5759 From: Adam Simms Jan 29 1999
PS The Intelligent Guide to Jewish Affairs
Issue # 118 -- / February 3, 1999 [For subscription information, see end of file] ************** IN THIS ISSUE: ***************Perhaps DNA Stands for "Do Not Ask," says James Munves *Why Pollard is an embarrassment to organized Jewry *The Editors invite you to "Help Jerry Falwell!" *Milton Goldin reviews Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941" and Wolfgang Sofsky's "The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp"
****************** ORACLES OF VANITY By James Munves ****************** According to recent newspaper accounts, DNA testing has revealed a genetic marker for Cohanes. Persons with the marker, it seems, can be linked to a common ancestor thousands of years ago, presumably (Exodus: 28), Moses's brother Aaron. This is really interesting. For one thing, it tinges with racism the definition of a Jew. For if a Cohane is able to establish genetically his right to carry a Torah, what would we make of the fact that Michael Cohan of County Cork, a practicing Catholic, shares the Cohane gene? And wishes to settle in Israel under the Law of Return? As I understand it, the Law of Return is not religiously based. Based on this definition of a Jew, possession of one Jewish grandparent allows one to claim the right to settle in Israel even if he or she has never attended a synagogue or even been told beforehand that he is a Jew (certainly true of many recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union). Nor is it required that the one Jewish grandparent practiced the religion. All that is needed is a birth certificate or other document listing the grandparent as a Jew. But now, in addition to written documents, we may have documents written in proteins. If we now have objective evidence of the hereditary nature of the Temple priesthood, we may find a way of identifying individuals, wherever they dwell today, who had an ancestor in Judah or Israel during the eight hundred and sixty years from Joshua to Zedekiah. For example, we know that King Nebuchadnezzar transported the Judah elite to Babylon, leaving behind the am ha-eretz, the common people, and that, indeed, many of the privileged Jews stayed in the East, prospering under the Persians, some remaining until our era. It is also recorded that the ten tribes of Israel were scattered north and east (some escaping south to Judah), except again for the most humble, and that successive conquerors settled other peoples in Palestine. Migrants, forced or unforced, neglected lowly tillers of the soil, servants, discarded slaves and concubines, returnees from Persia with Nehemiah-are these not among the ancestors of today's Palestine Arabs? And what are we diaspora Jews, creators of today's Israel, if not products of scattering, intermarriage, conversion, rape? Are we less mixed up genetically than the 700,000 Arabs who were living in Palestine when Zionism was born? We need samples of DNA from Jews buried in Judah and Israel from about the end of the second millennium b.c.e. to the fall of the first Temple. Using this, we can determine who, among those living in Israel today, had ancestors in the Jewish kingdoms. Wouldn't it be ironic if the Jewish settlers in Kiryat Arba turn out to have less connection with the sons of Jacob than the Palestinian Arabs whose houses they are bulldozing? Wouldn't it be ironic to see those same Arabs claiming rights in Israel under the Law of return? This is painful. It dissipates myths basic to Israel's existence, such as "A land without a people for a people without a land" and all the emotions growing out of "Next year in Jerusalem!" What are we to do? No Jew of my generation, nurtured in the early decades of this century, raised in a world of homeless Jews, can not feel satisfaction, even pride, in the existence of a Jewish state. At the same time, we must contemplate our participation in the outrages and duplicities of Israel. Willy-nilly, we are parts of a historic tragedy that corrodes the values that are the essence of Judaism. "Your prophets envisioned for you vanity and foolishness, and they did not expose your iniquity to bring you back in repentance; they prophesied to you oracles of vanity and deception." (Lamentations II:14.) James Munves, a PS contributing editor, is author of a forthcoming novel.
