Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR SOVIET JEWS I read with interest Jacques Katel's letter and Max Geltman's answer ("Dear Editor." NL, June 8), about Trotsky's reception of the delegation of Jews who visited him...
...So was Engels...
...If anti-Semitic expressions make an antiSemite, Marx was an anti-Semite...
...The most important political event before Trotsky's death was undoubtedly the rise of Fascism...
...To look back at these phenomena would be painful for any decent person of normal taste in the middle of the 20th century, even if we did not have the memories of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen...
...Why pull wool over our eyes...
...Descendants of a people who gave to Western man the vision of the One God, who gave him the Book, the Sabbath, prayer, the inviolable dignity of the individual...
...To state, as Raman does, that this is drawing the lines of debate between private investment and foreign aid "most sharply" is obviously incorrect...
...The Jewish intellectual life which centered about this magazine, which sparkled in our apartment when the elite of Jewish literature and art and scholarship from two continents gathered for teas or dinners — this intellectual life was as far removed from the spurious "Jewish intellectual subculture" of your writers as are mature adults from sniggering schoolboys...
...to permit—in a totalitarian country, where nothing can be published without government consent—an anti-Semitic attack such as Judaism without Embellishment in the second half of the 20th century, two decades after Auschwitz, is something quite different...
...a world in which the characters are aberrations, grotesque puppets jerked this way and that to the amusement of their gifted and clever but soulless authors and the giggling approval of their authors' fans...
...Whether Trotsky was anti-Jewish is of little importance...
...But when Sholom Aleichem or Peretz, or Israel Zangwill or Louis Golding wrote of their people, they wrote with compassion and love: They laughed with them, not against them, and above all they recognized and they declared that the schlemiels and gonifs were not the totality of the Jewish people—there were saints among them too...
...March 16...
...You look in vain, also, for some hint of the legacy to which the Jews in America are heir...
...And is there anything fundamentally more anti-Jewish than Marxism itself, since in its functioning it recognizes only factors of economics and class, and frankly proclaims religion to be "the opiate of the people...
...All of these are valid subjects for witty satire and and for serious criticism...
...Washington, D. C. James Louis Robertson Member, Board of Governors Federal Reserve System...
...But where in all this clever, facile writing is there some hint of the decency and self-respect and idealism to which this legacy should give rise...
...Was the man who ordered the shooting of the Kronstadt prisoners and the execution of the entire commanding staff of Makhno's Ukrainian guerrillas, after they had helped him to defeat Wrangel, not also capable of deliberately distorting the truth in order to conceal the real character of his allegedly proletarian revolution...
...I happened to be in Petrograd at the time of this occurrence...
...I believe it would be easy to find anti-Semitic passages in the writing of Fourier and Proudhon, although I have no references at hand...
...And when they are pictured today, in the Ukrainian hate book, Judaism Without Embellishment, as cheats and hypocrites and greedy materialists, again no one is surprised...
...Surely the Jews in America are, if no better than their Christian compatriots, at least no worse...
...Indeed, there is something distastefully juvenile about the whole exercise epitomized by Hyman's review...
...This hostility is based largely on a mythology which misinterprets economics...
...What was Trotsky's analysis of this phenomenon...
...I like a good laugh and am not unhealthily defensive about being Jewish...
...Hook may be right of course...
...So why couldn't Trotsky be one too...
...A symbol bound up with the words thundered from the firmament, Yehee Or—"Let there be light...
...What is the compulsion that leads writers like Markfield and Hyman to see Judaism only as an object of contempt and burlesque, and Jews only as rogues and comics to be mocked and caricatured...
...I don't recognize in his characterization any Jewish intellectual woman I have ever known, least of all the one who bore me...
...NL, June 8), about Trotsky's reception of the delegation of Jews who visited him with p. petition...
...We can hope that over time more of the less developed countries will acquire a better comprehension of the advantages of foreign private equity investment...
...One need only reread Trotsky's writings on the German events which culminated in Hitler's victory to realize how prescient they were...
