Abstract
After the 1967 Israeli–Arab War, Arthur Waskow was the leading figure in an effort to establish a distinctively religious Jewish left in the United States, something that never had existed. Waskow and others responded to the identity politics ascendant in the left at the time and to the moral challenges that events in the Middle East posed to Jews everywhere. However, it was hard for American religious Jews who felt committed to the State of Israel to come to terms with other leftists at a time when criticism of Israel as an imperialist, colonialist settler state was rising in the global left.
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- 1.
David A. Hollinger, “Communalist and Dispersionist Approaches to American Jewish History in an Increasingly Post-Jewish Era,” American Jewish History 95, no. 1 (March 2009): 1–32.
- 2.
Arthur I. Waskow, “L’Malshinim Al-t’hi Tikvah,” proposed article typescript attached to letter from Arthur I. Waskow to Philip E. Hoffman and Eli M. Black, March 13, 1971, 11. Waskow (who put this term in his own quotation marks) referred specifically to the “Freedom Seder” that he first led in 1969 (see below). Arthur Ocean Waskow Papers 1948–2009, American Jewish Historical Society Manuscript Collection P-152, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY, Box 3, “Jewish Involvement—Commentary Magazine Controversy, February–June, 1971.” Waskow later changed his middle name to Ocean.
- 3.
F. Hilary Conroy, “The Conference on Peace Research in History: A Memoir,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 4 (1969): 385–88. Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 362n32; Simone Zelitch, “Philadelphia’s Jewish Civil Rights Vets,” June 10, 2015, posted at https://simonezelitch.com/2015/06/10/philadelphias-jewish-civil-rights-vets-remember/. On the Wisconsin history program, see Paul Buhle (ed.), History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989). Major titles by Waskow from this period at IPS include: The Limits of Defense (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1962); The Worried Man’s Guide to World Peace (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1963); and (ed.), The Debate over Thermonuclear Strategy (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1965).
- 4.
Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-in, 1919 to the 1960s : A Study in the Connections between Conflict and Violence (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966); Michael S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 94–95.
- 5.
Simon Hall, Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements of the 1960s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 114; Arthur I. Waskow, “Notes on New Politics,” in Arthur I. Waskow, Running Riot: A Journey Through the Official Disasters and Creative Disorder in American Society (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 99–105. On the 1967 war see: Guy Laron, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Avi Shlaim and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The 1967 Arab–Israeli War: Origins and Consequences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
- 6.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 225. Jacobson rehearses this argument extensively. See Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). For arguments that Jews remained an oppressed group, see Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, “The Oppression of America’s Jews” (1970), and Jews for Urban Justice , “The Oppression and Liberation of the Jewish People in America” (1971), in Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology, ed. Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 29–49, 323–46.
- 7.
Jacobson, Roots Too, 221; Riv-Ellen Press, Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 169–70; Brooklyn Bridge Collective, “We Are Coming Home” (1971), in Staub, Jewish 1960s, 264, 265.
- 8.
Bill Novak , “The Making of a Jewish Counter Culture” (1970), in Michael E. Staub (ed.), The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press), 283; M. Jay Rosenberg, “My Evolution as a Jew” (1970), in Staub, Jewish 1960s, 171; Itzhak Epstein, “Open Letter to the Black Panther Party,” in Porter and Dreier, Jewish Radicalism, 68–69.
- 9.
James A. Sleeper, “Israeli Arabs: Israel’s Peaceful Frontier?” in James A. Sleeper and Alan L. Mintz (eds.), The New Jews (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), Sleeper and Mintz, New Jews, 64.
- 10.
Arthur I. Waskow, The Bush Is Burning! Radical Judaism Faces the Pharaohs of the Modern Superstate (New York: Macmillan 1971), 13, 14; Staub, Torn at the Roots, 182; Marty Jezer, Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 208.
- 11.
Arthur Waskow, “A Radical Haggadah for Passover,” Ramparts, April 1969: 25–34; Waskow, Bush Is Burning, 26. The text of the Haggadah is available at https://theshalomcenter.org/sites/default/files/freedomseder.pdf.
- 12.
Robert Alter , “Revolutionism & the Jews: 2: Appropriating the Religious Tradition,” Commentary, February 1971, 47–54.
- 13.
Waskow, “L’Malshinim Al-t’hi Tikvah,” 2, 3, 4–5. Much of this discussion saw the light of day later that year when Waskow incorporated it into The Bush Is Burning!
- 14.
Waskow, Bush Is Burning, 52; Rael Jean Isaac, Breira: Counsel for Judaism (New York: Americans for a Safe Israel, 1977); Uri Avnery, Israel without Zionists (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Arthur I. Waskow to Commentary magazine, March 30, 1977. Waskow Papers, Box 3, “Breira (1974–1977).” Breira: Counsel for Judaism was a somewhat notorious attack on Breira , the dovish Jewish group started in 1973 (see more on this in the text, below); Isaac was preoccupied with Waskow as the pied piper of a disastrous youth movement that she thought was working to destroy Israel.
