As for the Nazi analogy, it is indeed indiscriminately used, as is the word “fascist,” applied too readily to anyone who is authoritarian and racist. This is name-calling and it’s no substitute for analysis. The prime culprit here, however, is not the left. In my lifetime, every US military action, from Vietnam to Iraq (and now the threat against Iran), has been justified with analogies drawn from World War II. Every enemy is a new Hitler (Qadaffi, Noriega, Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Mugabe, Ahmadinejad), every call for peace is Munich-style appeasement, and every challenge to Israel is an existential threat akin to that posed by the Nazis—from the days of Nasser down to Hamas and Hezbollah.
Of course, the Nazis and the holocaust represent an acme of inhumanity, an evil so enormous that any comparison seems dubious. Yet if we remove them from history and treat them as sui generis, we debar ourselves from learning and applying the broader lessons. When the world discovered the extent of Nazi barbarism in the wake of World War II, the cry was “Never again!” We cannot turn that cry into a reality, we cannot ensure that nothing even remotely like this happens again, unless we are permitted to draw appropriate analogies from the experience. Where there is Nazi-like behavior, a Nazi-like idea or a Nazi-like threat, then it is right that the comparison is noted. Is it permitted, however, to compare anything to the holocaust? Its industrial and ideological nature and scale seem to make it unlike anything in the annals of genocide. But even these salient features occur only within the broader phenomenon of Nazi imperialism, and Nazi imperialism has to be placed within the still broader phenomena of imperialism, racism and colonialism. That’s where the story of the extermination of European Jewry belongs and it does not in the least belittle or relativize the magnitude of its horror to say so.
League tables of atrocities serve no purpose, or, rather, the only purpose they serve is to allow scope for the apologists for atrocities. The holocaust, the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Native Americans and Australians, the centuries of “untouchability” in South Asia, the Belgian Congo (where, according to Adam Hochschild’s revelatory book King Leopold’s Ghost, some 10 million Africans may have perished in little more than a decade), Stalin’s Gulag. All these are distinct historical phenomena, but share in common an institutionalized inhumanity on a mass scale. All are unspeakably, irredeemably horrific; they exemplify that which every human being has an absolute obligation to resist and not to aid, in any way, even by omission.
For many anti-Zionist Jews, one of the key analogies is between Jewish and Palestinian experience—exile, persecution, racism. “We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing,” writes the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. How can anyone study Jewish history and not draw the larger analogies with all those oppressed or displaced by empires, great and small? Palestinians themselves are alert to these analogies. They speak of the Palestinian “diaspora.” The separation wall is daubed with the words “ghetto” and “concentration camp.”
In the late forties, EVM started but never finished a memoir he titled “So You Want to Be a Politician?,” the fruit of his years pursuing the ambition articulated at the end of his letter to Dr Paul. He recalled:
I broke in in ’21. The local Democratic Tammany machine had sold a bill of goods to Nathan Straus Jr to run for state senator. The district was so solidly Democratic that Hiawatha could have won. Straus was the antithesis of what a politician should be—aloof, too rich and too sensitive a stomach. He served one term and obligingly folded his tent.
Straus was the Princeton-educated scion of the German Jewish family that owned Macy’s department store and the jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss. One uncle had been a congressman and another an ambassador. Unusually for wealthy American Jews of the period, they were Democrats and Zionists. To EVM, Straus was a “boob,” one of that breed of charitable reformer who dabbled in politics but failed to engage with the nuts and bolts of political organizing.
Why did the professed idealist choose to join up with Tammany Hall, the New York Democratic Party machine notorious for patronage and municipal plunder? Partly it was a strong attraction to hands-on politics, and a belief that he could succeed at them, and make something of himself through them. Ed’s brother-in-law was a Republican, as were many Jewish businessmen and professionals at the time, whereas most working-class Jews in New York—strongly influenced by the Bund—voted Socialist (the Lower East Side had sent a Socialist to Congress in 1914), and the Jewish-dominated unions were Socialist-orientated. A solidly Democratic Jewish vote in New York was in those days unimaginable. The Democratic Party was the creature of Tammany, and Tammany was still, certainly in the eyes of many Jews, Irish-dominated. It was, in EVM’s phrase, “the ahrganization.” But here he believed his name and his “hybridity” could be turned to advantage. He could stake out a position for himself as a liaison between Tammany and the Jews. It never worked out that way. At one point he resorted to forming—and having himself elected chairman of—a kind of front group called the John E. McCarthy Association, for which John E., an elderly Tammany time-server, provided merely a name. Later, EVM recalled his years as a Tammany foot soldier:
A saga of doorbell ringing, writing envelopes—speaking on street corners—making the club so the leader would see you. Watching the Law Journal to see if the Judge you broke your fool neck for in November remembers your name in July for a bit of patronage. . . law committees, publicity work, ghosting speeches.
The Tammany EVM joined was a well-oiled machine, but it was also a machine nourished by countless concrete links to the city’s working-class communities, and under the leadership of Alfred E. Smith it was turning to the left. Smith was the son of Irish immigrants, a boy from a poor family who started off in politics running errands for the Tammany District leader. EVM campaigned for him for Governor in 1922. In a precursor of the New Deal, Smith introduced labor laws, safety regulations, workers’ compensation, and rent control. He also stood up against the renascent Ku Klux Klan and spoke out against the 1924 Quotas Act, which blocked immigration from eastern and southern Europe (admitting only 124 people a year from Lithuania, but 28,000 from Ireland). The Democratic Convention of 1924 was held on Tammany’s home turf, at Madison Square Garden, and Smith was the organization’s candidate for the presidential nomination. While the urban ethnics backed Smith, the Protestants from around the country despised him (some turned up in white hoods and sheets). The convention was deadlocked for 99 ballots before Smith and his opponent, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, withdrew and the nomination was handed to a nonentity named Davis. For Tammany this was a bitter blow, especially for young Smith men like EVM. That November, Davis duly lost the state to Coolidge while Smith was easily re-elected Governor.
The EVM who plunged into Tammany politics in the early twenties is hardly visible at all in the diaries and private letters of the period. Here he appears a romantic introvert, quoting Omar Khayyam and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe: dreaming, posturing, hungering, spewing out overwrought prose about dawn and death and love and the stars, self-pitying but at times delirious with the excitement of an unknown future. In 1922, he puts what he calls an “epilogue” on the first page of a new diary: “The Dreamer wants to put at the end of his story the beginning. The Dreamer still hopes. The epilogue of shattered romance is really the prologue of a new desire.” In a long entry bemoaning his special fate—“burdened with a dual ancestry” in “a world of hate”—he muses:
There doesn’t seem much contentment in having a strict individuality. I have always gloried in being different, each and every mood of mine that partook of eccentricity was sponsored to become a habit by the thought that in it lay inanimate some future potentiality that made for success. I still sense the wall, feel the sting of the word “different” and loathe those people who hate their memories of a ghetto and yet place others in a prison of mental abhoration . . . One cannot be both Jew and Christian. One can’t forget the Inquisition by remembering that Christ was born a Jew. It is possible at times to feel relieved and read scientific treatises on the similarity between the races, but it is but flattering for the moment.
In a primeval wilderness, he suspects, a man and a woman could meet and love each other without regard to heritage, “But God, they