Despite Their Support for Israel, the Post-War Climate Would Prove Fatal to Ambijan and Other Jewish Groups Sympathetic to the USSR
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The Gathering Storm: McCarthyism, Cold War, and Decline THE GATHERING STORM: MCCARTHYISM, COLD WAR, AND DECLINE Despite their support for Israel, the post-war climate would prove fatal to Ambijan and other Jewish groups sympathetic to the USSR. The onset of the Cold War led to anti-Communist hysteria and the excesses of McCarthyism. Jewish “progressives” were open to charges of being dupes, if not indeed agents, of the Soviet Union.1 Ambijan became increasingly marginalized in the American Jewish community; much of its work now consisted of trying to discredit the accounts of Soviet anti- Semitism that appeared with increasing frequency in the media. When news of Shloime Mikhoels’ death in January 1948, ostensibly as a result of a traffi c accident, reached the United States, Ambijan meetings were held in his memory. At one memorial evening held in Chicago on February 14, Solomon Jesmer said that this “sudden and untimely loss” would be keenly felt; a recording of the speech Mikhoels had made when in Chicago in 1943 was played at the service. In Seattle, Harry Horowitz wrote that at a meeting of the branch held on February 2, they joined in mourning Mikhoels’ “untimely death.” At the national committee meeting in New York held later that year, Budish spoke of the “grief and distress” the members felt upon hearing the news of this “serious loss.”2 Paul Novick, in the Morgn Frayhayt, in an article entitled “Mikhoels is no More…,” tried to reassure the readership: “If he were still able to tell us something he would say: the [Jewish] people must live!”3 But if Novick suspected something was wrong, he did not elaborate. B.Z. Goldberg received a letter from the JAFC a month after Mikhoels’ death that ended with the plea, “Do not forget about us.”4 He too said nothing. The pro-Soviet movements would for years be unable or unwilling to admit that Mikhoels’ death was a murder engineered by Stalin to signal the start of a major anti- Jewish campaign in the USSR, one that would usher in the “black years” of Soviet Jewry. Others were not so easily fooled. Typical of the increased scrutiny of events in the USSR were two reports on growing anti-Semitism in that country and the deteriorating situation in Birobidzhan, by Drew Middleton and C.L. Sulzberger, respectively, in the New York Times of February 13 and 15, 1948. Middleton reported that little was now being written about Birobidzhan in the general Soviet press. Sulzberger stated that Jews in actual fact comprised less than one-quarter the total population of 100,000 people in Birobidzhan and that the numbers of new settlers were very limited. One of the primary functions of the secret police in Birobidzhan 189 C HAPTER EIGHT was “to prevent disillusioned pioneers from departing.”5 “The American people will not be misled by such fl imsy fabrications,” responded J.M. Budish in the Ambijan newsletter of March 1948. He refuted allegations that the region had “fallen into decay” and that Moscow had “lost interest in the area” with seven pages of predictably impressive statistics concerning population growth and economic development. The city of Birobidzhan, he insisted, had “many fi ne buildings, paved streets, asphalt sidewalks, substantial industries, producers’ cooperatives, nurseries, kindergartens, schools, colleges, theaters, radio broadcasting stations, libraries, bookstore, a beautiful Park of Culture and Rest, a modern railroad station, an airport, two hotels, electric street lights, modern hospital, department stores, mechanized bakery, etc.” The alleged “dilapidation” described in the Times had “no relationship whatever to the actual condition of the thriving and beautiful city,” Budish reassured Ambijan supporters. As for the Soviet government having lost interest in Birobidzhan, Budish asserted that, on the contrary, the USSR “has devoted every effort” to the area’s development. From the beginning, this “very realistic project” was intended to enable the Soviet Jews to develop a state of their own within the "multi-national structure of the Soviet Union.” Budish insisted that the development of Birobidzhan had been carried out “with a greater measure of success than history records for any similar colonization project.” Budish rejected the possibility that in European areas of the USSR, “the anti-Semitism engendered during the war has not died out,” which the Sulzberger article had offered as perhaps the main reason some Jews might wish to move to the far east. There was no anti-Semitism in the USSR, Budish asserted, as could be demonstrated by the fact that Ambijan members “receive hundreds of letters from their relatives and friends in the Soviet Union” and there was no reference in such letters “to any anti-Semitism whatever.” Budish also