Michael Steven Smith’s Notebook

ON THE BORDER by Michael Warschawski

Reviewed by Michael Steven Smith

Profoundly moving, beautifully written, intellectually penetrating, On The Border by Israeli socialist Michel Warschawski, is the outstanding political memoir of the generation of sixties radicals. Warschawski is the singularly most eloquent and effective anti-colonialst leader Israel has produced. “Mikado,” as he is known, is respected internationally for his unconditional, if not always uncritical, support of and solidarity with the Palestinians.

The problem of the Zionist project, from its inception in the l9th century, until now, is that there were already Arabs living in Palestine. Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, conducted his first Zionist congress in l897 in Basel, Switzerland. (The German Jews of Munich refused to host the congress on the grounds that they were successfully assimilated and therefore there was no Jewish question.) Afterwards the rabbis of Vienna sent two representatives to Palestine on a fact finding mission. They cabled back, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” (more…)

RADICALS, RABBIS, AND PEACEMAKERS: Conversations With Jewish Critics of Israel, by Seth Farber, Common Courage Press, 252 Pages, $l9.95. 207-525-0900.

Reviewed by Michael Steven Smith

My grandparents came to America from Hungary in 1912. My family who stayed there and the Hungarian Jewish population were mostly killed by the facists in the bitter winter of l944, some 800,000. Twenty thousand alone died of the cold and disease, huddled in the great unheated synagogue, the largest in the world, on Dohany Street in Budapest. I was in Budapest with my wife and sister and friends this past October vacationing and visiting my cousins. As it happened it was during Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holiday and new year. We are not religious, nor are my Hungarian relatives, but we asked them to take us to that synagogue for Yom Kippur services. It was quite stirring to be there amongst the remnant of that ancient Jewish community that had been in Budapest going back to the times of the Romans.

My Hungarian cousin Anti is still alive and vigorous at age 96. He was not picked up in l944 with the others but rather in l94l, because he was a communist. So was his wife Manci. They managed to place their two year old son Vili with a sympathetic Christian woman before being arrested and put in separate labor camps. Anti soon escaped and fought in the forests with the Partisans. He is figure mentioned by his country’s historians. Manci lived. In l945 with the Russian liberation they returned to Budapest to fetch their son. Vili answered the door. “I am your mother,” said Manci. “No you are not,” answered Vili. “My mother was beautiful.” She was ninety pounds and bald. So they started anew. (more…)

NLG friend Judge Bruce M. Wright died at age 86 this past March. He was a significant figure in the heritage and history of our country not only as a jurist and attorney, but as a humanist intellectual, a poet, and a humorist, as the two volumes of his autobiography reveal ( Black Robes, White Justice, and Black Justice in a White World).

Wright became a New York City judge relatively late in his life, unexpectedly appointed by Mayor John Lindsay in l970. When Lindsay told him of his appointment, Wright, unbelievingly, replied that he couldn’t accept the judgeship because he did not have the money to pay for it. He was then 52 years old. He had been a published poet, a lawyer, a decorated WWII combat veteran, an Army deserter, a manager and advisor to jazz musicians, and an expatriate intellectual in Paris. He met Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin, with whom he got drunk on scotch ending up in a French hospital with a bleeding ulcer. He worked on a magazine with Leopold Senghor, the future president of Senegal, with whom he remained a life-long friend. Like many black Americans, Bruce Wright found the City of Light less oppressive, deserting the Army on his way back to America from European combat, making the decision en route when a white officer looked at his medals and then looking straight at him said, “I didn’t know they allowed niggers to fight.” During the war From the Shaken Tower, a book of his poetry, was published in England and it was at that time also that he began his collaboration with Langston Hughes. (more…)

THE MAGICAL ANIMAL:

We bought Charlie almost fifteen years ago. We hadn’t intended to buy a bird. It was supposed to be a zoo visit. Debby found out about this cool place in Tribeca, The Urban Bird. All the baby birds for sale were just out there, standing on perches, sleeping in little cozy nests. No cages. Just young parrots - all kinds, sizes, and colors. Green ones from South and Central America; white ones from Australia; blue and scarlet ones from Indonesia; and Charlie, a grey one with a red tail from Central Africa. Charlie was featherless at the time and living above the store in the nursery. But I am getting ahead of my story.

