Jewish Communist Research Articles

Zakonšpirované Slovensko 1938 – 1945. Niekoľko úvah nad tvárami neviditeľného spiritus movens ľudáckeho režimu

The paradigm of Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (HSĽS) regime, as well as the persecutory measures implemented against fabricated “enemies of the nation” during its reign (October 1938 – April 1945), were based on conspiracy theories. This essay identifies the main ones, pointing out their genesis, intentionality, and ways of operating with them in political practice. The analysis shows that although many conspiracy frames used in wartime Slovakia correlated with narratives in other countries of the fascist Axis, they cannot be considered copypastes of rhetoric popularized mostly by Nazi Germany. The text promotes the idea that the conspiratorial thinking of the HSĽS already formed in the late Habsburg monarchy at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the changes in international politics in the 1930s only had an effect on their firmer establishment in the political culture of the party and political preferences of its supporters. The basis of this conspiratorial thinking was the fear of liberalism, of the threat to the Christian faith and the Slovak nation by a group of highly sophisticated interconnected “pests” with destructive intentions. Until 1918, it primarily included the Marxist left, capitalists, freemasons, and liberals in general, and after the creation of Czechoslovakia, Czechs, and Jews to an increased extent. The essay emphasizes that precisely the argumentation of conspiracy theories (“imperialism of Prague against Slovakia/Slovaks”, “Jewish Bolshevism”) provided the legitimizing platform for the repressive policy of the HSĽS regime and authorized violence against entire groups of the population that did not belong to the “ingroup”.

The Trials of Paul Novick: Israel, Zionism, and the CPUSA

The present study traces the role of veteran Jewish Communist editor Paul Novick, editor of the Morning Freiheit, in CPUSA discussions about Zionism, Israel, the Soviet Union, and anti-Semitism up until the June 1967 Middle East war. It assesses the deterioration of Novick’s status in the CPUSA and the development of conflicts culminating in his expulsion in 1973.

Shades of Red in the GDR: On the Identities of Jewish Communist Exiles after 1945

Discourse on Jewish life in the German Democratic Republic has often offered a clichéd portrayal of a society in which Jewishness was subsumed into the antifascist founding myth of the GDR, leaving Jews as either self-hating (Stalinist) Jews or as citizens forced to deny their Jewish origins. In particular, Cold War narratives have often differentiated between Jewish communists who were in exile in the Soviet Union, and thus seen afterwards as more loyal, and those who were in exile in the West, and thus more likely to be suspected of disloyalty. This paper focuses on non-Soviet exiles and their descendants to explore the diversity of Jewish identity, politics and culture in the GDR, ranging from assimilationist communist identity to explicit engagement with Jewish traditions and even the Jewish religion. Surveying through the generations from pre-Nazi communist activism to the GDR-born children of such activists, it finds a diversity that belies monochrome portrayals of GDR life, while also establishing that, far from being mere passive instruments in the service of an SED-led (neo-)Stalinist society, Jews in the GDR were agents in the establishing of their own multi-faceted identities.

