Marie Syrkin and Trude Weiss-Rosmarin
MARIE SYRKIN AND TRUDE WEISSROSMARIN Moment meets with two grandames of Jewish life and journalism— commentators and movers through a turbulent half century Marie Syrkin, left, and Trude...
...I don't mind if Jews have a very exigent standard for themselves...
...Weiss-Rosmarin...
...And, as I said before, I put great stock in personal observation...
...Now in later years, subsequently, she learned who the Palestinians are...
...This was back in '38, and my husband of those years didn't feel like it...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: In 1935...
...Syrkin: To be quite serious, I don't think that a magazine can exist without a core of devotees, who give their talent and their support...
...It was in Frankfurt-am-Main, and I became Jewishly aware when I joined Blau-Weiss, a Zionist youth movement...
...The Yiddisher Kemfer...
...I kept my name before I knew that was the thing to do...
...that's the problem, and it doesn't imply a value judgment...
...No, you shouldn't and can't look just at the Orthodox neighborhoods...
...Her father was Nachman Syrkin (1867-1924), a founding leader and theoretician of Labor Zionism...
...Look, back in the early days of the Frontier, when it was a good magazine, no otie was paid...
...And they went out and established a daily called Di Zeit, which lasted maybe two years...
...But that doesn't mean I subscribe to every accusation the Palestinians make...
...And that is to me a tragedy in the women's movement...
...No chochmas...
...Take Golda, for example, a person that I admire immensely...
...I consider this one of the most serious libels on the memory of a great woman...
...There are about a hundred thousand Jews in Boro Park...
...The obvious consequences include, for example, the notion that child-bearing should be relegated to a minor role, rather than seeing it as the most significant biological role...
...But even with so relatively minor a person as Haim Greenberg, who was, mind you, Golda's friend...
...It's a very sad thing...
...Syrkin: "Regret" is a funny word...
...Sometimes a minister and a rabbi co-officiate, all kinds of monkey business...
...I can tell you what happened to Di Zeit...
...So the Jews are precocious, because the decline took so much less time...
...It's one thing for the Jews to say to themselves, as every human being may, that they have to be ideal, that they should be extraordinary, but they must also, among their rights, stand up for their right to be as others...
...MARIE SYRKIN AND TRUDE WEISSROSMARIN Moment meets with two grandames of Jewish life and journalism— commentators and movers through a turbulent half century Marie Syrkin, left, and Trude Weiss-Rosmarin You both made quite atypical choices regarding what to do with your lives, and you both achieved quite a bit at a time when "achievement" was not the norm for women...
...So my mother came and took me home, where I stayed for six weeks...
...To choose this little group and say that it earns its very right to exist, to be treated in the community of nations as other people are, only by virtue of some extraordinary virtue, is an extreme form of discrimination...
...You came to this country in what year...
...Now if the demographic trend is projected with accuracy—I'm not a demographer myself—it's a very bleak picture...
...And I said, "But I've got all this material, I've got to write it, there's a publisher waiting," and it seemed to me that the most urgent thing I could do was that book...
...But how can I cite Jewish history in the presence of the real expert...
...I thank both of you, nonetheless, for playing with such virtuosity this morning...
...Syrkin: Obviously, unless one is crazy, one can't look about the world today and easily imagine a socialist Utopia...
...It's curious: In practice, I can't imagine anyone who has followed a more consistent feminist pattern than I have...
...I would say, "Hasneh einenu uchal"—"and the bush was not consumed...
...But the book is not the problem...
...So I consider my own a defective kind of character, that in light of my conviction I nonetheless failed to make aliyah...
...When did that start...
...Biology is destiny...
...Syrkin: That's about the same as the Jewish Frontier, which we started in 1934...
...Enlightened people, full of liberal ideas—and now we have Reagan...
...You remember Horace Kallen's concept of pluralism, the orchestra of cultures, where each instrument, each culture, contributes its own distinct melody to the orchestra, to the society...
...We live at a time when national feelings have reached unprecedented intensity around the world, and Palestinian nationalism is part of that trend...
...Syrkin: I dispute that thoroughly...
...But with regard to myself, I never encountered such a reaction...
...That such love may be less important than, say, becoming a stenographer...
