>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^E00:00:05 ^B00:00:24 >> Jason Steinhauer: Well good afternoon. My name is Jason Steinhauer and I'm a program specialist with the John W Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Before we begin today's program, please, take a moment to check your cell phones and other electronic devices and please set them to silent. Thank you. I'll also make you aware that this afternoon's program is being filmed for placement on the Library's website as well as our YouTube and iTunes channels. I encourage you to visit our website loc.gov/kluge K L U G E to view other lectures delivered by current and former scholars and residents including many on American history, intellectual history, and, excuse me, the Cold War. Today's lecture is presented by the John W Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and co-sponsored by the Library's Foreign Language Table and the Rabin Chair Forum of the George Washington University. 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Today's lecture is titled The Swastika Epidemic: Jewish Politics and Human Rights in the Cold War 1960s. Our speaker is Dr. James Loeffler now completing his 10 year as a Kluge Fellow at the Kluge Center. Jim's project offers the first comprehensive study of a history of Jewish participation in the modern international human rights movement. At the Library he has surveyed the papers of Justice Arthur Goldberg, Senator Patrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Benjamin Cohen, Hannah Arendt, and others as he has traced the origins of Jewish engagement with human rights activism and helped to form a distinctly Jewish conception of human rights that would shape a number of key episodes in the history of the movement. Today, he will share insights from his research focused around an outbreak of global anti-Semitism in 1960 that prompted a UN investigation resulting in the creation of the world's first international law against racism and the new ideological charge Zionism is racism. James Loeffler is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. He received his BA at Harvard University and his MA and PHD from Columbia University. Jim's scholarship resides at the intersection of Jewish culture, politics, and identity in modern Eastern Europe, Israel, and the United States. His current book project, the Vanishing Minority: Jews and Human Rights in the 20th Century looks at the Jewish role in building and critiquing the modern human rights movement after World War 2. He's currently co-editing an anthology devoted to Jewish lawyering and international legal thought in the 20th century. There's a joke in there somewhere. His first book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire examines the role of music in the formation of modern Jewish national identity in 19th and 20th century Russia. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, received many distinguished fellowships including from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and of course, the Library of Congress Kluge Center. Following his time here, Jim will become a Robert A Stavit Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. So, please welcome, or join me in welcoming, Jim Loeffler. ^M00:04:41 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:49 >> Jim Loeffler: Thank you very much. Thank you Jason. It's a pleasure to finish my 10 year here with a chance to talk about the work I've done and work that has advanced considerably since I discovered how much material there really is in this building. So, I want to begin, right away, with a story. And, the story begins on late Christmas Eve 1959 when two men in the German City of Cologne defaced the newly rededicated Roonstrasse Synagogue. On the screens you'll see an image of it, which from 2 days afterwards. They dowsed this building with paint, black, red, and white paint, they drew swastikas on either side of the entrance. Then they scrawled the anti-Semitic slogan Juden aus, Jews out, out the Jews. Over the next 5 days, swastikas appeared on synagogues across West Germany. The accompanying words came straight out of 1930s, death to Jews, Jews go home, heil Hitler. Over New Year's Eve, the swastika spread to Notting Hill in London, next Kinonfort [assumed spelling], Vienna, Paris, and New York. On January 6th vandals in Oslo in Norway defaced the statue of President Roosevelt with the painted caption [inaudible] Jewish peddler. The same day Swastikas appeared in East Germany and Latin America. The next day was Australia. Soon after came Hong Kong, Algeria, and South Africa. These are some other examples of the swastikas. Meanwhile, in West German, the pattern continued. For the next 20 days straight, new swastikas appeared all over the country. By January 10th, this is less than 2 weeks after the first incident, there were 500 anti-Semitic episodes in 34 countries. The pattern continued throughout 1960, by years end, the total rose to 2,500 attacks across 45 countries. Now, this swastika epidemic, as the press dubbed it, was the first outburst of global anti-Semitism after World War 2. It provoked an international crisis. British politicians reported an avalanche of mail, the most ever received from the public, demanding action. There were calls for an emergency international police force to intervene. European and American forces debated whether West Germany deserved to belong to NATO. In North Carolina, the poet Carl Sandburg, who was 82 years old, gave a fiery interview to the New York Times in which he stated that he opposed capital punishment, but, he favored a death sentence for any man caught painting a swastika on a synagogue. And, if you read the interview, the reporter kind of does a double take and says are you serious Mr. Sandberg? And, he goes on to say yes. The swastika stands not for the murder of an individual or a few individuals but for the death of a race. It's the symbol of race murder. You could see some of the headlines from his comments and others. Now, Jewish leaders were also outraged. But, they sensed an opportunity in this moment. In 1960, beginning in January 1960 when this was still developing and people were still getting a, each day brought new news of these incidents across the world, a collision began to form of international Jewish organizations, the Israeli Government and the U.S. officials. And, together, they launched an unprecedented effort to create a law that would band anti-Semitism. They went to the United Nations, the Commission on Human Rights, seeking redress. And, this campaign, eventually, bore fruit. In 1965, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination appeared, it's commonly known as ICERD. This was a legal convention that was instrumental in the fight against apartheid. But, it has a very different connotation in Jewish history. For, what began in 1960 as a global response to anti-Semitism and Anti-Jewish racism, just 5 years later had morphed into a UN law that many in and outside the Jewish community considered to be Anti-Semitic. That's because the making of ICERD the drafting process debates around it yielded a polemical legal catch phrase that remains with us today, Zionism equals racism, or Zionism is a form of racism. Now, this is a charge that historians mostly associate with the 1970s. That's because it was formally codified in a 1975 UN