Zionism, Assimilationism and Antifascism: Divergent International Jewish Pathways in Three Post-War Australian Jewish Magazines

Kaiser, Max

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-43639-1_6

Max Kaiser⁶

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media ((PSHM))

Abstract

In the immediate post-war period, Jewish communities worldwide sought to draw political lessons from the events of the Holocaust, the rise of fascism and the Second World War. At the same time, diasporic Jewish communities were struggling to create new political frameworks to understand the establishment of the State of Israel. In Australia, these conditions produced an intense level of cultural and political debate in the Jewish community. This chapter examines three major Jewish magazines of this period: Unity; The Zionist; and The Australian Jewish Outlook. These magazines reflected different perspectives on Jewish politics, representing antifascist, Zionist and assimilationist ideas, respectively. A central feature of these magazines was a transnational political imagination. The issues of Jews in Australia were refracted through an international lens.

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Notes

1.
See World Jewish Congress, Papers from the World Jewish Congress Second Plenary Assembly, 1948, http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=22287 (accessed June 21, 2017).
2.
Suzanne Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger 1997), 340–346; P.Y. Medding, From Assimilation to Group Survival: A Political and Sociological Study of an Australian Jewish Community (Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney: F.W. Cheshire, 1968), 20–21.
3.
Hsu-Ming Teo, “Multiculturalism and the Problem of Multicultural Histories: An Overview of Ethnic Historiography”, in Cultural History in Australia, ed. H. Teo and R. White (Sydney: Allen and Unwin 2003), 149.
4.
Teo, “Multiculturalism and the Problem of Multicultural Histories”, 149. In Michael Kakakios and John Van Der Velden’s account, “the massive increase of the migrant working mass, and the hegemonic problems this has created for the state since the 1960s, gave birth to “ethnicity” as an outward ideological projection of the community bourgeoisie”. Michael Kakakios and John van der Velden, “Migrant Communities and Class Politics: The Greek Communities in Australia”, in Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Australia, ed. Gill Bottomley and Marie De Lepervanche (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 163.
5.
Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 204–208.
6.
Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 18.
7.
Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 256.
8.
It is notable that census questionnaires in Australia have only ever defined Jewishness as a matter of religious identification. Medding, Assimilation to Group Survival, 18–19; Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 256. There was also significant immigration of Jews from Russia, Palestine and particularly Poland before the 1930s. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 147–148.
9.
Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 254.
10.
Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 256.
11.
Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 324–327; W.D. Rubinstein, “The Revolution of 1942–1944,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 11, Part 1 (1990): 142–153.
12.
Rubinstein, “The Revolution of 1942–1944” 146–149.
13.
Rubinstein, “The Revolution of 1942–1944”.
14.
These representative bodies are not elected via universal suffrage. They consist of delegates from Jewish organisations. Proposals for individual democratic franchise were defeated in this period. See, Rubinstein, “The Revolution of 1942–1944”, 152; Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 352–357.
15.
Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 212; Marianne Dacy, Periodical Publications from the Australian Jewish Community: A Union List, 5th edn (Sydney: University of Sydney, Archive of Australian Judaica, 2007).
16.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
17.
Miriam Gilson and Jerzy Zubrzycki, The Foreign-Language Press in Australia (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1967).
18.
