JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Bell, Daniel
professor at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria (1893–97). As a
university student, he had joined the *Ḥibbat Zion movement,
and from 1891 was in contact with the pre-Herzl Zionist circle
surrounding Nathan *Birnbaum in Vienna. When Herzl’s
Judenstaat was published in 1896, Belkowsky joined Herzl’s
group and helped organize the First Zionist Congress (1897).
At the Third Congress he was elected to the General Council
and appointed representative to the St. Petersburg district of
the movement. He was among the leaders of the opposition
to the *Uganda Scheme. Belkowsky published a series of pamphlets
on Zionist subjects. He also initiated the publication of
a bibliographical work in Russian entitled Ukazatel literatury
o sionizme (“A Guide to Zionist Literature,” 1903). Belkowsky
continued his Zionist activity during the Russian Revolution.
He was adviser to the British consul in Moscow on matters
regarding Palestine immigration certificates, and chairman of
the Zionist Central Committee of Russia (1920–22). In 1924 he
was arrested for his Zionist activities and sentenced to deportation
to Siberia, but the sentence was commuted to banishment
from the Soviet Union. He settled in Palestine in 1924
and was active in the Federation of General Zionists. He later
wrote his memoirs, Mi-Zikhronotai (1940).
Bibliography: Enẓiklopedyah le-Ẓiyyonut, 1 (1947), 143–6;
A.L. Jaffe (ed.), Sefer ha-Congress (19502), 299.
[Yehuda Slutsky]
BELL, DANIEL (1919– ), U.S. sociologist. Like many New
York intellectuals, Bell, who was born to Polish immigrants,
was deeply affected by the Great Depression. He grew up in
the slums of the Lower East Side and his first language was
Yiddish. He always viewed Zionism with a skeptical eye and
Socialism, not Judaism, was his real religion as a boy.
Bell read widely, attending the Socialist Sunday School,
and was tempted to join the Communist Party. His anarchist
relatives in Mohegan Colony, N.Y. were horrified. Bell was
handed pamphlets on the Russian sailors’ rebellion at Kronstadt
that Leon Trotsky had brutally suppressed. They dispelled
any illusions he might have harbored about the true
nature of Bolshevism. When Bell continued his studies, he
was the only member of his circle who resisted the lure of
Trotskyism.
In 1940, he became managing editor of the socialist
weekly The New Leader, which featured the writings of a number
of future liberal cold warriors including Melvin J. Lasky
and Sidney *Hook. Bell excoriated industry for war profiteering
and revered the magazine’s editor, Sol M. Levitas, a Menshevik
who had fled the Bolsheviks and who exposed the delusions
of many New York intellectuals about the true nature of
Stalin’s Russia. Bell went on to write for many years for Henry
M. Luce’s Fortune magazine, but always felt the academic tug.
In the late 1940s, he taught at the University of Chicago before
moving to New York, where he taught at Columbia University
and was close friends with scholars such as Lionel *Trilling
and Richard *Hofstadter. Bell also wrote for the journal En-
counter and worked for the Congress for Cultural Freedom in
Paris from 1956 to 1967.
Bell’s legacy rests with his books, which traverse immense
terrain and are studded with footnotes that themselves
often constitute minor essays. In 1960 Bell’s book The End of
Ideology created a sensation by declaring that the old categories
of left and right were becoming defunct. Next Bell turned
his attention to the unresolved tension between capitalism
and morality. In the Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell
prophesied the shift away from a manufacturing to a knowledge
society that has taken place in the U.S. and Europe.
But Bell did not believe that the quest for control over information
would fundamentally alter the nature of human
beings. He noted that “what does not vanish is the duplex
nature of man himself – the murderous aggression, from primal
impulse, to tear apart and destroy; and the search for
order, in art and life, as the bending of will to harmonious
shape.”
If ideology was at an end, the Public Interest, which Bell
co-founded with Irving Kristol in 1965, was supposed to supply
sound social science solutions to the problems that faced
the U.S. But politics intruded. Like other New York intellectuals,
Bell was horrified by the aggression and primal impulses
displayed by student radicals who rioted at Columbia in 1968.
He and others saw the New Left as totalitarian, hedonistic, and
jejune. It was indulging in revolutionary rhetoric that almost
irreparably damaged the university – the institution that had
offered a passport to the wider intellectual world for Bell and
others. Nothing filled Bell with more contempt than the daydreamers
about revolution and utopia who ended up creating
bloodshed and tyranny.
But unlike Kristol, Bell never moved to the right or
accepted the term “neoconservative.” Instead, he remained focused
on his academic work and moved to Cambridge, Mass.,
to become a professor of sociology at Harvard in 1969. In
1976, he amplified his observations about capitalism and hedonism
in his classic The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
In a sweeping historical tour de force, Bell sought to show
how capitalism had over the centuries inexorably weakened
the authority of the very bourgeois societies it had brought
into being. Where self-denial had allowed the Fuggers in
Europe to amass great wealth, the bounty created by postwar
American capitalism had created an unmoored individual
indulging mainly in self-gratification. The individual, he
concluded, “can only be a cultural wanderer, without a home
to return to.” The result is to threaten the vitality of capitalism
itself.
Though he retired from teaching, Bell continued to write
on politics and cultural matters in journals such as Dissent.
Bell described himself as a socialist in economics, a liberal in
politics, and a conservative in culture. His profound insights
have ensured that his own works are beyond ideology and
have become classics.
[Jacob Heilbrunn (2nd ed.)]
298 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3