********************************* ALL WE KNOW IS WHAT WE READ . . . ********************************* If Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American-born spy for Israel, serving a life sentence in federal prison since he pled guilty during his 1986 trial, did only half the things Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker magazine's January 18 issue, he is a lucky man. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair for supplying a lot less information to the Soviets. And there's little reason to doubt Hersh's account, despite The Forward's snide dismissal of his article as the work of "a left-wing journalist." Hersh has made a career of revealing what the powerful would rather not see exposed to the light of day, from the My Lai massacre to "the dark side of Camelot," and his revelations have never been challenged successfully. Some of Hersh's highlights: * Between the summer of 1984 and his arrest in November 1985, Pollard purloined and handed his Israeli masters a ten-volume manual describing all radio signals intercepted by the National Security Administration. One of Hersh's sources, a retired military officer, describes the manual as "a how-to-do-it book-the fireside cookbook of cryptography." * Pollard handed over data from the Defense Intelligence Agency's Community On-Line Intelligence System (DIAL-COINS), which compiled reports filed from the Middle East by Air Force, Navy and Marine attach‚s. Transfer of the data, another source told Hersh, was "[l]ike handing you the address book of the spooks for a year." * For more than a year, Pollard provided almost daily reports from the Navy's Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF), which contained data tracking movements in the Mediterranean of Soviet submarines carrying nuclear missiles targeted at American military bases. * Perhaps most startling of all, Hersh reports some U.S. intelligent officials believe that "much of Pollard's material" was "repackaged" by Israeli officials "and provided . to the Soviet Union in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel." According to Hersh, the objects of Israel's trade appear to have been "Jewish scientists working in missile technology and on nuclear issues." Hersh is careful to note that U.S. officials acknowledge no direct, conclusive proof of a Pollard-Israel-Soviet transmission belt. Rather, their suspicions are based on inference: "the documents that Pollard had been directed by his Israeli handlers to betray led [U.S. intelligence officials] to no other conclusion." Nor are they likely to lay their suspicions aside with help from Israel. "The Israeli government," Hersh notes, "has refused-despite constant entreaties-to provide the United States with a complete list of the documents that were turned over to it." * Pollard's advocates within the American Jewish Establishment have, over the years, floated a variety of reasons why he should be released from his life sentence. The initial argument was that he merely passed information to an ally with whom the U.S. shares vast quantities of military intelligence; ergo, Pollard hadn't really engaged in espionage. While this rationalization played well with some American Jews, it proved a nonstarter in Washington, where the power to free Pollard resides. So a variation emerged: O.K., Pollard spied-but his life sentence is harshly disproportionate to prison terms meted out to other spies who had worked for hostile powers, such as the Soviet Union. Aldrich Ames's unmasking and life sentence puts a damper on that argument. The latest iteration of the "free Pollard" camp is a resigned, well, yes he did it and he deserved punishment; but he's paid his dues by being imprisoned for the past dozen years, and now it's time to grant him clemency. If Pollard hopes that this argument will anytime soon result in his walking out of prison a free man, his supporters are guilty of fostering false expectations. Clemency is a form of compassionate discharge, usually reserved for elderly and/or physically or mentally debilitated prisoners. By all accounts, he is neither, nor does he show signs of succumbing to either condition in the near future. * What remains a mystery is why his supporters in the Jewish Establishment keep trying to spring him. The Establishment has virtually nothing to say about the disastrous state of the Middle East peace process, and even less to say about serious matters: health care, income inequality, Social Security, campaign finance. But the Presidents Conference has a Pollard committee, and hardly a month seems to go by that one or another macher doesn't return from a visit to his prison cell, an event that routinely generates a yard of so of coverage in weekly Jewish newspapers. Defending Pollard at this late date, after revelations such as Hersh makes and alludes to, is inexplicable unless one concludes that the organized Jewry's devotion to his cause is rooted in recognition that his actions were a response to its rhetoric during the last thirty years, positing the absolute congruity of U.S. and Israeli interests, the obligation of American Jews to support Israel unconditionally, and Israel being the end-all and be-all of Jewishness and Jewish identity. Pollard bought it all-literally, simplistically, without nuance or reflection-and so he was easy pickings for his Israeli recruiters. Israel and the U.S. are allies, and both nations share the same interests, don't they? Only in a limited fashion, however. By virtue of geography, culture, natural resources, climate and a host of