Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America

Michael Staub has presented a somewhat unusual book at divisions within American Jews from the fifties to the mid-seventies. His book does not possess a formal conclusion, but consists of eight chapters and an introduction. The first looks at the struggle between communists and anti-communists and how they argued over the Holocaust and American racism. The next two discuss the growing divisions within American over civil rights, and the fourth looks at divisions over the Vietnam war. The fifth looks again at civil rights, the sixth looks at the rise of Radical Zionism, the seventh looks at debates over family and sexuality and the eighth looks at the brief life of the pro-peace group Breira. Staub concentrates on especially Jewish movements: non-Jewish organs such as Partisan Review or The New York Review of Books get little or no mention. The participants are often theologians and members of explicitly Jewish groups. Novelists such as Bellow, Malamud, Mailer or Singer get no mention, while Philip Roth is mentioned only in passing. This appears to me as a mistake, since these writers obviously have a lot to say about Jewish-black and Jewish-feminist relationships, the topic of his book. Moreover they strike me as far more influential and important than the theological debates and the small groups such as Jews for Urban Justice, the Radical Jewish Union, the Jewish Liberation Project, or even The Jewish Defence League that Staub concentrates on.Notwithstanding these eccentricities, Staub has still produced an interesting book. Staub?s sympathies are clearly with those who tried to combine their Judaism with support for left-wing activism. He writes of those minority of Jews who were active supporters of civil rights who invoked traditions of ?prophetic Judaism? to emphasize justice for all humanity. He is sympathetic to those who seek to support a just peace via a two state solution in Palestine. He points out those Jews who sought to revive Judaism by supporting and incorporating the demands of feminists and homosexuals. He writes of those Radical Zionist groups who also strongly opposed the Vietnamese war and those groups who incorporated the style and arguments of the Black Panthers for Jewish purposes. (He prints a cartoon where a Black Panther is disgusted by one Jew?s lack of enthusiasm for Zionism.) He also discusses the widespread spread of Holocaust consciousness among Jewish spokespeople at the time. This is in fact a bit of a problem since the use of Holocaust tropes, such as the ?passivity? of the victims, the ?passivity? of the outside world, the ?treason? of the Judenrat and others by all sides against all sides does have the effect of making the participants look more than a little hysterical and paranoid. Staub produces enough bad Holocaust analogies to drive Peter Novick and Raoul Hilberg to despair. A reform rabbi in the seventies states Hitler will have won if Jewish couples do not have four children each by