I went over to Liberty Square at 3:30 this morning and saw the endgame.  Broadway and Church Streets were blocked.  The subway entances were closed. The place was ringed by hundreds of cops manning metal fences that were set up in a block from the park, encircling it, so I couldn’t get near.  But I could see.  The place was ablaze under Kleig lights.  Huge white garbage trucks  with signs on their sides stating “clean up after your dog”  were pulling up and loading up.  They carted off the 5000 book library, along  the tents and the personal belongs of the people they had driven out.  Some stayed and fought and some 70 got arrested.  I read that ultimately water canons were used a la Bull Connor.

Dear Friends,

I heard Malcolm speak when he came to The University of Wisconsin in 1963.  He had yet to break with The Nation of Islam and was protected by several of their bodyguards.  All were dressed nattily in suits and small knotted narrow neckties.  Malcolm had light skin and reddish hair.  “Detroit Red” they had called him when he lived there.   He spoke in a cadence which was musical.  I can’t remember the details of what he said.   The short of it was that he counseled fighting back.  He had a wonderful sense of humor.  A lovely and courageous man, I thought then.   He once posed for a photo in front of a Levy’s rye bread advertisement which proclaimed “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”  Despite my atheism, I identified with him, supported him, followed his evolution into a revolutionary and supporter of socialism.  I smiled when he said, reflecting on reforming capitalism, that a chicken can never lay a duck egg.  And if it ever did, well,  it would be a pretty revolutionary chicken.   A friend of mine had a photo of him on her apartment wall and said she loved Malcolm.  I knew what she meant.

I remember clearly the night Malcolm X was murdered in the winter of l965, a cold February night.   I had come home late to my law school dorm at NYU and picked up the New York Times, which you could get after midnight.  The story of his death was on the front page.  Crushing.  The true story emerged later, the story of Co-intellpro and how the government assassinated Black leaders in order to “prevent the rise of a new messiah,” in J.Edgar Hoover’s words.

It was a blow we are still reeling from.  Imagine the level of consciousness and organization we in America would be at if Malcolm was still here, instead of say Reverend Al Sharpton, whom the media foists on us as a leader.  Or, truth be told, Barack Obama, who just appointed General MacChrystal, an assassin, to head the U.S. imperial forces in Afganistan.  Obama, promoted by modern advertising, as Chomsky has written, foisted  upon us as “Brand Obama”, in Chris Hedges description, a Black man with the keys to the car, now driving the empire, misleading, widely, for the time being, supported by both those who profit from empire and those who don’t.

Two years later in l967, I moved to Detroit.  A real Black nationalist place.  I appreciated that Malcolm had lived there.  When Pathfinder Press published Malcolm Speaks, edited by George Breitman and then a second seminal volume by Breitman, Malcolm X:  The Evolution of a Revolutionary,  I got them carried by the central book distributor in the area and they appeared in many bookstores Detroit.  Later when I worked for Pathfinder in New York City I helped get them distributed nationwide.   They are still in print. Malcolm has been relegated to an icon, the fate as Lenin wrote, of many revolutionaries.  His picture adorns a U.S. postage stamp.  This is now.  Who can tell the future?   I think it is likely that what Malcolm stood for, Black consciousness, uinity in action, identity with those struggling against imperialism worldwide, independence from the two capitalist parties, self-defense by any means necessary, a deep sense of love, as Che said,  those ideas will have a time to come to the fore.

A birthday salute to our brother Malcolm X,

Michael Smith
5.19.09

Harvey Goldberg brought to life the history of social movements in Europe and much of the world to thousands of students during his teaching career at Oberlin College, Ohio State University and at the University of Wisconsin. His passionate and electrifying lectures regularly filled halls to maximum capacity. Many of his lectures were recorded. Below please find one of my favorites:

Ideology of Private Property 2/25/1977

Where did the idea of Private Property come from and how did the world work before then? What has become of mankind since the concept took hold. What beliefs do you hold regarding the sanctity and persistence of private property and what would happen if you gave up those beliefs? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this spellbinding lecture

You can find more his recorded lectures at the Harvey Goldberg section of the The Brecht Forum website. – put together by Richard Bonomo.

A Book Review of:
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” Haywood.

The IWW defended immigrants, persons of color and strike victims.  They insisted on freedom of speech and assembly.  They were very radical and knew deep in their bones the truth about law as Bill Kunstler once described it.  “To me, (the law) is in its fundamental essence, nothing more than a method of control created by a socioeconomic system determined, at all costs, to perpetuate itself by any and all means necessary, for as long as possible.  Clarence Darrow put it even more expansively…..when he said ‘there is no justice – in or out of court.’”

When their Russian socialist comrades, led by the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky, overthrew capitalism, stopped World War One, and got rid of the Russian feudal monarchy and the Christian Orthodox church, the left wing of the American movement gave total support and solidarity.  Jim Cannon helped form and was one of the three leaders of the new Communist Party.  Actually two parties were formed.  They soon merged. Cannon was elected Chairman of the Workers Party.

