In praise of troublemakers

JONATHAN S. TOBIN

In the cozy world of Jewish organizational life, there is no creature more despised than a troublemaker.

Troublemakers come in a variety of political affiliations and personal agendas. But to the powers that be, they tend to look alike.

The thing that troublemakers in the Jewish world have most in common is their contempt for "process."

"Process" is the term we use to refer to the way groups and organizations govern themselves. It involves committees and letterheads packed with names of donors, community big shots and behind-the-scenes power brokers.

One man who ran afoul of our communal "process" is the subject of a new book, "A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust" (New Press, $18.87, hardcover).

Though 60 years have passed since the upstart Bergson (whose real name was Hillel Kook) took on the Jewish establishment of his day, the question of what American Jews did and did not do during the Holocaust is one that continues to haunt us.

Written by David Wyman and Rafael Medoff, the book grew out of lengthy interviews conducted by Wyman with Bergson and other survivors of this dramatic battle to mobilize American public opinion to support efforts to rescue those European Jews from Adolf Hitler and his collaborators.

A Zionist activist who had grown up in Palestine, Bergson/Kook came to America at the start of World War II in the service of the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi. His mission was to organize support for a Jewish Army to fight against Hitler. This project was still floundering when he read the first confirmed published accounts at the end of 1942 of the German plan to exterminate all European Jews.

More than two million Jews were already known to be dead, but no one in America was saying much about it, especially not Jews.

There were many reasons for this failure. Lack of media coverage handicapped efforts to garner a response. A fear of anti-Semitism also deterred many from speaking up.

Yet that should have been no impediment to those Jewish leaders who were positioned to do something about it. Some, like the American Jewish Congress' Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, were fearful of alienating President Franklin Roosevelt and thereby losing their privileged status.

Yet somehow, Bergson was motivated to make the battle for rescue his one and only priority.

Others, such a writer and journalist Ben Hecht, soon joined him in his Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe.

In the end, Bergson created a movement that eventually forced the Roosevelt administration to act. Had the board been created sooner and been better supported, it is impossible to tell how many more lives could have been saved.

What makes this story important for us today is learning one of the chief reasons why Bergson/Kook was unable to fully succeed: the obstruction and sabotage of his campaign by the Jewish establishment.

Caring more about turf than the fate of their endangered brethren, most of the influential Jews of the day did their utmost to defeat the Emergency Committee.

Hillel Kook, who died in Israel in August 2001, went to his grave still lamenting the Jews who might have lived had his campaign been heeded.

Six decades later, the situation of world Jewry has markedly improved, and American Jews remain the most powerful and prosperous Diaspora community in Jewish history.

But with a terror war being waged against the Jewish state, the need for Jewish activism is undiminished.

Israel needs a motivated, active and sometimes brash American Jewish community to continue to speak up on its behalf. Troublemakers are needed to take on a media, the bastion of a journalistic culture of bias against Israel, as well as an academic establishment that treats Israel-bashing as an honored study.

We cannot save the lost millions of the Holocaust. But we can do something about helping the Jews of Israel fight back against those who would destroy them. The memory of the ragtag effort to save the Jews of Europe must continue to inspire American Jews in the years and decades to come.

Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia. Contact him at jtobin@jewishexponent.com.

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