...Are you being fair...
...She came by her Zionism quite naturally...
...Her books include a biography of Golda, as well as Blessed is the Match, an account of Jewish resistance, and, among others...
...This already gives you some idea of how far my mother was emancipated...
...We suffered terribly...
...Maybe you're right concerning Yiddish...
...I am old enough to remember the excitement of 1917 with the revolution in Russia...
...It would be foolish to describe him as an atheist, yet he was certainly opposed to the synagogue and to Orthodoxy...
...And afterwards, of course, I pursued my professional studies, and became deeply involved in them...
...He knew that these efforts, which are not really consonant with the temper of the community, usually don't last...
...Certainly today one has to take account of the realities of the situation...
...Syrkin: I noticed it not with regard to myself, because I was never in a role of such magnitude...
...To me, that's very interesting...
...But there are in the kibbutzim, in the various peace movements, people who guard the flame, to use a trite phrase...
...It's when one hopes for the great fire that one is disappointed...
...I believe very strongly in the she'aryashuv, that is to say, in the abiding remnant, which is really borne out by Jewish history...
...In subsequent periods, life for me became too complicated to manage it...
...So if I may, you've both had long connections to Jewish magazines, and I wonder whether we might not talk about that for a bit...
...And I thought moment was getting on, now that we're almost nine years old...
...There she published memorable articles on a wide variety of subjects, including the Moscow trials of 1937, Arnold Toynbee and the Jews, Hannah Arendt, and, again and again, the meaning of Zionism in our time...
...Still, subsequently I managed the academic career anyway...
...It's always been a matter more of ideas than of numbers...
...And to my own surprise, almost, I discovered that I wanted a baby very much...
...And these are not old people...
...Syrkin: I was brought up on that belief...
...It sounded insane, but he persuaded the unfortunate comrades that a daily was essential if Socialist Zionism and the Jews of America were to be saved...
...her own School of the Jewish Woman, which she founded in New York City in 1932, was modeled after the original Lehrhaus...
...And for many years now, the government of Israel—that goes for Labor as well as Likud—has been ignoring the reality of the Palestinians...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: My son is ultra-Orthodox...
...Does there seem to you to have been an attrition in quality, as is often observed...
...I say only that today, they have a case...
...either at the right time one does or one doesn't...
...Now if ever there was a blatant piece of propaganda, very cleverly done, and in which the writer editorializes, that's this book...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: Jewish self-hatred is a rejection of integral Jewishness...
...The School of the Jewish Woman started with a bang...
...For more than 50 years, she was the editor or a member of the editorial board of The Jewish Frontier...
...It takes very devious forms...
...You see, I'm not a very reverent person, an emotional, a respecting person...
...Gleanings, a book of poems...
...Look, I belonged to a childhood where, in the course of my travels, I sang the "International" in French, I sang the "International" in Russian, I sang the "International" in German, I sang it in Yiddish, in Hebrew, in practically every language of the Diaspora...
...Syrkin: That's true, but those are the dangers...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: I perfectly agree, so long as the judgment is kept out of it...
...Syrkin: I am very worried by the demographic data...
...If the Yiddisher Kemfer is failing as a weekly, then we must have a daily...
...Where I did feel discriminated against was in the synagogue...
...Syrkin: I don't know about that...
...And you don't have to tell me that a woman has to be independent, I was always independent, and very energetically so...
...At the same time, I realize that there is something else that didn't exist a while back...
...In the synagogue where my parents went, there was, of course, a women's gallery...
...There are no valid excuses for it...
...And now it seems to be charming...
...I was brought up with that almost as with the ABCs...
...He doesn't get pregnant, he doesn't have to nurse...
...You're talking about a minimal number, and even if it's a minimal number that's on the increase, you haven't really altered the balance within the total community...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: My son and I disagree, but we tolerate each other's views...
...If the demographers are right, then the future is bleak...
...There were fine lecturers, etc., etc...
...And you, Dr...
...oh, the intensity of those hopes...
...My mother herself was advanced...
...That led to some trouble later, as when, when I was 16 and my father said to me, "You're not to go out with this boy," I would say, "But what is the difference between boys and girls...
