SHADOWS OF WAR AND HOLOCAUST: JEWS, GERMAN JEWS, AND THE SIXTIES IN THE UNITED STATES, REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Abstract

The article reflects on the––muted––“shadows of war and Holocaust” motivating Jewish activists in the civil rights and New Left movements of the “sixties” as well as the women's movement in the 1970s. For children of Jewish refugees from National Socialism, as well as for “red diaper” offspring of American Communists and alienated rebels against the newly comfortable Jewish suburban middle class, participation in these political struggles could serve both as a key form of alternative “Americanization” or “assimilation through protest” and a link to Jewish values of social justice. In a radically forward-looking movement, profoundly influenced by the African-American church, and linked with a few prominent refugee rabbis, the call for “Never Again” admonished young Jews never to be “good Germans,” to reject complicity with unjust policies at home and abroad; the specifically Jewish invocation of “never again a victim” only came later, decades removed from the events of war and Holocaust.

Notes

1. This essay is based on a presentation at conference on “Jewish Voices in the German Sixties,” Schloss Elmau, 27 June 2012.

2. There is by now a considerable comparative literature covering both the 1960s and 1970s. See Gassert and Klimke, “1968: Memories and Legacies of a Global Revolt,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Supplement 6 (2009); Davis, Mausbach, Klimke, and Macdougall, Changing the World, Changing Oneself; Klimke, The Other Alliance. On the links between Germany and the American Civil Rights struggle, see Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom; see also the excellent website associated with this project, sponsored by the German Historical Institute, Vassar College, and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, www.aacvr-germany.org. For a comparative study of left-wing violence, see Varon, Bringing the War Home. None of these studies are focused on the Jewish experience.

3. See e.g., Farber, The Sixties; Morgan, The 60s Experience.

4. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties, 145.

5. See e.g., Letters from Mississippi, ed. Sutherland.

6. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties, 18. See also Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets; Ellwood, The Sixties.

7. Staub, The Jewish 1960s, 2.

8. Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography 195, XXXVI, quote from speech in Appendix B, Prinz's Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963. Reprinted in Staub, The Jewish 1960s, 90–91.

9. Heschel, “Religion and Race,” 105–107.

10. Michael Walzer, “A Cup of Coffee,” 10. See also, e.g., Edgecombe, From Swastika to Jim Crow, and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) documentary (200 ) and exhibit at the Museum of Jewish, or the joint memoir by Wilma and George Iggers, Two Lives In Uncertain Times. For an account of an Austrian refugee's activism in the Communist Party, the Civil Rights movement, and then, very significantly in second wave American feminism and Women's Studies, see Lerner, Fireweed.

11. Quoted in Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties, 100.

12. See the cinematic exploration of such relationships in New York's Harlem, in Sidney Lumet's 1964 film, The Pawnbroker, starring Rod Steiger.

13. For a brief suggestive account of how the “sixties” played out very differently for young Jews in Israel, in large part due to the drama of the 1967 war, see Margalit, “‘Israel’ 1968 and the ’67 Generation” in “1968: Memories and Legacies of a Global Revolt,” 111–117. Consider also the devastating impact on black-Jewish relations, including rapid Jewish flight to white suburbs, of the mid 1960s “riots” in Harlem, Newark, Detroit, and Watts (Los Angeles).

14. For discussion of the extensive coverage of the Eichmann trial on American television, see Shandler, “The Man in the Glass Box,” in While America Watches, 83–132.

15. See e.g., the documentary film Commie Camp about Kinderland, directed by Katie Halper in 2013.

16. One might consider some analogies here to the rebellion of the young Jewish Renaissance in Weimar Germany, which, of course, the émigré intellectuals remembered. See Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture.

17. The Port Huron Statement, SDS's 1962 founding manifesto, remains a remarkably stirring statement of that early sixties mood. See the reprint edition: Hayden, The Port Huron Statement.

18. See Staub, The Jewish 1960s, “Introduction,” xvi–xxiii; Gitlin, The Sixties.

19. Gitlin, The Sixties, 334–5.

20. Ibid., 173.

21. Brickner, “Vietnam and the Jewish Community,” 161.

22. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties, refers to “personalism.”

23. See Bettelheim's early and much cited (if not necessarily read) analysis in “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations.”

24. Elkins, Slavery.

25. Friedan, “A Comfortable Concentration Camp?” In Staub, The Jewish 1960s, 320, 323–24. See also the original chapter, “Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp,” in Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 271–298.

26. Götz Aly rather bizarrely uncritically rehearses (and not, I think, in good faith) some of these understandable anxieties as fact in his screed against the German student movement in which he was an active participant: Aly, Unser Kampf.

27. Gitlin, The Sixties, 350.

28. Alice Walker, “Why I'm Joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza,” The Guardian online 24 June 2011. www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/25. Walker has been an outspoken participant in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaign against Israeli policies which has generated controversy on US university campuses.

29. Beckerman, When They Come for Us.

30. For examples see Meir Kahane, “The Jewish Stake in Vietnam,” in Staub, The Jewish 1960s, 150–52 (originally published in The Jewish Press, June 9, 1967). In a 1971 interview Kahane attacked the anti-Semitism of the Black Panthers but expressed admiration for their militancy: “And we don't differ with the Panthers in the sense that if after asking for 300 years for things from the government––federal or local––it becomes necessary to use unorthodox or outrageous ways. There is no question. On this we don't differ. We don't differ on their wanting to instill in their young people ethnic pride:” Lowenthal and Braun, “An Interview with Meir Kahane,” 265.

31. See Arthur Waskow's 1969 “Freedom Seder,” https://theshalomcenter.org/content/original-1969-freedom-seder.”

32. Brickner, “Notes on a Freedom Seder” and “My Zionist Dilemma.”

33. Again it would seem important to think more about how this might have played out quite differently for the children of survivors.

34. “Women's Liberation and Jewish Identity: Uncovering a Legacy of Innovation, Activism, and Social Change,” conference at the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, New York University, April 10–11, 2011.

Additional information

Atina Grossmann is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City, where she teaches Modern European history and Gender Studies. In 2014–15 she is the Walter Benjamin Guest Professor in German Jewish History and Culture at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Publications include Close Encounters: Jews, Germans, and Allies in Occupied Germany (Princeton, 2007; Wallstein, 2012), Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und Teheran (Wallstein, 2012), and “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II” (New German Critique, 2012: 61–80). Her current research focuses on the experience and memory of Jewish refugees in Central Asia, Iran, and India during the Holocaust.