BYE BYE GAZA - Barry Chamish

451
451
Brandeis gave mute testimony in one respect to the lingering
vitality of at least some aspects of the family tradition. A
bachelor until the ripe age; of thirty-four, when he finally did
marry he followed, knowingly or not, a custom widely
practiced among Jewish crypto-Frankist families. His wife, a
cousin, was like himself a descendant of the Central
European circle of crypto-Frankist Jews,
who, as Scholem reports continued to maintain close contact
and intermarry among themselves.
Accounts of Brandeis's life often note the influence of his
mother on his own political idealism, while the recently
published volume of Brandeis' letters shows him frequently
writing on current politics, especially on international affairs,
to his father. He takes unfeigned pride in his family's
immediate European background: they considered
themselves "Forty-Eighters," and his father in-law, Joseph
Goldmark, had been one of the foremost student leaders of
the 1848 revolution in Vienna. But these were hardly
influences that could make a Jewish leader, let alone a
Zionist, out of him. Indeed, his Zionism was not shared by his
parents, his own generation, or his children except for his
daughter, Susan. There remains his uncle, Lewis Dembitz;
an early American Zionist. According to Alpheris Mason, the
standard, authorized Brandeis biographer, in the close
Wehle-Dembitz-Brandeis circle in Louisville this eminent
Kentucky lawyer, scholar, and abolitionist "was easily the
dominating figure of the group: Brandeis himself eulogized
his uncle as, "to those of my generation, a living university."
The strong attachment of L.D.B. to LeWis Dembitz is not only
attested by Brandeis' express statements; it is borne out by
certain acts of plainly symbolic character. He consciously
followed his uncle's example in becoming a lawyer-and a
1egal scholar. He changed his name: originally Louis David
Brandeis, he chose to call himself Louis Dembitz Brandeis.
Whatever the significance of his act in relation to his mother,
who was a Dembitz, it is a blatant identification with her
brother, his Uncle Lewis. His mother's reminiscences