Liberalism

A lot of my own views are tempered by my background, my own experiences, growing up in Miami Beach, which many considered just an extension of New York - separated by a distance of over a thousands miles and many states in between, but still as-if part of New York, or New Jersey - where so many Jews also live, which made living in Miami Beach almost like living in New York. The culture was the same. There were Hassidim, there were a lot of Reform Jews and everything in between. The food was the same. The entertainment (with Yiddish theatre when I was a kid) was almost the same. Some would say Miami Beach was like south Brooklyn. I suppose it was.

I think I would have been as comfortable in Brooklyn as I was in Miami Beach. Originally I was from New Jersey, but moved south when I was seven. It was the same with everyone I knew. Nobody was really born down there.

The culture was Jewish. The culture was New York. The diet was Jewish. The music and the sound of prayer was Hebrew. The theater was in Yiddish. If you were not Jewish you were probably from Miami, not Miami Beach.

My father leased a hotel in south beach. It was a unusual and very unique kind of world I grew up in.

All the "old Jews" lived in hotel rooms (efficiency apartments, some of them cooking on illegal hot plates) in South Beach, paid for by their kids who still lived in NY and NJ. Many of the old Jews still spoke Yiddish and many of them were Bolshiviks or they were Menshiviks. There was a constant babel of political debate about socialism and capitalism and the Soviet Union going on all the time. I was weaned on that kind of discussion from elder Jews who had the experiences and the wisdom and to try to take in - even a little bit of it - and it was challenging and exciting for me. I was grateful for the experience.

Today all that has changed and in today's world my Miami Beach where I attended elementary school, middle school, and part of my years in high school is now part of "little Havana" and if I don't speak Spanish I don't really understand the natives and they don't understand me. I has changed that much. I go back and I no longer see anything resembling the world I grew up in. I know others can say the same, but the changes here are so drastic that it really is another country, another world. I can't go home.

On weekends I didn't have to think about my day. There might be the Saturday matinee but more likely it would be a morning in shul in the conservative synagogue at 17th street near the convention center and it was like a concert of Jewish cantorials and song which as much part of me as my blood which flowed though my veins. Sometimes I would attend my own reform temple but I had the choices. There was so much to do. Sometimes it was just fishing off the pier or under it - or from a canal and gigging for crabs.

Jews like me are not so far separated in time from the Holocaust and the Russian Revolution but we're disappearing also. That world is almost behind us. It was a world where I couldn't venture far from Miami Beach because the hotels and clubs in Bal Harbour were restricted and I have been asked to leave because I was Jewish. BUT I also remember an African-American kid I befriended being told he couldn't sit at a soda fountain in a drug store in Miami Beach and me too because I was with him and we had to get out cokes at the back door and all the water fountains came in two flavors; "blacks" and "white only", and bathrooms were also segregated and sometimes they forgot to provide one for the black folks.

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written a lot about Jewish liberalism. In The New Republic (2/20/1995) Avishai Margalit, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew U describes Berlin's work. Berlin, born in 1909, was the first Jewish Oxford Fellow and he knew ALL of the great literary giants of the 20th century. Because Berlin wrote about them we would understand how their wisdom has influenced us.

When Berlin was six he moved from Riga to Petrograd where he observed the Russian Revolution, just as I, who with my family moved from Pennsgrove, N.J. to Miami Beach and we lived there through the second world war he lived in Petrograd and from there as a young boy he witnessed the revolution. In 1920 he was 11 he emigrated to England. When I was 14 (early 50s) I was sent off to the State of Georgia to military school.

I went to the last year of high school in Miami Beach and afterwards I enlisted in the army. Berlin pursued academics and already in 1932 he was elected the first Jewish Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford. I attended military schools in signals, cryptology, security at NSA and was assigned to the White House where I worked for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Later I did tours in Europe and I was in Asia and I worked directly for the Chiefs of Staff in the War Room in the Pentagon. Altogether I was in the army for 8 years before settling down in South Florida to a life of real estate development, brokerage and in and out of the orange grove business, growing oranges and book business, as a book-seller (sometimes successful, sometimes not).

A accident caused the death of our son in France and we (my wife, children and I) returned to Washington where I was assigned to work for the Chiefs of Staff in voice security crypto. It was an important job and was to be my work for the next couple of years. I also decided to learn more about my Judaism. After-all, I was in France and the Jewish community where I was stated was wiped out during the war and I wanted to find out why. I discovered that antisemitism was a whole lot worse than I experienced since my run in with hate in military school.

I was at first serious about the military and intended to continue with academics later. I worked in the white house for President Eisenhower as a voice security cryptologist and I was very busy becoming good at what I did. I considered trying to get into the Secret Service and knew the requirments - but it was not something I decided to pursue. After several years doing what I was doing and also feeling stuck I did get on on with my education, paid for with the G.I. Bill I began working on my own fortune, which proved to be too illusive.

Our fourth child was born with cerebral palsy so my wife and I became life-long care-givers. It was tough on him but it was also very tough on us. And I had my own problems with tic douloureux, considered the most painful disease known which eventually required brain surgery. I'm getting way ahead of myself though. That is not what this monograph was meant to be about.

My life's plans never quite came to fruition the way I thought they might or wanted them too - in spite of a fabulously beautiful wife who was smart too. But nothing was as easy as it sounds when you are thinking about it. and luck, good and bad, had a lot to play with my future, in spite of my decisions, one way or another. But I don't blame anyone for my failures. I just wish I knew what they would have been ahead of time - and I wish I had someone giving me the advice I would give with what I now know. BUT, hey, enough about me.

