Nathan Glazer on the Rise and Fall of a Jewish Student Paper

A rally at City College in the 1930s. Courtesy CCNY Archives.

That’s too bad, because Avukah Student Action, an almost forgotten Jewish student newspaper of the World War II era, is fascinating both as a document of a heady period of political thought and as a precursor to the writing its contributors would produce as professional journalists and academics.

Avukah Student Action was the official publication of Avukah, a national Zionist youth group with ties to the Zionist Organization of America. Its contributors were students and recent graduates associated with New York’s City College, then a hotbed of Jewish intellectualism and radicalism. With an editorial staff of three and a small stipend from the Z.O.A., they cranked out a weekly paper that ran such historically weighty headlines as “Nazis Plan Ghetto State in Poland” and “Reich Jews Herded to Lublin Pale” - or, with what in retrospect reads as devastating understatement, “Fascism a Real Danger; Jews Not Secure.”

According to Avukah’s mission statement, presented in the first issue of A.S.A. in 1938, the group was committed to three principles: combating “fascism and imperialist war,” working for “the creation of Jewish communal interests in America,” and “building up...Palestine as a non-minority center for Jews.” A.S.A.’s writers took seriously the connections between these goals, offering cogent analysis, often in Marxist-inflected language, of issues like the status of Arabs in the yishuv or the effects of British quotas on immigration to Palestine on European refugee Jews.

A.S.A.’s editors and mentors included Seymour Melman, who would become an economist and a professor of engineering at Columbia, and Zelig Harris, a linguistics professor at Penn who taught Noam Chomsky. But the paper’s most famous alumnus is probably Nathan Glazer, now 83, a retired Harvard sociologist who first gained notoriety as a member of the New York Intellectuals, a group of ambitious young writers on politics and the arts in the 1940s and ’50s who came primarily from New York’s Jewish working classes.

Along with comrades like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, Glazer started out a fiery socialist, but reacted to what he saw as the excesses of sixties student radicalism by turning to the right. But while Kristol and Podhoretz came to spearhead the neoconservative movement, Glazer has maintained that he is not a conservative ideologue but a critic of liberalism.
New Voices spoke with Glazer about his Avukah Student Action days.

How did you become involved in Avukah Student Action?

I got into it by accident during my first or second semester at City College, in 1940. Seymour Melman, who was a very powerful, attractive figure, a man of great charisma, pulled me in, and before I knew it I was editing the newspaper. I didn’t come from a particularly Zionist or Jewishly observant family. My father was a socialist who voted for [Socialist Party candidate] Norman Thomas.

One thing I noticed in looking through the A.S.A. archives was the relative lack of coverage of Europe in the late thirties and early forties compared to coverage of Palestine. Was there just not enough information coming out of Nazi-occupied Europe? Was it a political decision to distribute your coverage that way?

It certainly wasn’t a political decision, except in one sense. We felt the central issue was the British limitation on Jewish immigration to Palestine. So, in a way, the European Jewish situation became for us a question of how to enable Jewish immigration to Palestine, not just as a question of defense but as a refuge for European Jews.

It’s also true that in the years I was most active in Avukah Student Action, 1940 and ’41, we probably knew less about what was going on [in Europe] - we didn’t have much on it.

To an extent, the ideology of Avukah tried to incorporate the Jewish question into the problems of fascism and socialist self-determination. There was a subordination of Jewish interests into these larger interests. For example, very important at the time was the [political and literary journal] Partisan Review. At the time the war broke out, two prominent members of the Partisan Review editorial board, Dwight McDonald and Clement Greenberg, wrote an article called “Ten Theses on the War.” They argued it was an imperialist war and that we shouldn’t get involved. The argument would seem perfectly outlandish today. But their notion was, Germany was capitalist, England was capitalist, so it was a fight between capitalist counties and that was not our fight.
And while that was not necessarily our point of view, it reflects the way that the framework of socialism could influence our thinking in those days. The role of Jewish interests as such got depreciated within that [framework]. Now, it got depreciated less within Avukah, because at least we were also Zionists and committed to the idea of a Jewish national homeland. But because of our location within the socialist framework, we failed to think of special Jewish interests - like what the Nazis were doing to the Jews of Europe. We knew of it, but it didn’t play the role it should have.