Cannon helped get the movement – faced with fearsome repression, jailings, deportations and the Palmer Raids – up from underground and into the public political arena.  He worked to bring together the native American born radicals and their foreign born brothers and sisters then in the foreign language federations.

Revolutionary parties formed around the world in support of the great Russian revolution.  They banded together in what was called The Third International and met periodically in Moscow to conference and plan how to carry forward their work of defending and extending the revolution.  Because they didn’t have teleconferencing, e mails, or DHL, these meetings often lasted for months.  Cannon was the delegate from the American party to the conference in l926.   He and his companion, Rose Karsner, current NLG leader Matt Ross’ grandmother, met there with “Big Bill” Haywood, who had escaped a frame-up and was living in exile, protected by the Russian comrades as Assata Shakur is now protected by the Cubans.   Together they sketched
out the plans for  an American mass defense organization.  It was to be known as The International Labor Defense.   James P. Cannon became its first national secretary and Rose Karsner headed up the office.

They truly enacted the axiom of “An Injury to One is an Injury to All.”  They defended what they called “class struggle” victims, regardless of their political affiliations.  They raised money for legal defense, secured competent counsel, packed courthouses and rallied in the streets,  gave money to the men and women in prison, and to their families, especially to the children, precursors in a sense, to the wonderful Rosenberg Fund for Children.   Cannon traveled the country builidng support.  Rose ran the office with Martin Abern, then head of the Young Communist League.  The kept scrupulous books.    So as not to go over the heads of the different political formations to which the victims belonged, all monies collected for the victims went to their organizations.

The International Labor Defense took up dozens of cases throughout the country starting with Socialist party and trade union leaders Mooney and Billings in California and then, most famously, the case of  Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchist militants who had been extensively involved in labor strikes, political agitation, and anti-war propaganda.  They were framed up for robbery and murder in Massachusetts.  The men were doomed, fighting as they were in the teeth of an orchestrated anti-anarchist (bomb thowers they were called) anti-immigrant hysteria known then as “the red scare.” Despite an national and international movement in support, the men were electrocuted on August 23, l927.

A year later Cannon and Karsner fell victims to the split in the international communist movement and were expelled from the party for “Trotskyism.”   The ILD continued on under different leadership and eventually folded into the National Lawyers Guild founded in l937.

It is a tribute to the good work of the ILD under their leadership that the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti was so massive that fifty years later, in l997, the governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis posthumously pardoned them, stating “the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti should serve to remind all civilized people of the constant need to guard against our susceptibility to prejudice, our intolerance of unorthodox ideas and our failure to defend the rights of persons who are looked upon as strangers in our midst.”  This truth has not been lost to present day NLG members active in the current stuggles to defend Arabs, Muslims, and Southeast Asians victimized in the orchestrated “war on terror.”

Bryan Palmer is a master historian.   Here is what two foremost left historians have written.  Mike Davis: “ Palmer’s book recovers the lost history of the Left in the l920s and completely reframes the debate about the origins and nature of the Communist Party…beyond Cold War calumny or Popular Front fairy tale.”  I predict that JAMES P.CANNON and the ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT 1890 – 1928 will become a classic.  It shows that our movement today is, as Paul LeBlanc has observed about the formative decade of the twenties and Palmer’s research, “a promising outgrowth of U.S. radical traditions boldly intersecting with the contradictory realities of Russian Communism.”

By Michael Steven Smith

1965:  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.

But Wisconsin had a deservely progressive reputation and it was there at the law school that I met Karen Mills, who would be my connection to the Guild.  She was a red diaper baby from Great Neck, via Brooklyn Heights.  Her dad Saul Mills was an historical figure, I later learned.  He had been a reporter for The Brooklyn Eagle and an organizer of The Newspaper Guild before becoming secretary to John L. Lewis, the head of the militant United Mine Wokers and the newly formed C.I.O.

Saul Mills needed legal help and he got it from two young lawyers with whom he would become friends and who had recently started up a new firm.  They were Leonard Boudin and Victor Rabinowitz.  The firm, Rabinowitz, Boudin, and Standard, would become the great fighting leftist firm for the next generation.

Meanwhile, my new friend Karen was friends with Joannie Rabinowitz, Victor’s daughter.  They had gone to Antioch College, another progressive place,  and Joannie came out to Madison to visit.  That summer I was to be a clerk in a firm in Oakland, California.  Joannie was heading west too and told me she would be organizing farm workers with Cesar Chavez in the Salinas Valley.  (Three years before she had organized for civil rights down south.  While marching in an integrated demo some Ku Kluxer type on the sidelines yelled out to her, “You New York commie Jew nigger lover,” to which she shouted back, simply and proudly, “You’re right.”)

Joannie took me over to have Sunday supper with a woman who was a friend of her family’s.  That’s how I got to meet the extraordinary Ann Fagan Ginger.  Ann was welcoming and talkative.  She lived in a modest bay area house with a detached garage.  If this government did things right that garage today would be a national monument for it housed the Alexander Mikeljohn Library.  It was a tremendous resource for lawyers litigating civil rights cases

Ann showed me the library and told me about the Guild.  I liked what I saw and heard, although I was a little uneasy, knowing that by associating with people of her political coloration I was crossing a line that I suspected the government would know about.  But so what.

