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My grandmother
Bessie was a Jewish communist. She read the Morning Freiheit
from the day it was launched in 1922, and she held its long-time
editor, Paul (Peysakh) Novick, in the kind of high regard that
hasidim reserve for their rebbe. When the Freiheit folded in
1988, I offered my 94-year-old bubbe a subscription to the
Forverts so she might still enjoy reading a Yiddish paper.
I might as well
have asked her to vote Republican to enjoy exercising her
franchise. She even muttered "social fascists," the scathingly
sectarian term that communists applied to their socialist rivals
during the 1930s.
She couldn't
quite remember the names of her great-grandchildren — but
this she could remember.
Today, however,
my bubbe's curses have been replaced by words of love.
Jewish Currents magazine — first published in 1946 by the
Morning Freiheit Association, under the name Jewish Life — has
married the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring, the 106-year-old
Jewish fraternal/sororal organization for whom the Forverts, not
the Freiheit, was the paper of record.
Jewish Life
transmuted into Jewish Currents in 1956, declaring its
independence from the Communist Party following Nikita
Khrushchev's "secret" speech about the "extreme methods and mass
repression" of Stalinism. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the
magazine was a fixture in the homes of many of our family
friends, who had been chased out of the communist world by both
Joseph Stalin and Joseph McCarthy. The grandparents would read
the Freiheit; the parents, Jewish Currents; us kids,
MAD
magazine.
Pirkei Avot
teaches that "Moses received Torah from Sinai, and passed it on
to Joshua; and Joshua to the elders; and the elders to the
prophets; and the prophets to the sages of the Great Assembly"
(1:1). In our case, Torah meant secular Jewish identity,
devotion to (if not actual literacy in) the Yiddish language,
and commitment to the anti-establishment spirit of Jewish
culture.
On the printed
pages of Jewish Currents, it meant opposition to Jim Crow and
the Vietnam War, commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and
other forms of anti-Nazi resistance, translations of classic
Yiddish literature, hopes for a socialist Israel at peace with
its neighbors, endorsement of black-Jewish solidarity in the
United States, and increasingly vocal concern about the
repression of Jews and Jewish culture in the Soviet Union.
Last Sunday we
held an organizational wedding at Workmen's Circle headquarters
on Sholom Aleichem Place in Manhattan, in the same building as
the Forward offices. Representatives of both communities
constructed a chupah from old photographs and magazine
covers. Everyone in the room came to circle beneath and around
that chupah, to recite any or all of our seven blessings of
commitment. We offered champagne toasts to one another,
delighted in Jenny Romaine's "Great Small Works" theater and
Sarah Felder's juggling act (with a Yiddish patter) — and then
some serious multi-generational dancing began.
Seventy-five
years earlier, these groups had split into warring socialist and
communist camps, figuratively as well as literally. The
Workmen's Circle's Camp Kinder Ring and the International
Workers' Order's Camp Kinderland used to throw brickbats at one
another from opposite shores of Sylvan Lake in Hopewell
Junction, N.Y. Now, the long-divorced couple has remarried. "Nu,"
more than one wedding kibitzer asked me last Sunday, "are you
planning to have children?"
Indeed, we are.
Although I often tell friends that I signed on as editor of
Jewish Currents in order to be considered a "youth" throughout
my middle age — for our veteran readers, anyone not yet
collecting Social Security is a youth — one of the underlying
reasons why our marriage was possible is that baby-boomers have
moved into leadership positions in both communities. For us, the
internecine battles of the leftwing Jewish past are tragic, or
farcical, but not personal. At the same time, the passion and
perseverance of our elders have inspired us to believe that our
own children and grandchildren can find meaning and connection
in the culture of Yiddishkeit and mentshlikhkayt
that these institutions embody.
Serious
challenges, of course, confront that quest for continuity. The
traditional "secular" label of the Jewish left does not
necessarily adhere well to the clothes of younger Jews, who tend
to be fluid in their Jewish associations. To my mind,
contemporary ethical dilemmas have lent new meaning to Judaism's
teachings about economic stewardship, the unity of creation, the
meaning of idolatry and more, and a Jewish secularism that
ignores these riches for fear of invoking the G-word is
designing its own obsolescence. Our "progressive" label also
needs enlargement, to announce the fact that we have the same
passionate commitment to environmental preservation, gay and
lesbian inclusion, and other contemporary issues that we have
historically given to social and economic justice issues.
As the Midrash
suggests, "All the calculated dates of redemption have passed"
(Exodus Rabbah 5:19). In my view, therefore, it is insightful
questions, rather than answers, that now serve as the paving
stones of continuity for the Workmen's Circle and its
newly-acquired magazine.
Yesterday's
belief in the historical inevitability of socialism has been
reduced to a humble question — "Can't we do better than this?" —
regarding global capitalism. Yesterday's belief in the
malleability of human nature has been challenged by new
scientific knowledge. Yesterday's doubts about whether there
should be a Jewish homeland — doubts that were shared by
mainstream American Jewish organizations right into the 1940s —
have yielded to the vibrant reality of modern Israel.
Yesterday's view of the radical right as racist and crackpot has
been undermined by its disturbing rise to power in contemporary
America.
All of this
requires us to move beyond the easy task of critiquing the
status quo into the more difficult task of proposing
alternatives that lead neither to the gulag nor to McWorld, Inc.
Perhaps the
most dramatic change confronting us — and confronting every
corner of the Jewish community — pertains to community building,
which has been transformed in our consumer society into a purely
voluntaristic enterprise. The fierce energy of mutual support
that has sustained the Workmen's Circle for the past century,
and the idealistic passion that inspire roughly half of Jewish
Currents' subscribers to give donations to the magazine beyond
the price of their subscription, are hard to come by in a
society that has largely defined its younger generations as
consumers rather than as citizens.
Nevertheless,
as Mark Twain, the self-described "American Sholom Aleichem,"
famously said, reports of our demise have been greatly
exaggerated. The Workmen's Circle has significant resources that
include a summer camp and summer resort, geriatric centers, a
system of supplemental schools, and regional offices and active
branches throughout the United States and Canada.
Jewish
Currents, for its part, features columnists ranging in age from
31 to 85 who are read by some 15,000 people. Our most enduring
asset, however, is what Irving Howe described in "World of Our
Fathers" as "the code of mentshlikhkayt, a readiness to
live for ideals beyond the clamor of self, a sense of plebeian
fraternity... and a persuasion that human existence is a deeply
serious matter for which all of us are finally accountable."
Yiddishkayt,
and the entire Jewish tradition at its best, is essentially a
centuries-long discussion of how human beings can best live
together in peace and with maximum authenticity. It is that
discussion that constitutes the pillow talk of our newly married
organizations.
Lawrence
Bush, editor of Jewish Currents, is author of the forthcoming
"Waiting for God: The Spiritual Speculations of an Atheist" (Ben Yehuda Books) and the former editor of
Reconstructionism Today.
Copyright 2006 ©
The Forward
To read this on
the Forward web site,
click here.
To read what the New York Times wrote about our "marriage",
click
here.
To
visit the Workmens Circle website,
click here.
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