...But at the same time, I remember that when I was pregnant with my first child—I don't know whether this is too personal, but it seems to me pertinent—I didn't know whether to be ashamed in front of my advanced friends...
...Syrkin: I have the geatest respect for it, even reverence . . . Weiss-Rosmarin: I have no reverence for it, no feeling at all...
...At the age of 21 she said to the boy she lived with, "Either we go together or I go alone...
...Women's rights...
...I maintain that Jewish demographers and sociologists have over the past 20 years not at all considered what Egon Mayer calls in his book "the new shtetl...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: But you do have to look as well at things like the havurah movement, and not just havurot in synagogues, but in all kinds of places...
...Now, there's no disposition to do that...
...I'm talking about fairness with facts...
...Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, born in 1904, is the editor of The Jewish Spectator, which she founded in 1935...
...I'm not prepared to say that at all...
...My reason tells me that we must reckon with it...
...In its denial that biological differences— which are obvious, which I don't have to specify—fail to affect psychology, there seems to me a complete and deliberate ignoring of basic human situations...
...It is true that that is what she said, but to take her words out of their historical context is unjust...
...I'm afraid that's the cause of the approbation...
...And nothing has turned out as we dreamt...
...But the poor peasant who hasn't had his nails pulled off doesn't have to be manicured...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: I agree with you, but the difficulty is that ever so many people base value judgments on physiological differences...
...And, having failed in hachsharah, I was left out when everybody in my circle went to Palestine, to Bet Zera, a kibbutz...
...Not necessarily always to my advantage...
...After all, to be the daughter of Nachman Syrkin . . . Syrkin: Yes, but one thing he failed to provide me...
...I think that this willful ignorance and the readiness to accept the worst interpretation—the Jews were aggressors from the first moment, they kicked out all the Arabs, etc., etc.—the acceptance of the libels, the readiness to perceive the rights of every group except one's own, which is characteristic of a great many Jews, is a form of Jewish self-hatred...
...You've both been so deeply involved in Jewish life all these years...
...It merits a few years of your life...
...And Jewish self-haters, without taking the trouble to look into Zionist history, subscribe to the most outrageous statements...
...An even more remarkable thing—where have you seen the rebirth of a language as we have seen with Hebrew...
...I recently spent a Shabbat in Boro Park...
...Do you take them in Scarsdale or Beverly Hills, where you will get one kind of result, or do you take them in Boro Park or Riverdale, where you will get a different result...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: I was a member of Breira, I support Shalom Achshav [Peace Now...
...And I knew that if I were a boy, I'd have been downstairs, and perhaps even been able to shake the rabbi's hand...
...Is there not some kind of melody that is neither a dirge nor a march...
...We've had quite a long life...
...We'd get that far, and Papa would suddenly be busy, and by the next time, I'd have forgotten what we'd done so we would start over...
...But in subsequent years, when I matured, and as an old woman, I think it's a tragedy what's taking place with these young women, who are ignoring not merely urges, but—I don't think every woman necessarily has to have children, and there are obviously women who shouldn't have children, who don't want them—but to make a mockery of it...
...I see a tremendous surge in this...
...Syrkin: We do have a problem there...
...Syrkin: It seems to me that unless one believes in miracles, or has a mystical faith in that regenerative force which does seem to be a part of Jewish history and which enables us to overcome all obstacles . . . well, the matter of numbers can't be avoided...
...Despite my early conviction that there is no difference, I find contemporary feminism absurd in its extremes...
...And I saw no subsequent period when it would have made sense...
...Well, in the meantime I had left school, and I had lost the year, and I had to prepare for the final examinations...
...And you know how it has come to be these days...
...In the years when I should have done it, when I was young, I had reasons—my child, my this, my that, my personal life was very confused...
...Most of them are American-born, children of survivors of the Holocaust...
...Papa was a regular contributor, but within three months they stopped paying him anything for his articles, and the real problem in our lives was how to pay the rent...
...Above all, it's dishonest to refuse to face organic differences that are also psychic differences...
...I have small faith that those individuals will remain Jews...
...And I think that may be the reason, as well, that secular Jews view what's going on in Williamsburg or Boro Park with approbation...
...The books in question were Das Kapital in German, Spinoza's Ethics in Latin—I don't know why, except that I was precocious—and the Bible, where we never got beyond the first sentence...
