The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation of Israel

4. Silver’s Early Struggle against Anti-Semitism and Nazism

57 4 Silver’s Early Struggle against Anti-Semitism and Nazism How much of Silver’s post-statehood Zionist stance could be traced to the early pre-1948 years of his career? At first glance, Silver’s Zionist leadership during the 1940s appears to take an opposite direction, emphasizing anti-Jewish hostility and expressing mistrust toward the nonJewish American surroundings. In that period, Silver frequently attacked his political Zionist rivals for refraining from exposing the “conspiracy of silence” on the part of the American administration toward the European Jewish victims. On their part, Silver’s political rivals saw his combative advocacy as implying a lack of faith in American democracy. Is this not how one should interpret Silver’s response to the statement of support sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, prior to the November general elections , to the ZOA conference in Atlantic City on October 15, 1944? The world was silent at the ruins and outrage of a whole people. . . . A ten year cycle of slaughter and assault at the hand of a people and a government . . . which sacked and ravaged a thousand Jewish communities , slew 3 million men, women and children in horrible human abattoirs and crematories and filled the highways of the earth with herds of frightened feeling refugees, evoked from the civilized world, from the democracies, from our own country, a few perfunctory acts of rescue which resulted in little more than nothing . . . all our representations to our government to help save our doomed people in any way whatsoever resulted in pitifully little. . . . With all my supreme admirations for the great personalities who are our friends . . . I still say, unto you, what the Psalmist said long ago: “Put not your trust in princes. . . .” (Silver 1944) 58 | Silver’s Pre-State Zionist Career And yet, it is my claim that a different interpretation of Silver’s speech must be employed. One may explain Silver’s popularity among American Jewry in the 1940s not in his ability to raise the flag of suspicion and lack of trust in non-Jewish America, but precisely the opposite: his bellicose style of Jewish leadership was seen by his supporters—many of them striving to enter the American middle class—as the only way that could enable them to vigorously pursue their deep feelings of American patriotism without forgoing their Jewish sense of solidarity. This dual, complex quest was shared by many American Jews of that period, who, similar to Silver, bore witness to a tense encounter between the American ethos of individualism and equal opportunity and the deep-rooted, Old World Jewish collective heritage that was still a powerful force in the American-Jewish immigrant ghetto and the Jewish neighborhoods of the early twentieth century. One might say that the simultaneous all-encompassing claims of their Jewish and American surroundings amounted to a formative experience of an inability to choose between Judaism and Americanism. Mordecai Kaplan described this dual existence as one of living simultaneously in “two civilizations,” while Silver, in his memoirs, employed the metaphor of “New World” bottles bubbling over with the ferment of “Old World” ideas (Kaplan 1934; Silver 1963a).1 The 1920s and 1930s were a challenging period for those who, like Silver, wished to cultivate this complex two-civilization identity. Popular anti-Semitic sentiment both at home and in Europe was particularly threatening. It left many American Jews suspended between the immigrant ghettos, whose walls had already been breached and could no longer impart a full sense of belonging, and the non-Jewish exterior environment that suddenly seemed closed and nonaccepting. Against 1. One may view Silver’s rabbinical studies, from 1911 to 1915, as well as his service in the upper middle-class synagogues of Wheeling (1915–1917) and Cleveland (1917 to the end of his life), as socialization apparatus and entry tickets into the American middle class. Each of these early points in Silver’s rabbinical career could be seen as enforcing the “two civilizations” experience, that is, his sense of belonging to an all-encompassing Jewish religious-ethnic culture and, simultaneously, of being integrated into an American middleclass culture at the social and cultural levels. Silver’s Early Struggle against Anti-Semitism and Nazism | 59 this background, it is easy to understand not only the difficulties faced by those seeking to cultivate a two-civilization approach, but also the degree to which the struggle for that approach’s validity appeared urgent...