A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein

Reviewed by: Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein Marni Davis Allison E. Schottenstein. Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2021. 415 pp. During the postwar era, a significant proportion of whites who participated in civil rights actions and organizations were American Jews of European descent. This phenomenon has given rise to popular assumptions of a civil rights–era political alliance—a “golden age” of Black-Jewish relations, inspired by a shared history of marginalization and common liberal political leanings. But such notions beg for closer and more critical examination. The history of interactions between Blacks and Jews in the United States has been shaped by immense socioeconomic disparities that have influenced their conceptions of one another, often generating tensions between them, since the abolition of slavery. Black Americans and white American Jews have also disagreed on political issues like immigration, urban renewal, and Zionism, which unsettles the idea of an uncomplicated Black-Jewish coalition. Indeed, the very concept of “Black-Jewish relations” might conceal more than it illuminates, as it suggests an inherent distinction between the two categories and overlooks the historical presence of individuals and communities who identified as both. But any historical analysis of this subject should also include consideration of geographic region. Most historical studies of Blacks and Jews have focused on the cities of the American North and Midwest. In Changing Perspectives, Allison E. Schottenstein looks south, applying the framework of Black-Jewish relations to the history of Houston, Texas, in the twentieth century. Today the most enthnoracially diverse city in the South, Houston has been a central player in the Sunbelt’s postwar economic growth. But Jim Crow was a totalizing force there midcentury, as it was throughout the region, and Black Houstonians were consistently obstructed from sharing the benefits of the city’s growth. Houston’s small Jewish population, on the other hand, found general social acceptance and significant upward mobility throughout the Jim Crow era—in no small measure because they were of European origin, and could avail themselves of neighborhoods, schools, and other civic amenities limited to whites. Still, many Jews feared that their acceptance was provisional, their status vulnerable; for this reason, or perhaps because they simply accepted the racial hierarchy from which they benefited, the Jews of Houston were peripheral players in the city’s civil rights movement. [End Page 205] With a focus on the actions of communal leadership and elected officials, Schottenstein’s community-study approach provides a detailed top-down account of Jewish Houston’s internal discourse on race and politics. (Her study of the city’s African American leadership and institutions is far less thorough and consistent.) A few of Houston’s Jewish leaders had expressed support for racial desegregation in schools and other public accommodations, even before Brown v. Board of Education, and were enthusiastic participants in municipal organizations that advocated interracial cooperation. But the larger community’s approach to the subject had been “to take a back seat” in the movement proper, to “leave the vocal roles to others” (103). The principal reason for their unwillingness to take a public stand on the matter, Schottenstein contends, was unease. Houston’s Jews encountered social antisemitism in the form of restrictive covenants and exclusionary elite country clubs. In moments of local anti-Communist fervor, they were blamed for “creeping socialism” because of Jewish participation in liberal interracial organizations. Occasionally, more vicious and frightening forms of antisemitism surfaced, as when George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party founder who blamed Jewish Communists for racial integration, came to town. They also feared violence, and not without cause; in early 1960—a few years after a rash of synagogue bombings throughout the Southeast—Houston’s Congregation Emanu El suffered a bomb threat, and a swastika was graffitied on a nearby Jewish-owned grocery. Anxious that their status and their physical safety were conditioned on their willingness to abet white supremacy, Houston’s Jewish leadership, with a few exceptions, tended toward silence. They distanced themselves from those who spoke out, took a gradualist approach to the desegregation...

Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust

ABSTRACT This essay uncovers the systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia. In the last decade, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. To explain how distortionist editors have succeeded in imposing this narrative, despite the efforts of opposing editors to correct it, we employ an innovative methodology. We examine 25 public-facing Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 of Wikipedia’s back pages, including talk pages, noticeboards, and arbitration cases. We complement these with interviews of editors in the field and statistical data gleaned through Wikipedia’s tool suites. This essay contributes to the study of Holocaust memory, revealing the digital mechanisms by which ideological zeal, prejudice, and bias trump reason and historical accuracy. More broadly, we break new ground in the field of the digital humanities, modelling an in-depth examination of how Wikipedia editors negotiate and manufacture information for the rest of the world to consume.

“Burning Villages”: Leo Katz’s Novels on the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt and the Question of Antisemitism

This article explores the Jewish question in the context of the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt through the novels of the Austrian Jewish communist Leo Katz. Katz witnessed the uprising as a youth from his native village situated on the border between the Habsburg Empire, Romania, and Tsarist Russia. He wrote two novels about the revolt: one in 1940 and the other in 1946. The present study examines the violent clashes that unfolded at the border and how the writer approached the concept of antisemitism in the context of the revolt. Relying mainly on Katz’s personal papers, the article shows that Katz’s understanding of antisemitism was related to his communist beliefs. This changed following debates on antisemitism that he and other German-speaking communists had while in exile in Mexico, where Katz spent most of World War Il. Although Katz includes more details on antisemitism in his second novel, he does not address the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by the rural masses, which is an aspect otherwise well documented by the Austro-Hungarian border authorities. Katz’s novels are the most comprehensive Jewish narratives on the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt and represent a Jewish intellectual’s struggle to make sense of the rising antisemitism in that tri-border area at the turn of the twentieth century.