noted that B.Z. Goldberg had spent several months in the Soviet Union in 1946, visiting most of the centers of Jewish population, and had concluded that there was no anti-Semitism in the country. Clearly, the Times articles were “products of a biased and malicious imagination” designed to “mislead public opinion” and “sow enmity between this country and the U.S.S.R.”6 Goldberg was himself quoted in the Times as saying that the Soviet Union was “the only country on earth where the Jew does feel really free and equal, on a par with all other people in his country.” As for Birobidzhan, it was “a growing land, resembling in many respects the American Northwest during the days of our pioneers.”7 Goldberg told an interviewer from the National Council of American- 190 The Gathering Storm: McCarthyism, Cold War, and Decline Soviet Friendship that he had travelled throughout the Soviet Union, meeting with members of Jewish communities, and had heard no complaints of anti-Semitism “or of discrimination against Jews in any fi eld whatever,” including the military and diplomatic services. He had also met, in Moscow, with Moishe Silberstein and Alexander Bakhmutsky, respectively chair of the executive committee of the Birobidzhan Soviet and secretary of the region’s Communist Party, who discussed conditions in the JAR. The population of the region, they said, was approximately 160,000, of which about 45-50 per cent was Jewish. Increased Jewish immigration would soon make Jews a majority. Goldberg also was told that a Yiddish state university would soon be established there. And he denied that the secret police prevented disillusioned settlers from leaving. The region was “going through a process of development and civilization similar to that of our northwestern regions before they became states, or that of Alaska today. Pioneers come and go, but the bulk of them remain to develop their new country.” Goldberg added that the Times correspondents had clearly “swallowed whole some of the very stale anti-Soviet propaganda which has been discredited many years ago.”8 Yet while in the Soviet Union in 1946, he had been unable to obtain permission to visit the JAR, which he had last seen 12 years earlier. Upon his return to the U.S., Goldberg had privately written to Fefer and Mikhoels, informing them that this had proved “a handicap” to Ambijan: “No sooner did I arrive when I began to get telephone calls from important leaders of the Ambijan,” worried about the “true situation” in Birobidzhan. “It seems that many of the people around Ambijan do not have the faith in the project that sustained them the years before. I naturally reassured them,” by explaining that there was a ban on travel in the far east for correspondents, “and I expressed my confi dence that by next spring or summer…when the general situation will be more cheerful,” it would be possible for an American delegation to visit Birobidzhan.9 This never materialized, but Goldberg kept any disappointment he may have felt to himself when defending the Soviets in 1948. Moishe Katz also rejected stories of Soviet anti-Semitism; they were, he asserted in Nailebn-New Life, part of a campaign of lies by right-wing organizations against the USSR, a “trick” being used to prepare Jews for war against the Soviet Union. This was nothing new, he suggested: “in the 32 years since the October Revolution, they had tried out every form of libel,” in order to “besmirch the Soviet revolution in the eyes of the world, isolate the Soviet Union and scare away any potential friends.” A common tactic of the right-wingers was to describe the country as a “decaying hell on earth.” 191 C HAPTER EIGHT But there was one thing the enemies of the Soviet Union had been unable to besmirch: its nationality policy, which had liberated all of the peoples in the country and given them equality. “Even those Jews who were prepared to believe the worst things that its enemies said about the Soviet Union, were absolutely certain about one thing: that in the Soviet Union there was no anti-Semitism, and none was possible, as it had been torn out by its roots,” Katz wrote. When it came to protecting the Jewish people, Jews the world over had acknowledged that “the Soviet Union has earned their complete trust.” It was this very Jewish confi dence in the USSR that anti-Soviet elements in the community were now trying to undermine.10 Rabbi Bick weighed in as well, focusing on the attacks against the new people’s democracies. At fi rst, these “naysayers” had declared that it would be impossible for Jews to rebuild their lives and communities in the lands where millions had been killed. But they were now being proven wrong: in Poland, Romania, and elsewhere, a healthy and productive Jewish life had re-emerged. The reactionaries then switched to a different argument, insisting that, despite any evidence to the contrary, Jewish life in these countries would inevitably eventually expire.