Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 108

grew up in just such a shtetl in Poland,
regarded Jabotinsky as a somewhat inauthentic Jew. In a remarkable display of
uncharacteristic pettiness, Ben-Gurion
even refused permission for Jabotinsky's
remains to be transferred to Israel after
the latter's death in 1940.
But fast-forward to today, and matters
look rather different. It is Jabotinsky who
seems to be scoring a posthumous victory over his detractors. For now it is the
left that is in distinct retreat politically. The peace process is in tatters. And Israel's prime minister is the son of a man
who was a Jabotinsky protégé-historian
Benzion Netanyahu. When Benjamin Netanyahu states that it's premature to have
real negotiations with the Palestinians,
as he always does, he's channeling his in-

Vladimir, said Jabotinsky was the finest
orator in all Russia.)
Something similar might be said about
Cahan. The twentieth century, with its ideological feuds and bloodletting, pushed
both men away from literature and toward politics. As Seth Lipsky shows in his
erudite The Rise of Abraham Cahan, this indefatigable newspaper editor felt a virtual compulsion to weigh in on the tumultuous years, from the Bolshevik revolution
to the rise of Nazism, that were shaking
the world. He denounced the 1938 Munich Agreement as a "shameful document"
and said that Hitler was a "fascist devil"
who had "made a fool of his terrified opponents, of the democratic countries, and
of the whole civilized world." But Cahan's
loathing of Nazism did not prompt him to
suppress Stalin's failings,
as some on the left did.
On the contrary, he played
a key role in forging an
anti-communist consensus
among New York unions,
politicians, and intellectuals. To an extraordinary
extent, the most fervent
anti-Bolsheviks were former Jewish radicals from
the Soviet Union who had
watched as their socialist ideals were hijacked
by a ruthless and violent
revolutionary movement that perverted
them. In the 1920s, the Forward was one
of the first newspapers in the U.S. to report about the Siberian prison camps. In
1923 the Daily Worker, mouthpiece of the
American Communist Party, described
Cahan's remarks as a "compilation of the
most loathsome back stairs gossip against
Soviet Russia, emanating from the journalistic house of prostitution of the entire capitalist world."
Despite his prescient opposition to totalitarianism, Cahan recoiled at the idea
of a Jewish state before World War II. After Jabotinsky spoke at the Manhattan
Opera House in March 1940 to demand
"an exodus from Europe and the settlement of six million Jews on both sides of
the Jordan," Cahan attacked him. "How
to take care of five million or six million
homeless Jews and provide them with

The founders of Israel were not
right-wing Zionist Revisionists
like Jabotinsky. They were
decidedly men of the left and
viewed Jabotinsky with disdain,
suspicious of his militaristic
views, in which they saw
a distinctly fascistic bent.
ner Jabotinsky. The reasoning is circular:
the only way to reach an agreement, after
all, is to not reach one.

n his recent, excellent biography, Jabotinsky, Hillel Halkin is careful not
to freight his study with too much contemporary significance, though he does
allude to the present in the form of an
imaginary conversation with his subject about the prospects for peace in Israel. Halkin, an award-winning writer,
critic, and translator, sets Jabotinsky,
who was born in 1880, in the context of
his time. Implicit in his book is the contention that Jabotinsky was not a crude
fascist but a rather complicated character who was himself sometimes assailed
by doubts about his enterprise and
whose true talents rested in the literary sphere. (V. D. Nabokov, the father of

108

September/October 2014

homes is a question that is loaded with
incredible difficulties and problems," he
wrote. What Cahan did not foresee was
just how radical the Nazi movement
would become in wartime, as they embarked on a campaign to exterminate
world Jewry. Jabotinsky, it would seem,
had the clearer view.
Like Cahan, who had to flee Russia in
1882 after his numerous radical connections caught the eye of the tsarist police,
Jabotinsky got into hot water as a youth
for his connections with revolutionaries. Jabotinsky not only had attacked the
monarchy in a variety of Russian newspapers, but also had connections with
the Italian radical journal Avanti and was
close friends with left-wing figures such
as Vsevolod Lebedentsev, a member of
the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party who was arrested and then hanged in
1908 for plotting to assassinate Grand
Duke Nicholas. In 1903 a pogrom broke
out in Kishinev, a Jewish town in Moldavia, a hundred miles northwest of Odessa. Close to fifty Jews were killed. Fifteen hundred homes and stores were
ransacked. Jabotinsky called for a selfdefense force. According to Halkin, "he
helped to compose and print proclamations, raise money from wealthy Jews,
negotiate with arms dealers for the purchase of revolvers, distribute them to volunteers taught to shoot, plan their deployment, and patrol the city to check for
signs of impending trouble." In 1903, Jabotinsky was asked to serve as a delegate
from Odessa to the sixth Zionist Congress, which met in Basel in August of
that year.
As Halkin emphasizes, Jabotinsky was
more prescient than many of his fellow Zionists, who harbored a somewhat romantic notion about Arab-Jewish comity. In
particular, they embraced the idea that socialist Jews would create a kind of economic utopia in the Middle East in which both
peoples would live in peace. In his novel Altneuland, Theodor Herzl, the father of
modern Zionism, had himself forecast that
economic prosperity-just as Cahan later
argued and, most recently, Shimon Peres
maintains-would be the solution to overcoming any lingering animosity among the
Arabs toward the Jewish presence.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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