute to his lost comrades. He died in 1959 and is buried in New York. Other Bundists tried to rebuild the organization, until the following summer when, stirred by an anti-Semitic blood libel, Poles murdered forty-two Jews in Kielce, in southern Poland. In the next three months, 95,000 of Poland’s surviving Jews fled, via a Zionist-led clandestine network, to displaced persons camps in American-occupied Europe.

What pogroms could not accomplish, Stalinism did. “Many Jews who would have clung stubbornly to their homes despite anti-Semitism felt that they had to flee communism,” wrote Goldstein. Poland’s Soviet-backed government unleashed a campaign of mass arrests, surveillance and execution against every credible alternative to its rule. Within three years of liberation, it had liquidated the Bund.

Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement, New York

A Yiddish poster for the Jewish Labor Bund reads: “There, where we live, there is our country! A democratic republic! Full political and national rights for Jews. Ensure that the voice of the Jewish working class is heard at the Constituent Assembly,” Kiev, circa 1918; click to enlarge

Like Goldstein, other Bundists scattered. The unlucky went to squalid DP camps, which were often dominated by Zionists and where they alleged they were beaten and denied ration cards for resisting a draft imposed by the Haganah. Some gave up the struggle against Zionism and took the Haganah’s smuggling boats to Palestine. Those who were lucky enough to get foreign visas ended up in to refugee communities in Shanghai and Johannesburg, Paris and Montevideo. The Bund reconstituted itself as an international organization in 1947, with its base then in New York. That year, it called for an independent Palestine that would provide equality and self-government for both Jews and Arabs, for the resettlement of Jewish refugees in all free countries, and for Zionists to “renounce the goal of an independent Jewish state.” Immediately after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Bund demanded the right of return for Palestinian refugees that had been expelled by the IDF.

Such universalist humanism found fewer adherents after the Shoah. “Deeply grieved and shaken by the murder of six million of their brethren, the masses of the Jewish people became enveloped by strong nationalist tendencies, which… fanned by skillful Zionist propaganda, caused among the Jews a psychosis of Zionist and Messianistic illusions,” the Bund’s coordinating committee wrote in 1948. After all, had the civilized West not spent the preceding fifteen years slamming its doors shut to Jewish refugees on the pretext that they were not real Europeans? Would not Iraq, a few years later, force out more than 100,000 Jewish citizens on the pretext that they were Zionists?

Perhaps a group as innately Eastern European as the Bund never could have flourished on foreign soil. On the face of it, the Bund had little to offer Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews. In Tel Aviv, its tiny party organization could not even afford the funds required to get on the ballot. In capitalist, democratic America, the Bund seemed a relic, even among the US-based organizations that previous generations of Bundists had founded, and Bundist immigrants’ alienation only grew when they insisted on defining Jewish identity by a Yiddish that their own children had abandoned. While Bundists continued to pop up at later historical interstices—marching for civil rights in the Fifties, hosting a lecture by the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said in the 1970s—the postwar period’s combination of the Soviet gulag, Western assimilation, and Israeli hegemony eventually squeezed the Bund into irrelevance. By the 1980s, nothing was left but a dwindling number of old people with faded red banners and a dead language, ghosts in a legion hall for Veterans of Lost Causes.

The Bund’s Worldwide Organizing Committee dissolved in 2003, but several affiliated groups survived. In August 2018, when someone pasted a swastika on a billboard in Melbourne, Australia, it was immediately covered by a sticker for the organization my great-grandfather had joined in 1898.

*

Though he died before I was born, I grew up surrounded by reminders of my great-grandfather. It was not just the thousands of his paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and mosaics that filled my great-aunt’s house in Sheepshead Bay, but the very presence of Grandpa Sam himself, as if his personality had been too vivid to allow him to be rendered a ghost. And from my great-aunt and my mother, I knew his story.

Sam in his studio, Brooklyn

Sam worked in Brooklyn, as a decorator and a watchman for wealthy homes. During late nights, he carved small figures out of wood to pass the time. His boss encouraged his talent. He quit his jobs. From then on, he would be nothing but an artist. He taught himself to paint, gluttonously, selfishly, and exhibited throughout the 1920s. At the height of the Depression, he moved to rural Long Island to open a no-kill egg farm (he was a moral vegetarian before his time). Unsurprisingly, it went bankrupt.

He moved back to Sheepshead Bay with his wife Rose, who was from Luna Voda, near Białystock, and to whose face I can trace back some of my own features. There, in Brooklyn, no longer able to afford paints, he learned to carve sculptures from old doors and fenceposts. “Without art, you’re dead!” he pronounced later. While he had galleries, he spread his paintings on his front lawn every morning for decades, and called it “The Rothbort Home Museum of Direct Art.” He self-published a book about his sculptures, Out of Wood and Stone, filled with reminiscences of an idealized Volkavisk. In his memories, the shtetl loomed like a Chagall painting, a wonderland of old goats and heavenly love thrills and prophets, all rendered universal rather than tribal. Like Rembrandt, he painted himself in a thousand disguises. These oil paints that he smeared over his face probably caused the skin cancer that killed him in 1971. Even while dying, he made his nurses laugh.

