Some of my ancestors, c. 1940.
Two Orthodox Jewish friends of mine once argued whether I could be considered Jewish, and if so, how Jewish I could reasonably be held to be (to clarify, my mother was ethnically, though not religiously, Jewish, my father is Italian-American, and I was raised and remain Catholic). One of my two friends asserted that I was Jewish enough to make aliyah, but not Jewish enough to be called to the Torah. The other countered that I wasn’t really Jewish at all. Then again, she shrugged: “Two Jews, three opinions.”
I find that old saw, “two Jews, three opinions,” comforting in its suggestion that two or more seemingly contradictory ideas can be synthesized, or at least coexist in an uncomfortable balance. In fact, “two Jews, three opinions” is the exact opposite of Hegelian dialectics, so influential in the thinking of Karl Marx, which, in turn, influenced the thinking and feeling of my own Jewish forebears.
Excerpt from a declassified FBI report describing some of my grandmother Josephine Nordstrand’s communist activities.
When the above video of “This Land is Your Your Land” in Yiddish dropped a few years ago, I watched it on repeat. The restrained and achingly sincere performances, as well as the language, called forth a strong sense of recognition and understanding in me. I don’t mean that I understood the song literally, since, though I know a little Yiddish, I’m unable to speak it (my Yiddish-speaking great-grandmother, a refugee from Belarus, lived with my family when I was a child). My sense of recognition was due rather to the inchoate feeling of an old and deeply shared cultural sensibility — one in which, as we see all over the Yiddish rendering of Woody Guthrie’s famous text, utopianism plays a prominent role.
The utopianism of my forebears has persisted down the generations, but by now, 100 years later, it’s diffuse, vague, and a little shopworn. When my grandmother Josephine Nordstrand (born Esther Raskin; she changed her first name in honor of Stalin) joined the Communist Party in 1935, America was for all practical purposes a failed state, and communism presented a viable option.
My grandmother, Josephine Nordstrand (née Esther Raskin), second row from bottom, far right.
And if nothing else, the Communists fought the Fascists. But what did that really mean? For my grandmother and countless others, it meant honoring the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 — in other words, essentially apologizing for fascism — and then, two years later, railing against it. Indeed, Simone Weil wrote in her 1933 essay “The Power of Words”:
In Berlin, in the summer of 1932, it was common to see a little group of people gather around two workmen or two petty bourgeois, one a communist and the other a Nazi, who were arguing. After a time it always became clear to both disputants that they were defending exactly the same programme; and this made their heads swim but it only exacerbated in each of them his hatred for an opponent separated from him by such a gulf as to remain an enemy even when expressing the same ideas.
Melanie Klein (1882-1960).
The early twentieth-century psychoanalyst Melanie Klein would have recognized the communists’ whiplash response to fascism (and vice versa) as a form of “splitting.” Klein’s theory of splitting is essentially the opposite of “two Jews, three opinions”:
When a person holds two thoughts in the mind that are contradictory or otherwise so uncomfortable, the person will cognitively separate them, not thinking of the separate thoughts at the same time. This is a process of “psychic economy” whereby a complex situation is simplified by separation rather than resolution.
We can see a striking visual image of splitting in Taylor Swift’s stylish video for her 2019 song “You Need to Calm Down.” The video shows a mini-morality play with two warring trailer parks on either side of the split, a cretinous redneck one and a fabulous LGBTQIA+ one.
We all want to go to the candy-colored festival that is Taylor’s trailer park. Who wants to hang out with the toothless, bald, orthographically-challenged haters on the other side of the fence? The LGBTIA+ denizens are beautiful and full of love, and after all, love wins.
But is life really like this? Are the politics of “love wins” any less demagogic than those of “build the wall”? Can all questioning of the rapid reversal of millennia of social norms fairly be called hate? Conversely, is the celebration of this rapid reversal really love? And, finally, can politics accurately be said to embody the emotions of love and hate?
Certainly the politics that would seek to wipe out entire demographics — those of the Third Reich, for instance — are based in hate. But even hate doesn’t always look like hate. Prior to the Nazi era the eugenics movement in the United States was part of a platform of progressive political reform. W.E.B. Du Bois, among other Black intellectuals, wrote a column for Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review in 1932 in which he emphasized the importance of quality over quantity in births, and asserted that “the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”
It’s fair to assume that Du Bois believed in eugenics, however mistakenly, not because he hated his fellow Black Americans, but because he loved them.
Edith Sheffer published a fascinating book in 2018 called Asperger’s Children, in which she reexamined the life and thought of Austrian physician Hans Asperger, who did pioneering research on autism under the Nazis and who had lately been the subject of a hagiographic treatment in Steve Silbermann’s bestselling book Neurotribes. Silbermann casts Asperger as a hero trying to protect his autistic charges from the Nazi racial hygiene program; Sheffer, on the other hand, presents ample evidence that Asperger cooperated with the Nazis, even signing the transfers of many of his little patients to Am Spiegelgrund, thus sentencing them to death.
Was Hans Asperger a good man, per Steve Silbermann, or a bad man, per Edith Scheffer? And more broadly, are there certain people and groups we are constrained to condemn in order to not lose our standing in polite society, and if so, who are they? Did my grandmother Josephine think the Nazis were copasetic on June 21, 1941 — 83 years ago today — and on June 22, when the Nazis breached the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union, suddenly recognize them as beyond redemption?
Who doesn’t hate a Nazi, after all? When the singer Daniel Kahn raises his fist at the end of “Dos Land iz Dayn Land” as the words “Stay healthy and strong against fascism” sroll across the screen, I want to raise my own. But — as Jews, including my two friends, have been debating the question for centuries of “Who is a Jew?” — I wonder, who is a fascist? Is the “myth of the good German” just that — a myth? There must have been Germans and Austrians — perhaps Asperger himself among them — who believed that it was compassionate to eliminate “life unworthy of life.” After all, progressive icons like Margaret Sanger and W.E.B. Du Bois believed this, too. And as former Bernie Sanders campaign worker Matt Orfalea said recently about Nick Fuentes:
I can only conclude with the Afro-Roman playwright Terence:
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto — I am human, and therefore nothing human can be alien to me.
Terence (c. 2nd century B.C.)
Wonderful piece, Julia!
I really enjoyed it.
Another great blog, Julia! (I'm embarrassed that, in spite of being from Detroit) I knew nothing of the 1943 riots, only the 1967 ones.
This quote from Du Bois: "so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly," is very reminiscent of the opening scenes of the film Idiocracy.