...And I believe that we Jews, as citizens of an emancipated country, should contribute our own distinct melody...
...I don't want to use it too lightly...
...I'm not even talking here about the realm of opinion...
...To relegate love of a man or love of a child to a minor role...
...Syrkin: I quite agree with you in that regard...
...I don't share that emotion...
...My feminism in those days was intellectually oriented...
...Does the change in your values regarding tradition relate at all to the point you have made, that there was a time when you imagined a brilliant socialist future, but that time has now passed...
...otherwise I never read detective stories, I can't stand them...
...I consider that a form of discrimination...
...And it turned out that what was on her conscience was that in the days when they were collecting for Di Zeit, when she was 18 or 19 or 20, she went around of course with all her enthusiasm, and she explained to each comrade that he or she had to part with his or her last cent in order to save the paper...
...That's a very subtle form of Jewish self-hatred—the unwillingness to recognize what the enemy is doing to you, because you subscribe partially in your heart to some of the accusations that are made even when those accusations are false...
...Syrkin: As far as I'm concerned, not at all...
...Or take the revival of Yiddish . . . Syrkin: If you take it numerically, it's peanuts...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: Couldn't you have done it on your own...
...But for Jews to be emancipated, part of what is required is for this extraordinary people to have won, among its other rights, the right to be ordinary...
...They go about in Chassidic garb...
...It's the sort of thing we saw in Germany when German Jews would describe themselves as "German citizens of the Mosaic persuasion...
...Syrkin: Jewish self-hatred has reached an overwhelming degree...
...Syrkin: It's a matter of fate...
...And she said, "You know, there was one tailor I approached, and I made it plain that when I asked for money I wasn't asking for five dollars, I was asking for a real sum, and he said to me, 'Well, I'm saving money to bring my wife and child out of Europe.' And I said to him, 'How can you hesitate between that and immediate salvation?' And there was no gainsaying Golda, and the tailor came across with the cost of a ticket...
...They may be explantions, but they're not excuses...
...My father was a very serious Jewish scholar...
...Arafat offers me that standard, or some character in the government of the Soviet Union or some other equally unsavory regime...
...You've both been very deeply involved in Jewish life in this country, and you will both recall how recently it was that the commonly accepted wisdom was that the American Jewish community wouldn't make it, that the process of assimilation would inevitably do us in...
...And that school did pretty well for about as long as the Lehrhaus had done well...
...It was a wonderful investment...
...I was born into Socialist Zionism—the emphasis as much on the socialism as on the Zionism...
...For example, I have met intelligent Jews who think that The Little Drummer Girl, Le Carre's new novel, is a very fair account...
...After all, being pregnant, and giving birth, and raising a child—all that takes so many years out of a person— (/one doesn't know how to handle it...
...The problem is that apparently perceptive Jews fall for it...
...Isn't it so that if we stop expecting more of ourselves, we lose a very central defining characteristic of our people...
...When I argue with my friends, I tell them, "You don't have to tell me to keep my family name...
...We have certainly been an extraordinary people...
...And then, shortly after, I started going to Hebrew school, which was also with boys and girls together, and I had a wonderful teacher, Yosef Yoel Rivlin, who encouraged us and was a motivating teacher...
...But between what I want and what is possible, there's a vast difference...
...And you find yourself congratulating him because the grandson is marrying a Jew...
...But you can't escape the question of how large that is within the whole body of American Jewry...
...My son the rosh yeshiva...
...I suspect this is one argument we shan't settle here...
...Blessed is the match...
...But take the number of Jewish books being published by general publishers—and there are readers for those books...
...Syrkin: No, it doesn't go out...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: Oh, wonderful, perhaps you can tell me how to keep an ailing magazine alive...
...Also he didn't make enough...
...I see no point in rehashing the whole argument about the rights of the Palestinians and the rights of the Jews and how the Palestinians were abused and deliberately developed as a casus belli by the Arab states...
...At a time when I was very receptive to languages—for instance, when we travelled, when I was six, seven, eight years old, in France he taught me French, in Germany, German—Papa was always getting exiled, so we travelled a lot—in Russia I learned to read Russian...