resolution 3379. This is, to my knowledge, the only resolution that was ever formally revoked by the United Nations not 20 years later. But, my focus today and what I want to show is that its origins lie in the 1960s and in the Cold War. And, it tells us something about the making of human rights and the making of Jewish politics in that moment. So, what I want to do, in the talk, is try and answer 3 questions. First is the simplest one of all. How did this legal campaign against anti-Semitism, which was spearheaded by Jews, morph into something that gave birth to a troche, Zionism is racism? ^M00:10:01 It's a strange irony to say the least. Secondly, for my purposes, one of the most interesting question is how Jews responded and interpreted what was going on in this period from 1960 to 65. And, I put this in more specific terms that I'll explain. The next question is, why did European Zionist interpret this whole episode these 5 years as a political failure for both Zionism and for human rights while American Jewish liberals concluded that it's actually a success on both counts? And, stepping back more broadly, what can this strange episode tell us about larger intertwined histories of Jewish politics and human rights in the 20th century. Now, if you heard, this part of the book project and the work entitled is the Vanishing Minority: Jewish Politics and Human Rights in the 20th Century. In the book, I look at a number of key moments when we see human rights and Jewish political activism and political thought converging and diverging between roughly 1919 and 1975. The goal, in one sense, is to look at this as kind of a nonconventional space on top or in the international order to see how Jewish political thought develops. I'm particularly interested in understanding how nationalism and internationalism intersect in a way that we don't always get if we simply focus, for instance, on how Jews focus on Israel, the idea of a state, mobilizing for it, defending it, critiquing it, and so on and so forth. At the same time, I hope to rethink human rights history. This is a growing field. And, it's a growing field that has a strange lacuna in it because despite the centrality of the holocaust and narratives of where human rights come from and where cosmopolitan ethics come from, Jews are actually left out of the narratives. We assume the holocaust gave birth to human rights in some sense, at least in Europe in the period after World War 2. But, we have no real view into what Jews actually thought about human rights. Was it a new universal morality? Was it something that grew naturally out of [inaudible]? Or, was it something else. Was it about guaranteeing the rights of the rightless, a kind of global citizenship dealings from nationality as Hannah Arendt suggested at one point? Or, as Arendt also suggested elsewhere, was human rights something that actually derived from nationalism? Indeed, in her origins of totalitarianism, she wrote that only the creation of Israel, a sovereign Jewish Nation State, could restore to the Jews their human rights. Now, she's a very interesting figure in this story because there was some tensions inside her thinking and there was a trajectory of change in how she thought about Zionism and nationalism. And, she's characteristic about another, a number of figures that I talk about in this project. These include Peter Benenson who was the son of two British Zionist leaders, converted to Catholicism himself and created Amnesty International. Hersch Lauterpacht who drafted the first International Bill of Human Rights and the first version of Israeli Declaration of Independence. So, you can see, in these capsule little episodes, already, these strange ways in which these political commitments and these identities begin to interweave with one another. Today, I'm going to talk about 2 other figures. And, this is the tale of 2 Morris's basically Morris Abram and Maurice Perlzweig is how you pronounce his name. It's a tale that tells you about a conflict within this Jewish, excuse me, Jewish sphere of human rights activism. And, it also sheds light on the larger story I'm talking about. When word first broke of the swastikas, Jewish leaders in London and New York couldn't agree on who was behind them. Some thought it was fugitive Nazi's others thought it was neo-Nazi sympathizers, other's assumed communists, and others assumed it was a plot by Arab states to try and delegitimize Israel. All agreed that the UN, however, was the right place to turn. This was logical because, from before the creation of the UN, Jewish NGO, nongovernmental organizations, had been instrumental in pushing forward a number of initiatives that had to do with international law, war crimes, human rights, and humanitarianism, refugees among them. And, they continued to invest heavily in the UN human rights program. The place where Jews concentrated, specifically, their efforts was in the sub-commission of the Commission on Human rights. This is, as this long title suggests, the sub-commission on the prevention of discrimination and the protection of minorities. This was a group, a body comprised of, what were supposed to be, independent experts nominated by states. They weren't supposed to be official delegates of the missions from various countries. But, they were supposed to be, actually legal experts who were going to work on furthering human rights and developing new studies and new laws. It's also a body that included an enhanced role for public groups, NGO's again that's what we would call them. And the story of what happened at the UN between 1960 and 1965 basically global anti-Semitism can be boiled down to a 5 year fight at this organization, at this body between these two men that I've just mentioned Morris Abram and Maurice Perlzweig. They represented the two main wings of Jewish activism in this sphere throughout the entire period. And, they represented the two main organizations who were instrumental in creating a Jewish role for human rights and pushing forward with a kind of discrete visions of what it could be. On one side, you have Perlzweig, he's the representative of the World Jewish Congress which is a group of European Zionists and on the other side you have Abram representative of American Jewish liberals. I'll say more about what that means. Let me give you a little bit of background about Perlzweig first. He was a Cambridge educated British Rabi, a reformed Rabi we would call him in American parliament, as to say a liberal nonorthodox rabbi. He had had a very interesting career before this being involved in the British Labor Party, being the Jewish chaplain at Eton, being a cofounder of the British Zionist Movement, being a delegate to the League of Nations, and being a cofounder of his organization that's listed under his picture here the World Jewish Congress. Perlzweig was a Zionist but with a twist, for before World War 2, he championed the twin goals of a Jewish state in Palestine and the preservation of Jewish Nationhood in Adaspa [assumed spelling] through minority rights. What this meant, essentially, was cultural autonomy that would be legally recognized, the rights to use Yiddish or Hebrew, other kinds of communal self-role, in some cases actually having a portion of monies allotted from the state in different countries, two Jewish communities to use to run their own schools, courts, culture, and