...HYMÄN AND MARKFIELD I am surprised to find that The New Leader would, first, print so gleeful and sophomoric a piece as Stanley Edgar Hyman's review of Wallace Markfield's To an Early Grave (NL, May 25), and, second, imply that this was a true portrait of American Jewry by permitting it to be entitled "Jewish, All Too Jewish...
...Raman has misconstrued my position, with respect to loans versus equity investment in the international movement of capital, by wrenching three sentences from their context...
...It is with almost embarrassing relish that he rehearses the dirty jokes of his admired author—jokes which, to use his term, "broke him up...
...Trotsky was of course unwilling to admit that Fascism represented a camouflaged version of anti-capitalism, not unlike the pseudo-proletarian anti-capitalism of the Communists...
...viously had in mind Lenin's partner in greatness, also—the incomparable orator and man of action, but for whose invaluable assistance to the Father of Boleshevism the revolution would not have succeeded...
...But even though it is based on a misunderstanding, it is a fact of life which we cannot will away...
...Napoleon Bonaparte, who likewise was defeated by men inferior to him in every respect...
...Where he went astray in his predictions, as in France, it was largely due to his revolutionary optimism...
...Nowhere...
...Now let it be said that the Jews are not all paragons and angels...
...Besides, time is of the essence...
...A symbol more ancient than the cross, and to sensitive Jews easily as sacred as the cross is to Christians...
...If your reviewer is thinking of the women in his own "intellectual" circle, let him say so...
...But we do have these memories...
...I think The New Leader should recognìze that it has affronted the Jews of America by printing this kind of review...
...flesh and blood, and writers before the present crop wrote with gusto and humor of the schlentiels and schnorrers, the rascals and sinners among them...
...And never did he look more like a Jew than when he donned his military uniform...
...In the August 1934 issue of The New International, p. 38, he called Fascism "the government of finance capital because every non-proletarian government is forced to serve finance capital...
...In other words, the Fascists who, as Salvemini puts it in his Under the Axe of Fascism, "had almost without exception come from the intellectual lower middle classes," were slowly expropriating the profits of the capitalists while leaving them nominally in the legal possession of their property...
...What, indeed, does this new breed of writer, now all the rage, portray as "Jewish, all too Jewish...
...May 25...
...Hook illustrated this statement by quoting Trotsky's letter to Preobrazhensky in which he (Trotsky) says that "had Lenin not managed to come to Petrograd in April 1917, the October Revolution would not have taken place...
...I regret that Raman made this interpretation and ignored the more important point which I made...
...There is vulgarity to be found in American Jewish life, and it should be kidded and satirized and even chastised...
...In the meantime we should . . . try to find ways in which we can transfer to equity investment some of the capital flow to the less developed countries that is now in the form of official loans...
...but it does make sense to blame Hitler and Mussolini for having wrecked the League of Nations and to criticize the Birchers for wanting to dismantle the United Nations...
...I do not know precisely what passed between Trotsky and the delegation...
...Is this all there is to Judaism and to Jews...
...There is no smoke without fire...
...Permit me to cite a few sentences which preceded and followed those quoted by Raman to demonstrate that I have no illusions about the possibility of placing all international capital flows to the less developed countries on an equity basis...
...After all, we judge people by the doctrines which they intended to put into operation...
...The transition of the Jews from ghetto existence to at least formal equality was bound to create frictions of all sorts, including a good deal of Jewish self-hatred...
...But I do know that there was common talk in Petrograd at the time about the insultinghumiliating reception the delegation received, and the dejected mood in which it returned...
...But to move it to stage center, and throw in obscenity and promiscuity and all the other smut, and say "This is Judaism in America"—that is the dishonesty of these writers today, and you are party to it...
...Is there not some redeeming feature of grace or beauty or dignity to offset the tawdry prospect...
...has recently come to my attention...
...It does not make sense to blame the Mohammedan and Christian nations for waging long wars over religious and trade questions between the 11th and 13th centuries, instead of settling these questions by international conciliation or arbitration...
...But how much does all that prove...
...Reminds one somehow of simpering little boys in grade school who go into the rest room to giggle and slap their knees over some little bit of smut...