...But I have studied Jewish history, and there is a certain lesson in Jewish history, that only those whom you and I call Orthodox are truly concerned about Jewish learning...
...That seems to me a very tragic development of the women's movement...
...And what I'm saying is really banal...
...To me, our notes, our melody has something to do—so our history teaches, and I believe in that history— with an ongoing social revolution, with ethics and ideals that come to us from the Exodus, the first social revolution in all history...
...Avery civilized, luxurious women's gallery, with a dressing room to leave your coat and a beadle in a splendid uniform...
...the same experience, even though I grew up in an entirely different environment...
...I don't believe that to espouse certain rights for the Palestinians is necessarily to engage in self-hatred...
...Do you sometimes have the feeling that we lose some of the best talents of our people, that there is a kind of self-hatred that depletes our strength...
...Let's shift...
...However, if I had taken off four or five years to take care of him myself, I would really have suffered major professional damage...
...But to attempt to make of this that she ignored reality, without taking into account how the names were used . . . Weiss-Rosmarin: I accept that...
...I should have gone at 20...
...Syrkin: Yes, they are destiny...
...And then I'd add, "If you want the delight of having a child, don't assume that you can do it cheaply...
...Syrkin: We are a people with many melodies and many instruments...
...You can quote me—that's what I would want...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: But it's not just in Boro Park...
...Does any of this bear on the problem of measuring Israel by a double standard...
...How conscious were you, in the early years, of how unusual you were, and of skeptical reaction by the male community...
...I think it depends very much on where you take your statistics...
...Weiss-Rosmarin earned her doctorate at the age of 22...
...Ben-Gurion not, I'll say that for him...
...I'm not going to go into that whole subject...
...But by and large I came to the notion that the goals of male and female should be equal quite naturally...
...But I, in those days, approached the problem from the point of view of education...
...But the excuses don't excuse...
...If you ask me how I feel, emotionally, I would want Israel to extend from the Euphrates to the Nile...
...And then one realizes that it's just a small match, here and there—and that's what it's essentially been all along in Jewish history, I suppose...
...The Arabs whom she encountered did not view themselves as Palestinians...
...There is a movement from the suburb to the shtetl...
...I wasn't paid for the whole 35 years of my editorship...
...And, whatever the difficulties that beset Israel today, I still believe that Zionism and the reality of a Jewish state are the chief forces making for Jewish spiritual and physical survival in this secular age...
...I don't consider that a compliment...
...I was nine years old then, and I came into Blau-Weiss the way people today are coming into the cults...
...And I was a good pupil, so I didn't feel any discrimination...
...she has been called "the most Jewishly learned woman in the world...
...Syrkin: I accept that view of Jewish history which holds that we have a mission, a purpose, and that's why we survived...
...Yiddish has become fashionable, which may be the best indication of how little a threat it represents, of how tiny and weak it has become...
...But in theory, in evaluating the results of it all, if a young woman who wants a child were to ask me for advice, were to ask whether she should rush right out and have it, I'd say, "Good, have it when you're young, don't wait until you're 30 because you probably won't get pregnant right away, and who knows what kind of a child you'll produce if you wait until you're 40...
...So many of the children and grandchildren of people in my circle are marrying "out of the faith," as it is known, with the usual assurances that it won't make any difference...
...I said to myself that just as I had had to get a good Jewish education, with Gemara and Rashi and everything, so should other Jewish women get the same thing...
...I know that Golda said she had never heard of Palestinians . . . Syrkin: I have to interrupt...
...Syrkin: Yes, from Ben-Gurion to Begin...
...And while I was being raised, the notion that there was any important sexual differentiation was taboo...
...So that's one thing I have against my father...
...Weiss-Rosmarin is a distinguished scholar, whose articles and editorials have dealt with a staggeringly diverse range of subjects, from Masada to the Jewish Agency, from the status of Jewish women to the role of Jewish literature...
...So on the day when it finally expired, and Papa could go back to writing for The Day, which paid him $50 a week, that was a cause for celebration...
...Might they not say, "What kind of an intellectual are you, that you want a baby...
...And it seems to me that too many of us do not recognize that...
...As so many of us say, that would totally destroy the democratic and the Jewish character of the Jewish state, so I totally oppose it...
