It’s all about who you can talk to

One of the many joys of my job is — to put it straightforwardly but inelegantly — that I get to talk to smart people who know things. I can ask experts in their fields the kinds of simple questions whose answers I otherwise wouldn’t know. I get to ask people who have accomplished great things basic questions about their lives that would have been rude in any other context but are completely acceptable in that one.

I often think about the many questions I got to ask Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, the great midcentury American Jewish public intellectual who held the pulpit at Temple Emanu-El, now in Closter but then in Englewood, for decades. And I also think about the many insights he told me that I never had the wit to ask in the first place.

It was Rabbi Hertzberg who told me that the basic tragedy of Israel and the Palestinians is that both sides have a compelling, tragic, and true history. Both stories are true, and they are contradictory. If we lived in a world driven by logic, that would be impossible, but we live in a world of people.

He was a proud Jew, he told me, so he stood with his people, a proud Zionist, but that didn’t blind him from understanding that the Palestinian story was true too. That’s the tragedy, he said.

I often think about the wisdom of Eta Wrobel, who I was honored to be able to interview toward the end of her life, in her apartment in Fort Lee. She was born in Poland, the only survivor of her family of nine siblings, a Slavic-passing teenager who stole secrets and then, when she was almost caught, became a partisan leader in the Polish forest. She was a woman of such ferocity and character and warmth, a large woman who was so much larger than life that she seemed to take up an entire room. She told me that she loved smachot, she adored big parties, and that she always was the last person on the dance floor. Take all the joy you can out of life, she said; there always will be pain, so grab the joy.

And I often think about Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, who lives in Bergen County and knows so much — too much — not only about the Holocaust, which he survived as a child, but also the hatred that Jews seem to attract as if we were magnets and hatred were iron filings. Jew-hatred always courses below ground, he says; sometimes, like now, the sewer covers are lifted and it slimes out. It can come from the left and the right. We shouldn’t be surprised to see it, and we always should recognize it for what it is.

I thought of all three of these wise people when I was able to talk to Adam Kirsch, the author of “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice,” the book about that deeply misguided philosophy that he will discuss on Zoom for YIVO on Wednesday. Their wisdom resonates in that book. Rabbi Hertzberg’s view of how the tragedy of Israel and Palestine developed underlies it. Abe Foxman’s understanding of how antisemitism never goes away underpins it. And Eta Wrobel’s advice — fight, and also feel joy — offers sanity, and even hope.

We can use hope right now.

—JP

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