religious life. There's a common misconception that, when we talk about Zionism we're essentially talking about a movement that's all focused on building up a country, a sovereign nation state. And, this would, essentially, be the end of the story. [Inaudible] part of another strain of Zionism. It's a group I call Zionists internationalists. In his view, we can say very simply, Zionism didn't begin with a state, hence, it would not end with statehood. Jews deserve their own national identity and existence outside of an independent state. During World War 2 Perlzweig arrived in New York. He was a formidable speaker, very erudite charismatic. And, he spent the next 3 decades at the UN where he earned the nickname Mr. NGO. He was a self-described quote fervent Zionist. But, he maintained very good relations with Arab and Soviet diplomats throughout this entire period, indeed, as we'll see, this became central to what he thought about the swastika, excuse me, epidemic and what it could mean for human rights. Now, his rival was Morris Abram. Abram was a native of the American South, a lawyer who began his career at the Nuremberg trials as a junior staffer. He became a well-known civil rights activist and a staunch anticommunist. And, under Kennedy, he became the U.S. expert task to the sub-commission at the UN. Abram was also the president of the American Jewish Committee. And, this was a group, as I said, of American Jewish liberals who, in some cases, were ambivalent and in some cases were opposed to Zionism. For Abram, what he did not like about Zionism had little to do with Arabs and Jews and conflicting claims over land or nationhood in the Middle East. It didn't even have to do with the idea of having a Jewish state. What bothered him was the idea of nationalism itself, it was the ism in Zionism because he was concerned about its implication for Jews outside of this Jewish state. For Abram, the main solution to the problems of anti-Semitism was liberalism. And, he favored integrating Jews into the states in which they lived as citizens. Zionism could be a refuge for Jews who couldn't go elsewhere. But, beyond that, the key thing was to make sure that it didn't spill over into problems of dual loyalty and other political, let's say, sensitive areas for Jews outside a Jewish state. These are two different positions in the world of Jewish politics. And, as I'll explain, these two positions fed into the conceptions of human rights. For Abram, human rights was about civil liberties. It was about the idea that people everywhere should be protected. And Jews, who experience anti-Semitism should be protected as citizens of their country just like anybody else who faced hatred or bias. For Perlzweig, human rights was an extension of something he'd been already involved with before World War 2, minority rights and therefore was connected to preserving group identity, national identity along with civil liberties. This is the distinction that would prove crucial to what happened between them. Now, let me jump back to January 1960 and tell you want happened. ^M00:20:03 And, what I want to do, in my talk today, is briefly traced what happened through the eyes, first of Abram, and then through the eyes of Perlzweig. It's a little bit of a rush on the story because we begin to see how these two different conceptions effect their interpretations of what's going on, what human rights mean, what it means for Jews, and what's happening in this episode. When the sub-commission met, in late January 1960, the, excuse me, the swastika epidemic, as I said, was in full swing. Immediately, there was a resolution put forth by the U.S. and several European countries to have denunciation of this outbreak of anti-Semitism and other forms of racial prejudice and religious intolerance. It was unanimous support, the Egyptians, the Sudanese, the Lebanese, the Poles, the Soviets, all of them signed on to this resolution without trouble. Then, it proceeded up the chain at the UN. By May, the secretary general had called for an open investigation and for, basically, a fact finding phase about anti-Semitism. Who's behind it? What can be done to stop it? This stirred hopes for all of the parties involved that this was going to be a breakthrough moment for human rights as a whole and for the cause of eliminating anti-Semitism. But it raised one very specific and very difficult question. And this was what to do about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union? The arguments for focusing on it and presenting testimony materials at the UN were very simple. The Soviet Union, in the 1960s, effectively held a population of several million Jews captive. No one knew exactly how many because, again, this was something that was so politically sensitive. Between 1948 and 1953, think about this, we're in 1960s, it's a handful of years later, Stalin had murdered nearly the entire Jewish leadership, the cultural political leadership of the Jewish community of the Soviet Union. Now, even with Stalin long dead, many observers [inaudible], concluded that anti-Semitism was actually on the rise in the Soviet Union. And, 3 months before the swastika epidemic began, there had been an arson attack on the suburb of Moscow in which a synagogue and a Jewish cemetery were burnt down. That will play into the story also. Now, of course, the U.S. and the Soviets were also locked in a Cold War struggle. And, many considered it natural and logical to call out soviet anti-Semitism as a way to eliminate, to target and aluminate, excuse me, the basic evil nature of the regime. But Abram and Perlzweig are two guys in the story split on what to do. Abram favored strongly challenging the Soviets. Again, as a US representative to this body and the sub-commission, he was supposed to be an independent delegate. But, he was a Cold War liberal and he saw himself fighting, naturally, for the U.S. and for human rights and for liberalism against an illiberal authoritarian regime. Moreover, Abram was confident that this was a win win situation for the U.S. He was confident because he was a civil rights activist who saw, in the Kennedy Administration, that the civil rights movement, as he interpreted, was already almost complete in solving the problem of racism in America. He was so confident, in fact, that he arranged for the entire UN sub-commission to take a field trip down to Atlanta. And, he brought them down there, including the Soviet representatives, to see, basically, a city that he said was an example of American progress, that there was blacks and whites harmoniously interacting, that racism was basically over. Kind of remarkable because he did this in 1963. But, he viewed this, essentially, as win win, as I said. Now, when it came to Jews, Abram had a particular focus for his critique of the Soviets and a particular reason for raising Soviet anti-Semitism. And, it had to do with what he called legal segregation inside Russia. Under the Soviet legal system, Jews were classified as a nationality on their passports. The classic line was [inaudible] the line 5 of the passport which actually ended up being line 3 in the later years but derived from the Stalinist passport system. To Abram, this was the fullest expression of Soviet racism because it legally defined Jews as an other. And, it branded them in a way in which they were therefore discriminated