Gilson and Zubrzycki, Foreign-Language Press, 127–128. Gilson and Zubrzycki’s study explicitly excludes the Chinese and Jewish press. They cite Percy Joseph Mark’s The Jewish Press in Australia, Past and Present (Sydney, 1913) as “unfortunately out of date”. Gilson and Zubrzycki, Foreign-Language Press, vii. Mark’s volume was eventually succeeded by Suzanne Rutland, Pages of History: A Century of the Australian Jewish Press (Darlinghurst, NSW: Australian Jewish Press, 1995). For a more sociological survey, since outdated, see Mark Braham, “The Jewish Press in Australia”, in The Ethnic Press in Australia, ed. Abe (I.) Wade Ata and Colin Ryan (Melbourne: Academia Press and Footprint Publications, 1989).
19.
Gilson and Zubrzycki, Foreign Language-Press, 157.
20.
Robert Mason, “Australian Multiculturalism: Revisiting Australia’s Political Heritage and the Migrant Presence”, History Compass 8, no. 8 (2010): 817–827.
21.
Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, eds., Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008), cited in Robert Mason, “Australian Multiculturalism”, 819.
22.
Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2015), 92.
23.
Mason, “Australian Multiculturalism,” 820.
24.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 20.
25.
Medding, Assimilation to Group Survival, 70.
26.
Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 295–310.
27.
This began with the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, restricting Jewish immigration. However, the Yishuv’s fortunes were inextricably tied to the British Empire in the Second World War, somewhat dampening protests until after the war. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 307–310. For the role of the British in facilitating Zionist colonisation, see Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 31–64.
28.
The Australian intelligence services were thus concerned not only with communist activism within the Jewish community but also with Zionist organising, see “REFERENCE COPY, “Jewish Unity Association,” (1941–1949)”, A6122, 155, National Archives of Australia.
29.
Early issues accompanied a mass membership campaign for Zionist organisations that, in Victoria for instance, aimed to enrol “the majority of the adult Jewish population”. “Zionist Work in Australia and New Zealand,” The Zionist, October (1943).
30.
“The Weekly Bulletin,” The Zionist, September (1943).
31.
Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 303.
32.
For a biographical sketch of Patkin, see Vivien Altman, “‘The Spark in the Ash’”, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 23, part 1 (2016): 79–92. For a portrait of Australian Zionism and its growing fortunes during this period, see Bernard Keith Hyams, The History of the Australian Zionist Movement (South Caulfield, Vic.: Zionist Federation of Australia, 1998), 66–101.
33.
David Rechter, “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Communism in Melbourne”, Masters thesis, University of Melbourne, 1986, 81–82.
34.
Rechter, “Beyond the Pale,” 82.
35.
Rechter, “Beyond the Pale,” 110.
36.
Rechter, “Beyond the Pale,” 100.
37.
For a discussion of the intersection between Popular Front politics, a changing communist position on Palestine and the shift in Soviet foreign policy, see Paul Kelemen, The British Left and Zionism: History of a Divorce (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2012), 86–106. For an examination of the change in Soviet policy, see Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet-Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949 (Cold War International History project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2005). For Gromyko’s speech, see Andrei Gromyko, “Palestine at UNO: Extracts from the Speech Made by Mr. Andrei Gromyko at the General Assembly of UNO on May 14th”, New Life 1, no. 5 (1947).
38.
For an account of how the Soviet Union’s support for Israel allowed the communist David Martin to briefly edit the Sydney Jewish News see David Martin, My Strange Friend: An Autobiography (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1991), 213–214.
39.
For example, see: “Safeguard the Jewish State!”, Jewish Life 2, no. 3 (1948); Ber Mark, “Voice of the Oppressed: World Congress of Intellectuals in Wroclaw, Poland, August, 1948”, Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 6 (1949).
40.
See Burgoyne Chapman, “The Vindication of []”, Australian Jewish News, 21 July 1950; Philip Mendes, “The Australian Left’s Support for the Creation of the State of Israel, 1947-48”, Labour History 97 (2009): 137–148. It is understandable why the JCCFAS drew these two issues together. While there were no antisemitic riots around the issue as there were in Britain the period saw an upshot in antisemitism in the Australian press and as Norman Rothfield then put it “there was undoubtedly an attempt by anti-Semitic groups in this country to utilise the situation in Israel for the purpose of creating ill-feeling towards the Jews in Australia”. Quoted in Norman Rothfield, Many Paths to Peace (Fairfield, Vic.: Yarraford Publications, 1997), 23.