All the birds in the store were babies, with one exception. One old bird was living in a cage, hanging high from the ceiling, in the back of the store, commanding a view of all who entered. I opened the door and Eli, our son, age ten, and I walked in. Debby lingered by the cash register reading a New Yorker article about this “only in New York” place.
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This review was written for Socialism and Democracy (www.sdonline.org) and will appear in the journal’s November 2007 issue (no. 45; vol. 21, no.3).

Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (London and Ann Arbor Pluto Press, 2007).

Joel Kovel has given us an impressive and important book. Its first printing sold out without a single review, major or otherwise. Nevertheless word of this extraordinary work is spreading. The taboo in the United States (not Israel) against seriously discussing and criticizing Zionist Israel has been broken with the publication of Jimmy Carter’s bold book labeling the situation in the Occupied Territories “apartheid” and with the exposure by prestigious professors Mearsheimer and Walt – in the London Review of Books after rejection by the Atlantic Monthly – of the power of the Israeli lobby. Kovel, by focusing squarely on how to “overcome” Zionism, takes the discussion exactly where it needs to go from there. He writes beautifully, even poetically, not just on Zionism’s sordid history, but on its ideology, its ethics, and even on the terrible ecological devastation in Israel itself, where every river is polluted, some to lethal levels. And he writes with courage and hope.

Kovel believes that the creation of Israel in l948, as a colony of settlers who established an exclusively Jewish and discriminatory state, has created a multi-faceted disaster – “a dreadful mistake” – that should be undone, with Israel de-Zionized and integrated into the Middle East. His solution is stated in the book’s subtitle and restated in the title of the last chapter: “Palesrael: A Secular and Universal Democracy for Israel/Palestine.” This is an elegant solution, and he lays out an action program to accomplish it. (more…)

l965: How I First Found the Guild by Michael Steven Smith

The Guild in the early sixties was not so easy to find, especially if you were from Wisconsin. The culture of the Witchhunt still prevailed. I had come east to New York and was in NYU Law School in l964 and was one to two radicals in the freshman class. The other had been a founder of SDS at Ann Arbor.

The Guild in the early sixties was bowed, but unbroken. It fought successfully to not be placed on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. It had a chapter in New York City, but zero presence at NYU as far as we knew of. It took my transfering out of NYU to the law school at The University of Wisconsin to make the connection. It was fortuitious, as I suspect most additions to the NLG’s ranks were in those days before the broad student radicalization which was to come around l968, four years later.

NYU law cost $5,300 a year and I ran out of money, or more precisely, my parents and I ran out of money. They had two other children in college at the time. I had grown up in Fox Point, a small Republican village north of Milwaukee and had set my hopes on escaping. I went to the University of Wisconsin as an undergrad and now found myself dissappointedly back there, this time in their law school, which charged $100 a semester in tuition. I was able to work for my room and board. (more…)

JAMES P. CANNON AND THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT
1890 - 1928 by Bryan D. Palmer, University of Illinois Press, www.press.uillinois.edu, 2007
A root of the National Lawyers Guild, formed in l937, goes further back to the post WWI
American revolutionary left, to the newly established Communist (Workers) Party (1919) and beyond that to the legendary Industrial Workers of the World, the legendary often romanticized fighters for industrial democracy and the precursor of the CIO, the magnificent Wobblies.

For the IWW, “An Injury To One Is An Injury To All.” It was the Wobby poet Ralph Chapin who wrote the famous working class anthem “Solidarity Forever”. They expressed their class solidarity in the concept of “mass defense”, a practise the NLG undertakes to this very day with its support to and work in the defense, say, of Mumia Abu Jamal, The Cuban Five, or The Jena Six. The one person most responsible for this aspect of our heritage was James P. Cannon, as Professor Brian Palmer shows in his beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book JAMES P. CANNON and the ORIGINS of the AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT 1990 - 1928.

Cannon was a radical Irishman from the Midwest. His dad, John Cannon, was a rank and filer, what was called then a “Jimmy Higgins”, and a stalwart in the Debsian wing of the Socialist Party. Jim Cannon, at age 18, joined the SP in 1908. He took up with the Wobblies in the left wing of the SP and developed into an excellent organizer and speaker. Jim worked with two outstanding Wobbly leaders, Vincent St. John and the founder in1905 of the IWW and head of The Western Federation of Miners, the great almost mythical figure William “Big Bill” Heywood. (more…)