Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America: A Biography

11 Crimea and Eretz Israel

490 11 Crimea and Eretz Israel On May 26, 1924, President Coolidge signed into law the Johnson-Reed immigration act, effectively closing the country’s doors to newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe. Three weeks after America’s exit as a haven for indigent or persecuted East European Jews, the Joint Distribution Committee’s Executive Committee opted to support Jewish colonization in the Soviet Union.1 The decision proved to be highly controversial, particularly among Zionists who believed that American Jewish philanthropy ought to give utmost priority to Jewish colonization in Eretz Israel, but the Soviet colonization decision’s intrinsic rationale, along with the energetic backing Louis Marshall himself gave to it, has to be seen through the narrowing prism of life options available to world Jewry in the 1920s. The procession of Marshall and Uptown peers from Capitol Hill to Crimea was guided by their own instincts of Jewish solidarity and by the objective circumstances of their time. Once Eastern European Jews could no longer make new lives for themselves in New York City, America’s Jewish elite had to think creatively about how to help them survive and make the best of their days somewhere else. Debates in the 1920s about priorities given to Jewish colonization in one place or the other, the Soviet Union or Eretz Israel, were intricately connected to ongoing issues in global Jewish politics and to Marshall’s own orientation toward Zionism and international Jewish issues. Partisans in these debates had their eyes on complex developments in Mandatory Palestine and Soviet Communism that were unlike issues of religion, education, and popular culture relevant to Jewish communal affairs in 1920s America. Jewish Farm Colonies in the Soviet Union: Origins and Dynamics The 1918 Constitution of the Russian Republic disenfranchised an entire class of acutely vulnerable persons, the lishentsy. Regarded as nonproductive, petit bourgeois elements, the lishentsy faced discrimination in spheres of employment, Crimea and Eretz Israel • 491 housing, and education. Rights and positive class status could be regained via five years of productive agricultural or industrial labor.2 Out of some 3 million persons classified as lishentsy, Soviet Jews appear to have constituted from one-third3 to one-half 4 of the total; compared to other ethnonational groups in the new Soviet Union, this was an extraordinarily high figure, and it contributed to the sense that a special “Jewish problem” persisted in Russia after the consolidation of the Soviet Communist regime. Jewish colonies were on the ground in the Soviet Union before the JDC adopted its “Agro-Joint” project in the mid-1920s. A mixture of miserable overcrowding in the shtetls, anti-Semitism, and privation during the civil war years, and Zionist recruitment and activity in the Hehalutz youth movement had led dozens of Soviet Jews to colonies in Kherson and the Crimean steppe.5 JDC officials were introduced to conditions in the Soviet Union in 1921 through participation with Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA), which responded to calamitous famine in the Ukraine and other regions.6 James Rosen gained in-the-field experience as a JDC man contracted by the ARA in the Soviet Union. Rosen had a long life history in Russia. Born into an elite Jewish family in Moscow in 1877, he fled czarist Russia in his mid-twenties due to suspicions of radical activity. In the 1920s, he was an agronomist, with a PhD from the University of Michigan and an international reputation, owing partly to his development of an improved type of rye.7 In his work with the ARA, Rosen encountered Jewish farmers at Kherson, and from that point his enthusiasm for Jewish farm colonization proved irrepressible. Rosen’s own retrospective understanding of the prodigious JDC farm colonization and relief effort he spearheaded in the Soviet Union remains a mystery , because after World War II he burned a memoir devoted to the subject.8 Influenced perhaps by the highly divisive arguments sparked by the JDC’s Soviet colonization project within American Jewish circles for years after the mid-1920s, historians have reached little agreement about the net benefits and costs of an endeavor indelibly associated with the energies of this one man,9 but Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the author of the latest, most thorough, survey of the subject, sets the broad parameters of any assessment. Up to the JDC’s withdrawal from the project, in 1937–38, more than 150,000 Jews left shtetls to settle on 250 new colonies spread over about 1 million acres of...