41.
As Hannah Arendt suggests, the category of “Jewishness” as something quantifiable and subject to internal contestation was only possible as a result of modern Jewish emancipation and assimilation. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt Books, [1951]; repr., 1976), 83–84.
42.
For an extended account of the fortunes of this journal, see Louise Hoffman, “A Review of the Jewish Press in Western Australia”, Journal of The Royal Western Australian Historical Society 8, no. part 2 (1978).
43.
The AJO were against what they called “political Zionism”, which aimed at the creation of an independent Jewish State. They were in favour of “Zionism as a humanitarian and cultural movement designed to facilitate the migration to Palestine of Jews who, because of racial and religious discrimination, cannot or will not live in the country of their birth or adoption”. “The “Australian Jewish Outlook”: Editorial Policy Outlined”, Australian Jewish Outlook 1, no. 1 (1947), 2.
44.
“The “Australian Jewish Outlook”: Editorial Policy Outlined.”
45.
Shalom Ratzaby, “The Polemic About the “Negation of the Diaspora” in the 1930s and Its Roots”, Journal of Israeli History 16, no. 1 (1995): 19–38; Donna Robinson Divine, “Exiled in the Homeland”, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 21, no. 2 (2003): 66–81.
46.
Ratzaby, “Polemic About.” See also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile Within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture”, Theory and Criticism, 4 and 5 (1993): 23–56, 113–132.
47.
Daniel H. Weiss, “A Nation without Borders?: Modern European Emancipation as Negation of Galut”, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 34, no. 4 (2016): 72. This notion of nationhood does not imply a modern concept of nation as produced by modern nationalism.
48.
Weiss, “A Nation without Borders?”.
49.
Cited in Weiss, “A Nation without Borders?” 80. For a discussion of Jews and the French Revolution, see Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 17–49. For a discussion of Jewish emancipation and the emergence of modern antisemitism, see Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London & New York: Verso, 2016), 85–111.
50.
The origins of this ideology lie with the maskilim of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment who venerated the state, seeking to turn Jews into individual state citizens above all else. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 98–117.
51.
David J. Benjamin, “The Case for the Racial Group,” The Australian Jewish Outlook 1, no. 8 (1947), 10; Philip Masel, “The Case for the Religious Group,” The Australian Jewish Outlook 1, no. 8 (1947), 12–13; S. Stedman, “The Case for the National Group,” The Australian Jewish Outlook 1, no. 8 (1947), 11–12. On territorialism see Adam Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Clive Sinclair, “The Kimberley Fantasy”, Wasafiri 24, no. 1 (2009): 33–43.
52.
Masel, “The Case for the Religious Group,” 12.
53.
Masel, “The Case for the Religious Group,” 13.
54.
Masel, “The Case for the Religious Group”. For a discussion of the transformation of the idea of Judaism into a “religion” rather than a political entity, see Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 24.
55.
See Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 165–206.
56.
Benjamin, “The Case for the Racial Group,” 10.
57.
Benjamin, “The Case for the Racial Group”.
58.
Stedman, “The Case for the National Group,” 11.
59.
Stedman, “The Case for the National Group”.
60.
Stedman, “The Case for the National Group”.
61.
For a discussion of Zionist historiography, see David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
62.
A. L. Patkin, “An “Australian Jewish Outlook””, The Zionist, June (1947), 21.
63.
Patkin, “An “Australian Jewish Outlook””, 19.
64.
Patkin, “An “Australian Jewish Outlook””. While, as noted above, the movement internationally was turning against the British, even in 1947 Patkin was still angling to position Zionism as congruent with British imperial loyalty claiming that it “enabled Britain to obtain the Mandate for Palestine and to gain a firm hold in the Mediterranean”. Patkin, “An “Australian Jewish Outlook””, 21.
65.
