Jewish Leadership, Now and Then
Goldmann, Nahum
JEWISH LEADERSHIP NOW AND THEN NAHUM GOLDMANN TAV is our monthly endpaper, usually devoted to a controversial statement of opinion. Dr. Nahum Goldmann is President of the World Jewish Congress,...
...Had there been a Gallup Poll on either question, the Jewish people would have rejected it...
...How can you attract intellectuals—young or old...
...I am a democrat, and I believe that leadership is decisive for any democracy...
...In my opinion, that is the number one problem in Jewish life...
...One was partition—the Jewish State—and the other, German reparations...
...We exist because the internal front was strong, so we overcame inquisition and pogroms and Hitler...
...The scandals in Israel, the fundrais-ing, the protests against Russia...
...So Rose Hal-prin said, "Why do you say 'unattractive...
...Years ago, I established the Conference of Presidents of Jewish Organizations...
...I am entitled to have doubts about democracy in Jewish life because in our generation, which is full of tragedy and disaster and failures, we had two success...
...Naturally, this is a bit exaggerated, but primarily it is right...
...I am not popular...
...She is popular...
...Jews are the greatest example...
...Jewish life today is either protests or picketing or raising money...
...Intellectuals don't play the role they should play, and the tragedy is that we have never had a generation of Jews with so many intellectuals as we have in America today...
...If we had followed her, there wouldn't have been a Jewish State and there wouldn't have been the billions in reparations...
...A people is not stronger than it is internally...
...The opinion of the majority never impressed me very much...
...But to reply properly, it goes deeper...
...Goldmann I think it is a very serious problem...
...And, to a large degree, that is because the leadership is in the hands of people who cannot offer new values or challenges...
...Based on our external front, we should have disappeared hundreds of years ago...
...Once, in a meeting of the Zionist Executive, when I was its president, I said that American Jewish life is run by ignorant millionaires, overpaid executive directors, and unattractive women...
...I devoted most of my life to the external front, negotiating with non-Jews, governments, organizations, the League of Nations, the United Nations, and so on, but I never believed that the external front is decisive...
...A people lives on two fronts, the external front, and the internal front...
...I was its president for eight years, and finally I had to give it up...
...Ben Gurion used to tell me that reparations was the greater miracle...
...What a difference...
...At the age of 82, he is one of the preeminent Jewish leaders of the century...
...Today, the external front is wonderful, Jews are richer than they should be—"money corrupts" is valid for all peoples including the Jews, who are not used to being rich...
...And politically, Jews have great influence, though sometimes they exaggerate—the Jewish lobby and the protests and the running and filling the newspapers with headlines...
...He was the founder, and for eight years the first president, of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations...
...The following excerpt is extracted from an exclusive moment interview of Dr...
...What will attract them...
...But I give an occasional seminar at Harvard—my son is a professor there—and when I was there a year ago there were several Nobel Prize winners there— Jews—and I asked some of them why they were not active, and they said, "We can't contribute 30 or 50 thousand dollars to UJA...
...I remember American life with leaders in the past...
...Without proper leadership, democracy can be very negative...
...What role would we play...
...I said, "You are the exception...
...Yet the internal front is very poor...
...In American Jewish life—in Jewish life in general—leadership is very bad...
...One of the reasons I left America is because there was no leadership to work with...
...In Jewish life, especially in America, money dominates everything...
...Nahum Goldmann is President of the World Jewish Congress, and was the chief architect of the German reparations agreements...
...Herewith, his response to a question about Jewish leadership in America...
...They haven't learned how to use money...
...The balance of the interview will appear in our next issue...
...How long could I stay president of all the organizations...
...All right, it's interesting, but to go on year after year shrying, yelling— there's no content in Jewish life...
...Therefore, leadership is essential...
...I knew them all, I cooperated with them—Brandeis, Stephen Wise, Mack, Lipsky...
...My dear friend Golda Meir, whom I respect very much—I rarely agree with her—was against partition and against reparations...
...Now, people are beginning to realize this, to try to bring in the intellectuals...
...I made my first speech at the age of 13*/i, so it's been 50 years that I'm active, and I'm not overly optimistic for our future...
...And here, we have a wonderful youth, cultured as never before in our history...
...In non-Jewish life, I think, intellectuals play a greater role...
...In my opinion, that's a bigger problem than the Arabs and the Russians and everything else because these are temporary problems, and the other one is permanent, and it can ruin the basis for our survival...
...Not only America— France, too, England, too—there are thousands of Jewish professors in the universities, and so many of them are indifferent, but many could be interested...
...Fortunately, we didn't ask...
...I am ending my career as a Jewish leader after more than 50 years...
Vol. 2 • June 1977 • No. 8
