Dear Ziva,
I’ve read two of Hillel Halkin’s books: Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic and A Complicated Jew: Selected Essays. (I loved his translation of Sholem Aleichem [Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories].) I am sharing below some passages from the book of essays. He packs a punch. He made aliyah in the late Sixties and I saw that he returned after 2010 or so. He’s in his mid-eighties now.
Mark
Not unrelatedly, the shtetl is also much on the minds of those assertive proponents of a new Diasporism who have become steadily more vocal on the American Jewish scene. Their disillusion with both Israel and suburban synagogue Judaism has caused them to regard the shtetl—its material simplicity; its religious passion; its human solidarity and strong labor movement; its rich folklore; its humor; even (as demonstrated by the current popularity of klezmer bands and Yiddish clubs) its music and its language—as an alternative model of Jewishness. What cannot be brought back to life can, or so it is claimed, be emulated. 9
Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, life in the shtetl changed for the better—at least once the Ukrainian massacres of 1920-21 were over. (It forms a strange lacuna in contemporary Jewish historical awareness that accounts of anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe tend to go straight from czarist pogroms to the Holocaust, skipping over the murder of 100,000 Ukrainian Jews during the Russian civil war.) 15
At bottom, Yiddishism was a radical amputation of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish history. In place of Hebrew, the only language common to Jews in all times and places, it proposed a Judeo-German that most parts of the Jewish world did not speak. From the demographic mosaic of that world, with its Sephardic Jews, Middle-Eastern Jews, Central Asian Jews, Italian Jews, French Jews, Dutch Jews, Middle-European Jews, and English-speaking Jews, it crowned as the “real” Jews the Yiddish-speaking population of Russia, Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states alone. Eastern Europe, a region first settled by Jews in the Middle Ages, was now the true Jewish homeland. And of a Jewish past 3,000 years old, the first two-thirds, in which Yiddish did not exist as a language, was to be effectively discarded. Peretz’s “The Jews are one people—their language is Yiddish” was an absurd self-contradiction. But the attitudes of Yiddishism live on, not only in the voguish sentimentality of much of the current revival of interest in the Yiddish language but in Jewish intellectual circles as well. And for that reason, Yiddishism can be said to have survived the disappearance, in all but ultra-Orthodox circles, of Yiddish itself. 71
A key passage in the chapter on the language wars—These attitudes, in their contemporary form, can be enumerated. They include the belief—buttressed by the seemingly endless Arab-Israeli conflict—that Zionism was a mistaken political strategy for the Jewish people; that a strong identification with Israel need not be a central feature of Diaspora Jewish life; that minority status in the Diaspora is the optimal Jewish cultural and spiritual condition; that the political interests of Diaspora Jews lie in the forging of alliances with as many “progressive” and left-wing causes as possible; that solidarity with non-Jewish victims of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and other injustices is more important than solidarity with other Jews; and that the very notion of other Jews, of that klal yisra’el or collectivity of the Jewish people that all Jews are responsible to, can be trimmed at will to suit one’s ideological proclivities. 71-72
What is lacking in contemporary American Jewry is an ethos of Hebrew, the belief that without Hebrew, Jewish lives are incomplete. Although such an attitude was never prominent in America, it did once exist and even flourish in some places. It was found in elite schools where Hebrew was the medium rather than merely the object of instruction; in Hebrew-speaking summer camps that attracted thousands of campers; in a small but intense American Hebrew literary scene, with publications like Bitzaron and Hadoar and serious novelists and poets like Hillel Bavli, Reuben Wallenrod, Isaac Silberschlag, Simon Halkin, Abraham Regelson, and Gabriel Preil; in American Jewish readers who read such writers. All this has now vanished, along with the feeling that Hebrew is a Jewish necessity. 157
Here he comes out swinging: One would like to think that, at this late date, there is little need to comment on the absurdity of her charge that mankind’s long chronicle of bloody warfare, ethnic and racial prejudice, and religious and ideological intolerance results from attitudes acquired from the Bible. It is as if she had never heard of the sack of Troy, the Indian caste system, the persecution of Buddhism under the T’ang Dynasty, the mass human sacrifices of their enemies practiced by the Aztecs, the savagery of Genghis Khan, Japanese barbarism in World War II, the horrors of the Pol Pot regime, or innumerable other cases of wholesale violence and exclusion practiced in the name of the “identity commitments” of pre- or non-monotheistic peoples. 169
We went without him and were thankful for the experience because King was in fact different in a country church than he had been at the Lincoln Memorial. It was only gradually that I understood Micky better. And it wasn’t just the church. It was all of it, all of us white Northerners, a high proportion of us Jews, who had come south to be part of something. We were idealistic about what we were doing, but that’s what it was for us: an experience. We had come and we would go, taking the experience with us so that we could reminisce about it someday as I am doing now, while the blacks of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi would remain. We were Americans and their struggle was ours—but not in the same sense, not in the same way. In that sense and in that way, we were voyeurs. My black students knew it all along. It was in the looks they sometimes gave me, those guarded, curious, almost amused looks that I hadn’t known how to interpret and that had said: Yes, we’re grateful that you care, grateful for your show of solidarity—but don’t think we don’t see through you; don’t think we don’t know why you are here.As the year moved from Selma to Watts, a radicalized black civil rights movement let us know that it knew too, that it would continue without us. 290
I may have sent the following to you before, but this is how he ends the book— The year I was a student in England, I had a tutor, a poet and a mystic, who once said, “You know, you spend the first part of your life working your way into your incarnation and the last part working your way out of it.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. How could I? I was still working my way in. Today, I think I get it. I would just phrase it differently. I would say you live a life that’s messy with experience and clean up by leaving something complete. You don’t do that by throwing anything away. You do it by putting everything in its place.
