All the Way from Yoakum: The Personal Journey of a Political Insider

Chapter 4. Public Life

Cha pter 4 Public Life T he balance of the fifties was a strange period for me. I had no desire for any contact with my sister, and yet, since she had been so much a part of our lives, there was a void. In the absence of continual absorption with family matters, I found myself focusing my attention on public affairs. Temple Beth Israel is the oldest Reform Jewish congregation in Texas and one of the most respected. It, however, had always been a socially conservative temple, and the majority of its members had been in the United States for generations. They were Southern and very “American.” During periods of social upheaval, they avoided controversial issues of any kind, from integration to the special rela‑ tionship with the state of Israel, at that time a topic at the forefront of everyone’s mind. It is a tenet of political Zionism that Jews everywhere in the world have a personal obligation to the state of Israel. They shouldn’t just give money and visit regularly but also defend the state’s behavior and, if possible, move there, which they called making aliyah. Before the Hitler years, Zionism was just a bad word to most Jews, especially those at Beth Israel. The truth is, no one knew much about it; no one knew the difference between political and religious Zionism or between any form of Zionism and Judaism. More importantly, no one cared. Then came the Holocaust and with it a schism in the Jewish com‑ munity—a rupture that in one form or another still exists. When more and more of the atrocities committed by the Germans upon 130 Chapter 4 their Jewish citizens became known, the actual creation of a po‑ litical state for Jews loomed on the horizon, with protagonists and antagonists at each other’s throats. The issue divided Beth Israel. Many members of the congregation who favored the creation of a state for Jews resigned to form Temple Emanu El. They asked Bob Kahn, the associate rabbi at Beth Israel and a former beau of mine, to be their rabbi. A majority of those who remained at Beth Israel feared that the existence of a political Jewish state would blur their American citizenship and lead to confused concepts of nationality. Such concerns were shared by the American Council for Judaism, the premier American anti‑Zionist organization, of which a considerable number of Beth Israel’s congregants were members. This “war of the temples” took place during the early 1940s, the World War II years, when Raymond and I lived in West Frankfort, Il‑ linois. Every letter from Houston dwelt on the local turmoil, the divi‑ sion of families, and who was or wasn’t speaking to whom. It would even take years for Bob Kahn to view me as a long‑time good friend rather than an enemy, even though I wasn’t in Houston when the breach came. Passions on this subject took precedence over reason. In 1945, when we returned to Houston, the horrors of the death camps and the revelations of the tortures of innocent families, along with the fate of refugees, dominated the newspapers and exacerbated the divisions in the Jewish community. In 1948, after President Truman recognized the state of Israel, the position of anti‑Zionists was politi‑ cally and socially untenable. They had lost. The American Council for Judaism became anathema, the equivalent in some Jews’ minds to the anticommunist Birch Society. Members left in droves. Rational discus‑ sion in the face of so many pitiful victims was out of the question. I had been and continued to be a committed anti‑Zionist and a member of the American Council for Judaism, although I am no longer one of its national spokespersons (which entailed lecturing at universities and other public forums). However, I have never for‑ saken my position that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality, and that when religion and the state are intertwined, religion inevitably suffers. At the time of my active participation in anti‑Zionist affairs, my sympathy for the tragedy of people’s suffering carried no weight at all. I was respected—but scary. People with strong opinions they defend with valid arguments generally are. When I intensified my involvement in the Beth Israel Sisterhood, this became an issue. Public Life 131 In the 1940s, many families who were formerly traditionally Conservative or...