...I used to pray for the demise of Di Zeit, because there was no question of Papa leaving it as long as it had a breath of life in it...
...Syrkin: I agree...
...So I abandoned my thoughts of a PhD...
...And The Spectator...
...There was an afternoon meeting at the home of one of my friends, who invited me to join and come—they used to talk about "spearing" new members—and I came, and there was hora (lancing which I'd never seen before, and singing of Zionist songs, boys and girls together...
...But you see, it's "blessed is the match...
...but what does it really amount to...
...The Lehrhaus began in 1920 and it closed in 1926...
...I'm ashamed that I didn't make aliyah...
...You know, when I was a child, a teenager, he would periodically get the feeling that he was neglecting me and he would take over my instruction...
...And also in the secular circles...
...Freud, for example, coined the phrase, "Biology is destiny...
...And I doubt very much that it really describes the important trends of the community...
...I did that because of the problem that Jewish women were being shortchanged by not getting a substantial Jewish education, and I wanted to remedy that on the adult level...
...I talked with him about how when Sharett had been arrested by the British she'd taken over, and Greenberg's reply was, "Golda...
...That's certainly a monumental decline...
...A child is a wonderful thing, but one should not sacrifice . . . Syrkin: You have to sacrifice . . . Weiss-Rosmarin: Yes, sacrifice, but a man won't give up his essential personality for the sake of his child . . . Syrkin: That's true, and that's a very basic difference...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: I really wanted to make aliyah, so I left school when I was 15 and went to join a hachsharah, a training farm for agricultural life in Palestine...
...Here and there, perhaps, a few thousands...
...years ago, it must have been 50 or 60 years ago, it was in a bad way, in a critical condition...
...And my parents didn't want to pay for the tutor I needed...
...And it's a dangerous folly, which women will regret...
...One meets one's friend and says, "My grandson is getting married, and would you believe it, it's a Jewish girl...
...After he was born, there was of course the problem of who was going to take care of him...
...he's a rosh yeshiva in Israel, he's writing a commentary on the Babylonian Talmud...
...Weiss-Rosmarin lives in Santa Monica, California, and continues to travel extensively in connection with her work...
...you surely know what she meant...
...We are an extraordinarily resilient people...
...So I really worked in order to support a maid and a nursemaid...
...With all the blind alleys along the way, the flame doesn't go out...
...Her writings and frequent lectures around the country have stimulated communal debate for many decades...
...Syrkin: I was not able to take off four or five years, because of the circumstances of my life, but in retrospect, I would say that a woman owes four or five years to her child...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: "Emancipation" to me means only to have equal civil rights...
...For example, we have about 300 colleges and universities that teach Judaic studies—some more, some less, some better, some worse...
...Are you surprised by the vitality you witness today...
...That's no longer just the Orthodox community we're talking about...
...I quite agree that the demographic character of the West Bank would make its incorporation into Israel a great folly, a great injustice to Israel quite as much as to the Arabs...
...And Boro Park has satellites, new high rise buildings in Riverdale and elsewhere that weren't there eight years ago...
...I don't think I came to any specific political awareness of women's rights, because I was born into what was called a "radical environment...
...At the time, in the 20s, when I would have considered getting a PhD, which back then was essential for an academic career, my feeling was that I would not be able to pursue that kind of career with a baby...
...There's a return to tradition among the young...
...note: #!*@#!] You need a core of devoted people to bring the magazine out, and a core of devoted readers to keep it going...
...It's also in Scran ton, and in Denver—and those families are having seven or eight children each...
...There is a tremendous efflorescence of scholarship...
...And I still don't know whether staying then, and missing the opportunity to write that book would have been more productive—although it probably would have shown that I'm a nicer person...
...And that was that...
...I can disagree with an ideological member of Gush Emunim who sees biblical patrimony that he must act on—but when I read of a real estate boom on the West Bank, fueled by speculators for no other reason than to make money, I am shocked...
...And strictly from personal observation—in which, incidentally, I put great stock—it seems quite clear that the data are correct...
...That's an absurdity...
...My father was almost wild...
...Syrkin: Yes, and in this I confess I am a sinner, I am guilty, I'm a reprobate...