other reasons, nations have particular interests, which they pursue singlemindedly. Sometimes two nations' interests coincide, and they cooperate, as when Israel allows U.S. naval vessels to dock in Haifa. At other times their interests diverge, as when, as some in Washington believe, Israel may have passed to the Soviets material Pollard provided. The first is a friendly act, from which both sides benefit; the second is one for which U.S. intelligence officials can be excused if they perceive it as an unfriendly act of betrayal. So Jonathan Jay Pollard rots in jail, as naive in his hope that the Jewish people will somehow end his incarceration as he was naive in apparently believing that he was doing nothing wrong when he enlisted to pass classified documents to agents of an ally. Meanwhile, his American Jewish supporters go through the motions of trying to free him, for to do otherwise would acknowledge that the keystone of their edifice-the absolute identity of U.S.-Israeli interests-is a flawed rhetorical flourish. ******************************************* HERE'S YOUR CHANCE TO HELP JERRY FALWELL !! ******************************************* Last month, the Rev. Jerry Falwell announced that the Antichrist is alive and well, and is a Jewish male. Falwell, founder of The Moral Majority, made this revelation at an evangelical gathering in Kingsport, Tennessee. "Who will the Antichrist be?" he asked, according to a New York Times account. "I don't know. Nobody else knows." But how then does Falwell know that the Antichrist is a Jew? "Because when he appears during the Tribulation period he will be a full-grown counterfeit of Christ. Of course he'll be Jewish. Of course he'll pretend to be Christ." And, since Jesus was Jewish, and since the Antichrist is a "counterfeit" of Jesus-ta da!-the Antichrist has to be Jewish. Soon after the Associated Press and the Times picked up the Rev. Falwell's latest adventure in Sherlock Holmesian deduction, he was quick to reassure Jews that he isn't anti-Semitic. So, armed with this reassurance that a pogrom is not in the offing, we thought PS's readers might like to help the Rev. Falwell out of his quandary: Who is the Antichrist? Send us your nomination(s), and we'll pass them along to the Rev. Falwell. Dear Rev. Falwell: I think the Antichrist is: Because: Sincerely, (Your name optional)
*************** READIN' WRITIN' *************** Victor Klemperer's diary, "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941" (Random House), a runaway best seller in Germany before being hailed in the international press, is important for some reasons not noted thus far in reviews. For one thing, it is the only major Holocaust memoir to begin the day Hitler came to power and to end (in volume two, to be published later this year) after V-E Day. For another, Klemperer, a professor of Romance languages, not only lived in the camp of the enemy (that is, in Dresden) but was on friendly terms with a few non-Jewish Germans. Additionally, he says relatively little about violence-not because of evasiveness but because the utter lawlessness and anarchy characteristic of German conquerors in Poland and Russia were not characteristic of Germans in Germany. Albeit the SS also arranged for industrialized mass murders to take place in Poland, it failed to keep the Final Solution secret; Central Europeans, including Klemperer, could hardly not notice that deportation and "resettlement" meant death. For many German Jews, the alternative to deportation was suicide, and some of the most poignant passages in the book refer to that choice. Nor do many reviewers pose a question that probably occurred to readers who purchased the book after considering glowing comments. (In The New York Times, Peter Gay, who grew up in Germany, described Klemperer as "one of the greatest diarists-perhaps the greatest- in the German language.") The question is, What does Klemperer tell us that we did not previously know about the Holocaust? So far as facts and dates are concerned, not much. By 1999, we know far more about the Third Reich's dramatis personae than he did, and we have long known the dates on which momentous Holocaust events occurred, the details of which Klemperer could understandably not have known. But what we can hardly ever know enough about is what Klemperer describes in a way so gripping that it is hard to put down the book: How drip by drip, daily injections of Jew-hatred into the media and indifference to the fates of victims affected the sensibilities of both victims and ordinary non-Jews. The cumulative effect on the reader can only be described as a combination of devastating and sobering. And it does not encourage confidence in human nature. Paradoxically, Klemperer does not appear as someone who might have been chosen by a committee of his peers for the task of bearing witness. He was a rabbi's son who converted to Protestantism, he detested Zionism to the extent that he considered it as "evil" a philosophy as communism or Nazism, and he seems not only to have had hypochondriacal tendencies but to have been married to a highly-neurotic wife who suffered from various compulsions, including one to build a house no matter what was happening around her. The problem that the regime had with him (in the end, it saved his life) and with others like him was not that he had been born Jewish, nor that he now declared himself a Christian. For National Socialists, anyone with two Jewish grandparents was Jewish no matter what he called himself. Nor was his frontline World War I service any