Nations Divided

American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid

M. Feld

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137029720
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

The anti-apartheid struggle remains one of the most fraught episodes in the history of modern Jewish identity. Just as many American Jews proudly fought for principles of justice and liberation in the Civil Rights Movement, so too did they give invaluable support to the movement for racial equality in South Africa. Today, however, the memory of apartheid bedevils the debate over Israel and Palestine, viewed by some as a cautionary tale for the Jewish state even as others decry the comparison as anti-Semitic. This pioneering history chronicles American Jewish involvement in the battle against racial injustice in South Africa, and more broadly the long historical encounter between American Jews and apartheid. In the years following World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish leaders across the world stressed the need for unity and shared purpose, and while many American Jews saw the fight against apartheid as a natural extension of their Civil Rights activism, others worried that such critiques would threaten Jewish solidarity and diminish Zionist loyalties. Even as the immorality of apartheid grew to be universally accepted, American Jews continued to struggle over persistent analogies between South African apartheid and Israel's Occupation. As author Marjorie N. Feld shows, the confrontation with apartheid tested American Jews' commitments to principles of global justice and reflected conflicting definitions of Jewishness itself.

1

POSTWAR CONFLICTS OVER RACIAL JUSTICE

Political histories of the relationship between the United States and South Africa in the postwar era focus on the cementing of a Cold War alliance. American leaders saw in South Africa an important ally and trading partner. They were drawn to its growing economy, its wealth of minerals, its strategic location, and the zealous anticommunism of its leaders, the architects of apartheid. For these reasons, the United States supported South Africa at the United Nations.

Western Jewish leaders’ desire for an alliance with South Africa emerged out of their quest for Western Jewish unity after the destruction of the Holocaust. Many of these leaders felt an urgent duty to unify world Jewry, to perpetuate Western Judaism now that its cultural homeland in Europe had been viciously destroyed. Organizations like the World Jewish Congress (WJC) emerged from the war with new priorities. Founded in 1936 to meet the increasingly urgent need for a unified, representative body to coordinate, support, and defend Jewish interests in Europe, the WJC sought to represent Jewish interests in international and regional organizations; its leaders formulated creative plans for vital Jewish communal life outside of Europe and, too, outside of Palestine/Israel after the war. Its goal was also to strengthen the bonds among Jewish communities throughout the world.

Any history of the United States and South Africa in this era must account for the explosive racial situations in both nations, as American and South African citizens engaged in courageous acts of defiance to protest state-sanctioned white supremacy. South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) galvanized protests to apartheid, “moving from moderation to militancy” in the late 1940s and 1950s. While working fervently toward Civil Rights in the fires of the Cold War at home, liberal African American leaders were forced to accept “the U.S. foreign policy of fighting against communism, not colonialism.” These leaders spoke of their opposition to apartheid in anticommunist terms, or in terms that evoked clear analogies with evil: they compared apartheid to Nazism, white regime leaders to Hitler.¹ While these analogies had a special resonance for American Jews, it was a complicated road to their own apartheid protests.

The WJC sought the membership of South African Jewry, and this pursuit mandated taking a stand on South African apartheid. While the WJC’s international work only reinforced the already strong concept of Jewish solidarity, it also shed light on the different and uneven development, on the diffuse commitments and ideologies, of Western nations’ diverse Jewish communities.

At times, the pursuit of unity placed Jewish leaders like those of the WJC at odds with world organizations that strove to draw universalist lessons from the destruction of both World Wars—organizations like the United Nations, whose members also struggled to balance commitment to individual nations’ sovereignty with a professed commitment to universal human rights for all world citizens.² Jewish leaders’ vision of a unified world Jewry also proved to be at odds with those who took positions on domestic and global liberation struggles. This chapter first examines the postwar debate within the WJC, and concludes with a discussion of Fritz Flesch, a Holocaust survivor and American union activist. His correspondence over Jews and South African apartheid opens a window onto the diverse responses of American Jewish leaders to apartheid, as they wrestled with the live question of how Jewish organizations and individuals might balance what they saw as best for the particular interests of world Jewry with their positions on universal crusades for justice.