against by the state. Moreover, it promised to take Jews back to the ghetto in the sense of walling them off when really they deserved to be treated as equal individual citizens. So, this was, basically, state sponsored racism. What followed, over the next 5 years, was a series of drafting debates in this sub-commission and into the commission of human rights and up into the general assembly. And, as this proceeded, the question of anti-Semitism and the Soviets popped up at every turn. By 1962 there was now a draft law calling for a ban on anti-Semitism and racial segregation and apartheid. Particularly Jamaica and several new states in the UN pushed hard for dealing with anti-black racism. And Abram was fully onboard with this. He believed that, basically, this was essential, but, he insisted that if we mention apartheid or anything else of that nature, we have to mention anti-Semitism. And, he made it clear that he saw this as a cardinal issue because it had to do with the fundamental nature of human rights. Here, on the slide I've put up, you see a newsletter in which Abram is portrayed holding a book called Judaism Without Embellishment, a 1963 Ukrainian Communist publication, a notorious work of anti-Semitic propaganda, HAC, they were the first American Jewish Committee of which he was the president at the time while he's still at the UN. And, on the other side is a cartoon from inside it, which, for the sake of time, I'm not going to parse, but, suffice to say it's a cartoon which calls up the ghost of Auschwitz and of Jewish victims there, talks about David Ben Gurion Israeli Prime Minister, [Inaudible] Gurion, turned into an ally of the Western Regime selling arms to them and says this is basically all a conspiracy, you know, against the progressive elements of the world. Back and forth Abram went against the Soviet representatives. Every time this happened, the Soviets would say, if we mention anti-Semitism we have to mention Nazism and that's why this cartoon factors in because their attempt was to discredit the West German Regime. And, they assumed that the U.S. would not want to do this and that other western powers would not want to open up their side to vulnerability in a propaganda war. But, Abram refused to budge. And, over 62, 63, 64, as these negotiations continued, he insisted that anti-Semitism be mentioned and if fascism was mentioned too, or Nazism or Neo-Nazism, so be it. Excuse me. At the fall 1965 debate in the General Assembly of the UN, Abram, again, insisted that the law, as it now existed, include anti-Semitism. And, this was the point at which, after years of debating back and forth in various committees, the Soviets played, what I call, their trump card, the Soviet delegated proposed language. And the language said we should ban anti-Semitism, Zionism, Nazism, Neo-Nazism and all other forms of colonialism national and race hatred and exclusiveness. Zionism, the Soviet delegate went on to add, was a dangerous as Nazism, fascism, and anti-Semitism. This proceeded to launch a huge explosive debate that went on all day. And, by the end of the day, they'd taken out Zionism and they'd taken out anti-Semitism, and they'd taken out all isms except for apartheid. In December of 1965, this convention on elimination of racial discrimination was approved and open for ratification. Now, at this point, in one sense, the story's over because anti-Semitism isn't mentioned, the law is now on the books, and the story is over. And, the question is what has just happened? Let me actually pull up here, here's a quote from the Soviet representative speaking. Abram's attitude at this point was that he'd won because he'd exposed the Soviets for what they were which is anti-Semites who'd make preposterous charges against Jews and against anyone to further their cause. He still wished to seek for a specific law banning anti-Semitism. But, in the meantime he didn't see any downside to the struggle because he said we all understand that the Soviets are playing a dirty propaganda game, no reasonable person would conclude that Zionism is this kind of racism. And, therefore, we've showed the world what they are. Now, I want to pause and repeat the first of the three question I mentioned at the beginning. And that is, how did this campaign morph from a campaign against anti-Semitism to this new troche about Zionism's racism? And, as you can see from what I'm outlining, the short answer is before 1967, before major shifts in the relationships between Israelis and Palestinians, before the broader emergence of what we could call a new Palestinian nationalist propaganda offensive against Israel, Soviet brinkmanship takes us into a place where we see this legal and semantic link beginning to be forged. And, basically, what happens from here on is, on out, is the Soviets continue to thread this through all of their work. What we know now is a few key facts about this. ^M00:30:03 This is just another cartoon from the period where the Soviets, this is another Soviet carton making the allegation that out of the ruins of Nazism comes a blood thirst Zionist carrying the genocide baton and actually taking it out of the hands of a Jewish victim of Nazism. What we know now, thanks to the opening of KGB archives, is that the swastika epidemic, in fact, began in 1959 as a KGB offensive. This man, General [Inaudible] was responsible for the initial effort to launch it and did the attack on the synagogue I mentioned on the suburb of Moscow as a trial run and then began to send operatives into West Germany to do these arson attacks and to do these graffiti attacks. What he didn't realize is how fast it would take off. And, the story's still debating does that mean there was an agent in every country around the world? Unlikely. We have a lot more information about who's responsible, some of it is just youth rebelling, some of it is Neo-Nazis, it's a whole mix of things. But, the clear thing here is the soviets understand this as something to basically do as a propaganda war. And, what we also know is the Zionism is racism link is something that the Soviets instruct the delegates in every human rights meeting from the mid-60s onwards to raise this link, to raise this link because it was a way to make the West uncomfortable to put pressure on the U.S. and it's alliance with Israel and to delegitimize its own critics, right, because it was concerned about anti-Semitic, a anti-Semitism as a charge that could be leveled against the Soviets themselves. Now, what I'm telling you sounds like a tale of Cold War intrigue. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't dismiss the whole larger issues about the Arab Israeli conflict. But, it shows us that there's a lot more of the Cold War in this story than we realize. But, this isn't the only way to see what happened here. And, the interesting thing about this, for my purposes, is then to rewind and look how the scene unfolds through the eyes of Morris Abram's rival, another Jewish person involved in this conflict who is, himself, actually defined as a Zionist and sees this very differently in terms of who won and who lost and what's happened. Going back to January 1960. When the efforts first began to respond to the swastika outbreak, Maurice Perlzweig, the World Jewish Congress was extremely optimistic that human rights and Jewish nationalism would both benefit from this UN initiative. Where he differed was, as soon as the question anti-Semitism inside Russia came up, he was strongly opposed to raising any issue about the Soviet's anti-Semitism. He wrote that the best hope for human rights and for Jews is to keep them on the sidelines of the Cold War. And, here, I put up a quote which he says very simply. Human rights must not become a Cold War battlefield. And, he was really caustic in the way he thought about Abram and other American Jewish liberals pursuing this offensive. As he says, we're not about to elect a member of the New York City Council, we're dealing with the rulers of a totalitarian state. Let's avoid the dialogue of the deaf. IE, what we have to stop doing is just fighting a propaganda war back and forth because that would only drag the Jews and Israel into this East West conflict. We have to fight a different way. He dismissed Abram and all of the Cold war liberals as people who were essentially foe internationalists. And, he dismissed American Jews as a whole. Remember, he's coming, he's in New York but he comes from England and before that his family from Poland. And, he says these people don't really understand international diplomacy. He says this because his organization is, in fact, international. The World Jewish Congress has branches all across the world. It also has branches in the communist bloc in Hungary and Romania and elsewhere. And he sees this as a chance to leverage the strange nature of Jewishness to come up with, basically, a third where or a neutralist sphere, that is to say to step outside the East West conflict. This is the best way, in his estimation, to keep Jews outside the Cold War and to perpetuate the Jewish national identity. Because, what he wants more than leveling charges of anti-Semitism against the Soviet Union is to create a way for Jews there to be able to maintain their Yiddish language, to be able to learn Hebrew, to have cultural and religious rights. Why did he come up with this stance? The firs reason is that he believes that he was good at diplomacy and diplomacy worked. Perlzweig claimed, and I will tell you since this is a talk from a work in progress that he, I haven collaborated this, but, he claimed that he was the person who convinced the Soviet Union to ratify the genocide convention in in 1950s. He also said, in 1960, he was the person to convince the Soviets to sign on to this resolution denouncing anti-Semitism. And he was able to tell them there is no blowback for you if you join us in this. So, in a certain sense, he said we can talk to the other side and we can, actually, make them join up in something that resembles what we call a true internationalism. Secondly, Perlzweig shared some of the ways Soviets thought about human rights. You recall that I said he comes to it out of minority rights, cultural rights, group identity, that's what drives him. And this, of course, is what the Soviets claim to be is their actual position on human rights. They argue again and again that human rights really means economical rights but also cultural rights. It means self-determination. It means national rights. And, this is more important Western style civil liberties. Now, the best example of Perlzweig's thinking comes in the discussion about the Soviet passport and the idea of making Jews classified as a nationality. You'll recall I told you that Abram said this is racist. You put a Jewish stamp on a passport in the nationality category, you're doing the same thing as segregation in America. Perlzweig was enraged by this idea. And, I brought this quote here because it's a very telling quote. The last thing we need to do is to persuade the Russians to promote a simulation further by suppressing this last tenuous link with the Jewish heritage. And, elsewhere, he goes on to say we're willing to basically accept some discrimination in order to preserve our group identity over there because, otherwise, Jews will just disappear. He said, it's naive to think otherwise. And, he goes on, throughout this period of describing, to critique Abram and to go so far as to say that what Abram is doing and what the Americans are doing is generated anti-Semitism among the officials of the UN because they're so resentful that the Jews are derailing this human rights process by bringing up Soviet anti-Semitism. Now again, we're talking about a Zionist leader who is critiquing liberals for being the source of anti-Semitism. It's a strange thing. When you come to the end, to this vote in 1965, Perlzweig says this is a humiliating defeat. What Abram has done is something worse than a crime, it's a blunder. Because, by demanding anti-Semitism be named, be put into this law, he was the one who insured that the Communist and Arab world would unite against Israel. So, in a view, this is poor politicking and this is poor diplomacy. He goes on to say this is simply also basic political arithmetic. There's 1 Jewish state there are 14 Arab states. So, it's inevitable that these kind of conflicts and propaganda wars are going to happen. And, the goal is to try and pull Jews outside of this rather than making them the focal point for these conflicts. And, he added, Americans don't understand that we're a turning point in human rights. Jews are a tiny minority in an Afro Asian world. Their thinking on human rights is utterly different from ours. Naturally, this is also interesting, Perlzweig wrote, naturally they regard apartheid as infinitely worse than anything happening to the Jews in the Soviet Union. So, as concerned as he was about them, he's basically said human rights is never going to be about just one issue. It's always going to be in the context of competing claims about what's the biggest threat out there. Finally, he went on to say that even if this law had been past and had named anti-Semitism, it would've done nothing to really help the Jews of the Soviet Union. It's silly, he wrote, to claim that rapping the Soviets on the knuckles would stop anti-Jewish persecution. And, the last quote I'll bring from him about this is he said the image of marching rabbis with lighted candles down the streets of New York City will have no impact on the Soviets. He completely dismissed that idea of grassroots popular protest against Soviets. Now, having put these two stories side by side, let me pause and repeat the second question. And, I'm moving towards the conclusion here of some of the thoughts about what this means for the larger history of Jewish politics and human rights. So, why did a European Zionist interpret this swastika episode as a failure for nationalism of the Jews and for human rights and American liberals saw it was success? To answer this question, we need to look back at how they thought about human rights, as I've kind of emphasized throughout this. So here, we can see this, if we just take the title of this place inside the UN, the structure where this fight played out. For Perlzweig, human rights were a continuation of minority rights. They were first and foremost a way to protect minorities, vulnerable groups. And, this would include the Jews and other groups. He's coming out of Europe. He thinks, still, the way Europeans are thinking in anti-war period about the problem of minority groups. And so, therefore, when he goes to the sub-commission, as you can see in the slide, he thinks about minority protection. For