1968: Destruction in Chicago and the Birth of West Bank Settlements - Part 2

The formula, "Israel needs our sympathy because they live in a tough neighborhood" is now standard rhetoric for Israeli Prime Ministers and the U.S. administration. I did a Google search for: Israel "tough neighborhood" and got back over 28,000 hits.

The story of mass Jewish migration to America is one that is, by now, 2, 3 or more generations removed from the present. The story of the old life in Europe  has been romanticized in literature and musicals. The harsh story of the early years in America have been sanitized in museums and stories. But the collapse of the formerly Jewish neighborhoods in several U.S. cities shaped the lives of a whole generation of people who are alive and active today. They left an unhealed scar on the psyche of American Jews.

As an American-Israeli, I find it curious that America's cities erupted simultaneously with the birth of  West Bank settlements. Martin Luther King's assassination at the beginning of April 1968 triggered these riots. At the same time, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, spiritual father of West Bank settlements (whom I wrote about here) moved into the West Bank Palestinian city of Hebron to celebrate Passover. For the past 42 years, Hebron has been one of the focal points of state-sponsored settler violence against Palestinians and emblematic of Israel's program for the West Bank including constant violence, intimidation, vastly unequal control of resources, curfews,  occasional extra-judicial killings and impunity for Jewish thugs. Rabbi and Mrs. Levinger set the tone for Hebron and for the entire movement.

It's baffling to me how liberal American including the Jews who supported desegregation and equal rights for all American continue to support these policies against Israel's non-Jews.

I am suggesting that while Jews overwhelmingly moved into more affluent neighborhoods, they carried with them the fear of "white flight." Israel occupied the space in the American Jewish psyche of a "safe haven" and simultaneously, of a dangerous place that needs our protection.

Israel occupies the "tough neighborhood" that America's Jews left behind. Therefore, so the thinking goes, it's up to us to support those Jews who were left behind in the neighborhood.

Beryl Satter's book is so valuable because, by re-examining the American Jewish narrative about white flight, we can also begin to re-think American Jewish attitudes towards Israel.

1968: Destruction in Chicago and the Birth of West Bank Settlements - Part 1

                                                            

Martin Luther King addressing a crowd about school segregation

Chicago - July, 1965

        
Where did all the Jewish lefties go? Jews feature prominently in the annals of American socialism and progressive activism. From Emma Lazarus to Saul Alinsky, from the sweatshops of the Lower East Side to the communes of the 60s, Jews were at the forefront of progressive politics.
Much has been written about the Jewish neocons and about how success has moved Jews to the right.
One of the unhealed wounds in the Jewish narrative is the exodus to the suburbs in the 50s and 60s. The so-called "white flight" from America's cities involved Jews in a particular way. Rabbi Robert Marx, a well-known progressive activist in Chicago from that era (and beyond) recommended Dr. Beryl Satter's book, "Family Properties" to me. She is an historian. Her book is well written and is thoroughly researched. But this book also reads like a thriller. Dr. Satter follows the trail of her father, an activist lawyer and landlord on Chicago's West Side who died prematurely of stress-related heart disease. Satter tries to piece together her father's life, tracking how he became the victim of his own idealism and circumstances.

What I found compelling about the book was how she depersonalizes loaded issues. Satter describes how individuals became enmeshed in much greater forces, particularly institutional racism. During the 50s and 60s, federal agencies regulated a racist system against Blacks. This took decades to undo.  Anecdotally, my experience is that Jews tend to remember Black violence and the destruction of solid, middle class by Black homeowners and tenants. Satter shows how Whites' collective memory of the inner city riots is highly selective. Whites do not remember the extensive, officially tolerated White attacks on Blacks. Rampaging white hordes received police protection as Blacks were intimidated and Black property was attacked. A universal principle applies here. Just as in Israel/Palestine and British Raj India, the onus of non-violence was placed entirely on the oppressed minority. Any occurrence of Black violence dominates our memories. All the White violence - which was far more prevalent and was backed by racist government and business policies - was deleted from the White narrative.
Rabbi Marx tells me how anti-Semitism played into the tragedy that Whites know as "white flight." The WASP establishment knowingly directed the Black migration from the South to Jewish neighborhoods such as Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago. Their assumption was that Jews were the only minority that would tolerate racial integration. This brought Blacks and Jews into conflict. Jews became the interface between the African-Americans and non-Black Chicago.

The most inflammatory federal policy was the infamous "redlining." A neighborhood block had to be 100% White to receive the highest credit rating. As soon as one Black family moved in, the entire block was downgraded. Entire communities of White lower middle class Catholics saw their hard-earned equity evaporate overnight. The so-called "blockbusters" who brought in Black families to White blocks were vilified by the White community.

Westlawn and other West Side and South Side neighborhoods became almost 100% African-American in a few years. Jews fled northward to the north side of Chicago and to the far north suburbs of the city.

