Jewish Students, Progressivism and Zionism

I have blogged on several occsions that the collapse of Jewish national identification among the younger generation of Diaspora Jews. I noted the Bund which morphed into Communism, various pacifist groups in the 1920s and 1930s, Reform Judaism before 1937, the rise of the American Council for Judaism and other marginal but loud voices were all in this mold and preceded contemporary reality. Then the push after 1967 from left-wing anti-war groups led to Breirah and others which followed the previous generation in viewing Israel more as a threat to their Dispora identities.

What we see today with IfNotNow, JVP, Bend the Arc and others is reflected, if not totally in purpose, but at least in the process of development that occured with Avukah.

Thanks to Tal Elmaliach's new article, I was able to extract some relevant history that may make clear my position on history repeating itself, if not exactly:

I now located Nathann Glazer's memoirs which shed more light:

I entered City College in February 1940...I was persuaded by a fellow student to attend a meeting of Avukah, the student Zionist organization. I was not a Zionist but was willing to hear what there was to be said for Zionism. It was an accident that had a strong impact on the rest of my life. The speaker was Seymour Melman, a recent graduate of City College who had just spent a year in Palestine and was reporting on his experiences. Had Avukah been simply a Jewish organization, I doubt that it would have made much impact on me. But these were socialist>Zionists. What is more, they were intellectual socialist Zionists and looked down on nonintellectual socialist Zionists...soon I was on the staff of Avukah Student Action (the organization's national newspaper) and had become a Zionist; indeed, before that was settled, I was named editor. No loyalty oaths were required to become a member of Avukah. We had a three-point program, presented in documents portentously titled "theses," and in theoretical pamphlets. The organization may have been Zionist but the culture was in most ways left sectarian. We were generally allied on campus issues with the anti-Stalinist Left – the socialists and the Trotskyites.

The three points of our program were to build a "non-minority Jewish center in Palestine, to fight fascism, and to foster a democratic American Jewish community. This program represented a somewhat off-center Zionism. The term non-minority was meant to leave room to for a binational state of Jews and Arabs. In those days we believed it possible for the two nations to share power, with neither being in the minority in a political or cultural sense. Our notion was that if both nations were guaranteed equal political rights, the Arab majority of Palestine would allow unrestricted Jewish immigration...Avukah was a switching point on the road from socialism to sociology. At first it emphasized the socialism, of which I knew little until 1 became involved. But Avukah, following the pattern of other left sectarian organizations, had "study groups," in which we read not only Zionist classics but also socialist classics: Bukharin's Historical Materialism was particularly favored by some of our elders. But we were not Leninists. Though left, and critical of social democrats, the radical leaders of Avukah who tried to influence us were (Rosa) Luxemburgian – revolutionary but against a directing central party and for education of the working masses.

It was a very congenial bent. The only issues that called for action were Zionist ones; for the rest education was sufficient. The doctrine hardly mattered, I am convinced. It is almost embarrassing to say we believed in revolution. The only way to relieve the embarrassment is to confess that we really did not...

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