“Clerks of Revolution”: Jewish Youth of Province in Events of Civil War (Tambov Province)

Based on archival materials and published sources, the article deals with the problem of the participation of provincial Jewish youth in the suppression of the insurgent movement on the territory of the Tambov province. The relevance of the study is due to the need to specificate and clarify the historical role of the Jewish youth of the Russian province in the tragic events of the Civil War. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that on the basis of the biographies of the Jews of the “revolutionary turning point” generation, the mechanism of their social lifts is established. For the first time, the role and motives of the participation of Tambov Jewish communists in the fight against the peasant uprising of 1920—1921 under the leadership of A. S. Antonova are studied. The causes of anti-Semitic sentiments in the provincial society of the period of the civil war are revealed. The authors come to the conclusion that the anti-Semitism of urban and rural residents was largely due to the abuse of power by local Jews. It is noted that due to the noticeable penetration of the Jewish element into the Communist Party, in the public consciousness of the peasantry, the Bolsheviks were often identified with the Jews, stimulating the growth of dissatisfaction with the Soviet government within the peasant society.

The diary of Bernard Mark (December 1965 – February 1966)

ABSTRACT Ber (Bernard) Mark (1908–1966) was born in Łomża, then Congress Poland. Before the Second World War, he joined the Communist Party of Poland (KPP). He spent the war years in the USSR, where he worked for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and headed the Organizational Committee of Polish Jews. Upon his return to Poland, he became active in Jewish Communist organizations. From 1949 until his death, he served as director of the Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH), notorious for his pro-Communist version of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After 1956, he distanced himself from his earlier opinions and began to renew ties with the Soviet Jews and Israel. From the early 1960s, he was placed under surveillance by the Security Service (SB). In the last year of his life, Mark kept a diary in Yiddish in which he openly voiced his criticism of current affairs in Poland and Polish-Jewish relations.

The Yiddisher Kultur Farband in Argentina: Progressive and Communist Jews (1917–1956)

Progressive and Communist Jewish identity in Argentina flourished between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Cold War. In 1937, during the Popular Front period, Jewish Communist intellectuals organized an International Congress of Yiddish Culture in Paris. Twenty-three countries were represented, and the Congress formed the Yiddisher Kultur Farband (YKUF). In 1941, this Congress was replicated in Argentina, where the YKUF sponsored an important network of schools, clubs, theaters, socio-cultural centers, and libraries created by Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Ykufist or Progressive Jewish identity reflects a particular construction that is as ethnic as it is political. As “Jewish,” it aimed to transmit the secular heritage of the Yiddishkeit devastated in Europe during World War II, but as “progressive,” “radical” or “Communist,” it postulated its yearning for integration into a universal socialism led by the Soviet model. Progressive Jewish identity was shaped in the antifascist culture and by permanent tensions between Jewish ethnicity and the guidelines of the Communist Party. Above all, it was framed by a fervent aspiration of the immigrants and their children to integrate into their Argentine society.

Kommunist omed ve-shar (A Communist Stands and Sings): On Israel’s Ron Workers’ Choir

ABSTRACT At first glance Jewish Israeli Communists and SLI (Songs of the Land of Israel) make strange bedfellows. Communist Party members would seem to be the last to sing songs that glorify the Land of Israel using Zionist tropes. Yet they did. Since the end of World War II, the Ron Workers’ Choir, which was affiliated with the Communist Party, sang SLI songs and performed on international stages in the Socialist Bloc and in Israel. This amateur choir, its history, and the ideological shifts that enabled its activity are the focus of this article. We argue here that the shift in the Jewish Communists’ ideology toward a form of qualified recognition of Israeli nationalism and the development of a Zionist Habitus enabled the reception and embrace of Zionist culture, including its settler colonial aspects, by Jewish Israeli Communists.

