The "Reconquest" of Jewishness in Post-War America: Interview with Tony Michels

Tony Michels

On Tuesday, November 26th, Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will discuss his upcoming book on Communism, anti-Communism, and American Jews at YIVO's Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies, with moderator Daniel Soyer, Professor of History at Fordham University.

The outbreak of the Second World War precipitated an ideological-political crisis among Marxists in the United States. For much of the 1930s, Marxian intellectuals—specifically, those hostile to the Communist Party—had struggled to understand the rise of Nazism and the consolidation of Stalinism, but did so within Marxism's parameters. However, Germany's invasion of Poland, the systematic killing of Jews that followed, and the Soviet invasion of Finland raised questions about Marxism itself. Against the backdrop of totalitarianism, war, and genocide, intellectuals undertook a thorough reconsideration of Marxism. This process of rethinking Marxism entailed a new engagement with things Jewish: religion, Yiddish literature, Zionism, and the meaning of Jewish identity. This paper explores the turn to Jewishness by intellectuals during the 1940s and 1950s through the examples of Will Herberg and Irving Howe. Herberg rejected Marxism in the early 1940s, but over the next dozen years attempted to recast socialism on a theological basis, before he moved to the political right. Howe, who remained a socialist his entire life, negotiated a partial "reconquest" of Jewishness as an interpreter of Yiddish literature and the Jewish immigrant experience. Both individuals reflected larger political and cultural trends among American Jews in the post-World War II period.

Tony Michels is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard, 2005) and editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (NYU, 2012). He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

RN: Can you tell us more about the crisis among American Marxists at the start of World War II?

TM: The crisis was prompted first by totalitarianism in the Soviet Union: Stalin's consolidation of power and all the horrible things that followed from that. So, for a lot of Marxists that caused a crisis. You know -- this wasn't supposed to happen. What role did Marxism play in producing this situation, and what were the implications for Marxists around the world? In other words, if the first self-declared socialist state resulted in a totalitarian dictatorship, first, this needed to be explained, and then the possible implications for Marxists in the United States and everywhere else had to be pondered. And increasingly, there was a growing feeling by 1940 (and definitely going through the 1940s) that Marxism was fatally flawed. One opinion among the erstwhile Marxists was that it was fatally flawed because Marxists didn't have an ethics, they didn't have a morality that could check the abuses of power of the sort that happened in the Soviet Union.

RN: Didn't this crisis begin in the 1930s?

TM: It started in the 1930s but it came to a head later. In the 1930s, the problem of Stalin was dealt with mainly in a Marxist framework. But the problem was recognized. And then in the 1940s, many Marxists started giving up on Marxism altogether.

I should also add that people in the Communist Party didn't feel this way. I'm talking about socialists, Marxists of different kinds who were outside of the Communist Party. They're the ones who felt there was a crisis. In the Communist Party, no one saw a crisis at all. They thought that everything that was happening in Russia was further vindication of Stalin's greatness and the Soviet Union's existence as a beacon of social progress. And it was in the 1940s that the Communist Party reached its peak of influence and membership. The Communist Party was going strong in the 1940s. So there was a divide on the American Left.

In fact, there were a series of events in the last year and a half of the 1930s that also served to bring this to a head and that was Hitler-Stalin Pact or Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact:  the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. There was the Soviet invasion of Finland, there was the outbreak of World War II, and then the systematic killing of Jews that followed. And there was the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City. All that happened in a pretty short time period and it really precipitated the crisis. The entry of the United States into the war was probably the final event in this series of events between 1938 and 1941-42, where a number of Marxists felt they had to fundamentally rethink their politics.

RN: Why was what happened significant for Jewish life?

TM: When those Marxists began to rethink Marxism, they also, to a greater and lesser extent, started expressing an interest in things Jewish. That could be (depending on the individual) any number of things. It could be a discovery of Yiddish literature, it could be a discovery of Judaism as a religion, an embrace of Zionism, or an interest in Jewish identity and what the meaning of it might be. Jewish leftists started developing an interest in all of those things. And often that happened in conjunction with the rethinking of Marxism. Marxism said that the Jewish problem was not the fundamental problem in the world. The fundamental problem was the problem of class oppression. And Marxism also said that whatever Jewish problems existed would be solved through the transformation of capitalism into socialism. So, when Marxism itself was scrutinized, it opened the door to recognizing Jewishness as a subject worthy of understanding in and of itself.

That's one thing that happened. The other was that, of course, the Holocaust happened. That was the second impetus. So if the crisis in Marxism opened the door, the Holocaust impelled many Marxists -- by the 1940s-- to start investigating Jewishness in the ways I described. And it so happened that this wasn't just a personal exploration for many of these people. It had public manifestations. What I mean by that is that a good number of these people started writing in one way or another about things Jewish and then became influential. So for instance, Will Herberg was a kind of dissident communist in the 1930s, a Marxist-Leninist but not a member of the Communist Party. And then in the 1940s, he's done with Marxism. He goes on a long rethinking of Marxism, still in a way trying to reclaim socialism, and all the while he discovers Judaism as a religion. He becomes a devout Jew; he studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. So, as he embraces Judaism, he is also rethinking Marxism and socialism more broadly. Then, in the 1950s he goes on to write the most influential book on religion in American society, Protestant-Catholic-Jew. So, there's an example of someone who goes through this experience and winds up producing a very influential text about religion in American life.

A second example is Irving Howe. Irving Howe leaves Marxism, remains a socialist but not a Marxist and his path to Jewishness lands in Yiddish literature. And he publishes the first really serious anthology of Yiddish literature in 1954, A Treasury of Yiddish Literature. In 1976, he publishes World of Our Fathers, a best-seller, the most widely read book on American Jewish history ever written. Irving Howe's path is different from Herberg's, but it's part of the same phenomenon. He goes through the period of questioning Marxism, trying to figure out if anything from the socialist tradition can be salvaged, and as he's doing it, he moves towards some exploration of Jewishness. So for Herberg, it's Judaism and for Howe, it's Yiddish literature.

And those are just two examples of what this means for the Jewish community. More and more intellectuals who were previously on the left and maybe are still on the left in a reformulated way become important interpreters and writers, historians and critics of Judaism, Jewish literature, and so forth. Commentary magazine is perhaps the single most concentrated example of it. It's a main forum for these kinds of writers to discuss Jewish topics.

RN: How does this fit into the book you're writing? What is your book about?

TM: My book is about the relationship of American Jews to the Russian Revolution, from 1917 to 1956. One of the driving themes of the book is enchantment and disillusionment with Soviet Russia. This back and forth dynamic gets repeated over decades and across generations, both among immigrants and Yiddish-speakers and American-born or -raised English-speaking Jews who have a different relationship to Russia, but still in many ways a powerful one. Large numbers of Jews really embrace the Russian Revolution and then many become disillusioned with it and then feel the need to reorient themselves in some way. This gets played out repeatedly over decades in different ways.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

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