Books in Brief: Jewish Radicalism

Jewish Radicalism, edited by Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier (Grove, 390 pp., $7.95).

Lacking only responses to the latest watershed for Jewry, the Yom Kippur War, this anthology surveys a wide range of manifestations of Jewish radicalism, from the Jewish Defense League on the right to the newest New Left lunacies over yonder. The editors’ extensive introduction is cogent, rooted in the context both of Jewish history and of contemporary movement agitation, and on the whole sound, although, regrettably, the usual misconceptions about the Right—e.g., “overt antisemitism reemerg[ing] during the dark days of McCarthyism”—crop up there as, predictably, throughout the essays. This is no apologia for Jewish radicalism, but rather a convincing exposition of its manifold varieties, among which: renewed “relevant” Judaism within the counterculture; Jewish militance here and in Israel; the revised relationship to Negro extremism; Judaism and the women’s, gay, and other liberation movements; the socialist alliance; and, most especially, the phenomenon of the “authentic” Jew (the term is mine, not the authors’) arising midst the often vulgarized American Jewishness which substitutes too often both for religion and for Jewish culture. The dozens of essayists here represented, including the Israeli leftist Amos Kenan, the American ultraleftist Arthur Waskow, and Rabbi Kahane of the JDL, know how to write. They put their cases before the reader forcefully, passionately, excitingly.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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Jewish Radicalism, edited by Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier (Grove, 390 pp., $7.95).

Lacking only responses to the latest watershed for Jewry, the Yom Kippur War, this anthology surveys a wide range of manifestations of Jewish radicalism, from the Jewish Defense League on the right to the newest New Left lunacies over yonder. The editors’ extensive introduction is cogent, rooted in the context both of Jewish history and of contemporary movement agitation, and on the whole sound, although, regrettably, the usual misconceptions about the Right—e.g., “overt antisemitism reemerg[ing] during the dark days of McCarthyism”—crop up there as, predictably, throughout the essays. This is no apologia for Jewish radicalism, but rather a convincing exposition of its manifold varieties, among which: renewed “relevant” Judaism within the counterculture; Jewish militance here and in Israel; the revised relationship to Negro extremism; Judaism and the women’s, gay, and other liberation movements; the socialist alliance; and, most especially, the phenomenon of the “authentic” Jew (the term is mine, not the authors’) arising midst the often vulgarized American Jewishness which substitutes too often both for religion and for Jewish culture. The dozens of essayists here represented, including the Israeli leftist Amos Kenan, the American ultraleftist Arthur Waskow, and Rabbi Kahane of the JDL, know how to write. They put their cases before the reader forcefully, passionately, excitingly.