I finished law school a year later and to escape the draft joined VISTA, a sort of domestic Peace Corp, and moved to Detroit to do poverty law and tenant organizing in the inner city.  There I met the Guild – on the battle lines.  Jim Lafferty was there, having just finished being National Secretary and running for Congress against the Vietnam war.    Future Guild President Bill Goodman was there in the firm started by his father Ernie, the first integrated law firm in the country.  It was called Goodman, Crocket, Eden, Robb and Bedrosian.  It came out of the rise of the United Automobile Workers, the great C.I.O. union, and went on to spearhead the Guild’s civil rights work in the south in the early sixties.

A year after I got there future Guild leaders Dick Soble and Buck Davis reported for duty in VISTA.    In l969 we formed an NLG firm called Lafferty, Reosti, Papahkian,  James, Stickgold, Smith, and Soble.  We had a non-lawyer woman Linda Mass as a partner, but couldn’t list her on the letterhead.  In an Inter-Office Memorandum of December l, l970, Lt. Dennis Mulaney, Detroit Police Department Red Squad, wrote “There is hardly an underground newspaper, black liberation, or left wing group of any kind in Detroit that at one time or another was not represented by the law firm…”

We have all been Guild supporters and activists through the years.  But it  was my singular good fortune to meet Joannie Rabinowitz and to go over to Ann Ginger’s home for dinner 42 years ago.

by Michael Steven Smith
New York City

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.

How did Kovel, a Jew from Brooklyn, the oldest son of Ukrainian immigrants who did well – moving with Joel to “the purgatory of Baldwin, Long Island” – come to this radical critique and equally radical solution? Joel graduated from Yale and became a successful psychiatrist. He taught at medical school before switching careers and taking a social science professorship at Bard, where for a time he held the Alger Hiss chair. He is still there, the only Marxist on the faculty. This book is not going to further his career.

“What kind of Jew am I?” he asks, and answers “a very bad one.” More accurately, he defines himself as what Isaac Deutscher called “a non-Jewish Jew.” Not that he is not spiritual; he writes of reaching for the infinite. But he is not religious. Being part of a sect is too narrowing and confining. He identifies with the Jewish heretics who transcended Jewry, but who are nonetheless part of the Jewish tradition – he lists Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka, Wittgenstein, and Luxemburg – and for whom “the true glory” of being Jewish is to live “on the margin and across boundaries.”

Kovel writes that the ethical reference point for Jews is the tribal unit. Since ancient times they set themselves off as “a people apart,” chosen by Jehovah, with whom they have a covenant. In Kovel’s view, “Zionism’s dynamic was drawn from the most tribal and particularistic stratum of Judaism, and its destiny became the restoration of tribalism in the guise of a modern, highly militarized and aggressive state,” which they implanted in the center if Islam. Herein lies the tragedy.

At the turn of the 20th century, a Zionist conference in Vienna delegated several rabbis to travel to Palestine on a fact-finding mission. The rabbis cabled back, “the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Kovel writes incisively of what ensued. The “tremendous struggle” to dislodge Palestine’s inhabitants would involve three great difficulties:
the resistance of those who stood in the way and would have to be displaced; the exigencies of geo-politics; and one’s own inner being, which would have to be retooled from the self-image of an ethical victim to that of a ruthless conqueror. All of these obstacles could be dealt with by signing onto Western imperialism and capitalism.

Jewish suffering and persecution became justification for aggression in asserting the “outlandish claim to a territory controlled 2500 years ago by one’s putative ancestors.”
The Israelis took 78% of the territory in l948 and the remaining 22% in l967. The logic of Zionism – to create an ethnically pure Jewish state – led to organized terrorism; “the essentials had been put in place by the mid-1930s” and the opportunity came in l948. The leaders of Zionism, Chaim Arlosoroff, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and especially David Ben Gurion, quietly articulated the need to drive the Arabs out. South African Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd said in l96l something the liberals wouldn’t: that the Zionists “took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them, Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” When the smoke lifted in l948, 531 Arab villages had been destroyed, some 750,000 Palestinians driven out. In l948 Menachem Begin (later Prime Minister of Israel) organized the dynamiting of the British headquarters in Jerusalem, killing 88 persons, including 15 Jews. That year also saw the terrorizing of the village of Deir Yassin. With Begin in command, Yitzhak Shamir – who was also to become a PM and whose frankly fascist organization the Stern Gang had actually made overtures to the Nazis to create a Jewish state along totalitarian lines – took part in the operation. The terror at Deir Yassin was a decisive factor in the Arab exodus. The ethnic cleansing had been clearly planned by the Zionist leadership, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has documented. Thus the Zionists established Israel with a crime against humanity.
Ariel Sharon, the third Israeli terrorist PM, was actually found guilty by an Israeli court for permitting the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon in l982, where as many as 3000 Palestinian refugees were killed. In l953 Sharon led a cross-border raid on Qibya, Jordan, “in which the community was reduced to rubble, with 45 houses blown up and 69 people killed, the majority women and children.” He repeated his mass murder in Lebanon in 2006, using US-made cluster bombs. It is truly remarkable, as Kovel points out, that a terrorist could ascend to national leadership three times and “scarcely anybody has bothered to ponder its meaning.” Kovel notes the consequent bad conscience of the Israelis and remarks on how their resulting feelings “become projected and turned into the blaming of others” – whether these be expropriated Palestinians or critics of Israel, who are then labeled as antisemites and/or as that curious entity, the “self-hating Jew.”

