NATHAN GLAZER
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movement and anarchism. These attractions of course existed in the
United States, too, in Jewish and (formally) non-Jewish versions.
Here there was a strong parallel between the situation of German
Jewish and American Jewish intellectuals. But once again one senses
that Judaism or
J
ewishness- specifically, Zionism- formed a more
significant challenge to the universalistic Marxist and reform move–
ments in central Europe than in the United States. After the fact, of
course, one can say why: it was there a matter of life or death, as it
never was in the United States. But was this understood in the 1920s
and even 1930s by Jewish intellectuals? Not by most of them, who
died or escaped to the West or Palestine as a matter of survival that
had little effect on their ideas. But I would argue the reality that it
did turn out- certainly from 1933- that the debate between a uni–
versalistic Marxism and reform and a particularistic Jewish choice
might be a matter of life and death, and gave the Jewish alternatives
a seriousness that they could not have in the United States.
For the contemporary American Jewish intellectuals of the
1930s, too, one great alternative attraction to Jewishness then was
socialism and its heirs, possibly communism. That was the major
form in which universalism combatted their particularistic Jewish
tendencies. But rejecting these in the United States implied nothing
it seemed about any Jewish alternative, led to no necessary involve–
ment in any Jewish issue, even though inevitably one detected a
modest rise in Jewish interest as commitment to Marxism, commu–
nism, or socialism declined, a rise sometimes leading to (as in the
case of Will Herberg) full involvement. But there was an infinite
regress of other alternatives in the United States: if one rejected
Stalinism, one could go back to Leninism; if one rejected Leninism,
there was socialism; if socialism, democratic socialism. If any or all
of the above were found unsatisfactory, there was in the United
States Americanism (for which the
PR
intellectuals were roundly
abused) .
Once again, the contrast with central Europe is fascinating:
there was no Germanism (or add any other central European or
Eastern European national culture) to fall back on for Jews, except
for some eccentrics: Jews were totally rejected. The situation was
different, as well as the psychological dynamics. In rejecting Chris–
tianity and Marxism, some German Jewish intellectuals of great
stature infused Jewish thought with an intellectual energy that as yet
a much larger and in one sense more "Jewish" American Jewish com–
munity has not yet matched .
There was then no obvious, formal, direct denial of Judaism
