Returning, p.21
Returning, page 21
It was of paramount importance to Julian to dismiss the Conservative movement, then growing, as a temporary phenomenon that was sure to pass. He saw no purpose in it except to criticize Reform. Thankfully, it was nowhere to be seen in New Orleans, where “instead of the strict Mosaic laws of the Pentateuch,” the Reform movement “emphasized moral and social consciousness.” The rabbi was, appropriately, more like a minister than an interpreter of the myriad Jewish laws. As fully as all this seemed like progress—modernity—to Julian, there was one crucial aspect of it that he found frustrating. The New Orleans Reform Jews of Temple Sinai would not participate in even the relaxed version of religious observance that was all the temple asked of them. Julian would walk out to the pulpit on a Friday night and see only a few people sitting in the temple’s vast fourteen-hundred-seat main sanctuary. “My heart usually sank, my brain would be devoid of content, and my spirit would drain out. I would steel myself to go ahead and do my best.”
His frustrations built up over the years and then produced a crisis. In 1941 the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women scheduled an event on a Saturday morning. Julian wrote an editorial in the local Jewish paper criticizing it. Then the local Jewish country club—which was for the Jews who, unlike us, were barred from the New Orleans Country Club—held a dance on a Friday night. Julian wrote another chastising editorial. Not long afterward, he was called before Temple Sinai’s board and given a ten-point memorandum outlining ways he’d be expected to improve his performance as rabbi. One point was that he should not write editorials like those without first getting the approval of the board. Another was that his sermons—we didn’t have D’vrai Torah, the venerable explications of scriptural texts, at Temple Sinai—should be shorter, no more than fifteen minutes, and should be “on more up-to-date subjects”: “Sermons based on Biblical texts are considered pointless.” Julian came home and told my cousin Mary Anna, his wife, that he wanted to look for another pulpit. She said no: she was a New Orleanian and she wasn’t leaving.
It’s easy for me to see from this distance why the variety of Reform Judaism Julian was practicing, and his congregation was practicing even less, didn’t last. If you try to demystify and deritualize any religion, with the aim of making it completely normal and rational and up-to-date and unproblematic, then it winds up losing its hold on people. For Reform Judaism in particular, the idea of dropping everything that might strike outsiders as racial, or tribal, so that Jewishness could emerge in a purified form as a religion that could be practiced without any friction between it and the Gentile world, was fruitless. You wound up with nothing of the essence of it left. Then there was a layer that was Southern. Here we were, a tiny, often hated group living in a supposedly relaxed, charming, easygoing, tolerant, fun-loving city. But we had to be aware, or at least to sense, that our society rested on a very strict and inviolable set of rules about how every group should stand in relation to every other group, and that when that was put off center, bad things happened—usually to Black people, but not always.
The manner we Temple Sinai Jews adopted was casual, wry, offhanded, unexcitable, and never overwrought, except when it came to anything obviously Jewish, in which case a high wall of absolute unacceptability went up. Standard-issue Jewishness went against everything we stood for. It raised the possibility that we might lose everything we had. It was terrifying, threatening. It stood our whole life upside down. Our territory within Jewish America was shrinking, and as it did, maintaining ourselves required shutting out more and more that didn’t fit our cherished and fiercely held assumptions—things that were religiously, culturally, politically uncomfortable; things that were close by and things that were far away.
Everything about the picture of the world and our place in it that we had constructed for ourselves made it almost insuperably difficult to absorb, let alone confront, the destruction of the German Jews in Germany. It was like a violation of natural law: it required believing that what seemed impossible in Germany was possible; that an all-encompassing Jewish solidarity had become necessary; that Zionism might represent the only realistic future for many, even most, Jews. The opposite of each of these was a core assumption for German Jews. It’s a sign of our fondness for Germany and our optimism about the Jewish future there that Julius Rosenwald, who was the son of German immigrants, named his firstborn child (born in 1891) Lessing, after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the first prominent German philosemite, friend and champion of Moses Mendelssohn, and author of Nathan the Wise. As an adult, Lessing Rosenwald worked for some years at Sears, Roebuck, his father’s company, and then retired to devote himself to good works. He lived in Philadelphia and belonged to the Reform temple where Julian Feibelman had worked before coming to New Orleans, and of course he was Edith Stern’s brother.
Events forced Lessing Rosenwald to abandon whatever optimism about Jewish life in Germany he’d had; he transferred it to the United States. In the early 1940s, he became the president and chief funder of an organization called the American Council for Judaism, which was devoted to preventing the establishment of a Jewish state. (He had earlier been a member of the America First Committee, which opposed the United States entering the Second World War.) It had a council of rabbis; Rosenwald’s rabbi in Philadelphia, William Fineshriber, was a member, and Julian Feibelman was another. Julian still had many relatives in Germany, including his much-loved step-grandmother, and he had constant personal reminders of how desperate the situation there was. He’d get pleading letters from German Jews he’d never met who were also named Feibelman, saying they were his relatives. Could he help? Could he rescue them? Something in him made it impossible for him to receive these entreaties sympathetically. (From 1938: “Dear Cousin: We are very disappointed and troubled of not yet having an answer to my letter that I have directed to you Oktober of last year.” From 1941: “Please, Julian, try and try again, there is no time to lose anymore.”) He told himself that the writers had just picked his name out of a phone book, and in any case, he couldn’t imagine what he could do. If the larger implication of the individual cases was Zionism, he found that impossible too. He firmly did not believe that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine would help the Jews. “I never wanted to see a nation,” he told an interviewer, decades later. “I don’t have any faith in nationalism whatsoever, whether it’s Jewish, German, Russian, Chinese, or what.”
