Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Saul Bellow on the Unrest of the Late 1960s

The present combination of sometimes-violent protests, riots, racial tensions, collapsing cities, and a young left seized with revolutionary fervor has put some in mind of the “long, hot summers” of the late 1960s. While many of the leading figures behind that New Left fervor were Jewish—whether intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, and Herbert Marcuse or activists like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—so too were many of its liberal critics. It is to the latter group that David Herman turns, looking to the writings of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the critic Lionel Trilling, and the novelist Saul Bellow:

[T]he British media continue to see the 60s through the eyes of the New Left. . . . But there were others who saw the 60s very differently, older writers and intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Saul Bellow.

Isaiah Berlin, an almost exact contemporary of Trilling’s, . . . was almost sixty when the Columbia students started rioting. . . . He wrote to [the former national security adviser] McGeorge Bundy on May 31, [1968] about his impending visit to New York, “I propose to come armed with a water pistol, and if any militant student approaches me I shall rise up against him and say that the dons have turned, the worms fight back, and douse him. . . . Why cannot the professors build barricades of their own?”

Saul Bellow, like Trilling and Berlin, was appalled by the riots in the 60s, but took a tougher line than either. . . . He had been a supporter of the Congress of Racial Equality and wrote to the papers attacking the Vietnam War. Then came the riots in his beloved Chicago in 1968. He watched the chaos on TV, appalled by the anarchy on the streets of his hometown. . . . There’s a new tone to Bellow’s fiction during the late 60s. His sympathies moved from young men like Augie March and Tommy Wilhelm (Seize the Day) to older authority figures like Mr. Sammler, Mosby in Mosby’s Memoirs, and Braun in The Old System.

What’s interesting about the reactions of Trilling, Berlin, and Bellow, is that they all saw the 60s as a terrible moment. The language is revealing. “The crazy sixties (Bellow), “The rapid growth of barbarism” (Berlin). “Abominable,” “a total rejection of a way of life” (Trilling).

Read more at The Critic

More about: Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, New Left, Saul Bellow

 

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