Antisemitism and the American Far Left Stephen H

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03601-7 - Antisemitism and the American Far Left Stephen H. Norwood Frontmatter More information

Antisemitism and the American Far Left

Stephen H. Norwood has written the fi rst systematic study of the American far left’s role in both propagating and combating antisemitism. This book covers Communists from 1920 onward, Trotskyists, the New Left and its black nationalist allies, and the contemporary remnants of the New Left. Professor Norwood analyzes the defi ciencies of the American far left’s explanations of Nazism and the Holocaust. He explores far left approaches to militant Islam, from condemnation of its fi erce antisemitism in the 1930s to recent apologies for jihad. Norwood discusses the far left’s use of long-standing theological and economic antisemitic stereotypes that the far right also embraced. The study analyzes the far left’s antipathy to Jewish culture, as well as its occasional efforts to promote it. He considers how early Marxist and Bolshevik paradigms continued to shape American far left views of Jewish identity, Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism.

Stephen H. Norwood (PhD, Columbia University) is Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of fi ve books on American history, including The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower (Cambridge 2009), which was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Studies. He coedited the Encyclopedia of American Jewish History (2008, with Eunice G. Pollack), which won Booklist’s Editor’s Choice Award.

Antisemitism and the American Far Left

STEPHEN H. NORWOOD Professor of History and Judaic Studies University of Oklahoma

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107657007 © Stephen H. Norwood 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-107-03601-7 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-65700-7 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Eunice G. Pollack

Contents

Photos page ix

1 Promoting a Socialism of Fools: The New Left’s Debt to the Old Left 1 2 American Communists’ Tangled Responses to Antisemitism and Nazism, 1920–1939 22 3 World War II: The Limits of American Far Left Concern for European Jewry 50 4 Abandoning Assimilation: Communist Resistance to Antisemitism and Celebration of Jewish Culture in the Immediate Postwar Period 84 5 “Two, Four, Six, Eight, We Demand a Jewish State”: Communist Support for Partition and the Jewish War of Liberation, 1947–1948 116 6 “Fiends in Human Form”: Taking Conspiratorial Antisemitism to a New Level 146 7 The Jewish Question Discarded: Far Left Hostility to Jews and Israel, 1956–1973 171 8 Shaping the Next Generations: The Persistence of Far Left Antisemitism, 1973–2012 208

Notes 241 Bibliography 289 Index 303

vii

Photos

1 SNCC antisemitic drawing. page 3 2 A synagogue in Hebron desecrated by Arabs during the 1929 Palestine pogroms. The pogromists smashed furniture and tore up sacred books. 28 3 Jews fl eeing the Old City, Jerusalem, during the 1929 Palestine pogroms. 28 4 Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov shaking hands with Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop is to the left of Molotov; Dr. Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, is to the right of Himmler. 51 5 Arthur Koestler. 62 6 American Peace Mobilization “No Convoys” rally, May 16, 1941. 64 7 A demonstration against New York Daily News antisemitism. 88 8 A Communist-sponsored picket line protesting the German Exposition, New York City, April 1949. 95 9 A Communist-sponsored picket line at the German Exposition, New York City, April 1949. 96 10 A demonstration at Globe Theatre, New York City, against showing the movie Desert Fox . 98 11 Morris Schappes in court. 107 12 State assemblyman Leo Isacson and New York City councilman Michael J. Quill, president of the Transport Workers Union, CIO, picketing the British consulate in New York City, June 24, 1946. The demonstration was sponsored by the Communist-led International Workers Order as the Communists moved toward supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. 119

x Photos

13 Some of the more than 4,500 passengers the British seized from the Exodus 1947 as it sailed to Palestine, in the hold of the British transport Runnymede Park on its arrival at Port de Bouc, France, August 22, 1947. 123 14 Jews confi ned behind barbed wire in a Cyprus detention camp, March 16, 1947. An armed British soldier in the watchtower guards the Jews. The British had denied the Jews admission into Palestine and deported them to Cyprus. They had been held in the camp since August 1946. 125 15 A campaign rally for Leo Isacson, denouncing President Truman’s “double-cross” of Israel, 1948. 126 16 A Leo Isacson campaign poster, urging sending of arms to Haganah, 1948. 127 17 Henry Wallace with Jewish youth in Palestine, 1947. 132 18 Itzik Feffer, Eddie Cantor, and Solomon Mikhoels, 1943. 147 19 L á szl ó Rajk in the dock. 153 20 Muslim women in Tashkent, Soviet Central Asia. 227