Word was beginning to leak out about the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews en masse. In the summer of 1942, a secretly anti-Nazi German businessman who’d dined with Heinrich Himmler, just after Himmler had made an inspection tour of the Auschwitz death camp, told a Jewish banker in Switzerland what he’d heard. The news went from hand to hand among the leadership of Jewish organizations. Gerhard Riegner, an intelligence official for the World Jewish Congress, put it into the form of a telegram addressed to Stephen Wise, the head of that group. The telegram passed among various government officials in Switzerland, England, and Washington before it finally got to Wise at the end of August. A formidable, proud man, zealously liberal and ardently Zionist, Wise was like Frankfurter in having a carefully maintained direct relationship with Franklin Roosevelt and other high American officials. Unlike Frankfurter, his relationship with Roosevelt was mainly confined to Jewish matters, which led to a particular version of the court Jew’s dilemma: Do you press hard, and risk losing access, or be cautious, and keep the doors open?
Wise, choosing to play the insider, gave the telegram to a high State Department official, who asked him to keep Riegner’s report confidential until he could check it independently. Two consequential months went by, when there was no time to lose. Finally the State Department told Wise that it was true: the Nazis had a plan to murder three or four million Jews through industrial processes that surpassed in pure purposeless cruelty anything the world had ever seen. There would be no government announcement of this, but Wise could tell the world himself. He held a press conference, which got only moderate public attention. One can retrospectively chastise Wise for not being more aggressive—but for contrast there is Julian Feibelman’s reaction, which was probably closer to typical among American German Jews, certainly in New Orleans. A few days after Wise’s press conference, Julian devoted his column in the New Orleans Jewish Ledger to criticizing Wise, and not because he thought Wise hadn’t acted quickly enough. He found Wise’s story implausible—it wasn’t so much that the Nazis would not have such intentions as that they would not be able to carry them out. He remembered that “the horrible atrocities of the First World War were proved false later.” This could well turn out the same way.
To Julian nothing about Wise’s account was plausible. Why would Germany, in the middle of a vast offensive against the Soviet Union, divert precious men and matériel to killing “poor and actually harmless Jews,” when that would not help them win the war? Also, Wise had said that one of the Nazis’ methods of killing Jews was to inject air bubbles into their veins, at the rate of up to one hundred per hour, but a doctor in New Orleans told Julian that this was impossible. Who knew what other wild exaggerations Wise had chosen to believe? It bothered Julian, too, that Wise had chosen to announce what he had heard directly, when it might have been more appropriate for the announcement to come from the State Department. Of course the State Department hadn’t and wouldn’t make such an announcement, but it was one of the core convictions of anti-Zionist Reform Jews like Julian that Jews should not advocate on their own behalf, that the advocacy should come from others, who were more neutral. That way it wouldn’t enhance the perception that Jews are pushy, loud, and aggressive. Julian ended his editorial by asking, “Would it not have been far better for Dr. Wise to have refrained from adding his name to these accounts?”
Wrath immediately came down on Julian’s head—first from a Zionist Reform rabbi in New York named Louis Newman, then from Stephen Wise himself. Both of these rabbis were already furious about the formation of the American Council for Judaism, at just the moment when the Nazis were putting into place the mechanisms of the final stage of the Holocaust. (Another vocal opponent of the council was Rabbi Max Heller’s son James, who had become a Zionist Reform rabbi in Cincinnati.) Why, Newman wrote, would Julian choose this of all moments to give the world reason to doubt that the horrors unfolding in Europe were actually happening? Why would he lend his voice in opposition to the efforts to find a place of refuge for whatever Jews were able to survive? Julian wrote back, staunchly maintaining his commitment to anti-Zionism: “I can see no future for the peace and security of our people unless they can enjoy these privileges throughout the world.” (That sounds like an awfully big project.) Julian’s letter, understandably, made Newman only angrier—he wrote again, pointing out that Julian had put himself “in company with Goebbels” by disputing Stephen Wise’s alarming report. And Wise’s letter to Julian was even harsher: “I am sorry for you. I pity you. I consider your attitude disgraceful in every sense. Instead of lifting a finger to help your people, you traduce one who has sought to do everything within his strength in order to touch the conscience of the American people and to avert further Hitler crimes against his people.”