Israel, as a racist state, discriminates in the critical areas of immigrants, settlements, and land development. Any Jew in the world who can show that his grandmother on his mother’s side was Jewish may obtain automatic citizenship, yet the Arabs expelled in l948 and l967, despite international law and United Nations resolution 194, are not permitted their right to return. 92% of the land in Israel is administered by The Jewish National Fund, which does not allow its use by non-Jews.

Racism is in the nature of a colonial settler state. What is remarkable is the degree to which Zionists deny this. Kovel gives examples of a top Israeli general calling Palestinians “drugged cockroaches in a bottle”; he cites a 2006 poll showing that more than two-thirds of Israelis would refuse to live in the same building as Arabs and that the idea of deporting Arab citizens is popular. Many Jewish soccer fans curse and attack Arab members of their national team.
Kovel writes, reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson, that no state has an absolute right to exist, hence all states are to some degree illegitimate; he adds that states may be relatively or absolutely illegitimate, and that a racist state is illegitimate. Israel, being an exclusively Jewish state, is a racist state. He concludes that “the problem then is with Zionism and the Jewish state as such, and not its illegal occupation of the West Bank.” The point is to change it, “to dissolve the Jewishness of the state. For this, one does not smash or trample Zionism; one overcomes it and frees people from its chains.”

He goes beyond the two-state solution, necessarily, because by steady aggression and aggrandizement the Zionists have whittled the Palestinian territory down to 8% of what it was in l948, leaving the natives with a negligible fragment, without much water, polluted, economically unviable, denuded of its agriculture, isolated by Jewish-only roads, and partly encircled by an obscene wall.

What to do? Speak the truth about Israel. Expose the Zionist lobby. Force it to register as an agent of a foreign government. Bring lawsuits for violations of human rights, as the Center for Constitutional Rights did against an Israeli general for mass killing in a village, or against the US Caterpillar company for making gargantuan bulldozers sold wittingly to the Israeli army for the express purpose of house demolition (one of which, ran over and killed Rachel Corrie, to whom Kovel partly dedicates his book). Place Israel where it belongs, in the company of apartheid South Africa. Cut the threads of Israel’s support system; boycott it academically, economically, and culturally.

Palestinians are the largest and oldest refugee population in the world. Central to the campaign against Zionist Israel is to support their right of return. Zionism can thus be brought down in an entirely peaceful manner. The Right of Return is more basic than liquidating the occupation, which would leave the Zionist state unchanged. The Right of Return would require the end of the occupation as a pre-condition and can directly undo the Jewishness of the state with the returnees having full and equal rights. Even now, counting the occupied territories, the population is roughly 50/50, Jew and Arab.

The new state – “Palesrael” – could reshape itself according to the South African anti-apartheid precepts of recognition and responsibility, which point to a society organized along essentially non-capitalist lines. Kovel knows that this will not come easily and that the outcome will depend partly on unforeseeable convulsions in the outside world. He concludes: “Such is the reality facing dreamers for a better world: a slim chance, and a long haul. As ever, it is the journey that counts, the seeking of good conscience, good will, and good comrades.”

This is a rich, multi-layered book, reflecting the author’s wide reading and travel. Kovel’s background as a psychiatrist is evident in his wise understanding. Judaeophobia in Nazi Germany “draws from a time when Jews were, if not blameless, at least powerless and were made to pay the debts demanded by the anticommunism of the fascist state and by Christendom’s bad conscience.” He calls it “intellectual barbarism” to take current criticism of Israel as “antisemitism,” but he well understands that given a situation of invasion and occupation of another people’s land, it is not surprising to find “the whole spectrum of human responses … ranging from emancipatory and nonviolent expression to crude atavisms including racist belief.”

Israel has become, in Kovel’s view, the most dangerous place on earth for Jews. It now has the largest gap between rich and poor in the whole industrialized world. Forty percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Half of Israeli families cannot meet their monthly bills. Kovel reports that the immediate cause of this has been a fierce neoliberal assault on the poor and the public sector, which has left Israel with “the worst primary and lower secondary education in the Western world.” Socialist ideals lie in ruins. As a result, a serious amount of emigration is taking place, with some 760,000 Israelis living abroad in 2004. Jews leaving Russian prefer, ironically, to go to Germany.

