Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism

302 Pages·2022·5.995 MB·English

by  Max Kaiser

Jewish Antifascism
and the False Promise of
Settler Colonialism
Max Kaiser
Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise
of Settler Colonialism
“Great history writing tells a story of the past that challenges and excites us. Max
Kaiser’s Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism is such a
book. Kaiser is a dedicated researcher and lucid storyteller. This is an important
book, clearly relevant to current global and community challenges.”
—Tony Birch, Author of Dark As Last Night and The White Girl
“Max Kaiser presents us with a beautifully excavated and written “partisan his-
tory”. Looking nationally and internationally, writing generously and insightfully,
Kaiser rewrites Jewish history in Australia, charting the specifically Jewish antifas-
cism created out of the Holocaust, in the Australian settler-colony. These are the
stories and analyses of our collective Jewish Leftist past that we need, the perspec-
tives that have been too easily forgotten and now have the space to breathe and
thrive, thanks to Kaiser’s expert eye.”
—Jordana Silverstein, University of Melbourne, Australia
“Over 300 pages of Kaiser’s book lie in front of me, almost every page marked
with underlinings of needed insights. I read this work with urgency, with a hunger
because the times are so pressing, the frightening fascist past breathing down our
necks, the impulse to narrow our visions, just when they need to be most inclusive,
so seductive. As an 82-year-old progressive Jewish lesbian queer who came to
Melbourne when I was 61, I have so much to learn. On Kaiser’s pages I found
compelling histories, I found courageous creative figures like Pinchas Goldhar,
Yosl Bergner and Judah Waten all touched by the Holocaust, trying to take in the
complex class and race realities they found here. I heard the voice of Max’s grand-
father, Walter Lippmann, as he brought the Jewish Council into being with its
international, antifascist left focus, refusing the narrowed horizons of racialized
nationalisms and the cold war. Jewish artists, young brave leftist communities of
the 1940s trying to look beyond Israel as the only answer, aware that internation-
alism, that solidarities of the oppressed, would give us a deeper vision of what we
could do together. How we remember the Holocaust, how we understand the
antisemitism at the heart of fascism, how we use our archives, how we see displace-
ment histories in the faces of each other are at the heart of this excellent work. I
have had two moments of deep hope in the last few days—the [2022] Australian
election results and the knowledge that Max Kaiser’s book is in the world.”
—Joan Nestle, writer, Co-Founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives
Max Kaiser
Jewish Antifascism and
the False Promise of
Settler Colonialism
Max Kaiser
University of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-031-10122-9 ISBN 978-3-031-10123-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10123-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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To my grandparents, Walter and Lorna Lippmann.
A
cknowledgements
I am very grateful for the expert guidance, enthusiasm, and care from Sara
Wills in the early stages of this research project at the University of
Melbourne. Jordy Silverstein was a constant source of intellectual inspira-
tion and introduced me to many of the thinkers whose work informs
this book.
A special thanks is due to the late Stuart Macintyre for his rigorous
reading of an earlier draft of this book. I was very fortunate to do course-
work subjects during my PhD with David Goodman, Kate Darian-Smith,
Kevin Brophy, Samia Khatun, and Catherine Hall. All of these scholars
spurred me to challenge myself in my thinking and writing.
Thanks to all those who generously gave feedback, encouragement,
ideas, and source material including John Docker, Jack Jacobs, Brendan
McGeever, Briony Neilson, Andrew Sloin, Lisa Milner, Ben Silverstein,
Graham Willett, Martie Lowenstein, Davina Lippmann, Matthew Albert,
Monique Hameed, June Factor, Clare Fester, Faisal Al-Asaad, Ángel
Alcalde, Arnold Zable, and Emma Russell.
Another big thanks is due to Jehonathan Ben and Esther Singer for
their assistance with translations.
My thanks to Beth Muldoon, Freg Stokes, Jimmy Yan, and Shan
Windscript, for their always energising, supportive, and intellectually chal-
lenging friendship.
For their friendship, support, faith, and encouragement along the way
thanks to Lorena Solin, Alex Turnbull, Teishan Ahearne, John Croker,
Anton Donohoe-Marques, Terri Ann Quan Sing, Beth Marsden, Sian
Vate, Rachel Barrett, Ainsley Kerr, and Carol Peterson.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my Jewish lefty comrades around the world but especially to
Jem, Fillie, Liam, Sivan, Han, Yoel, Esther, Babs, Sonya, Greg, and Goldie
for their ongoing comradeship.
My sister Marti and my parents Alon and Lenora gave me their unwav-
ering support. Being encouraged to read widely and follow my academic
and activist passions are gifts I treasure more and more as I get older.
It was a privilege to be a host of the New Books in Jewish Studies pod-
cast while doing this research. My thanks to Jason Schulman and Marshall
Poe for giving me the opportunity and to the dozens of brilliant Jewish
Studies scholars who I have interviewed.
Sections of this book have appeared in altered form in the Journal of
Modern Jewish Studies, The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant
and Minority Press (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Fascism. Journal of
