454
LEWIS A. COSER
radical movement mainly in revolt against what they felt to be the
constraining background of Yiddish-speaking or 'Orthodox Judaism. But
though parental backgrounds differed, such differences were soon over–
shadowed by common experiences. Jacobs went to Townsend Harris High
School, an accelerated school for smart youngsters, most of them J ewish.
Here, and later at City College, he was soon immersed in the hectic and
superheated debates among Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists which
gave these schools their characteristic flavor in the thirties. In a very
short time, the proper middle-class child who had often been warned
by his parents to "stop acting like a kike" had become part of that noisy,
brilliant, argumentative, intensely competitive and intensely committed
group of youngsters who made up a major part of the world of New
York radicalism in the thirties.
While never inclined to "reduce" the attraction of radicalism among
young J ews in those years to their unconscious desire
to
escape from their
Jewish background-the misery and suffering of the thirties were real
enough, and it would hence be a sign of insufferable smugness to dis–
count them-Jacobs is nevertheless fully aware that the radical movement
"provided an atmosphere in which I could reject being J ewish without
any feeling of guilt." His comments upon the ritual of adopting a party
name by which one was to be known in the organization are especially
pertinent in this respect. The custom had originated among European
revolutionists in an effort to escape police persecution. But in America
it served above all as a kind of rite of passage, a dramatization of a
transformation in identity. But, asks Jacobs shrewdly, "why was it that
so many of the Jewish radicals took as their cover name ones that were
conspicuously non-Jewish? No comrade Cohen ever adopted Ginsberg
as a party name; instead he became Green or Smith... ."
The pages in which Jacobs describes the world of New York
Trotskyist radicalism in the thirties are by far the best in the book.
The Socialist Party ha.d a native tradition to sustain, the Communists
looked at the Soviet Union as their emblem and motherland, the
Trotskyists were thrown completely upon their own resources. They
had to rely on sheer argumentative skill, on exegetical agility in the
reading of the sacred texts of Marxism a.nd on pure intellect, in their
otherwise unequal contests with other radical tendencies. But such
brilliance of argumentation was likely to go together with a rather
pronounced removal from concrete political realities. They could argue
about the "correct line" for the revolutionary movement in China or
Bulgaria or Peru while they were woefully ignorant of what politics are
all about in South Dakota. The hothouse atmosphere of New York
