by Seth Lipsky
Jabotinsky ended on an optimistic note that the Jews “will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbours. But the only way to obtain such an agreement, is the iron wall, which is to say a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure. In other words, the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an agreement at present.”
Jabotinsky’s stark assessment of the coming struggle was far from Cahan’s sense that the tension in the land was between different sectors of Jewish society: between the socialists and the capitalists, the agrarians and the urbanists, the collectivists and the individualists. After brushing aside the “chauvinists,” Cahan focused on the cooperative settlements and the ins and outs of the Communist bodies in Palestine. The future depended on the success of industry, he said, but if Palestine ever became an industrialized country, “the fine things we see in it now are doomed to vanish.” What Cahan called the “tragedy of the entire situation” was not relations with the Arabs but the Zionists’ attempt to blend two irreconcilable opposites: the splendidly idealistic farming collectives in the Jezreel Valley and the highly industrialized urban economy that would be needed to make possible significant immigration.
If, in his reporting from Palestine, Cahan seemed to veer from wide-eyed exhilaration and reportorial earnestness to armchair philosophizing and socialist condescension, he certainly ignited a debate among his colleagues at the Forward and, presumably, among its quarter-million daily readers. But he had succeeded in creating a newspaper flexible enough to accommodate a no-holds-barred debate on what he now, belatedly, comprehended was a defining issue of Jewish identity in the twentieth century. And he opened this debate at a time when mainstream American Jewish organizations evinced little interest in it.
A long, mocking piece by Ben-Zion Hoffman, writing in the Forward under the name Zivion, began: “Comrade Abe Cahan declared that despite the fact that the work being accomplished in Palestine aroused considerable emotions in him, he has not become a Zionist. If this is indeed so, I have nothing to argue about.… I will not try to persuade Comrade Cahan that he is a Zionist when he himself admits that he is not.” Hundreds of words later, many of them excoriating Cahan for his new passion, Zivion concludes that in the same way that messianic Judaism exists because of the Messiah’s nonappearance, “Zionism likewise will continue to exist, for the reason that it cannot be realized.”
Then Max Pine weighed in with a long attack on Zivion. Pine conceded that “we are not Zionists” in Zivion’s sense of a movement that wanted to restore the throne of King David and bring all Jews to Israel, he said. But “we are Jews!” and therefore “have something to discuss on the subject of Palestine.” Cahan’s reporting “had only deepened our sympathy,” and one day “a great change will take place in the minds and hearts of our workers regarding their attitude toward our brothers, the workers of Palestine.”
Against charges that Cahan had abandoned the principles of international socialism, B. Charney Vladeck defended him, proclaiming that a close reading of “all the telegrams and articles sent by Comrade Cahan from Palestine” enabled one to conclude that “the affair between Madam Zion and Comrade Cahan is up in the air.” Cahan, he said, “did not go beyond making a few compliments. For a couple of charming remarks you don’t get the electric chair.” As long as Cahan’s position remained “Palestine also” and not “Palestine alone,” Vladeck had no problem with his boss’s Zionist enthusiasm. Then he spent a few thousand words reiterating Cahan’s arguments, concluding that the socialist position should be not “Palestine alone” but “Palestine also.”
Some prominent secular American Jews, such as future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, had come to Zionism earlier than Cahan; Brandeis became formally involved with the movement in 1913. If Cahan was lagging behind him and other Zionists, he was running ahead of important sectors of the American Jewish community. Not until the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s would the Reform movement depart from its long hostility to the idea of a Jewish nationality and officially come out in favor of Zionism. Before World War II even the Orthodox Agudath Israel of America declined to support political Zionism on religious principles; it played an increasingly involved role in the Israeli government after statehood was declared in 1948. The American Council for Judaism, which opposed the idea of Jewish nationhood, didn’t even get incorporated until 1942.