...Sharett was distinctly negative...
...I remember, for example, when I was collecting material for my book on Jewish resistance, Blessed is the Match, in Palestine in 1945, Golda said to me, "Why don't you stay...
...When one speaks of Israel, if one is really honest, the problem is this: Look at the small group of wonderful individuals who started the American democracy...
...In my eyes, that's a form of discrimination under the guise of a compliment...
...the chaverim, the Labor Zionists, of course stripped themselves...
...The thing has gone to such extremes—the notion, for example, that lesbianism is not merely a possible life-style, but is actually perhaps even a desirable life-style...
...To demand more of a martyred people...
...Vfery fine speaker, lovely woman...
...There were, then, certain paradoxes in this kind of upbringing...
...Where else have you seen that a nation that lost its country 2,000 years ago continued to insist over the two millenia that it is homeless, that "over there" is its home and one day we shall go there...
...So let's drop the matter of names...
...And, curiously, it is sometimes totally unaware of itself...
...It took a different kind of character...
...And we can't always be expected to be the first violins...
...I'm very dubious as to how that can be arranged, but I mean that one can't have everything...
...Why did she say that...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: You were very fortunate in your upbringing...
...Syrkin: My son is a physicist...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: I had more or less Marie Syrkin, born in 1899, has long been the dean of American Labor Zionism...
...And I don't share your pessimism regarding the American Jewish community or the world Jewish community...
...And Papa sat at the meeting, and he looked very grave, and finally he spoke: "There is only one solution," said he...
...But look at the scholarship that grows and thrives in America...
...But when I became interested in writing about Golda, an idea I had in the 50s, when she was Minister of Labor, before she became famous—that's my pride, that I didn't wait until she became the ultimate celebrity—I went to various individuals, and I noticed there was a real male feeling about the idea...
...But now you're changing the terms of the argument...
...Now there are many amongst us—and, incidentally, this also goes for myself—who see that the Palestinians have a very legitimate case...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: I would like to take issue with a bit of what Marie has said...
...I literally had only two dresses, because all that I earned went to provide proper care for the kid...
...And not a car moves there on the Shabbat...
...Why can't one simply say, "This is one kind of destiny, that is another...
...But I resent it profoundly when Mr...
...Of particular pain to me of course is the situation in Israel, where the marvelous hopes—perhaps the foolishly marvelous hopes—of the pioneer generation and of those that I knew of the Second Aliyah and the Third Aliyah—that all that has come to such a very sorry pass...
...I've known too many people who did make aliyah, and under the most difficult circumstances...
...I suppose that everyone would agree, however, that whatever one has contributed, a child is the best contribution...
...So—in those days, at the age of 15 or 16, we were already responsible people, capable of doing things—I took a job in a nearby town as director of a Hebrew language school, where I was really the only faculty member as well, and earned money with which I paid for my own tutor, and I took the final exam a year ahead of my class...
...Miss Syrkin taught in the English Department of Brandeis University, and now lives in Santa Monica, California...
...Another generation and they will be gone...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: I would use a different image...
...The farm was near Berlin, but it didn't agree with me, and I got pneumonia, which in those days was a difficult illness...
...But that he didn't teach me Hebrew was a serious loss...
...And the doctor said, "You're not physcally fit for that kind of life...
...Now when a woman who has spent her most active years in a struggle in which the opponent calls himself an Arab, an Arab nationalist, but rejects the definition of himself as a Palestinian, and the term is only the prerogative of the Jews she knows, she's perfectly justified in saying, "Who are these Palestinians...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: Yes, but unless we had thought ourselves an exceptional people, a people charged with a mission, a task, whatever you want to call it, we wouldn't be in Israel today...
...Syrkin: That's splendid, but it should be a dream, it should be a hope, a goal, it should not be the sine qua non by which you justify your existence, unless it becomes your existence, unless it becomes the sine qua non for every other group...
...Can't any revolutionary social movement be caricatured by focusing on its extremes...
...I read it because it is a number one best-seller, so I thought it important to read...
...However, Rabbi Nehemiah Noble, a very charismatic personality, who was the teacher of Rosenzweig and of Ernst Simon, when he would give the sermon, which I was too young to understand—I understood the choir, with enthusiasm—and I wanted to get a view of him, I would go down to the first row, and invariably the beadle would yank me back...