* * *

The war, the founding of the United Nations, and the gradual rise of South African apartheid set the scene for critical debates over this question. A decade after the founding of the United Nations, South African legislators began to strengthen apartheid laws for “separate development,” restricting nonwhite residence to specific areas, controlling social interactions with nonwhite South Africans, limiting their movement as well as their access to education, jobs, union membership, land and business ownership, and governmental participation. Although the ideologies stretched back to the beginning of white settlement in the seventeenth century, the rise of the Afrikaner Nationalists in South African politics after 1948 marked the start of the codification of apartheid. These new laws further entrenched the white minority’s control over South African land and resources.

India attempted to place South Africa’s poor treatment of people of Indian origin on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly. As the number of members of the General Assembly grew with recently decolonized nations, and as groups such as the Council on African Affairs began lobbying the United Nations and drawing worldwide attention to oppression in South Africa, the United Nations began to criticize apartheid.³ Unhappy with the pressure placed upon it by the United Nations, the South African government later chose to withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and downgrade its representation at Assembly meetings.⁴ In December 1950, the United Nations formed its Commission on the Racial Situation in the Union of South Africa. Four years later, it issued a Resolution urging nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to “eradicate prejudice and discrimination” and to work with them on “promoting a peaceful settlement” in South Africa.⁵

As an NGO, the WJC received this resolution.⁶ With its main leadership and constituency in the United States, the WJC had already developed a productive relationship with the United Nations. Its leaders worked with the United Nations to draft the language of 5 of the 30 articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These articles dealt with the international treatment of national laws that restricted human rights and issues of asylum. “We had learned our lessons from the Nazis,” wrote one WJC leader, celebrating the passage of the Declaration in1948.⁷ Although limited by Cold War political alliances, the United Nations became a forum for global awareness around issues of human rights and offered the antiapartheid and other anticolonialist movements the opportunity to use the language of human rights to appeal to a legitimate higher authority.⁸ These limits proved especially powerful for African Americans, as scholar Carol Anderson documents: American governmental leaders sought to mute the United Nations’ investigations into South Africa’s human rights abuses so as to “escape national scrutiny of the ‘negro problem’” within their own borders.⁹

The WJC had a complex and tangled relationship with South Africa’s organized Jewish community, whose primary instrument was the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD).¹⁰ This Resolution presented yet another tense moment in that history. Since the years immediately following the war, the WJC had courted South African membership. With the SAJBD as members, the WJC would gain credibility over the British Board of Deputies, with its long-standing ties to South African Jewry, as the leaders of world Jewry. Indeed, the WJC would emerge as the main Jewish NGO at the United Nations. The WJC also faced a tremendous fiscal crisis, and hoped to benefit from the immense wealth and historic philanthropic generosity of organized South African Jewry. Ultimately, prior to the United Nations resolution, the WJC reached an agreement with the SAJBD that stopped just short of formal affiliation: the WJC received a moderate sum from South Africa each year and also gained the loyalty of the organized South African Jewish community. But the temporary nature of the arrangements gave the SAJBD significant leverage over the WJC. The promise of a more permanent, future affiliation was regularly used to fend off any criticism of South African Jews, especially over apartheid.¹¹

But leaders of the WJC differed over how to respond to the United Nations 1954 resolution regarding South Africa. The white South African government continued to respond to nonviolent protests of apartheid with repressive measures, meeting the Defiance Campaign, in which Nelson Mandela rose to leadership, with massive arrests and curfews. South African Jewish leaders continued to debate formal membership in the WJC. How might the WJC best balance the organization’s commitment to uniting world Jewry—building on their valuable connection to South African Jewry and negotiating its relations with other Jewish organizations—with its responsibility to speak out against injustice in an affiliated nation? Did it, indeed, have that responsibility?

British Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, who became head of the WJC’s New York office, served as a strong advocate of Jewish solidarity in this debate. He informed the board that it must ignore the United Nations request: though his regret was “deep and genuine,” he saw this as “inevitable in view of our relationship with the South African Board of Deputies.”¹² To the president of the WJC, Perlzweig was even more direct: “It would manifestly be a very foolish thing for us to send a highly critical document on South Africa to the U.N., and it would certainly wreck the hope of doing anything in regard to affiliation.” Using language indicative of his powerful feelings of allegiance to world Jewry, Perlzweig asserted that Simon Kuper, chairman of the SAJBD, “would rightly regard it as a betrayal.”¹³ With family in South Africa, Perlzweig had intimate knowledge of the political position of the SAJBD, and his feelings of a strong diasporic identity, a Jewish family in diaspora, was doubtless informed by this.

David Petegorsky, an executive board member of the WJC since 1948, responded to Perlzweig’s memo with “vigorous protest.” He replied as a leader in the American Jewish Congress, founded by East European Jewish immigrants in 1918 as a more democratic, less elitist alternative to the American Jewish Committee. “The refusal of the WJC to reply to a communication from the Secretary General on one of the worst cases of racial segregation in the world cannot be regarded simply as a matter of expediency,” Petegorsky wrote. “It seems to me to go to the very heart of the principles for which we stand.” Although Petegorsky acknowledged the difficult position of the WJC with regard to South African Jewish leadership, he insisted that a “dignified reply” could be made without jeopardizing South Africa’s affiliation. In his final paragraph, Petegorsky inserted a reference to the American Civil Rights movement and to Jewish organizational involvement in a pivotal event within US borders in 1954, the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas:

You may not be aware of the fact that last year, the AJCongress filed a brief amicus in the segregation case before the Supreme Court. A delegation of three Jews from the South came to New York to visit Dr. Goldstein [Israel Goldstein, head of the American Jewish Congress from 1951–1958] . . . to demand that we withdraw our brief and threatened that if we did not . . . we would be denied allocations from Welfare Funds in the South. Dr. Goldstein promptly told them that while he had no idea how we would be financially affected, this was to us a matter of basic principle and we could under no circumstances yield to any such demands.¹⁴

Many mainstream American Jewish organizations supported Civil Rights in the postwar era, drawing from a “unitary concept of prejudice” which meant that “anti-Semitism, white racism, and all other forms of bigotry” were inseparable. To defeat white supremacy, then, was to defeat anti-Semitism. These groups saw a direct connection between their “wartime struggle against fascism and their postwar dedication to intergroup relations,” including Civil Rights.¹⁵ The American Jewish Congress specifically viewed the adoption of a liberal, universalist worldview, intentionally linked to both Zionism and to Jewish communal solidarity, as a means to “save American Jewry from assimilation.”¹⁶ In these years, Petegorsky and other AJCongress leaders saw no conflict between a commitment to universal ideals and to Jewish particularism. Indeed, taking a stand against apartheid marked the global extension of their dedication to pluralism and inclusive democracy at home—and not incidentally, aligned Jewishness, even Judaism, with these forces in the postwar, modern world.

Struggling against Perlzweig’s notion of solidarity as consensus, Petegorsky continued to press the issue. He asserted that he was “not insensitive to the peculiar problems which an international organization faces.” But to him, Perlzweig’s argument for silence on the issue of South African apartheid rested on weak evidence. From an organizational standpoint, Petegorsky noted that the AJCongress’s “actual allocation from the Southern part of the U.S. is far greater than the sum which the South African Board contributes to the WJCongress.” Thus the risk the AJCongress took in speaking out against American segregation was, by his measure, far greater than the WJC faced. Nevertheless, they were “outspoken” on the issue of African Americans’ Civil Rights. Moreover, he wrote, the problem of segregation in South Africa was not solely a domestic issue: “Evidently the United Nations did not think so when it set up its commission.”¹⁷

In 1960, activists in the United States and South Africa focused new attention on the evils of white supremacy. Thousands of Black South Africans marched i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Apartheid and American Jews
• 1   Postwar Conflicts over Racial Justice
• 2   American Zionism and African Liberation
• 3   Jews or Radicals?
• 4   “South Africa Needs Friends”: Cold War Narratives and Counternarratives
• 5   Jewish Women, Zionism, and Apartheid
• 6   New Agendas: The Organizational Jewish Response to Apartheid
• 7   “Our South Africa Moment”: American Jews’ Struggles with Apartheid, Zioniasm, and Divestment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index