Norman Berdichevsky

I was born and grew up in the Melrose-Morrisania and Grand Concourse section of the Bronx that in my post-World War II childhood was among the most densely populated Jewish neighborhoods of the largest Jewish city in the world. A look at the school photographs taken at graduation from P.S. 90 and Junior High School 22 reveals more than 90 per cent and 80 per cent Jewish names respectively. I went on to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan where perhaps “only 65 per cent” were Jewish.

Being Jewish in the most Jewish neighborhood in the most Jewish city in the world, I spent a young childhood free from the complexes, persecutions and humiliations of three thousand years agonizing over Jewish identity. Unlimited opportunity beckoned whether we chose college or started our working life after graduation. My friend Ralph (whose grandfather had been a rabbi in Greece) even became a hero in the New York Police Department, first by becoming the youngest Captain and then by winning the highest award for valor. No anti-Semitic ghosts, specters or evil demons from the European past threatened our sleep.

Although my father never preached Zionism, he had a deep admiration for Israel. A memory that stands out is attending a soccer match at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan in 1956 on Israel’s eighth anniversary to see a top Israeli club play a major European team. I will never forget the expression on my father's face on hearing both the Star Spangled Banner and Hatikva played. It was the one occasion when I remember him--a henpecked husband who had fought in the Red Army in 1920 against the Polish invasion, a foreign war with no meaning for him, and who was too old for World War II—standing proud and tall. His look was one I would later see again on the faces of Holocaust survivors at celebrations of Israel's Independence Day.

Yet as I grew older I began to feel outrage at the deafening silence to the key question "Why the Holocaust?" Feelings of helplessness burned within me. I could not escape the conclusion that somehow my parents and indeed their entire generation had been tested and failed miserably in confronting the worldwide horror of anti-Semitism. How could they have remained so passive? In my mind, only two of my relatives stood out as exceptions: my Uncle Max, who came back from participation in the Battle of the Bulge and General Patton’s Third Army with a captured German helmet and a distant cousin Aaron who was among the founders of Kibbutz Yagur and had helped bring refugees to Palestine from the displaced persons camps in Germany. I became convinced that the success of Zionism had been achieved by the dedication of a gifted minority of idealists who had refused to listen to conventional wisdom. They had achieved their goal through a total renunciation of the Diaspora mode of existence that had set the scene for the Holocaust.

But I now stand in the shoes of my parents. For thirty years I have witnessed the growing ostracism and return to pariah status of “The Jews,” as defined by Hitler and Goebbels, abandoned by all those who at one time embraced the Jews as “allies” in all sorts of “progressive causes”.

A considerable number of academics and media pundits would like to rewrite history, much as Stalin’s staff of photographers who skillfully subtracted purged Bolshevik leaders. The biggest myth of all is that Israel is the product of “Western Imperialism.” The major Arab armies who invaded the nascent Jewish state were British led, equipped, trained and supplied. The Syrian army was French-equipped. The Israelis depended on smuggled weapons from the West and Soviet and Czech weapons. On January 7, 1949, the Israeli air-force consisting of former Luftwaffe Messerschmidt fighters (transferred secretly from Czech bases to Israel) shot down five British-piloted Spitfires flying for the Egyptian air-force over the Sinai desert causing a major diplomatic embarrassment for the British government.

What is so shocking is that hardly any "progressive" critic of Israel is even aware that in 1947-49 Israel’s struggle was endorsed by the entirety of what was then called “enlightened public opinion,” above all by the political far left. The most famous and colorful personality of the Spanish Republic, the Basque delegate to the Cortes (Spanish Parliament), Dolores Ibarruri, who had gone into exile in the Soviet Union, issued a proclamation in 1948 saluting the new State of Israel and comparing the invading Arab armies to the Fascist uprising that had destroyed the Republic. Just a few months earlier, the hero of the American Left, the great Afro-American folk singer, Paul Robeson had sung in a gala concert in Moscow and electrified the crowd with his rendition of the Yiddish Partisan Fighters Song. Andrei Gromyko, at the UN, asserted the right of “the Jews of the whole world to the creation of a state of their own.” Taking (as always) their lead from Moscow, the (hitherto anti-Zionist) Palestinian communist organizations merged their separate Arab and Jewish divisions in October, 1948 giving unconditional support to the war effort and urging the Israel Defense Forces to “drive on toward the Suez Canal and hand British Imperialism a stinging defeat”!

In the vote on partition in the UN, apart from the states with large Muslim minorities (like Yugoslavia and Ethiopia), the Arabs managed only to wheedle a few abstentions out of the most corrupt non-Muslim states. These included Cuba and Mexico eager to demonstrate their independence of U.S. influence and Latin American countries whose regimes had been pro-Axis until the final days of World War II such as Argentina and Chile.

And where are we today? Today we have pseudo-sophisticated media, especially in Europe, pandering to old repressed envy and hatred, countless U.N. votes damning Israel (while that same U.N. ignores gruesome atrocities in Africa and elsewhere) and notorious conferences spouting resolutions condemning Jews or Israel for the evils of our time: all this makes the “genteel” prejudices of “polite society” that had been the target of Elia Kazan’s 1947 film against anti-Semitism, A Gentlemen’s Agreement, appear prehistoric by comparison.

At the Islamic conference in October 2003 in Malaysia, Prime Minister Matathir received a standing ovation when he warned leaders of dozens of Muslim states of a Jewish plot to control the world. He even held the Jews responsible for the [to him, corrupt] notions of democracy and human rights. In the 1950s Mad Magazine would have rejected such a scenario as too absurd for the pages of Mad.

Deja vu? Déjà vu in spades! Have we regressed to 1933? George Orwell wrote in 1944: "However true the scapegoat theory may be in general terms, it does not explain why the Jews rather than some other minority group are picked on, nor does it make clear what they are the scapegoat for." Mark Twain had put it succinctly almost a hundred years earlier when he said that the worst thing that could be said about the Jews is that they too are part of the human race. I used to think that such aphorisms had entered into the general psyche after 1945. I now know that this was too optimistic.

It long ago dawned on me how unfair I had been towards my parents. I now marvel at their courage for having carried on and had children in hopes of a better world. If there is anything to be learned or gained by their trauma, it is a better understanding of their dilemma. What then can we do? We must carry a torch and illuminate our surroundings with the same zeal as Zola, the defenders of the Warsaw Ghetto, the judges at Nuremberg, the rescuers at Entebbe, and politicians who will not play political games to excuse or “explain” anti-Semites by cloaking their hatred under the guise of progressive causes. This is the vow I made last Yom Kippur. It is a vow I cannot break.

Norman Berdichevsky is a geographer, writer, and translator.