"Irresponsible, Undisciplined Opposition": Ben Halpern on the Bergson Group and Jewish Terrorism in Pre-State Palestine

I. Introduction

In December 1946, the Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier published an exchange between Daniel Bell (b. 1919) and Ben Halpern (1912–1990), two rising intellectual stars of twentieth-century American Jewry. The exchange highlighted the most pressing philosophical and existential dilemmas faced by the Jewish world in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Bell, a young instructor at the University of Chicago, opened his essay with a statement by the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "Woe to man who has no home." He proceeded to raise and answer a series of probing questions: "What meaningful role can the young Jewish intellectual play in [today's] world?" "How can one maintain a critical temper?" "Where are we to go?" "What of the relation of this position to Zionism?" Taking his cues from Nietzsche, Bell asserted the futility of an ethnic-religious worldview and argued instead for the harnessing of Jewish passions to a universalist and this-worldly Weltanschauung. "The plight—and glory—of the alienated Jewish intellectual," he concluded, "is that his role is to point to the need of brotherhood. . . . He can only live in permanent tension and as a permanent critic."²

Halpern, Jewish Frontier's managing editor and a Harvard Ph.D. in sociology, challenged Bell's assertions. Disputing Bell's premise of the role of the "alienated Jewish intellectual," Halpern argued in favor of a search for community, fellowship, and belonging in the modern world. In his rejoinder, he insisted on a historically conditioned rationale for Jewish nationalism, and the significance of Jewish intellectuals in shaping the future of Jewish life:

Let me suggest that you are driving into a blind alley when you flirt with the idea that it is necessary to live in a physically defined state of alienation, like the Jews in the ghetto, in order to be a prophet. . . . It might be a fruitful exercise if you were to ponder all over again the question of love and social organization, of community and the pitfalls of romanticism and cynicism. We have gone through a very purgatory of social education in our century, and one of the chief devils stoking the fires has been the demon of intellectual theocracy—the Ideocrat. . . . Should we not still explore the possibility that there are ways of action and types of commitment by which the independence of the spirit need not be sold out?

The Bell-Halpern exchange reflects the sea change in modern history effected by the Nazi regime's catastrophic destruction of European Jewry. It also underscores the gravity of the Jewish public debate in the years following World War II and the Holocaust, especially the vexing issue of the place of Jews in the postwar world. Bell's universalism, akin to Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher's conception of "the non-Jewish Jew," starkly contrasted with Halpern's unapologetic particularism. Like Horace M. Kallen, Louis D. Brandeis, Mordecai M. Kaplan, and other intellectuals who subscribed to an idealistic American brand of Jewish nationalism in the pre-state era, Halpern emphasized an appreciation of the peculiar conditions that shaped and defined Jewish life in the United States. He was to articulate this theme most fully a few years later in his trenchant essay "America Is Different."⁴ In the latter, he examined the relationship of Jews to America—a postemancipationist, open, liberal society—and pointed to the special challenges faced by Jews in the New World. The new postwar reality in which America and the Yishuv (later Israel) assumed dominant roles in the Jewish public arena forced a reconsideration of and "a new focus in the direction of Jewish thought," particularly with regard to the dilemmas posed to the American Jewish society-in-the-making by the forces of acculturation, assimilation, and antisemitism.⁵

There is, however, another subtext to the Bell-Halpern exchange that merits investigation, namely, the heated debate in postwar American Jewish life over the best political strategy for driving forward the twin campaigns of Jewish statehood and alleviating the distress of the...