Abram, human rights are a, kind of, global constitutionalism, a check on state power over the individual, and then, really a continuation of what we, the discipline of Jewish history talk about as the story of emancipation. ^M00:40:12 Giving Jews individual citizenship and civil rights inside the countries of Western Europe and North America beginning in the 18th century. And, therefore, when he thinks about what human rights can mean, it's not about isolating group rights, it's about prevention of discrimination much as he saw the same thing happening inside the U.S. in the civil rights context. So, you can see this played out. Now, of course, this shows us that the tension of human rights is built into the commission itself. Right? It has these two different things which really means different things. And, these two different wings of Jewish thought focus on other aspects of it. Now, for the sake of time, I'm not going to say more about the different meanings of this. But, I will note that basically, in one sense, Perlzweig wanted Jews to be visible. They should, he's against assimilation. He wants Jews to have a public group identity. And, law should be something that can provide that. And, Abram did not want that. This is the very same moment where the Civil Rights act of 64 is being created. There's a debate about whether this should be something that could cover religion, this is something that could cover Jews. And, Abram is part of a wing of American Jewish civil rights activists who are determined to achieve civil rights but also determined to make Jews invisible to the American state. As some other historians have talked about, this is the moment where Jews insist that religion not be on the U.S census for instance. They don't want there to be any way in which Jews can be seen and classified by the American government. It's also the point at which they say Jews are white and our goal is to protect ourselves from bias and discrimination but not to assert a different identity. Interesting enough, Abram would go on, although he was a prominent civil libertarian and liberal for the rest of his career, he would go on to critique affirmative action also and say group rights is something which is not seen in the U.S. Constitution and therefore is something which is a deviation from a norm of a truly neutral race blind legal ideal. So, you can see some of this stuff is going into the human rights activism of them. Now, there's one more thing to think about this. And, this has to do with the meaning therefore of what human rights could or couldn't do for Jews who are still vulnerable, of course, there's still a couple million Jews in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and long afterwards. And, this has to do with the larger contours of Jewish politics at this point in time. Now, let me take on step back and talk about this in terms of Israel. We think of the story of Jewish politics in one sense as the story of a radical departure in 1948 to where Jews who are at the asper group suddenly get a nation state, right. And, after 2,000 years of exile and political power instance, they suddenly have a Jewish nation state. But, one of the things we have to figure out is what happens to the Jews who stay outside of that state and what it would mean for the way they think about statehood and think about sovereignty. Another way of putting this is to say that Jews emerged after 1948 as strong critics of the very idea of sovereignty. If you think about what human rights is, it's an attack on sovereignty by saying there ought to be a way to have law that's more powerful than state power, to peer inside sovereign boarders. But, at the same moment they're doing that, Jews, liberals, and Zionists are supporting the idea of having a sovereign Jewish nation state. So, the question is how do they reconcile these two things? For Perlzweig, it's simple. The birth of Israel is undeniably a good thing but it's not the end of the story. And therefore, he writes the state must acknowledge the sovereignty of a higher law. Sovereignty is one, it's fine and good. But, Jews also need to be supporting something above their own state, something that will protect them and protect everybody else. And, this is international human rights law. Global anti-Semitism in the 1960s taught him, he said, that Israel could never simply protect Jews by existence. In fact, it might be, as he feared, something that would also draw Jews into other political conflicts. And again, this is all separate from the way we think about it today in terms of naturally the Middle East as a focal point as an Arab Israeli conflict. Perlzweig saw human rights as a new kind of international politics that would allow Jews to have a state and still have a national identity outside of it. Now, Abram, what about him? This is why I put up this last slide here. I want to go back to this last slide because I think it tells us something about what Abram learned from the 1960s about human rights, about anti-Semitism, and about sovereignty. So, in concluding, I want to look at this caption that I put up here of the graffiti on the statue from Oslo. If we think about this, it's very interesting. It's a compilation of placid anti-Semitic stereotypes. Right? Jewish capitalism, the Jewish peddler, the Jewish secret infiltration that Roosevelt is secretly a Jew, and Jews are taking over the international sphere, never mind that Roosevelt died before the [inaudible] conference, anti-Semites were never necessarily accurate in their facts. But, it's a negative image. And, it's actually, I would argue, the beginning of a new negative image of American super power and a new negative image of American imperial sovereignty, right. Remember, this is the context of the debate about NATO about bond, East and West Germany. This statue is in downtown Oslo. It overlooks the Nobel Peace Center and the Town Hall. And, it was dedicated in 1950 by Eleanor Roosevelt who herself is our greatest American ambassador for human rights in this period. So, I think, this is a key to something that's going on at this moment. In one of Perlzweig's letters, he writes that the most dangerous thing you can do is to make the Jews of the Soviet Union appear to be quote, the wars of the United States. This could only prove disastrous because, again, it would link Jews everywhere into this Cold War struggle. But, Abram saw it completely the opposite way. His idea of what human rights was and how to protect Jews was very much linked to American power. Recall, he goes there as a representative of the U.S. body politic and as a leader of a Jewish organization. And, in an era of global anti-Semitism, what he seemed to argue is that the only way to really protect Jews is to push for a strong American foreign policy that will focus on Jews as a bellwether of democracy and as a particular interest. And, in other words, what he's trying to do is put Jews under the protective armor of American sovereignty. This, I think, is something that is initially hard to see because you think of this as well he wants human rights and he wants the Jews to be mentioned. But, as much as he wants human rights, he really wants the U.S. to win the Cold War. And, later on in his life he admits this. In a 1980s interview, he says he came into the human rights struggle with one view and came out with another because he realized