A Jew In America: My Life and a People's Struggle for Identity (review)

I have long thought that if I were on a ten-hour flight from New York to Israel, there were few people in the world that I would rather have sitting next to me than Professor Arthur Hertzberg. Listening to my erstwhile professor at Columbia University and consummate Jewish contrarian hold forth on historical topics and on the condition of contemporary Jewish life would be a delightful way of whiling away our time crossing the Atlantic. Reading his memoir, A Jew in America, and then writing this review at 35,000 feet, traveling Zion-bound, brought me very close to fulfilling my voyager's fantasy.

Ever the great story-teller and raconteur, Hertzberg captivated me as he began telling the tale of a young man who grew up in the U.S.A. but was decidedly not of this country's stock. Nor was he possessed of American Jewry's proclivity for assimilation. He was, from earliest youth, the "outsider" and reveled in that distinctiveness. And if, over time, he came to deviate from his family's strict Orthodoxy, Hertzberg's account made it abundantly clear that throughout his long and controversial career that young man remained true to his father's ultimate admonition: If he were to be become a "heretic," at least become an intelligent one.

As Hertzberg related more about his life, I was amused by accounts of his appearances as a young Zionist activist with some of the greatest and most controversial people of his time at the most momentous events of the mid-twentieth century. We meet up with him as an usher at the Biltmore (Hotel) Conference of May 1942. The great American Zionist spokesman Rabbi Stephen S. Wise got him that job. We join him for coffee with radical Zionist leader Peter Bergson, who revealed to him that some of the same establishment figures who took him to task publicly were quietly supporting his efforts and funneling him needed funds. We stand with the young rabbinical student and with his father as they observed the strictly Orthodox Agudath ha-Rabbanim cry out in front of the White House, in October 1942, on behalf of the ultimately doomed Jews of Eastern Europe. We also find Hertzberg hanging out at the Zionist Offices in New York carrying messages and documents for officials of the Jewish Agency. We even join him on a wild ride to California as he convinced gangster Bugsy Siegel that it would not be in the best interests of the Jewish people to have British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin bumped off when the diplomat next visited this country.

Needless to say, as Hertzberg advanced in his remarkable career, he himself became one of the central players on the world Jewish scene for whom others would run messages and with whom young aspirants would desire to have coffee. Accordingly, for the largest part of the memoir, readers are treated to Hertzberg's recounting of the saga of America—American Jewish and Israeli relations and diplomatics through wars and without peace over the last half of the twentieth century. Hertzberg's account is compelling even if one does not accept at face value some of this outsider's assertions that the world Jewish condition would have been better if only those in positions of real power had heeded his point of view. At least, Hertzberg, besides being intelligent, is consistent in his beliefs. His views on Palestinian statehood, West Bank Settlements and the like that, reportedly, earned him the scowl and rebuke of Golda Meir after the Yom Kippur War are expressed with equal, unmitigated conviction in this 2002 memoir. (And they are at the core of The Fate of Zionism which appeared in 2003 to an expected chorus both of hosannas and criticisms.)

Hertzberg's self-projection as possessed of a unique vision of what is right and wrong with the Jewish world also came through loud...