Within the pages of the Forward, the debate raged well into the spring of 1926. Scores of other publications followed its progress, reprinting and commenting on the impassioned articles that were running in the paper. It is hard to think of another editor in the history of American journalism who permitted such brutal articles to be published about himself in his own newspaper. Cahan finally did call a halt to the feud by running a series of “summing up” articles, which appeared in the paper beginning May 6. “I am not a Zionist,” he wrote, “but I have never defined myself as an opponent of the Palestinian movement. Furthermore, I have always shown sympathy toward the idealists in Palestine, even though I did not believe at all in their ideology or in their program. My visit to Palestine increased my sympathy significantly. I returned from my visit and I am still not a Zionist, just as before. On the other hand, my feelings have changed, positively, toward the socialist segment of the Zionist movement. Had I known about and understood the communes and the Histadrut, with all its ramifications and enterprises, I would have treated it previously with far more friendly warmth.”
It was a rare admission of error.
No sooner had Cahan closed the Forward’s debate on Zionism than he began planning a trip to the Soviet Union, which took place in 1927 and might be described as the reverse of his tour of Palestine. He had visited Palestine as the head of a movement that was skeptical about Zionism, only to be surprised, even floored, at the positive things that were happening there. That visit set in motion a long, slow turn that would cause the Forward to joyously greet the partition of Palestine in 1947 as one of the most significant events in the long history of the Jews. In the case of his trip to the Soviet Union, Cahan went as a representative of a movement that had been overjoyed at the downfall of the Romanovs and the rise of democratic socialism in Russia, only to become increasingly disillusioned by the Bolshevism that replaced it. What he saw and personally experienced there solidified his contempt for Communism, and his determination to fight it in the pages of his newspaper obtained for the rest of his life.
David Shub, Cahan’s sometime deputy, was put in charge at the paper while the editor was away. Before Cahan left, he later recalled, rumors had it that the Forward was “going to be pro-Soviet.” Cahan, trying to keep to his standards of unbiased reporting, told Shub that while he was in the Soviet Union, Shub “should be discreet” in his editorial writing and “avoid any themes that are critical of Soviet Russia.”
For more than a month, Cahan visited Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, Minsk, and other cities as well. As with the Palestine trip, the Forward widely publicized his journey. “No American journalist is better qualified to understand and interpret Soviet Russia than Abraham Cahan,” the paper proclaimed in an advance advertisement. “He combines a thorough knowledge of the Russian language and literature with a profound sympathy for the Russian masses.” Cahan claimed that “I went everywhere as a Russian like all other Russians. For the most part no one knew that I was a guest,” but that is doubtful. He neither dressed nor talked like an ordinary Russian, and ordinary Russians didn’t arrive at agricultural settlements in automobiles, as Cahan did, accompanied by officials from the Joint Distribution Committee.
Shub recalled that Cahan “decided from the very beginning not to have any interviews with any of the Soviet bigwigs, members of the Soviet government, or leaders of the Communist Party.” He was given leave to travel wherever he wanted, but almost every day a former labor editor of the Forward, using the name Max Goldberg, woul
d call on Cahan at his hotel. Goldberg had returned to Russia after the 1917 revolution and had been, as a Bundist, mayor of the city of Berdichev. “In the summer of 1918, however, he betrayed the Bund and became a secret member of the Communist Party,” according to Shub. Another frequent visitor to Cahan’s hotel was a man named George Vishniak. Vishniak had been a member of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party and a leader of the Cloak Makers Union in New York, before switching allegiances and becoming an employee of the Soviet government. “Cahan told me later,” recalled Shub, “that he had wondered how come that no matter what city he was in, at whatever hotel, he would encounter Vishniak the next day, who happened to be on ‘Soviet business’ in the exact same place.” Cahan became convinced that Vishniak’s “business” was to keep tabs on him and find out whom he was seeing.
The Forward’s Moscow correspondent, Z. Vendrov, also visited Cahan frequently; Vendrov was considered a Soviet sympathizer, if not a party member. After Cahan returned from Russia, Shub noted, “Vendrov was still the Forward correspondent, and when I sometimes changed the lead of an article of his, he would write to Cahan that under no circumstances should his articles be edited, because that could lead to serious reprisal.”