I think that if persons concerned about the problems of Jews and Zionism could have but one book on the subject on their shelf, it should be this one.

Michael Steven Smith
National Lawyers Guild, Member of the NLG fact-finding committee in Israel/Palestine, 1985

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.

The old bird spotted us. He was old and bitter. The two guys that had owned him had abandoned him when they split up. He saw us and yelled out “I’ve got a yeast infection.”  ”What?”, said Eli, looking up first at the bird and then at me. Before I could answer the bird added a “fuck you.” Instantly Eli responded, “Dad, can we get a bird like that one?” And so we did.

Parrots bond with one mate for life. Since we were part of the flock it would be one of us and with Eli at camp, it would be me or Debby. The issue was settled when Charlie, sitting on my index finger, bent down and bit me. “You son- of- a- bitch,” I exclaimed and reflexively dropped the poor bird. He never forgot it. And he bonded with Debby. He even tries to feed her, so that she will lay a good egg.  Even though she rebuffs his attempts, he still loves her.  And when he is mad he still says ” you son-of-a-bitch” in my voice.

Along with Charlie we had an outsized grey cat named Moe. Charlie was smarter than Moe and used to mess with him. “Come here Moe,’ he would command, in my tone of voice. Moe would wander over. And Charlie would wait until he got over to his cage and say “You grey son-of-a-bitch.”

When Eli would practice guitar in the living room where Charlie lives in his cage he frequently would meet with Charlie’s free associations. Once a day Charlie unburdens himself with every phrase he knows, going on and on until it could make you crazy or you leave the room. That’s how he learned how to say “I’m gonna kick your ass.” Eli would yell that at him, hoping he would shut up, but to no avail.

On the morning of 9/ll I was supposed to meet my friend John Pellaton for breakfast at Windows on the World, atop of Tower Two at the World Trade Center. We were to meet at 8:00 o’clock. The first plane hit the building at 8:40. But John had a meeting and called just before to cancel. So we were still at home at the time the crash shook our apartment. When it shook it again for the second time we thought we were being bombed. With the big cat and Charlie we weren’t very portable, so we stayed put the first night. Everyone in our building left, except for us, Moe, Charlie, and a blind bass player on the 6th floor. The FBI rousted us the next morning. We left large Moe for later, packed up Charlie in his traveling cage, and headed up to our friends the Ratner/Ranucci’s, who we reached by cell phone. Everything was blanketed with a thick layer of toxic dust, the ash from the ruins of the buildings and their contents. We trudged north swinging Charlie in his cage. “It’s O.K. It’s O.K.,” Charlie assured everyone we encountered along the way.

But it was not O.K. We almost lost him. Five weeks later Debby and Eli, now nine years older than when we got Charlie and home from Oberlin College for fall break, where he was a sophomore, noticed that Charlie kept closing his eyes and nodding out. He even fell off his perch. We rushed him to The Animal Medical Center on the upper east side where, only in New York, they have a specialist vet who only deals in parrots. She checked him out, put him on an IV and kept him over night.  He had “avian respiratory disease.” This was serious.  Think of the canary in the mine shaft.  By the next morning however, he was doing much better and could come home.  When we called to see how he was doing the doctor said she guessed he was better because he just bit her assistant. She also said, “That will be nine hundred dollars please.” I replied, “But he was a victim of terrorism.” “Just a second,” said the doctor, and hustled down the hall. She came back and informed us that she had consulted with her superior and that a fund had been set up for animal victims of terrorism and that “there will be no charge.” She gave Debby some anti-biotics and Charlie was nursed back to health.

Our office is kitty-corner from where the World Trade Center used to be. After 9/ll we lost it for a year. Contamination. We could have found another office downtown, but we could not get phone service. So six weeks after 9/ll we moved all our files out of our building and took them home. A big schtarcker cop from Staten Island with a tattoo and a flashlight helped us schlepp them all down from a darkened fourth floor suite and we took them home to our apartment down the block in Battery Park City on the other end of the World Trade Center ruins.

Meanwhile, there we were in our living room, practicing law, with all our files stacked up on the table on the other side of the window from Charlie’s cage.  Running an office with Charlie as a participant was really a challenge.  Every phone call was an opportunity for him to say “Hi, it’s Mike Smith, how are ya?”  Or give our phone number.  Debby was on the phone with an insurance adjustor trying to settle a case. The guy was giving her a hard time. He was loud and rude.  Charlie loves Debby. He is very protective. He heard the guy on the phone and was getting increasingly agitated, pacing back and forth on his perch. He couldn’t stand it. Finally he yelled out, in my tone of voice, real loud so the guy could hear him, “I’m gonna kick your ass, you son-of-a-bitch.”  The guy said “What?” But Debby said she didn’t think they had anything further to discuss and hung up on him, figuring she wouldn’t amuse him with a story about a bird who was right on.