that American war authority would not bring all the countries of the world into this human rights ideal and that maybe it did not make sense for the U.S. to pursue this any further. And, he went on to say that maybe sovereignty can't be lawful. It has to operate in the dimension of power politics. Abram, in his last act, started an organization called UN Watch which is still around today. And, it was designed to critique the UN human rights system for anti-Semitic anti-Israel bias. It's a very interesting group because it positions itself as a watchdog of human rights. But, it's fundamentally coming from a position of critiquing this as a system that has gone wrong. It's also a group that helps with the U.S. effort to reorganize the UN Human Rights Program in 2003. So, what does this all tell us? It's a complicated story about shifting positions and understanding of this. But, fundamentally, it tells us that, a couple things. Number 1, the story of Jewish human rights isn't just a story about Jews inspired by ideals of Biblical justice or the horrors of the holocaust demanding that the world pay attention to this cause. It has to do with politics. It has a lot to do with nationalism and anti-nationalism. Second, the struggles, I would argue, that the Jewish community confronts today about how to relate to Israel and human rights questions have a very, very long history. And, it's a history that begins already in the Cold War. And, it's a history that has as much to do with the politics of Jewish Identity as it does with the question of Israeli state power or issues of land and Palestinian claims and the things of that nature. Thirdly, what happens in this story is, after this moment, this, kind of, vigorous Jewish effort press human rights at the UN begins to end. All the groups I mentioned, the two organizations close up their human rights at the UN after this episode, basically, by the 1970s. And so, really, what happens is the international phase of Jewish political history ends. There's a few more things that happen to cause this. The first is, the Soviets are so enraged by this that they basically launch an effort to kick all NGO's out of the UN process and discredit them. But, they focus in particular on the Jews because they say there's no such thing as a Jewish NGO that's not really an arm of Israel. Along with this, though, something else is happening. ^M00:50:02 And, it has also, I think, an overlooked significance in the history of how we talk about Jews and human rights. You've got to recall that this whole thing, in a certain sense, is a fight about the Jews of the Soviet Union. Beginning in the 70s, the Jews of the Soviet Union leave. They leave through a dramatic story of departure and making destinations involving Israel and the U.S. and Western Europe. Once Jews leave the Soviet Union, there's no other place left in the world where Jews are legally defined as a national minority. And they're no longer a large enough community to rise to the international level and open up the possibility of debate about their interests and language rights and these other kinds of things. And, it certainly says one phase of Jewish [inaudible] had ended. There's still Jewish communities around the world. But, there's no big population that is therefore an object for political advocacy and mobilization. And, what this means is, the Jews, in a certain sense, cease to be a minority. And certainly, they do at the UN also. They cease to be a minority that is a subject of debate, how to protect them, how to weigh their interests against he claims of other minorities, Arab, Muslim, Greek, Albanian, Polish, you name it. So, in a certain sense, and this is what the book is really about, the Jews, as a minority, vanish, they end at this period in the 1970s. It doesn't mean that Jews and the human rights story is over. It doesn't mean that Jewish politics is over. It doesn't mean that the politics of Jewish human rights is over. But this particular story where it's kind of a mission driven by these actors who think of themselves as carrying forward a basic fundamental Jewish political project ends. And so, with this, the story of Jews as a minority, a vanishing minority, reaches its end and so does my talk. Thank you very much. ^M00:51:51 [ Applause ] ^M00:52:03 I think we have a minute or two for questions. Yeah. ^M00:52:06 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:52:27 Yeah. ^M00:52:28 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:52:33 Sure. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. Yeah, just to repeat the question. I mentioned that the whole outbreak the very outbreak of swastikas was engineered by a Soviet KGB general. Now, let me say two things. First of all, I would say that he experimented. He seeded the ground with this. But, it took on a life of its own, right. So, I don't think it's right to explain this. And, I don't agree with those who would say it was all a Soviet conspiracy. I think, there were other things. And, that's one of the interesting things that happens. When a mean gets out there, there's copycat, right. And, one of the fascinating things, as a historian, is to read the Jews, the Jewish groups trying to understand who's behind this. You know. They're very confused. They're terrified because they wish it was clearly one group. They, almost wish it could be, you know, Arab intelligence services, then it would all make sense, you know. The most terrifying thing is that there's no one behind it. So, when we say that there is someone behind it, I don't think he's completely, you know, responsible for it. The records are partial for the KGB involvement, suffice to say it appears the KGB, this general was surprised how it took off like wildfire, you know. The main goal was Europe. The main goal was to delegitimize the West German regime. And, the, it had to do with this well-known phenomenon of a propaganda war where the East Germans and the Soviets would say the West German regime is basically all Nazis, you know, that won't own up to their past. And, the U.S. and the West is just propping them up. So, this is just propaganda gold, right, because let's go after them. And, what's the best way to do it? To have anti-Semitism breaking out there. And then, they're even happier because it's just, you know, they've got agents and there are some people arrested who confessed that they were paid to do it. But, clearly, they say that other people have just taken this into their own hands. What they're not happy about is it begins to break out in East Germany too. You know, then, they've got a problem. Right? And, they try and keep it under wraps. But, of course, there are incidents there. So, yeah, it is KGB driven. And, in that sense, who was right? What does it mean to be right? Morris Abram was right when he said it's the Soviets behind this. But, of course Perlzweig was right about the danger of pursuing this in a certain way that you're going to politicize everything we're doing. Right? And, you may, actually, be counterproductive in focusing on the Soviets niche of nations. Yeah. >> [Inaudible] first you need to say a little more about what Jewishness as a national minority still means in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. ^M00:55:45 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:56:09 Yeah. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. >> [Inaudible] >> Jim Loeffler: Yes. Yeah. Those are both great question. I think Perlzweig was naive and a little nostalgic and he's the man of the inner war period, you know. If you look at the pictures of these people we're talking about, that's this is the best picture of him in the moment. He's older. He's a generation older, right. And, I think he's holding on to that. I think that, at the same time, he probably, well, I can say, he does not go so far as to speak the language of the 1920s and 30s to say we are a national minority who demand autonomy, you know, [inaudible], these types of tropes that are part of Jewish political discourse then. But, he does say cultural rights are really important. He does think language is key. He does believe that, he doesn't, nobody knows who speaks Yiddish and who uses Yiddish in the Soviet Union. But, the assumption is there's still probably, you know, half of this population, so maybe, 1.5 million people for whom it's a native language. Basically language rights is really important to him. So, he also is conscious of the fact that there are lots of other national minorities running around the Soviet Union. Most of them are territorial, you know, Ukrainians, stuff like that. And, this is the classic Jewish problem that they're, they're different in that respect. But, it's still an ideal for him that there's something, some groupness has to be preserved. And, you know, he, he's a little uncertain about what he really wants to see happen because he's also in favor of immigration for Jews who want to leave. But, he thinks there's something there. The best way, maybe, to illustrate it is to mention, you know, when one of the first petitions from behind the Iron Curtain, comes out and gets to the UN from a group of Soviet Georgian Jews, from Soviet Georgia in 1968, 25 of them write a document in which they say we demand to go to our homeland. Right? And, it's the beginning of the Soviet Jewish movement to seek immigration to try and get out. Now, what's interesting, if you read it more closely, and the way he reads it is they say we're not demanding this because we can't have religious freedom here, we're not demanding this because of racial persecution here, we're not demanding this because of these kinds of challenges. We're demanding this because we are a nation and therefore we want to be repatriated to our nation. And, we can't have our full national life here. So, I think, that is part of what he's thinking. Yes, the key thing here is not just to think of them as a vulnerable group or even to idealize what might be happening there that could kind of be a true communal national cultural autonomy, but he wants the public recognition of it. This is what he wants most of all that I'm trying to get at. He wants them to recognize as a nationality that deserves to be treated that way and therefore can make claims on the international community too by itself. The other question, is a complicated one. I think you're right. It depends on context what's a minority what's not. I made it in two sentences and I think there may be a slippage in how I'm using it. In a one larger sense, I think, in the global imagination, Jews are no longer the same kind of minority. Certainly, they're not the minority in the human rights imagination about what it means to defend a group that is a diaspora population that needs to have its identity preserved, you know. And, the shift is to other groups Kurds, Armenians other groups who begin to make strong claims for language rights, minority rights, you know, there are still these bodies at the UN who pursue, who organize global conferences on diaspora minorities and the right to sustain their language. ^M01:00:04 This discourse, actually, gets picked up, I think, here with Native Americans. You know, but for Jews, no one carries on with that argument anymore. And, I think, the interesting thing is American liberals are happy to have Jews leave and go to Israel and to concentrate Jewish nationality in Israel. And, American Zionists and European Zionists are happy to have that also. So, they don't really see a virtue in preserving kind of a separate international identity as what Simon Dubnow, you know, the great theorist of this would say a truly international minority people. Things are dynamic. So, I think minorityness can come back, but, I think, in the, particularly at the UN in the discourse there, in the international legal sphere, no one even refers to this anymore. Ironically, because, of course, there still are these Jewish minorities in Europe, and, but the term is, loses its applicability and it's stickiness, I think, when connected to Jews. Okay one more question yeah. ^M01:01:09 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:01:40 Yes. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jim Loeffler: Yeah. It's a very interesting question. Just to make sure people hear it. Was this reflected in different parts of the Jewish community and particularly in the demographics of those Jews who had older immigration stories and had been already Americanized and acculturated for a couple of generations versus those who were more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe closer to the old world experience, more identified perhaps with Yiddish language and, you know, politics and culture? What's very interesting to me is that, I would, I thought that too. That was my working assumption. And it's not the case. In fact, this guy, Perlzweig, feels that all American Jews just don't get it because all American Jews, including his partners who are the American branch of his World Jewish Congress, called the American Jewish Congress, they also, to him are too American. They're too American in their assumptions, they sound too much like the other side. They sound too much like Morris Abram who they say is, you know, not strongly patriotic enough in the Jewish Zionist cause. So, long story short, what you really feel developing is, kind of, the passing of a European Jewish identity. And, at this point, in the 60s, we know in larger terms, Jews are becoming more and more Americanized. And the distinction between those who came over right before World War 1 and those who came over long before has ceased to really matter. That's why Perlzweig, I think, again, himself is a man of a different generation. And, he spends, basically, almost 40 years living here but keeps his British accent, you know, and sees himself as finding people, trying to find people who really understand it. And, by understand it, it means they still think of the world in the categories of nations and national groups. And, everyone else here seems to be really focused on religion as the thing that defines Jews in American society as different. And with that. Thank you. ^M01:03:49 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:01 >> Jason Steinhauer: We will have to leave it there. But, I think, Jim can stick around for a few minutes to answer any additional questions. And, just a quick word of announcement, this was our final lecture of the calendar year of 2014. But, we are back in 2015 with many more lectures, programs, and symposia. So, please sign up to receive announcements on your way out and thank you again for coming. ^M01:04:25 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:30 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.