Lets get back to Jews and liberalism:

While I worked for the establishment in the White House and in the Pentagon and was a soldier I was always a liberal and always remembed those conversations the old people had in the hotel where I grew up. That made a big impression. Military school and antisemitism I experienced there also had a big impact on my life. Berlin had an impression also.

I read his work and saw some of the areas first hand where Jewish antisemitism was prominant and would occasional rear it's ugly head over and over again. My eyes were being opened to a reality I had only heard about and may have experienced as a kid but now was and still is everywhere, all around me - and I couldn't hide from it then. I could make believe it didn't exist and it was easier when other people didn't know I was Jewish but I knew inside and it remained a big element in my attitude and concerns.

I asked some of the French where the Jews lived and they said they didn't know any Jews. They said there were "NO" Jews left in France and they said also it wasn't as bad as I was told it was. They lied of course. I knew it and they knew it. I liked the French people and at first I couldn't understand this diffidence they had toward Jews. And Jane, my Cherokee-Irish wife was becoming Jewish the hard way. (She converted after we were married about 10 years)

So I read more of Berlin's work. I was impressed and I was learning. Berlin was an attache in the British Embassy in Moscow at the end of the war and he met many embattled notables. He met everyone I had known about from the books I read. He knew Freud and Virginia Woolf. He knew Stravinsky, Akhmatova and he knew Pasternak. He knew Nehru, Eliot, Toscanini, Churchill, Auden, Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Bertrand Russell, Gorbachev. He knew Kant, Verdi, Marx. He met them all and through his writing I felt as if I know them too. Berlin knew Rachmilewitch, the "old Menshevik" who he considered the "purest intellectual mind" he had ever known.

Berlin is one of the most important liberal thinkers of our time who like me believed in the `morality of liberalism' not the psychology of liberalism inherited from the "Enlightenment." We didn't agree on everything though. Berlin did not believe everything could be explain vis-a-vis scientifically. BUT I DO. If it does not have a basis in science it does not make sense in my view.

While he respected science he did not accept everything from the ideology of scientism. Berlin has been a Zionist all of his life. And so have I. He championed Zionism as the national liberation movement for the Jews and so do I. I see Zionism as the NLM, the salvation of Jews from antisemitism. If not for antisemitism however I would not consider Zionism important at all. Sometimes my Zionism is really tested by the actions of the Israeli government and army but I remember my own experiences with antisemitism and I am then less critical - although I am still going to challenge wrong-doing when it happens and I will not hesitate to say so but I will remain a committed Zionist as long as antisemitism exists.

Berlin was not religious and neither am I. He did not accept the assertion by many religious Jews that the Jews are `chosen' people. As a securlist that assertion also makes no sense to me. We are not chosen. We are however scapegoated.

An article in The Jewish Week pointed out that for Jews, "liberalism" is more than a label. Jews have been very comfortable on the left. However, the left is, especially today, more and more betraying us as Jews. They cannot understand our attachment to Israel. When they attribute the same conspiracies the right does for Jewish involvement and influence they are betraying us also. When they want Israel to go away and they support those who want to kill Jews they betray us. And we are more left than they are.

To quote from Samuel Heilman in The Jewish Week (12-1-1994):

"At Home On The Left: For most Jews, liberalism is more than a label.. One of the givens of American political life has been the Jewish attachment to the Democrats and the values of liberalism associated with them. As a minority, Jews reasoned their condition would be secure so long as all minorities were protected. This came from their culturally embedded conviction that a society should be measured by how well or badly it treats its most vulnerable citizens."

"Long among the most vulnerable, Jews accordingly supported candidates who because of their liberalism could be counted on to be sympathetic to the powerless. They voted for them on the assumption that when those lower on the social scale are treated well, so too will the Jews. That logic made Jews early and strong supporters of civil rights and prominent in the struggle for minority empowerment. If American blacks -- who for generations were on a inferior rung of the social ladder than were the Jews -- or even gays were protected and offered full civil and constitutional rights, then so too would the Jews."

"Some Jews perceived liberalism as essential to their Jewish identity. According to one of the suburbanites whom sociologist Herbert Gans quoted in his 1950s classic study of Park Forest, III., being Jewish did not mean being chosen for a life dedicated to ritual observance and Torah study (as it had classically meant). Rather, it meant having "a social conscience and liberal tendencies," which distinguished Jews from "the 16 or 18 out of 20 gentiles" who went `without.'"

During the dawn of the Reagan era, a nationwide survey of American Jews showed that Jews have a pronounced "commitment to social equality" and when asked by the Los Angeles Times, "As a Jew, which of the following qualities do you consider most important to your Jewish identity: a commitment to social equality, or religious observance, or support for Israel, or what?" and clarly ONE HALF answered they consider "social equality" the most important of all, which is a very clear indication that "liberalism" is essential to Jewish values.

The same survey showed that MOST Jews remain quite distinctly in the Democratic and liberal camp.

Whenever Jews tilt to the right it is because it is a time when they feel themselves less vulnerable in this increasingly pluralistic U.S. BUT Jews are the most vulnerable part of the WHITE establishment and the challenge to their empowerment is a threat which has influenced some (but not substantial) shift to the right. One might consider this phenomenon applicable to everyone who were formerly in the liberal camp. It does not help to sustain a liberal view when some African-American who have historically been supported by Jews to now have a tendency to become less supportive of the Jews and Israel. Jewish liberalism cannot always be counted on if Jews feel betrayed by others on the left and by minorities who they have historically been supportive of in the past.

Also as pointed out in the article by Samuel Heilman,

"Jews who may be expected to move in a rightward direction are those who continue to suffer the frailties of their minority existence."