In the summer of 1943, a few months after Wise’s press conference, a member of the Polish resistance named Jan Karski came to Washington to give the still evidently unbelieving American officialdom another report on the Holocaust, then in its peak period of factory killing. Karski, disguised, had managed to visit the Warsaw ghetto and the Bełżec extermination camp. He then made his way to London and told the Polish government-in-exile what he had seen. From there he was sent to Washington. He secured meetings with, among others, President Roosevelt and Felix Frankfurter. Four decades later, in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, Karski reenacted his meeting with Frankfurter. In his telling, after he had laid out his terrible story, Frankfurter rose from his seat and declared, almost shouting, “I don’t believe you!” It’s a resonant moment in the film—but what did Frankfurter mean? Karski’s idea was that Frankfurter wasn’t accusing him of lying; nor was he reacting in the manner of Julian Feibelman, by implying that things in Europe couldn’t be awful on that scale. Instead, Frankfurter meant that what he had heard went beyond the bounds of what he’d been able to consider possible, in a long life of crusading against injustices. How could one live after learning this? Could it be put out of mind?
After the war, Julian joined a delegation of American dignitaries on a trip to Berlin. The city still lay in ruin, filled with piles of rubble and ghostly, half-destroyed buildings that had not been demolished yet. These conditions shocked and horrified him; he thought the United States should not have demanded an unconditional surrender from the Nazis, so that the war might have ended earlier and with less destruction. Just before he left, he stopped by the office of the Joint Distribution Committee, an organization devoted to helping Jewish refugees, to ask whether there was any news about his step-grandmother and his other German relatives, from whom he had heard nothing in years. As he told the story, the people in the office promised to try to find them. It would have been possible, I suppose, for Julian to pursue his search for his missing relatives more doggedly, running down every possible lead, but he hadn’t chosen to do that during the war either. It wasn’t who he was. He never heard back from the Joint Distribution Committee. He returned to New Orleans and resumed his old life at Temple Sinai. With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, he resigned from the American Council for Judaism, though without endorsing Zionism.
I grew up in the penumbra of the American Council for Judaism. Father was not a member, probably because he knew Pop would not have approved, but he and most of the other Jews in New Orleans whom I knew shared its perspective. That was what I knew as normal. It was only when I left New Orleans that I realized how profoundly different, in fact opposite, the council’s views were to what most American Jews believed, and also how widely despised, for being an organization of Jewish traitors, the council itself was. At every point in the standard story most American Jews told themselves about who they were and the progress they were making in America and in Israel, the council had an alternate story.
The director of the council was an energetic Reform rabbi named Elmer Berger, who was an old friend of Julian. To him, President Harry Truman’s early recognition of the Jewish state in 1948 was not a great human rights advance, but a cynical gambit to pander to a bloc of voters so as to improve his chance of being reelected in 1948. The capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, by Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina in 1960, and his subsequent public war crimes trial in Jerusalem, which most Jewish Americans cheered, was to Berger a disaster, legally and morally indefensible. (In Berger’s view, it was Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, who had given the Nazis the idea that Jews should be removed from Europe.)
When American Jews, by the postwar decades prosperously middle class, began to expand the network of Jewish summer camps and day schools, which were meant to keep traditional Jewish religious culture and practice strong into the next generation, Berger tried to launch a campaign of resistance, because he saw these institutions as examples of Jewish self-segregation. Integration should be the Jewish ideal; the council had a program devoted to producing alternate Jewish educational materials that touted assimilation. When Jewish aid organizations launched campaigns to help Jews in Romania and the Soviet Union immigrate to Israel—another popular cause throughout Jewish America—Berger saw it as just a self-interested financial scheme, insisting that actually those Jews were quite happy where they were. When Leon Uris, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who became a popular novelist, published Exodus (1958), his sentimental bestseller, beloved among most Jewish readers, celebrating the birth of Israel, Berger started a back-channel conversation with the Hollywood producers who were going to make the movie version, to get them to tone down the novel’s glorification of the Jewish state. The central concern that pushed Berger to do all this was not primarily Palestinian rights—the word Palestinian was not in his vocabulary—but changes he found alarming in the way American Jews chose to define themselves. They had to be persuaded to resist the tribal impulse.
Berger and his colleagues at the council regularly had quiet conversations with people they thought could be their allies. Another article of faith in the Jewish mainstream was that the career diplomats in the State Department were unfriendly to Israel. From the standpoint of the American Council for Judaism, that was quite true, and a good thing, so they conducted regular off-the-books meetings at the State Department to explore the possibility of weakening American support for Israel. In 1959, when The New Yorker published “Defender of the Faith,” by Philip Roth, a brilliant young short-story writer, about an unsavory Jewish army private appealing to his Jewish sergeant’s tribal loyalty, it was condemned by rabbis across the country—bad for the Jews. But an official of the American Council for Judaism invited Roth to lunch and offered to support his future work financially. (Roth declined the offer.) Elmer Berger’s long run at the council finally ended in 1967, after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War over the armies of the countries surrounding it. That was another event that played very differently inside the council than among most American Jews, who regarded it as a triumph to be celebrated: it indicated that the shaky new state could survive and that Jews could successfully defend themselves. Even Lessing Rosenwald and the council’s other German-Jewish patrons, who were becoming less worried that coming across as too Jewish would lead to exclusion, were not upset about Israel’s victory. But Berger, on behalf of the council, called the war an unwarranted act of aggression and the Israeli victory a tragedy. The board of directors pushed him out.
