[Marxism] Elderly Jewish leftists mend fences

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, April 13, 2006
Jewish Currents Magazine and a Longtime Adversary Decide to Merge
By JOSEPH BERGER

Like more than a few blood relatives, they were the bitterest of enemies.

More than a half-century ago, the Communist editors of Jewish Currents 
magazine and the Socialist and liberal leaders of the Workmen's Circle 
clawed at each other over the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case, the 
prevalence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and now-obscure 
controversies like the execution of Rudolf Slansky, a Czech Jew who defied 
Stalin. Many on both sides refused to forget or forgive.

But with Communism no longer stoking the ardor it once did, some of these 
old quarrels have come to seem pointless or have been spent. So it has not 
completely shocked the remaining combatants that Jewish Currents is merging 
with its once-despised adversary.

The magazine, one of the last remnants of an era when many Jews in New York 
City believed that Communism would redeem America, realized that with just 
2,200 aged readers remaining, its future looked dim. By becoming an arm of 
the Workmen's Circle, the century-old mutual aid society and preserver of 
Yiddish culture, it instantly gained 13,000 additional subscribers ? that 
organization's dues-paying members. And the Workmen's Circle has gained the 
voice it needs to make itself heard on issues of the day, a voice that 
might help it appeal to younger Jews.

"We are liberal-left people, and in light of history, the differences now 
seem like nuances and not gigantic mountains that could not be overcome," 
said Dr. Barnett Zumoff, a former president of Workmen's Circle and a 
member of the Currents editorial board.

This marriage of opposites will be consecrated on May 7, but already the 
number of Workmen's Circle members on the 12-member board has been 
increased to 9. Not surprisingly, some leaders of Workmen's Circle opposed 
the merger, saying, "Don't trust those old Commies," according to Dr. 
Zumoff, who is an endocrinologist. But they had difficulty making their case.

True, the editor, Lawrence Bush, 54, is a onetime "red-diaper baby" whose 
grandmother Bessie Sayet, a rabbi's daughter, claimed to have returned to 
Russia in 1917 on the same boat as Leon Trotsky to help the Revolution. 
Nevertheless, Mr. Bush grew up in a solidly bourgeois pocket of Queens and 
was never even a doctrinaire socialist, let alone a Communist.

"To this day, I'm wary of ideology," Mr. Bush said during an interview at 
his home in Accord, N.Y., in Ulster County. "Anybody who purports to 
explain the world through a single ideology, I'm interested but I'm skeptical."

That perspective no longer sticks out among the Jewish Currents audience. 
Most of the magazine's onetime Communists were disillusioned first by the 
revelations about Stalin's murderous purges and finally by the collapse of 
the Soviet empire, and their revised views have converged with the 
reformist vision of the Workmen's Circle. Many of the diehards have, well, 
died.

Still, the merger could not but stir up memories of a time when razor-thin 
distinctions of doctrine set off fistfights, name-calling and searing 
critiques in political journals. So byzantine were the political 
machinations between Marxist cousins that in the mid-1920's, long before 
Jewish Currents was born, the Communists within the Workmen's Circle 
snatched away its summer camp, Kinderland, on the western side of Sylvan 
Lake in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. The Workmen's Circle was forced to set up a 
new camp, Kinder Ring, on the lake's eastern side.

Jewish Currents, now a bimonthly with a $30-a-year subscription cost, was 
started as Jewish Life in 1946. It was in all but name a Communist Party 
organ, and its editorial policy zigged and zagged with the Soviet party 
line. David A. Hacker, a member of the magazine's advisory board, recalled 
how the magazine labeled Stalin's Jewish detractors as fascists who "must 
be destroyed."

But in 1956 Khrushchev began to acknowledge the purges and slaughters of 
the Stalin era. Word also filtered out that a group of Jewish writers and 
scientists, later numbered at 14, had been executed in 1952 for publicizing 
Jewish suffering during World War II, even though their effort had been 
sanctioned by Stalin. Louis Harap, the magazine's editor, was devastated, 
telling colleagues, according to Carol Jochnowitz, the magazine's 
production editor, that he felt "as if the world had fallen out from under 
him." After the magazine printed the revelations, it lost three-fourths of 
its subscribers.

"They considered that Jewish Life had Jewish blood on its hands," Mrs. 
Jochnowitz said.

Morris Schappes tried to keep the flame burning. He had sterling leftist 
credentials: fired from City College for Communist membership, imprisoned 
for 13 months for perjuring himself before a state legislative committee. 
He changed the magazine's name, promised to be more self-critical and 
raised questions about Soviet anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, the magazine did 
not fully break with party dogma until the June 1967 Mideast war, when the 
Soviet Union denounced Israel for aggression against its Arab neighbors 
while Jewish Currents supported Israel's right to defend itself.

Currents' outlook proved increasingly compatible with organizations like 
the Workmen's Circle. The animosity thawed. One sign of rapprochement came 
in 1997 when Mr. Schappes's 90th-birthday tribute took place at Workmen's 
Circle headquarters on West 33rd Street. (He died in 2004 at 97.)

Mr. Bush, the editor, worked as an assistant to Mr. Schappes from 1979 to 
1983. When he was asked to take the magazine's helm in 2002, he said, "I 
didn't know whether I was returning as an undertaker or as an editor." As 
an editor working with board members to whom subtle shadings make a big 
difference, he has struck a balance. An editorial on Israel in the current 
March-April issue says that if the Hamas-led government is willing to 
negotiate, Israel should reply in kind, but if not, then Israel should 
continue its unilateral withdrawal from occupied lands.

A test of the new partnership came when the Communist Party U.S.A. asked to 
place an ad congratulating Jewish Currents on the merger. The board decided 
to accept the ad, not only because they needed the money, but because 
refusing to run it would violate their members' feisty devotion to free speech.


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