HER RED FATHER Significance to Jewish Culture

Her Red Father follows the political career of a Southern Jewish lawyer, radicalized by the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties. Under the auspices of the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense Bernard Ades engages the systemic legal racism in , has some success and is also made a pariah for his efforts. He then confronts , fighting in . He returns to the US to blacklisting and years of relentless and fruitless FBI surveillance. In all three phases Bernard Ades can be seen as one of many in his generation: secular and in thrall to the ideals of socialism, involved in the issues of nationalism but not necessarily for his own people, and passionately committed to seeking justice.

Moreover. the issues of those times, imaginary and real threats from abroad, endless and unfocused surveillance, as well as demonization of unpopular political groups and national or religious minorities, and a lack of substantive, effective responses, these are issues now too.

Several of these historical events mattered to Jews and Jewish history, directly and obliquely. Reactions to the problems of capitalism were often nationalistic and thusly exclusive and also socialistic. Within the Zionist movement this was expressed in the hope for a homeland and the foundation of the Kibbutzim. In Europe both the Communists and the fascists advocated socialism and the social democrats were committed to it as in Scandinavia. But in the meantime in the 1930s the totalitarian, nationalistic and anti-Semitic currents forced many, and disproportionately Jews, into exile.

An early military confrontation occurs in Spain where many of the exiles including many Jews fight to stop the fascist takeover of that nascent democracy. Those Jewish and other European exiles who opposed Franco fled to southern France where they formed the corps and locus of the first French resistance. (See Helen Graham’s The , A very Short Introduction, 2005 , Oxford University Press.) That Jews were passive in the face of fascism is belied.

Returning to the US Ades is asked to surrender his passport, is forced out of his government job and spends his later years as an accountant for the CPUSA. He is targeted both publicly and surreptitiously by the FBI. During the war years and the US alliance with the USSR no critical eye is cast on the Soviet Union which bears the larger share of the fighting, the Nazi occupation, the population of Jews, and an internationally prominent Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Bernard Ades and his family live in an all Jewish enclave where the lingua franca is Yiddish and people contribute to the Russian War Relief.

Following the war, in the US the anti Communist campaign builds. Soviet agents are sought and identified, Hiss serves five years in prison and a Jewish couple, the Rosenbergs, are executed. With the “Red Scare” many Hollywood Jews with left backgrounds such as Lillian Hellman and Zero Mostel were fingered and faulted. Professionals. lawyers were also badly affected. (see Ellen Shrecker, Many Are the Crimes, Little Brown & Co. 1998). Bernard Ades is blacklisted and we follow his loss of income and then his years on unrelenting surveillance.

Ades' history exemplifies that of a segment of the Jewish Community (including notably Leonard Boudin. Bella Abzug, and William Kunstler ) which turned to secular, non-nationalist left wing political activity in the twentieth century.

The story sheds light on a period in American and world history and lends a fresh perspective assesses a part of the twentieth century: the ideals of economic justice, of egalitarian opportunity are salient today; the government’s role, the quandry about surveillance, what data is needed , significant or even of use is still unanswered; the over zealous loyalty to the USSR or any non-democratic leader and where that path leads is a constant international dilemna. The historical issues are recurrent and the present time is a last opportunity to see how that generation experienced their history and interpreted its political failures and achievements.