Rose and Sam, New York, circa 1911

My  mother had learned to paint at his side, and so knew his aphorisms well. To her, he was forever Grandpa Sam, the self-taught artist, the trickster who blew fire and hung upside down on a chin-up bar into his eighties, who believed all men were brothers—though artists were a cut above. Who read Shakespeare in Yiddish. Whom she never saw visit a synagogue, though his own father had studied the Talmud.

I knew Sam Rothbort was a rebel, of course, but I knew only vaguely what that had meant. Perhaps he did associate with “revolutionists” in the old world, but my awareness of that word’s implications paled beneath all I knew about my mother’s beloved grandfather. Photos showed him as the charming old joker with a nimbus of white hair, an axe-like nose, a smile full of earthy humanity. He was not a party man in America, either Democrat or Communist. He confined his political activity to writing letters to President Eisenhower, which he was convinced hastened the end of the Korean War.

So, when I first saw that word “Bundist” among his painting titles, I gave it a quick Google and moved on. Only later, after my own work of reporting, from Gaza and elsewhere, did my research turn into a fixation. I needed to know about the Bund, and not just because they were my great-grandfather’s comrades, but because I wanted to make visible again a group that had almost vanished, though it was so just and so right. I acquired the few books on the Bund that are still in print, spent days squinting at dusty pamphlets in the New York Public Library, at photos put out by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the archives of Bundist newsletters on the web.

Sam Rothbort: Ripping Feather Beds During a Pogrom, 1930s–1940s

Finally, I hired a Yiddish translator to unlock for me a chapter on the Bund in Volkavisk’s Yizkor Book (Yizkor books were oral histories compiled after World War II to record something of the lives of the countless murdered from the shtetls of Eastern Europe). When the translator returned the pages, there sat Sam’s name, as one of the book’s narrators, right above a photo of a group of girls, including the famous Itka, at first sight unfamiliar with her sleek bob. This was proof: Sam had taken part in an armed resistance movement, something I had never imagined him capable of. What change of heart or evolution in his thinking took him from that commitment to a pacifism so intense he would not kill a chicken, I can only guess at.

But as far as he had traveled from Volkavisk, I came to see the traces of Bundism that he kept within. His benign lawlessness. His contempt for money. The welcome he gave to my Puerto Rican father and my Korean aunt. His lack of ties to Israel. The sculpture he made of a worker’s fist, clenched Communist-style—though he slyly mocked Communism in the caption. His bohemian humanism, big enough to take in the world.

*

In Israel, the Bund has been either ignored or belittled. “[They] are perceived as individuals who stubbornly clung to an unrealistic solution for Jews’ persecution in Europe, with the ‘right’ solution being the one offered by the Zionists—immigration to Palestine,” Israeli human rights activist Elizabeth Tsurkov told me. Zionist ideologues have a self-serving motive for framing it this way. For Jews, there could be only two choices: march like a sheep to the gas chamber, or become a brave Israeli, bravely suppressing Arabs. Diasporic weakness is the necessary foil for sabra strength.

I visited Israel and its Occupied Territories once, as a reporter. I marveled at the beauty of Jerusalem, saw settlers hurling rocks in Hebron, and in Gaza listened to the shells landing around us. Despite Israel’s achievements, Jewish ethno-nationalism is a poison like all ethno-nationalisms and, as they all do, it has continued to reap a harvest of repression and death. The only way out is a solidarity that cuts across religion and race, one as deep as that felt by Dabrowski and Goldstein when they walked the pogrom-stilled streets of Bretz that Sabbath night.

I return to do’ikayt, Hereness: a doctrine created by the godless Jews of the diaspora, written with mongrel words in Hebrew letters, then spread by itinerant troublemakers carrying forged passports, whose fundamental demand was the right to stay. What does Hereness mean in our age of mass migration? An attempt, I believe, to find the self in exile, to square homeland with the freedom to leave.

Sam made another painting, titled Without Passport. It shows two men and a woman in a moonlit forest, dragged off by the tsarist police. They were most likely Jews who lacked the internal passport that would allow them to travel outside the Pale of Settlement. But they had tried, anyway. Was this a betrayal of “Hereness”? Or was the “here” within them, in their act of illicit movement? Did their defiance taste like home?

I like to think that, later that night, Sam and his comrades sawed through the bars of the trio’s jail cell window. They would have shimmied out, the couple perhaps pausing for a kiss amid the frigid stillness of the forest, and then going on, past a border blurred by snow fall, going wherever they wanted to go. 

October 6, 2018, 7:00 am