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Secular Jews consider liberal future at Rutgers-Newark confab
With a broad array of topics, ranging from anti-Semitism to Yiddish humor, from race relations and the war in Iraq to the Jewish influence in popular music, some 150 secular Jews from 10 states and four Canadian provinces gathered over Memorial Day weekend at the Paul Robeson Center on the Newark campus of Rutgers University.
They came together for the annual conference of the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations in a gathering entitled “Secular Jewishness and Human Welfare — Putting Our Values to Work.”
Although in theory joined only by a philosophy that puts Jewish culture and history ahead of religious belief, in practice the gathering reflected — sometimes critically — the largely liberal politics of its organizers and attendees.
In her address, “Anti-Semitism, a Progressive Jewish Perspective,” Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, founding director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, said she was troubled by manifestations of anti-Jewish attitudes on the Left.
“It is in my way. When we internalize it, it humiliates, isolates, and silences us. We need our loud, proud Jewish energy, and it alienates us as potential allies,” she declared.
But Kaye/Kantrowitz added that “frankly, I am scared of anti-Semitism on the Right. Sometimes it’s not exactly anti-Semitism. Sometimes its philo-Zionism, and sometimes it’s just plain rampant Christianism,” which threaten women’s reproductive rights and the separation of church and state.
She told NJ Jewish News that “the Jewish community is becoming more divided” in terms of supporting Bush administration policies, despite perceptions among some Jews that the president is “good for Israel.”
“I think the progressive end is speaking up more, so that the Jewish community is not being spoken for so much by the right wing,” she said.
Also asserting a left-wing analysis, this time on the Middle East, was Jennifer Klein, national vice president of the peace group Brit Tzedek v’Shalom. She urged negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinians, despite the stated reluctance of Israeli leaders — joined by strong backing from the Bush administration and Congress — to negotiate with the Hamas-led Palestinian government.
“Israel and American Jews now have the opportunity to push Hamas to do the right thing,” Klein said.
Speaking at a workshop, she acknowledged that Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. And yet, she said, in previous peace talks, Egypt and Jordan did not agree to recognize Israel until after bargaining started. “Recognition of Israel was one part of the peace agreements,” she said, “not a precondition for talks.”
Klein said that unlike the “disorganized and corrupt” Fatah party, which was formerly in control of the Palestinian parliament, Hamas ran a “clever campaign. Not all of their candidates were Islamists,” she said, and popular support for the group came because of its emphasis on domestic issues of fighting poverty and corruption, not on rigid opposition to Israel’s existence.
Klein said the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act and other measures aimed at cutting off U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority can backfire for both the peace process and Israel itself.
“The Palestinians are going to have to get money from somewhere,” she said. “We do not want it to be from the fundamentalists. When people are pushed to desperation, they can do anything, and we don’t want to create a situation that will make things more dangerous for Israel.”
In two separate gatherings, the secularists considered the role of Jews as champions of social justice, most notably as close allies of African-American battles for civil rights.
Addressing a lunchtime meeting, Paul Robeson, Jr., son of the late New Jersey actor, singer, scholar, athlete, and activist, said his father “was a free Black American — Black with a capital ‘B’ — whose cultural forebears were the African field slaves of the deep South.”
Stemming from this culture, “he grew to understand and empathize spiritually with all folk cultures,” said Robeson, a New Yorker who has written two biographies of his father and is a contributor to Jewish Currents magazine.
Speaking of his father’s “special relationship to the Jewish people,” Robeson said, he “felt a bond between working people — not upper-class people.” The senior Robeson identified the Jews “as a folk culture, and that’s where the connection came from.”
He said his father won a special respect from European Jews who survived the Holocaust as well as the Russian people, who sustained 28 million casualties in World War II.
Robeson said his father “spiritually and emotionally conveyed his attachment to those two hells on earth, relating them metaphorically to black slaves. Those of us who survived are like survivors of a long-term holocaust. We’re a tough breed. He connected by singing Russian war songs and “Zog Nit Keyn Mol,” a Yiddish song he learned from a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion that means, ‘Do not tell me this is the bitter end.’
“When he sang ‘Zog Nit Keyn Mol’ anywhere, it was the power, the voices, of all those who died in holocausts from time immemorial; it was shattering, and I can’t listen to that song now without breaking up,” said the singer’s son.
In another panel dealing with black-Jewish relations, Rodger Taylor and Fred Jerome, coauthors of a book called Einstein on Race and Racism, published by Rutgers University Press, told workshop attendees that Albert Einstein’s deep concern with America’s racial problems as well as his close friendships with Robeson and NAACP founder William E.B. DuBois were virtually hidden from the American public and went unmentioned in most previous biographies of the German-born Jewish physicist.
Jerome said Einstein’s experiences with anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, coupled with the comfort he felt on his visits to the black community in what was in the 1940s the segregated town of Princeton, gave motivation to his becoming active in anti-racist and anti-lynching struggles.
“The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me,” they quoted Einstein as saying. “I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.”
Taylor said he hesitated before embarking on the three-year writing and research project.
“As a black guy writing about a white man who was anti-racist, I felt I had to be very sure about what I was doing, and the fact that Einstein was Jewish — in terms of the reception I would get in the black community — was another additional thing I thought about because there is some level of resentment and some level of anti-Semitism in the black community.” But he said the black community’s reception to his work “has been really, really positive.”
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