When Cahan made an expedition to the Jewish colonies of Crimea, he was accompanied by Dr. Joseph Rosen, the director of the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation, a program under the umbrella of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Rosen was personally opposed to Bolshevism but managed to avoid criticizing the Soviets; the mood of fear and self-suppression was everywhere evident.
The highlight of Cahan’s trip was a visit to the revolutionary Vera Figner, whom he had long admired and whose memoir he had published in the Forward. Born in 1852 into a well-to-do family, Figner had trained as a doctor in Switzerland (Russia didn’t allow women to attend medical school at that time) and returned to Russia to work as a paramedic and an antigovernment agent. As a member of the radical terrorist group Narodnaya Volya, she had helped plan two of the assassination attempts on Alexander II in 1881. When the group was betrayed by one of its members,a Figner was arrested, tried along with other members of Narodnaya Volya, and sentenced to death. Her sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison. She served for twenty years, plus two additional years of internal exile, before being allowed to leave Russia in 1906. In Europe she traveled widely and advocated for political prisoners in Russia. Her autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, published after she returned to Russia in 1915, made her an international celebrity. It is still in print.
In the years after her return, Figner had grown disillusioned with the revolution, criticizing the Soviet dictatorship until it drove her into silence. Introducing Cahan to a group of surviving members of Narodnaya Volya, she referred to him, sotto voce, as “one of us.” As Cahan listened intently, this aging band of revolutionaries expressed their opposition to the Soviet regime. To protect them, Cahan did not write about this meeting in the Forward, but he confided to Shub that it was “one of the most moving moments” in his life. It only increased his contempt for the Soviet regime.
The America to which Cahan returned in 1927 was hardly concerned about repression in the Soviet Union. The country was busy toasting its newest hero, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had just completed the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight, from New York to Paris. The economy was booming, and unemployment, which had peaked at 21 percent in 1921, had fallen to a little more than 3 percent. The anarchists Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in August of that year, after a highly politicized murder trial and in the face of widespread opposition to the verdict among the Jewish labor unions. It was to the growing tensions in Palestine that Cahan would next turn his attention.
As European Jews continued to immigrate to Palestine in record numbers, the Arabs of Palestine responded with increasing fury. In the late summer of 1929, tensions were running high as false rumors that Jews were massacring Arabs in Jerusalem and seizing control of Muslim holy places swept through Arab communities. On August 17 a Jewish boy was stabbed to death in Jerusalem, a crime that a week later led to a catastrophe: a massacre in Hebron, home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah are buried. Jews had lived harmoniously with Arabs in Hebron for centuries. After fleeting warnings of trouble, the killing started on Saturday, August 24. During the “affray”—the word that The New York Sun used in its editorial to refer to the massacre—sixty-seven of Hebron’s Jews perished.
The Forward published an editorial on August 29, referring to the massacre as “The Third Destruction,” intentionally linking it in significance to the destruction, in 586 B.C.E. and 70 C.E., of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. The attacks on Jews had been made by “savage Arab masses, incited by their own leaders and permeated with dark chauvinism—the root of all wars, of all misfortunes.” Clearly understanding the scale and significance of the story, Cahan returned to Palestine to report on it himself. The confidence that he had expressed back in 1925 in the ability of the British Mandatory authorities to keep peace between the Jews and the Arabs had proved to be overly sanguine.
Cahan’s editorial, the Forward would observe nearly seventy years later, was noteworthy “not only because it marked a milestone in the Forward’s swing behind the idea of a Jewish state but also because of the long view it took, drawing distinctions between what was happening in Palestine and what happened at the massacres at Kishinev and Proskurov.” In the Russian pogroms, the 1929 editorial declared, Jews had been “literally slaughtered like oxen in a butcher shop.” But in Eretz Yisrael “Jews put up resistance wherever they could. Even in the Slobodka yeshiva in Hebron, the boys fought back and built fortifications with tables and chairs.” The details of the struggle, the editorial confidently predicted, would include examples “of great heroism and self-sacrifice” that would “fill everyone with pride at the combative spirit and courage of Jewish youth.” The editorial was startling not only for its support of the religious Jews, but also for its break with the left, which sided with the Arabs at Hebron. The Communist newspaper Freiheit initially supported the Jews of Hebron but then promptly fell in with the Soviet line, calling the pogrom a revolt against British and Zionist imperialism. The Freiheit even organized a pro-Arab, anti-Jewish demonstration at Union Square.