help. The critical factor was that he was married to a non-Jew, and not until the end of the war did the regime decide that Jewish spouses of non-Jews had to die. The irony would be that in early 1945, when Klemperer discovered that he would be deported, what spared him were the Anglo-American fire-bombings of Dresden, events that condemned to death untold thousands of Germans. In the confusion that followed, his wife tore off his yellow star and they joined crowds of people trying to survive. Meanwhile, the regime shifted its concentration to hanging non-Jews of military age suspected of being deserters. Klemperer had kept a diary from the age of seventeen, learning to record, precisely, what he observed, experienced, and wanted to explain to himself. His powers of observation were immense, and his vivid and concrete style of writing make for the work's extraordinary literary quality. What makes for its pathos is that until almost the last entry in volume two (which I read in the German version), the reader will repeatedly ask, Can things get worse? and know that the answer is yes, because the reader knows what happened. Klemperer, of course, does not know what his future holds, so his assumptions give the work a tone that cannot be replicated by writers who did not have similar experiences. What were his assumptions? Among them, early in Third Reich history, not to have illusions about Germans. But he then met non-Jews who extended themselves to provide encouragement or tangible help, when and where they could. With respect to Jews, he does not relate spectacular deeds of bravery, but neither does he relate shameful acts of cowardice. People displayed the qualities of mind and spirit that they had shown before the National Socialists came to power. Klemperer's sharpest criticisms are of his colleagues. He is prepared to forgive ordinary people caught up in National Socialist hysteria and even Nazi leaders who "might perhaps have had honorable intentions and not known what they were doing." But, on August 16, 1936, he is not prepared to forgive fellow academics such as Johannes Kuhn, who he had thought was "a genuine thinker." On that day, Klemperer wrote, "I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lampposts for as long as was compatible with hygiene." Credit should be given the diary's translator and editor, Martin Chalmers, not only for his excellent rendering into English but for his judicious decisions in editing the German original. These characteristics have not always been evident in translations of critical Holocaust documents. We have been well served by Chalmers. Unlike I Will Bear Witness, Wolfgang Sofsky's "The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp" (Princeton University) has not been widely reviewed. This is unfortunate because he picks up the story where diarists had no choice but to leave it; writing on a daily basis was not possible in death camps. (A surprising number of survivors bore witness to what occurred in Auschwitz, but these were memoirs, not diaries.) Sofsky is a historian, not a survivor, but his work has an immediacy that, like Klemperer's diary, makes it difficult to put down. Based on documents and reports by survivors, the book tells how the SS operated death camps in Poland, which was different in several ways from how it operated concentration camps in Germany. The "order of terror" to which Sofsky refers is the procedure through which not just resistance but the will to live was crushed. That procedure was to make terror an arbitrary pastime, to constantly and deliberately confuse victims, to install prisoners as "capos" to head work details and thus divert hatred away from the SS, and, above all, to inculcate an understanding that no one and nothing could be trusted and that therefore there was no hope. Some historians argue that Heinrich Himmler & Co. moved according to a blueprint from which no deviation was permitted and that these criminals knew exactly what they wanted to accomplish. Sofsky does not suggest that the Third Reich lacked an overall intention to massacre European Jewry. He argues, however, that camp commandants and SS troops were not ordered to torment or casually murder Jews but did so as matters of personal choice. It tells us something that "The first precondition for the unbridling of brutality was the institutionalization of terror. From the beginning, violence was regarded in the camps as a means of repression and discipline." A conclusion that can be drawn here is that Germans did not nurture homicidal tendencies toward Jews for centuries, a view with which Klemperer would have agreed, but that in the twentieth century mankind invented ever worse forms of mass murder. By the beginning of World War II, it was as if Germans, led by Hitler, had become possessed by a psychopathic resolve to finish all that World War I had left undone - not simply to reverse political decisions by the victorious Allies but to end what remained of man's decency and his hopes for himself and his future. The world would return to a Dark Age of strange noises during the night and sub-humans who created conspiracies to subvert the world from the hovels in which they lived. In the practical enterprise, Germans failed to end western civilization. But as both Klemperer and Sofsky imply, in the metaphysical sense they may have succeeded. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, how many of us believe idealism to be anything but a philosophy that appeals to fools? - Milton Goldin
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