Singing between two worlds: Lin Jaldati and Yiddish music in Cold War Europe and divided Berlin, 1945–1953

ABSTRACT Although post World War II Berlin is usually held up as the front line of the Cold War, it was precisely in Berlin where the “Iron Curtain” was porous. Lin Jaldati (pronounced “Yaldati”), a Dutch Jewish Communist Yiddish cabaret singer and dancer … and Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen survivor, had been performing in Berlin since 1947. She gave her first wildly popular concert for displaced persons there in an American DP camp. Her popularity all over Berlin after the 1949 division of Germany, her 1952 move from the Netherlands to Berlin, and the 1953 division of Berlin’s Jewish community shows how her Communist and Jewish identities and communities found a kind of unity in a ruined Berlin landscape. The city’s peculiar political geography after World War II meant that until the Wall was built in 1961, Berlin functioned as one highly idiosyncratic space, in which the Communist Jaldati and her Yiddish music successfully straddled ideologies and communities. A close examination of Jaldati’s early Berlin performances shows how Yiddish music was reintroduced into a German cultural landscape that had tried to exorcize the reminders and remainders of eastern European Jewish culture. Jaldati’s successful reintroduction of Yiddish music to Germany took root specifically in Berlin, where DPs and Berlin residents, Jews and non-Jews, cohabitated in a postwar city full of physical, political, and cultural porousness.

‘L’antisémitisme est l’auxiliaire obligatoire du fascisme’: Jewish Communists, Antifascism and Antisemitism in France, 1944-1960s

Abstract This article studies the discursive construction by Jewish communists of the struggle against antisemitism in France between 1944 and the 1960s. It shows that after the Holocaust, without denying the racial aspect of Nazi antisemitism, Jewish communists adopted the French Communist Party and the ussr’s antifascist analysis of antisemitism according to which antisemitism was the corollary of fascism, a strategy to divide people and the working class. However, after the War, Jewish communists’ fight against antisemitism was also shaped by their experiences as Jews during the Holocaust, by their commitment to defend Jewish interests and by their desire to be (re)integrated into the French nation. The author argues that through a specific Jewish and communist antifascist fight against antisemitism, Jewish communists managed to remain faithful to their multiples allegiances – to Jews, to the pcf, and to French universalism – and to reach multiples audiences that identified, at least temporarily, with antifascism.

Twice Exiled: Leo Zuckermann (1908–85) and the Limits of the Communist Promise

Beginning with an encounter between Erich Honecker and the Jewish communist Leo Zuckermann that took place in Mexico City in September 1981, this article investigates the relationship of the communist movement in the German-speaking world to the ‘Jewish question’ and the Holocaust. At a reception of the GDR embassy on the occasion of Honecker’s state visit, the Chairman of the State Council shook hands with Zuckermann, a formerly high-ranking Socialist Unity Party of Germany functionary who had fled the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1952, and assured him that he was happy to see him again. This gesture by Honecker rehabilitated a man over whom a blanket of silence had been spread in the GDR decades earlier: during his first exile in Mexico, Zuckermann had developed positions that granted the Jewish people in light of the crimes of National Socialism the right both to restitution and to an independent state. This article offers new insights into the genesis of Zuckermann’s thinking and illuminates the reactions of the party leadership, which was surprisingly not opposed to such partisanship on behalf of the Jewish collective during a short ‘interim period’ from 1943/4 to 1948/9.

A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany: The Life of Werner Scholem (1895–1940), written by Hoffrogge, Ralf

A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany: The Life of Werner Scholem (1895–1940), written by Hoffrogge, Ralf

Organization and methods of the O.G.P.U: Two British Documents from 1933

On March 27th, 1933 a British MI5 officer Oswald Allen Harker received a report on the inter+relation of the Comintern, GPU and Department IV of the Staff of the Red Army. The source of this report was a Jewish communist. Another report received by Harker, on the same day, was the OGPU method of investigation. He informed his superiors that the source of this document was the first-hand source. This article presents these documents because they are relevant to the level of knowledge of MI5 about Russian Espionage and subversive activity at that moment.

