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34 Chapter 2 Sol Stern,“Israel, American Jews, and the Peace Now Camp,” Jerusalem Post Weekly, 24 August 1976. Introduction Of all the interviews in this volume, this one most prominently addresses Howe’s relationship to the Jewish community. It occurred at the pinnacle of Howe’s popularity, due to the success of World of Our Fathers. The book had actually reached number seven on The New York Times bestseller list and earned Howe a 1977 National Book Award. Yet Howe’s support for the Israeli Left, particularly the peace movement, led to attacks from Jewish leaders who saw him as disloyal, as unwittingly giving aid and comfort to those bent on Israel’s destruction. This interview is largely Howe’s defense against such charges. Sol Stern, who conducts the interview, was born in Tel Aviv. His family immigrated to the United States when he was three years old, and he was raised in the Bronx. Like Irving Howe, he was a graduate of City College of New York. In the early 1960s, he attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley , where he became a student activist and met many of the leading figures both in the Free Speech Movement and in Berkeley’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, probably the most important activist organization at the time. By the mid1960s , he was writing for the radical Left magazine Ramparts on whose editorial board he also served (1966-72). The young Stern was a prominent advocate for reconsidering the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 as Communist spies after what leftists generally considered a show-trial. Spurred largely by his commitment to Israel, as well as by his anti-Communism , Stern had broken with the New Left by the mid-1970s, shortly before Interview with Sol Stern, August 1976 35 the time of this interview. He would continue an extensive freelance career writing on Israel and related issues. By the 1990s, Stern sided with conservatives on a variety of issues, notably on school reform, arguing that unions protect inferior teachers and that private school vouchers should be adopted. In this interview Stern voices a concern that recurred in numerous reviews of World of Our Fathers, namely that Howe’s work overemphasized the Yiddish, secular, and Socialist aspects of Jewish life in the United States and neglected the religious dimension. Furthermore, this is the only interview that mentions Howe’s relationship with the American Jewish Committee, the organization that sponsors Commentary and was similarly critical of Howe. Nevertheless, as in his later relationships with former New Left figures such as Todd Gitlin and Morris Berman (both of whom eventually joined Dissent’s editorial board), Howe and Stern got along well; as Stern turned away from his radical past in the 1970s, he extended an olive branch to Irving Howe, who might be said to have served—as in the cases of Gitlin and Berman—as a midwife in Stern’s migration away from the far Left. Although both Howe and Stern had long shared a contempt for Soviet Communism, Stern shifted much further toward the right than did Howe, moving into alignment with such journals as Commentary and National Review. The interview opens with a discussion of the success, quite unusual for an author associated with academia and with a small group of intellectuals, of World of Our Fathers. Delighted though he is about the book’s reception, Howe worries that the cause for its popularity is superficial, indeed just a romantic, fleeting nostalgia: the book’s sales may signify “a kind of emotional ‘last hurrah’ [for] many middle-class suburban Jews . . . [that] gives them an opportunity to have one last emotional wobble and then continue with their lives.” The book may represent only a last glance back on the road to assimilation, an observation that Howe makes also in A Margin of Hope. For Howe, of course, World of Our Fathers meant far more; in this interview he even goes so far as to refer to it as “a disguised autobiography.” In its concern with the Jewish milieu that incubated Howe, World of Our Fathers may be seen as a kind of subterranean story of his youth some six years before the explicit autobiography, A Margin of Hope.1 As a secular Jew who had as a young man denied the relevance of his Jewishness , Howe had special reasons to ponder his Jewish heritage. “It becomes harder and harder,” he...

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