Without wanting to get tiresome, there is one other “son-of-a-bitch” story to tell. Charlie sings. Not whole songs, but good chunks of them. He knows parts of the old rock ‘n roll number “Get a Job”, “get a job, dada dada”.   Our building super, Louis, a gentleman, but, like most supers, not that busy, was up in our place one morning fixing the radiator. He walks in and Charlie spots him and says “Get a job, you son-of-a-bitch.”  Louis was both genuinely insulted  and amused and went around the lobby telling people about the Smith’s bird. I felt bad about it.  He also sings “You Are My Sunshine”, a song written and made popular by a former governor of Louisiana, actually. It goes “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey.” Sometimes Charlie telescopes phrases, truncating them. Hilda, who comes to clean on Tuesday mornings is a big fan of Charlie’s and he looks forward to her arrival, asking “where’s Hilda?”   She is very religious and goes to church every morning. So she comes in the apartment door and into the living room. Charlie is out of his cage and sitting on top of it. “Ola, Charlie,” says Hilda. “Ola, Hilda” says Charlie. And then, “You are my son, my only son.” Like the annunciation, but this time from a parrot.  Hilda says Charlie is full of surprises.

Charlie also sings “Home On the Range,” but doesn’t quite get it right.  “Home, home on the range, where the antelope bird is heard” and then he trails off in a kind of a whistle. He also does one bar of “I’m a Lone Cowhand”. I tried to teach him “Istanbul Was Constantinople”, but he could never get the hard “K” sound of Constantinople and would break down into a paroxysm of guttural “ka, ka, ka, ka” sounds every time he tried it. He blew the hard “K” sound in The Internationale as well, to the disappointment of our household. He would try “Tis the final ka ka ka ka”. He just couldn’t get “conflict” out of his beak. But he redeemed himself by learning how to whistle the song, not that well, because I can’t hit all the notes, but passably and recognizably. When our friends Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray were over visiting Charlie started whistling the great anthem of the worldwide working class and Bill was incredulous, exclaiming to Ellen, “He’s whistling The Internationale,” as I beamed pridefully.

I tried to teach him the Bessie Smith song “Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.” He unburdened himself with the only line in the whole song he gets one afternoon when Eli brought his friend Jeremy Kohn home from grade school. When they walked through the front door Charlie let out with a “Check all your razors, and your guns” and Jeremy shook his head saying to Eli, “Only in your house.” Charlie also intones philosophically, and lamentably, since both Debby and I are now getting into movies at the senior rate, “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”

When we go away we take Charlie over to Nancy Chambers, who used to own The Urban Bird. She is an excellent and passionate aviculturist and tells Charlie she is “Aunt Nancy,” of course, because she nursed him along. She lives in our Battery Park City neighborhood and Charlie likes going over to her apartment which has one room set aside to board birds. I say to him “Want to go to see Aunt Nancy?” and he raises one foot. He’s ready.

Charlie has a friend over there. Rusty. He’s a three year old African Grey and under Charlies influence, if not wing. Charlie has taught Rusty how to talk. When Nancy’s phone rings, Rusty yells out, “Hello, it’s Mike Smith” in my tone of voice. He also says “tickle tickle.” Charlie raises one wing and says “Tickle my pits”, but Rusty isn’t there yet.

One night we came back from somewhere and Debby retrieved Charlie at Nancy’s, taking the long elevator ride down. In Nancy’s building it makes frequent stops and she lives on a high floor. Charlie was friendly, secure in his small travel cage, saying “hello” to people when they got on and “goodbye” when they got off. But if that wasn’t enough to cause a stir in the crowded car, when a dog got on he started meowing, which he learned from Moe. His mischief making didn’t stop there. When Debby got off our elevator and started carrying him down the hall they passed a young Mexican delivery guy who was delivering food to a neighbor from the local diner.  Debby knew him because he delivered food to us too. As she was walking past him, Charlie, concealed in his little cage, started making kissing noises.  Debby apologized, saying it was the bird, but the man was incredulous not quite knowing what to believe.

Because he lives in a cage, it figures that eating is a big part of Charlie’s life. Not just the kinds of food he enjoys, but getting waited on, having people come over to him.  Since he can’t travel, he gets a good break in the routine. He doesn’t say it anymore, but for a time when we would get home from work at dinnertime Charlie would say “Let’s order out.”

He has his favorites. Without our teaching him, one day, when Debby was in the kitchen, Charlied yelled out “Want some chicken.” Which is kind of sick if you think about it. He also calls out for apples and water. Passover is a favorite meal. He likes matzo balls and brisket, gefilte fish and chopped liver, salad with dressing. He’ll eat pizza and loves eggs, scrambled or over easy. He can’t eat chocolate, avocado, or drink coffee or alcohol, but otherwise eats what we do and we give him some of our food when we eat at home. We even take a doggie bag home from restaurants for him. Charlie himself is not allowed in restaurants, it is against the health law. But we recently found there is good Greek diner on highway 28 outside of Kingston which is bird friendly with a waitress and host willing to flout the law as long as Charlie behaves himself.