...But it is perhaps more likely that in this case Trotsky's "flair," or non-Marxian insight, was what one might call a "Freudian slip," prompted by his egotism, which was apparently stronger than his Marxian dogmatism...
...he obThe New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...This analysis was certainly "without peer" either in its ignorance or its hypocrisy...
...but the fact is that Karl Marx, as one knows from his little publicized essay, "Emancipation of the Jew" (that is, from himself), was a vile anti-Semite...
...It may be noted that there was for half a century a beautiful New York Jewish intellectual magazine of art and literature and comment called The Menorah Journal, edited by my father and described by Lewis Mumford as a magazine that "makes available an important stream of historic culture and contemporary thought, lacking which there would be a serious blank in the American mind...
...That enabled the Fascist regime to feed an enormous army of upstart office-holders—a social class differing from the Bolshevik counterparts only in the ideological vocabulary with which it justified its privileged status...
...They are, after all...
...In implying that Trotsky "deliberately distorted the truth" to conceal the real character of Fascism, Nomad is also implying that Trotsky understood the nature of Fascism after all...
...Their prophets wrote "Let justice well up as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream," and "Proclaim liberty throughout the land...
...Accurate sociology" according to whom...
...What, in heaven's name, is this "New York Jewish intellectual world" which your authors have concocted, in which women are "insignificant, instrumental housekeeper-bedmates...
...Trotsky's tragic fate was certainly moving —but only to the same extent as was that of another man of genius...
...To that extent Geltman is right...
...New York City John Cournos Just to clear up the "mystery" about Leon Trotsky's statement, "Go home to your Jews, and tell them that I am not a Jew and I care nothing for the Jews and their fate," I should like to point out that, whether true or not, it is found in H. Valentin's book, Anti-Semitism, translated by A. G. Chater and published by Viking in 1936...
...Berkeley, California Carl Landauer TROTSKY AND DEUTSCHER Despite my admiration for the brilliant way in which Sidney Hook dealt with Deutschere crypto-Stalinism ("The Cunning of History," Nl-, May 11), I cannot quite follow him when he writes that "Trotsky, when not in the grip of his unexamined dogmas about historical materialism, had a flair for empirical analysis...
...I am not a rabbi and not a saint or paragon...
...Who are these Jews after all...
...A world of erections at funerals, rashes on penises, middle-aged women knocked down to expose their vaginas, sexual orgies on Yom Kippur, "dirty, tirelessly promiscuous" little fat Jews, and brats screaming "you bastard" at their rabbi...
...their Marxism is neither a cause nor a pretext nor an excuse for their tactics...
...So were quite a few Lassalleans (see the Lassallean leaflets reprinted in Eduard Bernstein, Geschichte de Berliner Arbeiterbewegung...
...But whenever he steeped himself in concrete empirical material he usually managed to break through the constricting bonds of dogma and say something illuminating...
...New York City Max Nomad Sidney Hook replies: Trotsky's interpretation of Fascism as a historical movement was a piece of doctrinaire Bolshevik-Leninism, but his analysis of Fascism as a political movement and of its march to power was something else again...
...This was a warning that the build-up of international debt is dangerous if the borrowers are not developing the capacity to service it...
...And what is this "menorah" which is the excuse for a gibe at Jewish cemeteries...
...Of course Trotsky could never have denied his Jewish origin, for the simple reason that he looked so much like a Jew that he could not have done so without appearing like a fool...
...The statement is reprinted on page seven, column one...
...New York City Moshe Starkman There seems to me something wrong with the discussion among Messrs...
...The picture is all degradation, cheapness, immorality, and your title says to the Christian world "It's too bad Jews are this way, but alas this is exactly the way they are...
...Had he quoted more fully from my remarks, he could not have built up the straw man he wanted to demolish...
...I cannot say that Trotsky was antiSemitic...
...By the same token, to express anti-Semitic feelings in the first part of the 19th century is one thing...
...So he used the same hackneyed clichés about "finance capital" that were employed by his Stalinist rivals...