Comparative Fascist Studies. My thanks to the anonymous reviewers, and
editors of these respective publications, including Glenda Abramson,
Catherine Dewhirst, Richard Scully, Mattie Fitch, Michael Ortiz, and
Nick Underwood for strengthening my writing and arguments.
I am grateful to the selection committees at the University of Melbourne
for the honour of receiving the Lloyd Robson Memorial Award, which
allowed me to travel interstate to research materials vital for this research,
and for the Gilbert Postdoctoral Career Development Fellowship, which
allowed me to develop my research into this book.
Thanks to the staff at all the libraries and archives I have visited includ-
ing one very special (former) staff member at the University of Melbourne
reading room. To Rula, this book will be forever inextricable from your
love and support.
This book was written on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the
Kulin nation. Their sovereignty has never been ceded.
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Remembering the Holocaust, Fighting Fascism 23
3 Jewish Antifascism, Communism, and Antisemitism 61
4 The Jewish Left, Zionism, and the Diaspora 103
5 The Anti-German Migration Campaign and the Fall of the
Jewish Antifascist Left 137
6 Jewish Antifascism, Australian Cultural Nationalism, and
Settler Colonialism 183
7 Defining a Jewish Antifascist Minor Literature 217
8 Conclusion 253
Bibliography 259
Index 293
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
With whom does historicism actually sympathise? The answer is inevitable: with
the victor.
Walter Benjamin1
For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any
present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image.
Walter Benjamin2
I do not pretend that mine is a detached history. This volume is a par-
tisan history. I agree with Saul Friedländer that ‘a kind of purely scientific
distancing from the past, that is, a passage from the realm of knowledge
strongly influenced by personal memory to that of some kind of “detached”
history [is] a psychological and epistemological illusion’.3 My sympathies
are with the Australian Jewish antifascist left and against their opponents,
their politics reflecting in many ways my own.
The main organisation of the Jewish antifascist left in Australia was the
Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism (hereafter the
Jewish Council). A like-minded group of Central European refugees, men
1 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (London: Fontana, 1955; reprint, 1973), 248.
2 Ibid., 247.
3 Saul Friedländer and Martin Broszat, “A Controversy About the Historicization of
National Socialism,” New German Critique, no. 44 (1988): 120–121.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
M. Kaiser, Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler
Colonialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10123-6_1
2 M. KAISER
from established Eastern European families, and Anglo-Australian Jews
founded the Jewish Council in Melbourne in May 1942.4 The Jewish
Council ‘represented in institutional form the broad-based antifascist left-
ism enjoying considerable vogue both within the Jewish community and
in society at large’.5 It combined the practical activity of monitoring and
responding to specific incidences of antisemitism with a larger propaganda
effort that consistently linked the threats of antisemitism and fascism.6 The
Jewish Council’s central strategy was to ally the Jewish community with
progressive political forces in order to fight these threats.
By 1943, the Jewish Council was popular enough for the Victorian
Jewish Advisory Board to vote to give it ‘full moral and financial support’
and responsibility for all public relations activities going forward. This meant
that the Jewish Council served as the official political interface between the
Jewish community and the general public. From its founding and through-
out the 1940s the Jewish Council had widespread support.7 It was consti-
tuted by hundreds of members and numerous committees, including special
committees of doctors and lawyers and later on a very active and successful
ladies auxiliary committee and youth section.8 Australian Jewish antifascism
was thus a major political and cultural force in Australian Jewish communi-
ties in the 1940s and early 1950s, but this history of Jewish antifascism has
been obscured and distorted. In today’s Jewish communities, dominated by
Zionism, Jewish antifascism has variously been forgotten or told as a tale of
political folly, or worse, Communist infiltration. This cultural and intellec-
tual history of Jewish antifascism in Australia utilises a transnational lens to
provide an exploration of Jewish antifascist ideology. It argues that Jewish
antifascism offered an alternate path for Jewish politics, between national-
ism and assimilation, that was foreclosed by mutually reinforcing settler
colonial ideologies from both Palestine and Australia.
One of the central figures in the Jewish Council was my grandfather,
Walter Lippmann. One somewhat unexpected product of my research was
4 David Rechter, “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Communism in Melbourne” (University of
Melbourne, 1986), 81–82.
5 Ibid., 82.
6 Ibid., 110.
7 P.Y. Medding, From Assimilation to Group Survival: A Political and Sociological Study of
An Australian Jewish Community (Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney: F.W. Cheshire, 1968), 63.
8 David Rechter, “Beyond the Pale,” 84; “Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-
Semitism Annual Report 1952–1953” (University of Melbourne Archives, Norman Rothfield
Collection, 2002.0014, Box 1).