As you would expect, Charlie has a whole night time routine when we put him to sleep. When he is tired he says “Wanna go sleep”. He’ll say it repeatedly if he has to. In fact he’ll say “Wanna go sleep” during the day to get you over to his cage. But at night he gets weary. Greys sleep a lot, they are not night owls. So he’ll command “Wanna go sleep” and the routine starts. Then he’ll say “want some water” and we change his water. Then he commands “cover my cage” and “turn out the light”. When we throw the sheet over his cage he asks “Where are you?” I’ll then raise a corner of the sheet and he says “Peek a boo.”

One night Charlie was particularly imperious with Debby, ordering her around, “clean my cage” and “want some water” and “turn off the light” and “sweep the floor” until Debby exasperatingly pleaded with him, “What am I, your slave?”

I remembered an old Lenny Bruce routine where he is making fun of the flipped out Governor Long of Louisiana and has the governor say to his maid, “Yo free Beulah.” So I yelled out, while Charlie was bossing around Debby, “Yo free Beulah”. Charlie never forgot it and now calls Debby “Beulah.” When he wants Debby he asks, “Where’s Beulah?”

One last story. How Debby saved his life. One morning we both were still in bed. Charlie must have gotten out of his cage because we could hear him outside of our bedroom door pleading “wanna come up.” His pleas got louder and closer together. “Wanna come up, wanna come up, wanna come up”. Debby knew something was wrong and jumped out of bed, ran across the room to the door, flung it open, and there was Charlie, one leg raised to come up, with Moe behind him, ready to pounce. Debby snatched him just in time. Charlie got a new lease on life. And who knows, parrots like him can live to be sixty years old or older. So this story will continue.

Michael Steven Smith
January, 2007

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.

The history of the Zionists in Hungary is a sordid one, even before they established their exclusivist colonial settler state in Palestine. My cousins, who were not important people, were amongst the several thousand Hungarian Jews who survived the fire. A pact was signed by Dr. Rudolph Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and Nazi exterminator Adolph Eichmann in l944 allowing 600 prominent Jews to leave in exchange for Zionist silence on the fate of the remainder. Malchiel Greenwald, a Hungarian survivor, exposed the deal and was sued by the Israeli government, whose leaders at the time had actually drawn up the terms of the pact. Greenwald won. The Israeli court concluded, “The sacrifice of the majority of Hungarian Jews, in order to rescue the prominent ones (and send them to colonize Palestine – MSS) was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis….In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the Nazi S.S. opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner.” ( Judgment given on June 22, 1955, Protocol of Criminal Case 124/53 in District Court, Jerusalem.)

In point of fact, members of the Zionist movement actively collaborated with Nazism from the beginning. The World Zionist Organization sabotaged world Jewry’s attempt to boycott the Nazi economy in order to be allowed to send money from Germany to Palestine. They fought against liberalization of U.S. immigration laws, for they wanted European Jews to go to Palestine, not America. As Ralph Schoenman, like me, an American Jew of Hungarian descent, wrote  “This obsession with colonizing Palestine and overwhelming the Arabs led the Zionist movement to oppose any rescue of the Jews facing extermination, because the ability to deflect manpower to Palestine would be impeded.(The Hidden History of Zionism, Veritas Press, P. 50)   David Ben Gurion summarized to a meeting of “left” Zionists in 1938 in England: “If I knew that it would be possible to save al the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.” (cited in Lenni Brenner, “Zionism in the age of the Dictators,” p.49)

The first time I toured and worked in Israel was over the summer of 1959. I was sixteen years old. Israel was eleven. Anti’s brother Carl and his son managed to survive and get to Israel. The lived in Jaffa, a once Arab village north of Tel Aviv which was ethnically cleansed in l948. I found them in a two room apartment off an alley. Carl’s son, a boy of ten, greeted me at the door. He wore a blue shirt embroidered with white Chinese characters on the pocket. I recognized the shirt; it had once been my favorite. My grandmother must have sent it in one of the care packages she regularly assembled and mailed. Carl is dead now. So is his son. He was the last Israeli soldier to die in the 1967 war.

Seth Farber’s extraordinarily intelligent book, consisting as it does of interviews with ten eloquent critics of Israel, and a fine summation by Farber,  strikingly demonstrates, as
did my cousin’s death, that not only is Israeli a dangerous place for Jews, not the safe haven advertised by the Zionists, but the very existence of the State,  where when the state was declared 385 out of 475 Palestinian cities, towns, and villages were raised to the ground; where the construction of an apartheid wall and the widespread use of torture are an international disgrace;  where to live, lease, sharecrop, or work on 93% of the land administered by the Jewish National Fund one must establish four generations of maternal Jewish descent; where only its Jewish citizens have equal rights;  has undermined Judaism’s ethical and humane tradition and the moral capital oppressed Jews had accumulated over the centuries.