...It is when Jews are publicly stripped of all selfrespect, all pride, all dignity, when they are indicted wholesale before their Christian fellow Americans as lechers and fornicators and contemptible characters of various kinds, that tears of pain and frustation come to the eyes of one who remembers the fallen, remembers the Jewish lads who died at his side in the War, and remembers his parents...
...New York City David L. Hurwood PRIVATE INVESTMENT The article on "Private Investment vs...
...And that a magazine of your standing should give this libel sanction by allowing it to be termed "Jewish, All Too Jewish" is inexcusable...
...a world of lechery, deceit, materialism and vulgarity, in which half the people behave with the cynicism and immorality supposed lo be the hallmark of the modern sophisticate and the other half are ghetto stereotypes...
...Why must they be specifically Jewish adulterers and sluts—and Jewish pornographers, and Jewish this and that ad nauseam...
...No one was surprised that in the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels Jews were portrayed exclusively as obscene, immoral, repulsive types...
...Nor do I quite agree with Hook when he writes that Trotsky was "without peer" when it came to analyzing contemporary political events...
...The Soviet leaders, or some of them, do not make use of anti-Semitism because they read anti-Semitic phrases in Marx's writings but because they have found it tactically convenient...
...But wit and criticism tempered with some modicum of good will and sense of balance, and recognition that these shortcomings and these vulgarians are not all there is to Jewish life in America...
...At the time when Trotsky wrote this "analysis," real analysts of contemporary events, such as the outstanding Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini, fully realized that the Fascists, at first mercenaries of the capitalists in the struggle against the Socialists and the labor organizations, had, after seizing power, "become their masters' masters...
...Does your reviewer mean to imply that they are not fit for the ears of "you adult squares" but only "us cool kids...
...I confess I find extremely odd Nomad's charge that Trotsky "obviously" had himself in mind when he acknowledged, despite the principles of historical materialism, that but for Lenin there would have been no October...
...Trotsky interpreted history with a ready-made set of categories whose adequacy he never questioned...
...of Joseph L. Baron's A Treasury of Jewish Quotations, published by Crown Publishers in 1956...
...If they delight in writing about adulterers and women of "ready horizontality," can't they just be adulterers and sluts...
...This, in essence, is what I said: International capital movements can play an important role in assisting economic development . . . However, it is essential that money borrowed from abroad be employed in an economically productive manner . . . Parts of the existing or the new production must be diverted to exports in order to earn the foreign exchange with which to service the debts . . . "One way to relate international capital flows more closely to growth in the capacity to service debt is to put them on an equity investment basis . . . The great obstacle to more reliance on this form of capital flow is the hostility toward foreign private investment in many parts of the world...
...Geltman, Pachter and Nomad about the anti-Semitism of Socialists ("Dear Editor," NL...
...The simple fact is, he was an ardent Communist, and in that role had no alternative but to act against Jews...
...Let it be remembered, too, that untold numbers of Jews lived by these precepts and were hated by despots and demagogues because of it— and slaughtered by them...
...Psychological apriorism can be just as misleading as historical apriorism in the quest for truth...
...This point, it seems to me, got a little obscured in the statements of the three critics, whose common error is to overrate the importance of the question of whether we can "whitewash" or must indict Marx of anti-Semitism...
...For when he wrote "Lenin...
...But when a hardly less distorted and biased picture of them is presented in 1964 in America by gifted writers who are not in the pay of a propaganda machine directed to the public humiliation of a people, one is not only surprised but angered...
...Was it mere dogmatic blindness...
...Then there are broad hints of "all too Jewish" indecencies "unfortunately not synopsizable in this family magazine...
...Foreign Aid," by N. Pattabhi Raman (NL...
...I recognize that we have our backsliders, our foibles, and —in some circles—a degree of coarseness and ostentation that makes me wince...
...I have reason to think that the truth is all on Gelt man's side...
...But look in this literary wasteland for the decent, reasonably moral Jew, a Jew of some dignity and self-respect, adjusted to his American life but proud of or at least mindful of his heritage—look for this normal, ordinary, real American Jew and you look in vain...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 13