...She is a link to the famed Freie Jiidische Lehrhaus of Frankfurt, founded by Franz Rosenzweig, with whom she studied...
...When she came to Palestine, she was a Palestinian...
...And they had a Central Committee which had on it Papa and a few other such luminaries, and they had a meeting to decide what to do, how to rescue the magazine...
...In fact they rejected the term, they insisted there was only southern Syria...
...I've not read Le Carre\ but I have read the reviews, and I understand that he takes very much the case of the Palestinians...
...Syrkin: I came in 1908, at the age of nine, so I was really raised here...
...It would have seemed a very backward trend to me when I was young, something primitive...
...But I can't say that salvation lies in Williamsburg and such...
...While 1 perfectly agree that physiological differences imply psychological differences, they are hardly "destiny...
...She and my father met at a Zionist Congress in Switzerland, where both of them were studying medicine...
...And then I became a little dubious as to whether I had a right to this pleasure...
...A match is such a small thing...
...She was, as well, one of Golda Meir's closest friends...
...I established the School of the Jewish Woman in New York, which was modeled—a poor model, of course—on Rosenzweig's Freie Jiidische Lehrhaus...
...It's maddening...
...And the passion with which these people raised funds...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: In 1931...
...And Golda said to me, 50 years later, "I often wonder what happened to the chaver and his wife and his child...
...We are this people that covenants itself to a special code of goodness or ethics, and consequently we expect of ourselves and others expect of us that we live up to the idea of being a goy kadosh, a special people...
...That's to pull off their nails and then demand that they be manicured...
...I mean that what we have today is a very far cry from what had been hoped and desired, and, what is worse, we see not merely failures of achievement in Israel in this regard—such failures can be explained by outward conditions— but we see a change in the desires...
...Weiss-Rosmarin: . . . which is still a very good magazine . . . Syrkin...
...Again, in subsequent years, one begins to question all these things...
...Haven't we thought all along that we are special...
...And people have as many children as God gives them...
...What's happening there is, at best, picturesque...
...The attempt to ignore the connection between biology and psychology is a falsification of something very profound and very basic...
...other psychologists as well, to this day, place value judgments on the physiological differences...
...Do you regret not making aliyah, not living in Israel...
...I've always used my name, through several marriages, strange as that may appear...
...After all, how many Zionists were there at the time of the First Zionist Congress in 1897...
...I may not have achieved that equality, but personally I felt no discrimination...
...Back in 1936, wasn't it, Dr...
...When I think of how I was raised, of how acute was the notion of total erasure of male-female difference...
...There exists a peculiar form of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews and in which Jews participate, namely, a demand that the Jews be holier than any other people...
...According to the Zionism in which I was brought up, this was going to be an ideal world for all mankind in which the Jews would play a leading role, because—from my father I had the notion—it is their function, arising from the prophetic tradition, to create and help shape an ideal society...
...To suggest that environment is significant, but to consider that the really organic environment, which is what you are yourself in your body, is not significant in the differences it may make in your reactions, is such a folly...
...Syrkin: If you want to hear a story about that, I have a story for you...
...There was one exception...
...You mean the Zionist movement, in which you were so active, was that far advanced...
...Rosen-zweig wasn't surprised...
...And that was that, so far as he was concerned...
...Syrkin: Now I have to make a correction, because I don't want to be on record as agreeing that emotionally I want Israel to extend from the Nile to the Euphrates...
...Politics is the art of the possible...
...And by the time I was ready, it was really too late...
...The values change...
...Weiss-Rosmarin, when you wrote your first article on women . . . Weiss-Rosmarin: It wasn't exactly on women...
...And I remember that Golda told me, not so many years ago, "I have one thing on my conscience...
...Syrkin: I'd like to add something...
...I have only one son—and being pregnant and giving birth to him, I didn't permit myself to interrupt my professional schedule...
...He did not teach me Hebrew at an age when I could have learned it...
...You know, there was a time when if you were reading a Yiddish newspaper, you'd fold it inside your English newspaper so no one would see...
Vol. 8 • September 1983 • No. 8