- 15.
Waskow, “L’Mlshinim Al-t’hi Tikvah,” 4.
- 16.
Waskow, Bush Is Burning, 132, 169–70; Arthur I. Waskow, “Messianism and the New Halacha,” Response, 8, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 33–62 offered a detailed presentation.
- 17.
Waskow, Bush Is Burning, 47–56. Waskow’s wife, Irene, had a sister who lived on a kibbutz.
- 18.
Allan Solomonow , “The Jewish Peace Fellowship—Alternatives in the Middle East Packet, An Introduction,” n.d. [1970]. Kivie Kaplan Papers, 1948–1975, Manuscript Collection No. 26, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH, Box 12, Folder 13.
- 19.
AFSC granted CONAME $2,500 each year during 1971, 1972, and 1973. Allan Solomonow , “A Review of AFSC–CONAME Cooperation,” May 5, 1974. Document courtesy of Donald Davis, AFSC Archives, Philadelphia, PA. Arthur I. Waskow to Kenneth E. Tilsen, November 29, 1971. Waskow Papers, Box 11, “Folder on Correspondence on the Middle East (1970–1975).” Allan Solomonow , “Dear Friend,” September, 1972. Kaplan Papers, Box 12, Folder 13.
- 20.
Arthur I. Waskow to Allen Pollack, December 2, 1970. “Lenny” to “Art,” December 30, 1969 discusses an earlier draft of the JUJ statement. Waskow Papers, Box 5, Jews for Urban Justice.
- 21.
Waskow to Pollack, December 2, 1970; “The Liberation of Palestine and Israel,” New York Review of Books, July 1, 1971.
- 22.
“The Liberation of Palestine and Israel ”; Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in Strength to Love (1963; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 44, 47.
- 23.
“Liberation of Palestine and Israel.”
- 24.
Noam Chomsky to Art [Waskow] and Paul [Jacobs], January 17, 1971. Waskow Papers, Box 11, “Correspondence re: Liberation of Palestine & Israel.” Everett Gendler, “Therefore Choose Life,” in Allan Solomonow (ed.), Roots of Jewish Nonviolence (Jewish Peace Fellowship , 1985), 7–16. This was a reprint of the original 1971 publication. Everett [Gendler] to Art [Waskow], 2 March 1971. Waskow Papers, Box 11, “Correspondence re: Liberation.”
- 25.
Sol Stern , “My Jewish Problem—and Ours: Israel, the Left, and the Jewish Establishment” (1971), in Porter and Dreier, Jewish Radicalism, 353; Arthur I. Waskow to Sol Stern, July 9, 1971. Waskow Papers, Box 11, “Correspondence on the Middle East.”
- 26.
Bill Novak to Arthur I. Waskow and Paul Jacobs, n.d. Waskow and Jacobs had written to Novak after their statement ran in the New York Review, soliciting further signatures for a planned wider circulation. Waskow Papers, Box 11, “Correspondence re: Liberation.”
- 27.
Sharon Rose to Arthur Waskow and Paul Jacobs, July 21, 1971; Arthur I. Waskow to Sharon Rose, July 26, 1971. Waskow Papers, Box 11, “Correspondence re: Liberation.” I have corrected for typographical errors in these quotations.
- 28.
“A Joint Arab–Jewish Statement in Answer to the Ad Hoc Committee for the Liberation of Palestine and Israel,” n.d. Waskow Papers, Box 11, “Correspondence re: Liberation.” On Waldman, see the following: https://jwa.org/weremember/waldman-selma; and http://www.selmawaldman.org/assets_d/40673/download_media/susan-platt-selma-waldman-in-memorium-raven-chronicles-9-2009_108.pdf, accessed April 25, 2017.
- 29.
Arthur Waskow, “A Letter to MERIP” (with response), MERIP Report no. 17, May 1973, 10, 22. Art [Waskow] to Brian, January, 1974; Deborah Hertz to Art [Waskow], 20 January 1974; Arthur [Waskow] to Deborah [Hertz], January 28, 1974. Waskow Papers, Box 12, Correspondence on the Middle East I [1974].
- 30.
Arthur Waskow to Maxim [Ghilan], September 7, 1973. Waskow Papers, Box 12, “Correspondence on the Middle East (1972–1973).”
- 31.
Arthur Waskow, memo on The Conference on the Middle East and the American Jewish Community called by the Jewish Peace Fellowship, January 22–23, 1973. Waskow Papers, Box 5, Folder 11. Allan Arkush, “Jewish Renewal,” in Jewish Polity and American Civil Society: Communal Agencies and Religious Movements in the American Public Sphere, ed. Alan Mittleman, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Robert Licht (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 363–87.
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Rossinow, D. (2018). “The 1900-Year Crisis”: Arthur Waskow, the Question of Israel/Palestine, and the Effort to Form a Jewish Religious Left in America, 1967–1974. In: Danielson, L., Mollin, M., Rossinow, D. (eds) The Religious Left in Modern America. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73120-9_12
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