“REFERENCE COPY, “Jewish Unity Association,” (1941–1949)”, A6122, 155, National Archives of Australia.
66.
After the formation of the Sydney Council, the magazine continued to be published by the Unity association. All other political work was undertaken by the SCCFAS. Nate Zusman, ““Unity” a Magazine of Jewish Affairs,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 9, part. 5 (1983): 341–355.
67.
There were two major Jewish weekly newspapers in Melbourne at the time, both of which had substantial Yiddish supplements, the Australian Jewish News and the Australian Jewish Herald. In Sydney there was The Hebrew Standard of Australasia and the Sydney Jewish News. There was a plethora of contemporary publications affiliated with social and sporting clubs, political organisations and synagogues. For a comprehensive listing of Australian Jewish periodical publications, see Dacy, Periodical Publications.
68.
The driving force behind the establishment of the magazine was its editor Hyam Brezniak who lived in Sydney, see Suzanne Rutland, “Creating Intellectual and Cultural Challenges: The Bridge”, in Feast and Fasts: Festschrift in Honour of Alan David Crown, ed. Marianne Dacy, Jennifer Dowling, and Suzanne Faigan (Sydney: Mandelbaum, 2005); Hyam Brezniak, interview by Hazel de Berg, 29 April, 1975, National Library of Australia, Hazel de Berg collection.
69.
Duncan Hallas, The Comintern (London: Bookmarks, 1985), 123–159; Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998), 244–328.
70.
Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik, “Introduction”, in A Vanished Ideology, ed. Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 10–11.
71.
For an extended discussion of the genesis of this politics and of New Life and Jewish Life see Max Kaiser, ““A new and modern golden age of Jewish culture”: shaping the cultural politics of transnational Jewish antifascism”, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 3 (2018): 287–303.
72.
Hyman Levy, “What Is a Nation?,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 2 (1948), 17.
73.
Levy’s analysis of what constituted a nation was informed by Joseph Stalin’s 1913 definition of a national group, see Joseph Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question”, in Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1935), 3–53.
74.
Hyman Levy, “What Is a Nation?”. Levy expanded upon this in his 1958 booklet Jews and the National Question (London: Hillway Publishing Company, 1958).
75.
The Jewish left historical materialist account of Jewish history was set out comprehensively in a series of articles by Moses Miller published in Jewish Life disputing a nationalist (or religion based) Jewish historiography, see Moses Miller, “Zionism and the State of Israel : 1,” Jewish Life 3, no. 7 (1949). For Miller both a nationalist and a religious interpretation of Jewish history were founded on an idealist conception of a national or divine will as historical subject, discounting material factors.
76.
Hyman Levy, “A Letter to Jewish Intellectuals”, Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 3 (1948).
77.
A.L. Patkin, “Note”, The Zionist, October (1945).
78.
For instance, see M. Kusher, “The Jewish Cultural Conference: Critical Comments,” Australian Jewish Forum 8, no. 71 (1948).
79.
A. L. Patkin, “Press Review: The “Unity””, The Zionist, April (1950). See Max Kaiser, “Between Nationalism and Assimilation: Jewish Antifascism in Australia in the Late 1940s and Early 1950s”, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, University of Melbourne, 2019, 145–187.
80.
Sam Goldbloom, interview by Suzanne Rutland, 12 April 1988, CY MLOH 437/135, Suzanne Rutland collection, State Library of New South Wales.
81.
Dacy, Periodical Publications.
82.
Bernie Sanders, “How to Fight Antisemitism”, Jewish Currents, November 11, 2019, https://jewishcurrents.org/how-to-fight-antisemitism/ (accessed November 20, 2019).
83.
Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), 423.

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University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
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University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia
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Kaiser, M. (2020). Zionism, Assimilationism and Antifascism: Divergent International Jewish Pathways in Three Post-War Australian Jewish Magazines. In: Dewhirst, C., Scully, R. (eds) The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43639-1_6

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