Introduction: The Soviet Romance and its Demise

How long ago it seems since communism, socialism, or the ideals of the Soviet Union mattered to American Jews. It’s been even longer since these things stirred us vitally. Was there really a time when American Jews were predominantly socialist in attitude? Could the newspapers our great-grandparents devoured actually have touted their seemingly endless variations of the same leftist economic patter? The American Jewish theater, graphic arts, song, and literature—could these, too, ever have been so thoroughly inflected with the concepts of Lenin and Marx? Given the rapid social and economic rise of Jewry in America (with most American Jews having left the ranks of labor as long ago as 1919),¹ there is something suspicious about the appeal of socialist politics to our forebears. Still, it is impossible to deny that a full-blown romance between American Jews and leftist political-economics did indeed exist. Even the slightest perusal of the historical record of the first half of the twentieth century reveals that socialism and related ideas once stood as a foundation of American Jewish identity. Perhaps for a while it was even the foundation.

This was all before Israeli statehood, when Zionism began to take its place at the heart of American Jewish identity. It was also before the liberation of Auschwitz, when Holocaust memory came to serve a similar function. Truth be told, any influence that socialism and related ideas held over significant numbers of American Jews came before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, when Stalin’s truce with Hitler put an end to the strange Jewish-socialist romance in America. It did so, that is, except among the most infatuated ideologues, who seem to have been utterly unaware not only that the affair was over, but also that world Jewry itself had been the humiliated and ravaged partner of a love and hope that had never been requited.

The stories of some of those romantic ideologues are recounted in these pages. In his article, Matthew Hoffman describes a factional dispute that took place during the heyday of socialism in Jewish America, when Zionism first contested some of the universality of the old socialist vision (especially after the Arab riots in Palestine of 1929), and American Jewish communism splintered off from a Jewish identity that was becoming increasingly nationalistic. Then, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, virtually nothing of the old American Jewish socialism was left except the extreme communist faction, whose own dying out is the subject of Gennady Estraikh’s article. According to Estraikh, even these few die-hards could not survive revelations in the 1950s of Stalin’s purges, or tolerate the Soviet Union’s foreign policy during and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Maya Katz uses this moment of estrangement as the starting point for her article, which explores the reinvention of New York’s Jewish Museum from a stodgy art forum to a vital cultural-political institution. The museum initiated that transition in 1972 with an exhibit called “Art from a Soviet Prison,” dedicated to exposing the plight of Soviet Jewry, and it continued to address this increasingly popular issue throughout the decade. Clearly, the Jewish romance with socialism, communism, and the Soviet Union had reached its end—so much so that Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington state decided to appropriate for his own purposes the Jewish Museum’s new agenda by co-sponsoring the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974 and by making Soviet Jewry an unlikely centerpiece of his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1976. From the Jewish socialism of the beginning of the twentieth century to the flirtations with neo-conservatism first widely expressed in connection with the Soviet Jewry issue, American Jewish political identity had traveled a long way.

Today, even Israel has all but abandoned its socialist experiment, arguably the most successful version to have been conducted anywhere in the world. So the events recounted in these pages—the pronouncements of Jewish socialism in America and the retreats from those positions—now only remind us of a confusing and often painful period for American Jewry, a...