My Friendship with Martin Buber

10. Buber’s Last Visit to America

126 10 Buber’s LastVisit to America In the spring of 1958 Buber came to America for the last time at the invitation of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University where, by a happy coincidence, his old friend Albert Einstein was also present. This was the shortest of his three visits to America, lasting only two months. Kitty McCaw, a donnee of mine, drove us to pick Buber up at the airport. When Kitty met Buber, she asked him if he would meet with a group of Sarah Lawrence students, to which Buber agreed. Martin Buber and I worked together many hours in the basement of the home of Malcolm Diamond, a professor of religion at Princeton University who had published a book on Martin Buber as religious existentialist. We worked together both on Buber’s “Replies to My Critics” for The Philosophy of Martin Buber and his answers to the short questions in the Buber sections of Sydney and Beatrice Rome’s Philosophical Interrogations. At Buber’s request, I translated both of these rejoinders, and as usual we spoke together of problems in my translations. These were, I believe, the last of my translations of Buber. By then, I had translated most of Buber’s Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation of Religion and Philosophy, his The Knowledge of Man (for which I wrote an introductory essay that became chapter one), all of Buber’s Legend of the Baal Shem, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, Hasidism and Modern Man, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, Daniel: Dialogues on Realization (for which I also wrote BUBER’S LAST VISIT TO AMERICA • 127 a long introductory essay), Meetings: Autobiographical Fragments, and Elijah: A Mystery Play. Once, as we were working together, Buber asked me, “What did you do to get involved with the Buber?” recognizing humorously that he had become a sort of institution in the world. Another time, as he descended the stairs to the basement, he fixed me with a wordless look of inquiry that bore into my very soul—a look that I shall never forget! I did not attempt in any way to answer his silent query, which could not, in any case, be put into words. One of the high points of Buber’s 1958 visit to America was a meeting that the American Friends of Ihud sponsored to commemorate his eightieth birthday on February 8. This was also the tenth anniversary of the death of his colleague and friend Judah Magnes, a leading spirit of Ihud and founder and first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A number of prominent people spoke on this occasion, in addition to Buber himself, such as the noted American psychologist who came originally from Germany, Erich Fromm, and Roger Baldwin, head of the American Civil Liberties Union. Toward the end of the meeting, I got into an unpleasant altercation in front of quite a few members of the audience with Isidor Hoffman, Jewish Chaplain of Columbia University and the oldest member of our executive council. Isidor insisted that Erich Fromm should speak last rather than Martin Buber, as had been planned. Since the meeting was in honor of Martin Buber and Fromm was a known anti-Zionist, I held my ground and insisted that Buber, and not Fromm, should close the meeting. After the meeting, I naively told Don Peretz that I was going to resign as chairman of the American Friends of Ihud in order to raise the issue of the extent to which quite a number of the members of our executive committee seemed to be much closer to the notorious anti-Zionist organization the American Council for Judaism than to the Zionism that Ihud in Israel expounded. 128 • MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MARTIN BUBER Instead of allowing me to raise the issue at the next meeting of the executive committee, Peretz gathered all the other members for a meeting without me and, unbeknownst to me, told them I was going to resign as chairman. He then had himself elected chairman in my place. At one point Peretz and I were going to edit a collection of essays of noted Israelis who all took the Ihud position. Ihud had advocated a binational state with parity of population between Jews and Arabs as the only way to avoid the war that did, in fact, come. This is what...