Chicago 1968 riots

The climax was 1968, with the the assassination of Martin Luther King. King had moved from Alabama to Chicago in 1965 from Alabama to establish a base for the northern States. His assassination in April 1964 triggered massive riots hat lasted for days. Mayor Daley called in thousands of national guardsman. 28 city blocks were destroyed in the fired and violence. The physical scars are visible to this in the city's vacant lots. Lawndale was etched in White consciousness as a place too dangerous to visit.

For Jews (and other White people), the memory of that time shaped their relationship to the city as they escaped from the city's melting pot to White suburbia.

In part 2, I will suggest how the Jews flight from the city has shaped American Jewish attitudes to Israel.

Israeli Messianic Judaism

How did the West Bank settlements become the national project of the State of Israel?

On 5/5/05, in honor of Israel's Independence Day , the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a list of the top 10 people who made Israel what it is today. Predictablye, David Ben Gurion comes in first. Yizhak Rabin and Anwar Sadat are also in the top 10. There is one rabbi in the listL Zvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook. He comes in after Yasser Arafat and ahead of Golda Meir.

                      

Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook (1891-1982) was the father of the settlement movement. The paradox that he advocated was a. the State of Israel is the fulfillment of God's redemption and ushers in a Messianic age and b. his followers should violate the State's laws in building Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. His followers became the founders of the West Bank settlement project. Many of them are still public figures on the West Bank and Israel.

In preparing for a class I'm teaching next semester I did some research on the origins of Kook's settler movement. It started with Zvi Yehuda's father, Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook (piling on the names must run in the family). Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook was the rabbi of generation of Israel's founding fathers (the so-called second wave of immigration). He negotiated the divide between traditional Judaism and political Zionism. He was ideologically committed to the Zionist project. He parted company with his fellow traditionalists in conferring rabbinic blessing on the young anti-clerical - often anti-religious - Zionists.

                                                                  

                                                        Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook (1865 - 1935)

The outbreak of WWI left A.I. Kook stranded in London. This is what he had to say about the Great War in his essay, "Days of Battle" published in "The Vision of Redemption" (1941)

(The translations are mine. In a time of the revival of the Hebrew language, Kook's prose was particularly creative. He writes elsewhere how he strives for a (kabbalistic) transcendence through language. I've toned it down a bit in the English.)

When there is a great war in the world, the Messiah's power quickens. "The time of the songbird is nigh" (Song of Solomon 2:13). The song of the evil tyrants is eradicated (lit. the pruning of the evil tyrants is at hand) and the world breathes. "and the sound of the turtledove is heard in the land." The individuals who die an unjust death in the violent upheaval of war possess the quality of the righteous, whose death is an atonement. Their souls ascend in the root of life. Their very lives bring goodness and blessing to the greater good of the new world that is being built. The presence of the Messiah becomes more apparent. As extensive and devastating as the war is so is the depth of yearning for the appearance of the Messiah. (p. 121)

Later in the book, Kook answers a question from a devout Jew whether he could collaborate with the (secular) Jewish National Fund. The question centers on the JNF's desecration of the Sabbath by conducting land purchases on Saturdays.

Kook reviews some Talmudic material on the importance of Jewish ownership of land in the Land of Israel. Then he writes:

The JNF's mission is to to purchase properties in the Land of Israel, to transfer them away from non-Jewish ownership to Jewish. This is defined under the religious requirement to occupy the Land which is equal in significance to all the other commandments. The proof is that the Torah requires us to engage in this commandment even by waging war. Naturally, lives are always lost in war. The Torah says of all the other commandments, "that one may live by them." Not so in relation to occupying the Land. While we are not currently engaged in occupying the land by force, we are enjoined to invest all our efforts in occupying the Land through transactions.

The suspension of all law for one redemptive act, and the atoning power of the death of the innocent echo another Jewish Messianic movement: Christianity. Other Jewish Messianic movements in history similarly placed the Messianic idea ahead of all Judaism. The 17th century Shabtai Zvi is a notable example.

The suspension of all of Judaism for reclaiming the Land foreshadows one disturbing aspect of American Judaism. For many Jewish organizations there is no dogma other than Zionism. A Jew can reject God, not observe any of the basic Jewish commandments and still be a Jew in good standing, but if you reject Zionism, your risk rejection by the Jewish community.

Kook's glorification of violence is deeply troubling. To this day, echoes of the debate between Kook and the traditionalist Jerusalem rabbis who rejected Zionism continue to be relevant.

Why the Israeli leadership and public adopted the Kook program is a separate question. Haaretz's readers got it right. Undoubtedly, the Kook ideology has made Israel what it is today. It has also shaped mainstream American Judaism.
                                                                  

Zvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook with Ariel Sharon, the West Bank settlements spiritual and political architects respectively, planting a tree at the settlement of Elon Moreh, near Nablus, 1974.