Did Avukah consider itself a socialist organization?

Part of the leadership tended to be left, and when it ran into organizational difficulties, it was accused of being under the control of Trotskyists - which was not true, there may have been one or two Trotskyists, but not that many - but it certainly was left in its Zionist orientation. We would run our summer camp up at [the campsite of] Hashomer Hatzair, the youth group that supplied the most communal and left [participants in] the kibbutz movement. But we ourselves were not Hashomer, we had all kinds of points of view, and some of us were really mainstream Zionists.

Our relations were quite friendly for the most part, those who came to Avukah out of left inclinations and those who came to it out of more Jewish orientations. The latter group was numerically much larger, but the first group was the dominant one and the one that ran Avukah Student Action.

Was that because the leftist group was more intellectual?

I don’t know. Academics came out of both groups. But maybe. Our group was more New York, and the other might have been more Midwestern. We had a large chapter at Harvard, but interestingly enough, none of the left group I’ve described came out of the Harvard group. The New York group came largely out of City College and Columbia.

The left group at Avukah Student Action [was at one point advised] by Hannah Arendt, who represented the anti-nationalist tendency. This must have been ’43 or so, before she had started writing in America. She was writing for the German Jewish publication Aufbau [Reconstruction] and living in a crowded apartment on the West Side. Later Arendt worked for Commentary. I was [at that point] part of the predecessor to Commentary, the Contemporary Jewish Record, which was a mix of Greenwich Village people and German Jewish émigré intellectuals, all connected to the American Jewish Committee [which published those magazines] through their ideology of non-Zionism. They had this humanistic idea that something short of a country like all other countries - without an army and perpetual wars and so on - was possible, but what that was no one could ever define. That was a position I agreed with at the time. Commentary, the Contemporary Jewish Record, the [more religiously-inclined magazine] Menorah Journal - they were all part of a complex point of view that is very difficult to define or appreciate today.

Avukah broke up in 1943, right at what would seem to be the peak of its relevance. Why did that happen?

I suspect the war would have broken it up anyway. Seymour Melman was drafted, leaders were going off to war. Plus, the Z.O.A. was [withdrawing] support. The sums of support would seem miniscule today - something like $1,500 - but in those days, that went a long way towards paying the rent.

But the other thing that happened was the left [contingent of Avukah] decided to organize a kind of coup at the national convention in ’43. We thought it was very important that Avukah would survive, and that we would control it. We were going to bring the revolution or something. [Avukah leader Seymour Martin] Lipset got up in the course of these various shenanigans and said, there’s a group here that’s trying to take over - and it all broke up in disorder.

Now how it actually happened, I don’t know. I don’t know who took the card catalogue. Who took the bound volumes of Avukah Student Action. Who closed up the office. We just fell apart. In view of my age, I don’t know how many people are left to tell the tale. Of the old Avukais, a woman named Irene Schumer has organized a reunion or two. She was part of the non-left group, but we’re all friends now to the extent that we ever see each other. There aren’t many of us left to meet. We’re in our eighties now. So reconstructing that history might be very difficult now. In spite of the fact that we were all so verbal, that so many of us wrote, I don’t know that anyone has tried to tell the story of the breakup of Avukah. I don’t know if it’s tellable anymore.

In your book American Judaism (University of Chicago Press, 1957), you talk about a wave of Jewish student publications that emerged from the student movements of the 1960s, most notably the Berkeley-based magazine The Jewish Radical. Do you see a lineage connecting different eras of Jewish student journalism?

The different phases seem not to connect to each other. The historical moments that created them and ended them seem to be very different. Like this burst of activity in the late sixties, early seventies - they had a different focus from ours in that they were already focused on questions of Jewish religion. We just didn’t have any connection to the cultural Jewish side, even though we probably all came from more Jewish homes than those who founded those Jewish papers in the seventies! They were trying to fill a void. I think we thought we had plenty of Jewish culture and didn’t need any more. But you might say a connection all the way through is the problem of the Jewish homeland.

Comments

Add New Search

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.12

Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.