The Freiheit’s posturing infuriated Cahan, but it proved a boon to the Forward, as readers decamped from the Freiheit and switched their allegiance to the Forward; so did three of the Freiheit’s important writers, H. Leivick, Menachem Boraisho, and Avrom Reisin. Cahan filled the Forward’s pages with letters from angry Freiheit readers, some of them accusing the Freiheit of treason. The debate over Zionism that Cahan launched in the pages of the Forward had, however awkwardly, put the Forward on a trajectory toward growing support for the Jewish state. The Abraham Cahan who was about to lead the Forward into its fourth decade was a different person from the impassioned revolutionary who arrived in New York in 1882. There was only one other major issue on which Cahan needed to find his way home.
* * *
* Comrade
† In 1941 Kacyzne would flee Nazi-occupied Warsaw for Ukraine. But the German army reached Ukraine ahead of him, and on July 7 in Tarnopol, during a Nazi roundup, Ukrainian collaborators beat him to death.
‡ Joseph Trumpeldor (1880–1920) was a Russian-born Zionist pioneer. A hero of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, he immigrated to Palestine in 1911. In 1915 he organized the Zion Mule Corps, a division of Jews from the Middle East who fought alongside the British at Gallipoli during World War I. On March 1, 1920, responding to an alarm from the residents of the farming village of Tel Hai in the Upper Galilee that was being threatened by Arab gangs from nearby Lebanon, Trumpeldor arrived with reinforcements and died in the course of the battle.
§ The first Soviet state security organization, the Cheka was a forerunner of the KGB.
‖ Jabotinsky’s essay wa
s also published in an English translation in South Africa’s Jewish Herald on November 26, 1937; that version of the essay is available at http://www.danielpipes.org/3510/the-iron-wall-we-and-the-arabs.
a Sergey Degayev, a police informer who later changed his name to Alexander Pell, eventually moved to America and founded the school of engineering at the University of South Dakota.
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Cahan returned from Palestine in October 1929, just as the stock market was crashing and America was plunging into an economic depression that would last for just about a decade and leave millions unemployed. In its most severe months, more than 25 percent of American job seekers were out of work. That same year Jay Lovestone was ousted as the head of the Communist Party USA on orders from Joseph Stalin. In the wake of his feud with Stalin, Lovestone vowed to bring down the entire Soviet Union. As a place to weave his plots, Lovestone was given a cubicle at the office of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which was the Forward’s arm in the labor movement. From that cubicle he would forge an alliance with David Dubinsky, president of the ILGWU and, later, with James Jesus Angleton, the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA.
By taking in Lovestone, the Forward was providing seed money for one of the greatest, if least-known, efforts in the struggle against Communism: the drive, after World War II, to organize throughout liberated Europe free trade unions that were answerable not to a government, a corporation, or a political party but to a vote of their members. These unions operated under the umbrella of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, based in Brussels; they battled the Communist-influenced unions that were under the influence of the World Federation of Trade Unions, based in Prague. At the end of World War II, Lovestone sent to Europe a young organizer named Irving Brown, who helped break the Communists’ control of the Western European docks, enabling aid from the Marshall Plan to arrive. A generation later he brought in labor union members to help break the effort of Communist-backed students to topple France’s Fifth Republic. It was with Brown’s International Confederation of Free Trade Unions that there eventually affiliated a little-known free trade union in Gdansk, Poland, named Solidarity, which would later rise up and crack Soviet rule in the East Bloc.