On Haltof's Screening Auschwitz

On Haltof's Screening Auschwitz Michał Oleszczyk Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration. By Marek Haltof. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 198 pp., ISBN 978-0810136083. US $34.95. With his latest book, devoted entirely to a single film but drawing on years of studious research, Marek Haltof confirms his stance as the leading historian of Polish film working abroad. Based at Northern Michigan University, Haltof has significantly contributed to the field of Polish film studies (with his 2002 Polish National Cinema still serving as the basic single-volume history of Polish film, reissued in an expanded edition in 2018), and he has done much to remain in touch with the latest developments in Polish arts and politics, making him a uniquely equipped commentator on Polish film culture past and present. That Haltof should devote a nearly 200-page study to a film not currently available from any major distribution companies or streaming services is indicative of the film's richness and the dire need of reintroducing it to a wider public in a worthy edition that would highlight its aesthetic qualities and political significance. The work in question, Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948), is no ordinary film. Shot and released within three years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (which has since become a metonymic symbol of the Holocaust), the film was made by a survivor and shot on the very location the horrific events took place. Co-written by Jakubowska and a fellow political prisoner Gerda Schneider, The Last Stage was not just a pioneering work of feature-length narrative cinema dealing with the still-recent [End Page 104] Nazi genocide but also a fierce act of faith in filmmaking's power to write history (and stop history from replaying itself). Haltof 's approach is multidimensional and methodical. He offers a detailed production history of the film (significantly indebted to Alina Madej's archive findings and featuring a number of freshly unearthed facts) and Jakubowska's meticulously rendered biography as a political prisoner in a number of camps. The film receives a close reading, leaving practically no scene uncommented on, after which Haltof draws attention to the film's reception (in communist Poland and abroad), its implications for the wider politics of preserving Auschwitz-Birkenau as a historical site, and its eerie afterlife through other films in which it has been quoted—often as supposed documentary footage (Alain Resnais's Night and Fog [1955] and George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank [1959] provide just two famous examples of such self-effacing appropriation). Perhaps the most interesting reading Haltof provides has to do with the film's ideological aspects, none of which could have been discussed freely in the director's homeland (and were largely ignored by international audiences) at the time of its original release. As Haltof reminds us, Jakubowska (who died in 1998 and thus saw the fall of communism) stayed a lifelong communist stalwart. She inscribed her vision of history into The Last Stage, in which the horror of the death camps is ultimately shown as an environment in which the power of the human spirit is forged and from which the new communist mindset emerges into its postwar dominance of Eastern Europe (here equated with salvation). In this respect, the key character of the film is Marta Weiss (played by Barbara Drapińska), a Jewish communist political prisoner whose multilingual skills save her from immediate death in the gas chambers and allow for her gradual gain of ideological awareness, culminating in a neophyte revolutionary confession: "It's only here in the camp that I understood how things are." Within the multibranched and rather unfocused narrative of The Last Stage, which doesn't follow any single conflict and doesn't focus on any particular character's arc, Marta serves as the closest thing to a stand-in for the audience. Through her eyes we learn about the inner workings of the camp. Her bravery and martyrdom is celebrated in the much-discussed final reel, in which the imminent Soviet intervention is seen not only as bringing about the dismantling...