Farber writes in his introduction that “This book, this compilation is intended to be an affirmation of the moral and spiritual tradition of Judaism – or at least of certain aspects of this tradition that probably most Jews, most Americans, agree constitute a valuable legacy. It is based on my conviction, shared by most of the individuals interviewed in this book, that this legacy was betrayed and its currently threatened with extinction by the policies of the state of Israel, and in particular its violation of the Palestinian people. It was betrayed also by the American Jewish establishment which gives active and unqualified support to Israel’s and has been willing to turn a blind eye to the considerable evidence that Israel’s actions over the last few decades are those of a…state engaged in brutal military Occupation in violation of fundamental principles of international law….Most American Jews are reluctant to even consider the argument that Israel belies the ethical ideals of Judaism at its best – of prophetic Judaism – and instead have endowed Israel with mythic status as the political embodiment of Jews’ eternal innocence and goodness…”

Farber believes that “What is ultimately at stake because of the deeds of  ‘the Jewish state’ is the Jewish spiritual tradition itself and that the apologists for Israel “are betraying Judaism.”  Noam Chomsky,  states in his interview that “I think the creation of a state as a Jewish state was a serious mistake…I thought then, and think now, that it is wrong in principle to establish a state that is not the state of its citizens, but rather, as the High Court later defined it, though it was clear enough from 1948 – the sovereign state of the Jewish people, in Israel and the diaspora.  Hence it is my state as an American Jew, though it is not the state of non-Jewish citizens.  For the same reason, I would oppose moves to turn the U.S. into the sovereign state of the white (Christian, whatever) people, and I object to Islamic states, etc.  It is a matter of principle, quite apart from the consequences.”   He too, like contributors Joel Kovel, Norman Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, Daniel Boyarin, Steve Quester, Adam Shapiro of the International Solidarity Movement, Phyllis Bennis, Norton Mezvinsky, and  Orthodox Neturei Karta Rabbi David Weiss, his daughter Ora Weiss, make the central point of the book in their interviews that those who challenge the present consensus are keeping the prophetic tradition alive.   In Rabbi Weiss’ words, “”Zionism is the antithesis of Judaism” because Jews in their exile were supposed to be compassionate, “the work of the Jew is to perfect himself as best he could, to serve G-d and to emulate G-d and he should be a light unto nations,” not “oppressing a second person.”

Baylor University professor and Jewish theologin Marc Ellis says that the Jewish embrace of power and empire mirrors 4th century Roman Emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity  (in the middle of a battle to better his chances) and the conversion and transformation of the Roman Empire to a Christian enterprise.  He says today we have “Constantinian Judiasm” where “The Jewish Community is divided between those who support Jewish power without question and those who resist the use of that power to oppress and silence.  A Constantinian Judaism has come into being, mirroring the empire-oriented Christianity that emerged…There is a civil war in the Jewish world that crosses geographic and cultural differences.  There are Constantinian Jews in Israel and America;  there are Jews of conscience all over the Jewish world.”

Ellis reflects that “It is little solace to remember that the prophetic, our great gift to the world, our indigenous practice, has always been heard and rejected by the Jewish community.  The prophets have always been persecuted within the Jewish world and one hears through the ages  the cries of Aaron and Moses, Jeremiah and Isaiah, Amos and Jesus.  They have always and everywhere been surrounded by darkness and violence…I cannot embrace my own history or religion without embracing the Palestinian people.  I cannot affirm the prophetic without practicing it in my own lifetime.  The prophetic is not for the few or for someone else or for another time.  It is the now deeply grasped, even in loss and at a cost.”

The ideal my cousin Anti fought for was the communist goal of universal human emancipation.  This was not the Zionists’ aim,  neither in its theoretical conception nor in its predictable and proven results.    In l887 The Zionist Congress sent a delegation of rabbis from Vienna to Palestine.  They reported back that “The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man.”.  The Zionists nonetheless persisted with their project of  overwhelming and displacing the Palestinians with the consequence that in the name of Judaism they have put into jeopardy the morality of the religion that gave us the ten commandments, especially the first.  The eminent scholar of Jewish origin,  Isaac Deutscher, wrote in the wake of the war that killed my cousin that “I hope that together with other nations, the Jews will ultimately become aware – or regain awareness – of the inadequacy of the nation-state, and that they will find their way back to the moral and political heritage that the genius of the Jews, who have gone beyond Jewry (Spinoza, Marx, Luxembourg, Heine, Freud, Einstein, Trotsky) has left us – the message of universal human emancipation.”  (Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, l968, p. 4l.)

This book with its probing interviews and unsparing analyses is a sunbeam of piercing truth, carrying the debate over Israel/Palestine to the highest level of understanding.  As Rev. Daniel Berrigan, S.J. has written:  “For me, indebted as I am to the prophets from Isaiah to Jesus,  (Seth Farber) has illumed the human vocation…to labor on behalf of justice and peace, to stand with the victimized; to oppose war and its vile tactics…The book is indispensable, given…the ongoing tragedy of the Palestinian people.”

By Michael Steven Smith

Michael Steven Smith was a member of The National Lawyers Guild delegation which traveled to the West Bank and Gaza in l985 just before the first intifada to investigate Israeli human rights violations.  He later testified before a committee of the United Nations.  He practices law in New York City.