The Son of Jewish Immigrants Who Made $10 Million While a Soviet Mole

“In the 1930s and ’40s,” David Evanier writes, “there were any number of American Communists so enamored of Joseph Stalin and the shining tomorrows he promised that they would do anything for the Soviet Union, disdaining payment of any kind.” David Karr wasn’t one of them. Yes, born in 1918, he was raised in the Jewish immigrant Brooklyn from which emerged many American Jewish Communists, and yes, he spent the early years of his adult life as a true believer, and yes, he may have been a Soviet mole—but he certainly didn’t disdain payment for his efforts.

Karr went on to amass a $10 million-dollar fortune from careers as varied as muckraking columnist to corporate raider. All the while, the one constant in his life seems to have been his involvement with the USSR. But what he wanted from the Soviet Union is hard to say. Reviewing a new biography of Karr by the historian Harvey Klehr, Evanier summarizes the matter:

Throughout it all, writes Klehr, “Karr cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies, tried to act as a middleman between the USSR and the U.S. on several issues, and attempted to get close to American officials and politicians at the behest of the KGB.”

Was he a double agent? Whose side was he really on? Klehr would seem to have answered that question definitively with his title, “The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole.” But no: The author’s final verdict is that while Karr began as a Communist true believer, he ended, at age sixty, as an amoral monster, an “unscrupulous and driven” man who in all his business dealings—especially those between Russian and Western parties—played both ends against the middle, using his connections mainly to enrich himself, no matter who got hurt.

Karr wasn’t entirely unusual, though. As Evanier’s own recent essay in Mosaic shows, that kind of cynicism turns out to have been normal for aging American Communists.

Read more at Wall Street Journal

More about: Communism, History & Ideas, Soviet Union

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society