Untitled - Ameinu

In "To a Communist Friend," written in 1936,
Greenberg refutes the argument that the end justifies
the means:
Ends and means in politics are analogous to
form and content in art. Form in art is not
merely technique; means in politics are not
merely instruments. The content must be felt
in the form. The means must contain the basic
elements of the end. When this minimal
harmony between ends and means is lacking,
we get the stake at which the Holy Inquisition
burns unbelievers to save their souls. I cannot
subscribe to Nechaev's famous slogan: "Full
speed ahead, right through the mud."
Free democratic socialism, which respected the rights
of the individual and disavowed the concept of
transitional generations, generations which could be
brutalized or sacrificed for some remote future, was
the only socialism that Greenberg could accept or
preach.
On one occasion, when Greenberg developed the idea
that no individual must be viewed as the means for
advancing the welfare of another because each man is
an end in himself, he was accused by a labor audience
in Palestine of implied opposition to the life of the
Palestine pioneer. Greenberg answered this objection
in uncompromising terms:
I would be an opponent of pioneering in
Palestine if the hardships entailed in the
rebuilding of a long-neglected country were
imposed on Jewish youth from above and
against its will, if the pioneers in Palestine
were considered fertilizer on the fields of the
country so that a later generation might enjoy
its roses. But pioneering in Palestine is a
voluntary task freely undertaken by those
rejoicing in it.
Greenberg's fundamental expositions of the moral
bases of Zionism led him into discussions far
removed from the level of journalistic polemics. One
of these occasions was an exchange of views with
Mahatma Gandhi, whom Greenberg venerated as a
saint. Gandhi's failure to oppose the dissemination of
anti-Jewish propaganda among the Moslems of India
by Arab agents was the starting point for several
"Open Letters" to Gandhi. In 1937 Greenberg warned
against the kindling of religious fanaticism among the
Moslems of India. In the light of subsequent
developinents, particularly the emergence of Pakistan,
the words then written have a prophetic ring.
Greenberg's unilateral romance with Gandhi was
sometimes viewed by hardheaded realists among
Greenberg's associates as one of his philosophical
quirks, but the fact remains that Greenberg was
unique among American Zionists in his understanding
of the shaping forces within Asia.
It is astonishing to observe the freshness he could
bring to the restatement and rearguing of the Zionist
position from every angle. In his life, part of which
was always devoted to the editing of Zionist
periodicals, familiar dragons had to be re-slain not
annually but monthly and sometimes weekly. Yet
Greenberg rarely wrote a purely routine article. He
was saved from mechanical repetition by the richness
and variety of his knowledge and by the streak of
poetry in his nature which enabled him to use his
learning as leaven rather than ballast. Whether he was
discussing patriotism and plural loyalties, or
defending Socialist-Zionist theory, or answering Arab
arguments, he would write on a level of seriousness
that transformed many articles originally written as
journalistic chores into classic expositions. Despite
the fact that many of his best articles reached only a
limited Yiddish- speaking audience, he was probably
the most profound and eloquent Zionist publicist in
the United States; his work was regularly reprinted in
South America and in the Palestinian press.
Greenberg's Zionism was as free from ideological
fetishes as his socialism. At a time when Labor
Zionist circles proclaimed the return to "productive,"
that is to say manual, labor as a central thesis of the
movement, Greenberg insisted on examining the
slogans and rejecting the "masochistic selfflagellation"
implicit in the notion that the Jewish
middleman fulfills no productive function. In "The
Myth of Jewish Parasitism" Greenberg takes a
heretical position in addressing his party. He asserts
that “any work which is socially useful or satisfies
Continued on page 27
20 JEWISH FRONTIER
Summer 2004