On Haltof's <em>Screening Auschwitz</em>

On Haltof's Screening Auschwitz Michał Oleszczyk Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration. By Marek Haltof. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 198 pp., ISBN 978-0810136083. US $34.95. With his latest book, devoted entirely to a single film but drawing on years of studious research, Marek Haltof confirms his stance as the leading historian of Polish film working abroad. Based at Northern Michigan University, Haltof has significantly contributed to the field of Polish film studies (with his 2002 Polish National Cinema still serving as the basic single-volume history of Polish film, reissued in an expanded edition in 2018), and he has done much to remain in touch with the latest developments in Polish arts and politics, making him a uniquely equipped commentator on Polish film culture past and present. That Haltof should devote a nearly 200-page study to a film not currently available from any major distribution companies or streaming services is indicative of the film's richness and the dire need of reintroducing it to a wider public in a worthy edition that would highlight its aesthetic qualities and political significance. The work in question, Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948), is no ordinary film. Shot and released within three years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (which has since become a metonymic symbol of the Holocaust), the film was made by a survivor and shot on the very location the horrific events took place. Co-written by Jakubowska and a fellow political prisoner Gerda Schneider, The Last Stage was not just a pioneering work of feature-length narrative cinema dealing with the still-recent [End Page 104] Nazi genocide but also a fierce act of faith in filmmaking's power to write history (and stop history from replaying itself). Haltof 's approach is multidimensional and methodical. He offers a detailed production history of the film (significantly indebted to Alina Madej's archive findings and featuring a number of freshly unearthed facts) and Jakubowska's meticulously rendered biography as a political prisoner in a number of camps. The film receives a close reading, leaving practically no scene uncommented on, after which Haltof draws attention to the film's reception (in communist Poland and abroad), its implications for the wider politics of preserving Auschwitz-Birkenau as a historical site, and its eerie afterlife through other films in which it has been quoted—often as supposed documentary footage (Alain Resnais's Night and Fog [1955] and George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank [1959] provide just two famous examples of such self-effacing appropriation). Perhaps the most interesting reading Haltof provides has to do with the film's ideological aspects, none of which could have been discussed freely in the director's homeland (and were largely ignored by international audiences) at the time of its original release. As Haltof reminds us, Jakubowska (who died in 1998 and thus saw the fall of communism) stayed a lifelong communist stalwart. She inscribed her vision of history into The Last Stage, in which the horror of the death camps is ultimately shown as an environment in which the power of the human spirit is forged and from which the new communist mindset emerges into its postwar dominance of Eastern Europe (here equated with salvation). In this respect, the key character of the film is Marta Weiss (played by Barbara Drapińska), a Jewish communist political prisoner whose multilingual skills save her from immediate death in the gas chambers and allow for her gradual gain of ideological awareness, culminating in a neophyte revolutionary confession: "It's only here in the camp that I understood how things are." Within the multibranched and rather unfocused narrative of The Last Stage, which doesn't follow any single conflict and doesn't focus on any particular character's arc, Marta serves as the closest thing to a stand-in for the audience. Through her eyes we learn about the inner workings of the camp. Her bravery and martyrdom is celebrated in the much-discussed final reel, in which the imminent Soviet intervention is seen not only as bringing about the dismantling...

From a Jewish Communist to a Jewish Buddhist: Allen Ginsberg as a Forerunner of a New American Jew

The article examines Allen Ginsberg’s cultural and spiritual journeys, and traces the poet’s paths as foreshadowing those of many American Jews of the last generation. Ginsberg was a unique individual, whose choices were very different other men of his era. However, it was larger developments in American society that allowed him to take steps that were virtually unthinkable during his parents’ generation and were novel and daring in his time as well. In his childhood and adolescence, Ginsberg grew up in a Jewish communist home, which combined socialist outlooks with mild Jewish traditionalism. The poet’s move from communism and his search for spirituality started already at Columbia University of the 1940s, and continued throughout his life. Identifying with many of his parents’ values and aspirations, Ginsberg wished to transcend beyond his parents’ Jewish orbit and actively sought to create an inclusive, tolerant, and permissive society where persons such as himself could live and create at ease. He chose elements from the Christian, Jewish, Native-American, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, weaving them together into an ever-growing cultural and spiritual quilt. The poet never restricted his choices and freedoms to one all-encompassing system of faith or authority. In Ginsberg’s understanding, Buddhism was a universal, non-theistic religion that meshed well with an individualist outlook, and offered personal solace and mindfulness. He and other Jews, who followed his example, have seen no contradiction between practicing Buddhism and Jewish identity and have not sensed any guilt. Their Buddhism has been Western, American, and individualistic in its goals, meshing with other interests and affiliations. In that, Ginsberg served as a model and forerunner to a new kind of Jew, who takes pride in his heritage, but wished to live his life socially, culturally and spiritually in an open and inclusive environment, exploring and enriching herself beyond the Jewish fold. It has become an almost routine Jewish choice, reflecting the values, and aspirations of many in the Jewish community, including those who chose religious venues within the declared framework of the Jewish community.

A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink

A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink