Palestine--Divided or United?: The Case for a Bi-National Palestine before the United Nations
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This book contains the full text of the IHUD (Union) As...)
This book contains the full text of the IHUD (Union) Association's evidence, both written and oral, before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine in 1947. It also contains passages of the IHUD's evidence before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. To complete the picture of the bi-national case, an address delivered before UNSCOP by Dr. Ernst Simon, a leading member of the IHUD, has been included.
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Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes
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For nearly half a century, until his death in October ...)
For nearly half a century, until his death in October 1948, Judah Magnes occupied a singular place in Jewish public life. He won fame early as a preacher and communal leader, but abandoned these pursuits at the height of his influence for the roles of political dissenter and moral gadfly. During World War I he became an outspoken pacifist and supporter of radical causes. Settling permanently in Palestine in 1922, he was a founder and the first president of the Hebrew University.
Increasingly, he viewed rapprochement with the Arabs as the practical and moral test of Zionism, and the formation of a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews became his chief political goal. His life interests thus focused on the core issues that confronted and still confront the Jewish people: group survival in democratic America, the direction and character of the return to Zion, and the reconciliation of universal ideals with Jewish aspirations and needs.
Dissenter in Zion draws upon a rich corpus of private letters, personal journals, and diaries to offer a moving account of an eloquent and sensitive person grappling with the great questions of the day and of an activist striving to translate private moral feelings into public deeds through politics and diplomacy. We see Magnes disagreeing with Brandeis over the leadership and direction of American Zionism and with Weizmann and Ben-Gurion over ways to achieve peaceful relations with the Arabs; defending himself against charges by Einstein that he was mismanaging the affairs of the Hebrew University; and persistently negotiating with Arab leaders, trying to reach a compromise on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel.
Dissenter in Zion also contains a biographical essay on Magnes by Arthur Goren, assessing his ideas and motives and placing him in the context of his times. It shows Magnes's profundity without covering up his weaknesses, his lifelong tactic for courting repeated defeat in favor of long-term goals that could not come to pass in his lifetime.
Russia and Germany at Brest-Litovsk; a Documentary History of the Peace Negotiations
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Commission Of The American Jewish Relief Funds: Report To The Joint Distribution Committee...
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Commission Of The American Jewish Relief Funds: Report To The Joint Distribution Committee
Judah Leon Magnes, Alexander M. Dushkin, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
Press of Clarence S. Nathan, 1917
History; Military; World War I; History / Military / World War I; World War, 1914-1918
Judah Leon Magnes was a rabbi, communal leader, chancellor. He was the first president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Background
Judah Leon Magnes was born on July 5, 1877, in San Francisco, California. He was the eldest of five children of David Magnes and Sophie (Abrahamson) Magnes. In 1863, at the age of fifteen, his father left Przedborz in south-central Poland, a center of Hasidic Judaism, to join his older brother in San Francisco.
In later years, Magnes came to revere the religious orthodoxy and Yiddish-speaking culture of his paternal grandparents. His maternal grandparents had emigrated to Oakland, Calif. from Filehne, in East Prussia, in 1872. From his grandmother and mother, he acquired an appreciation for German language and culture.
Magnes was thus exposed from his earliest days to the cultural heritages of the two main groups that constituted American Jewry. While he was still a child, the family moved across the bay to Oakland, where his father established a moderately successful dry-goods business.
Family life was warm and close-knit. The language of the home was English, and the children were well integrated into the social life of the community.
Education
Magnes attended the public schools and excelled in his studies. He was active on both the high school debating and baseball teams. He received a more thorough religious education than was common, and under the influence of Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, he enrolled in the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Concurrently, Magnes pursued his secular education at the University of Cincinnati; he received the B. A. degree from the university in 1898 and two years later was ordained a Reform rabbi. From 1900 to 1902, he studied Semitics and philosophy at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, receiving the Ph. D. degree from Heidelberg in 1902.
At the same time, he attended classes at the Lehranstalt in Berlin, an institute for advanced Jewish studies. During these years, Magnes established lasting ties with a circle of young Jewish intellectuals from Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States. They were committed, like himself, to the advancement of Jewish culture and Zionism.
Career
On returning to the United States, Magnes served for a year as librarian of the Hebrew Union College. In 1904, he was called to the pulpit of Temple Israel in Brooklyn, New York. Two years later, New York's Temple Emanu-El, one of the preeminent Reform congregations, invited him to become its associate rabbi, a remarkable distinction for a young rabbi of twenty-nine.
Ministering to a congregation that drew its membership from the highly acculturated and affluent German-Jewish community did not deter Magnes from participating in the Yiddish cultural life of the Jewish quarter. In 1905, in the wake of the pogroms in Russia, Magnes organized mass protest demonstrations in New York and headed a national campaign to raise funds to arm clandestine defense units of Russian Jews. These activities won him the admiration of both immigrant and native American Jews.
The same year, he became secretary of the Federation of American Zionists and directed its affairs until 1908. In 1906 when the notables of the established community created the American Jewish Committee to represent Jewish interests in the United States, Magnes was co-opted to the executive board. Thus his communal leadership uniquely spanned the divergencies and antagonisms that characterized the heterogeneous Jewish community of that time.
In 1908, Magnes directed the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Kehillah of New York City, a comprehensive communal structure for coordinating and improving Jewish philanthropic, educational, and religious services. For the next thirteen years, he played a central role in educational reform, labor arbitration, anti-crime activity, and social welfare on behalf of the Kehillah.
Magnes was repeatedly elected chairman and so dominated the organization. Some critics accused him of using his position to serve the interests of the "uptown" Jews in their desire to "control" the immigrant Jews of "downtown. " The Kehillah ceased to function in 1922, although some of its institutions survived. Magnes had hoped the Kehillah would serve as a model for community life in America. He approved of the perpetuation of ethnic group life as a permanent feature of a pluralistic American society, a view he expressed most succinctly in a 1909 sermon, "A Republic of Nationalities. "
In the course of his chairmanship of the Kehillah, Magnes left the active rabbinate. In 1910, as a consequence of his demands that the congregation introduce a more traditional ritual, his contract with Emanu-El was not renewed. A brief tenure with Congregation B'nai Jeshurun (1911 - 1912) was terminated for the same reason. With the outbreak of World War I, Magnes became active in overseas relief work. He participated in the formation of the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the leading Jewish agency for overseas relief.
In 1917, Magnes became a leading spokesman for the radical pacifist position. He was the main speaker at the two largest pacifist meetings of the war, which were held in New York on May 30, 1917, and in Chicago on September 2, 1917. These meetings led to the formation of the People's Council of America. Following the Russian revolution, he criticized President Wilson for his hostility toward the Soviet Union.
Magnes' pacifism and his concern for civil rights led him to support the American Civil Liberties Union. In these activities, he collaborated closely with Scott Nearing, Emily G. Balch, Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin, and Oswald Garrison Villard.
Magnes was criticized for his support of controversial causes by some members of the Jewish community who were concerned about possible imputations of disloyalty.
In 1922, Magnes and his family left for Palestine, which he had already visited in 1907 and 1912, intending to remain for a year or two. However, with the opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925, he was elected chancellor, a position he held until 1935, when he was elected president, a largely honorary office. Under his administration the university developed into a major academic center.
Magnes stressed the need to establish scientific research institutes to meet the needs of the country, as well as departments of Judaic, Semitic, and Islamic studies. Following the rise of Hitler, he made strenuous efforts to bring to the university scholars forced to leave Germany.
Among the largest financial supporters of the university were such philanthropists as Felix M. Warburg, whose confidence he had won in the course of his public life in America. Fundraising endeavors brought Magnes to the United States periodically, and in Jerusalem he received a steady stream of distinguished American visitors. The 1929 anti-Jewish riots in Palestine induced Magnes to reenter political life in an effort to improve relations with the Arabs.
The continued growth of the Jewish settlement, he was convinced, required an accommodation with the Arabs. He spoke and wrote widely in support of a binational state in Palestine that would guarantee the essential interests of both sides. The Zionist organization, he declared, should alleviate Arab fears of Jewish domination by agreeing to a limit on immigration. The vast majority of the Jewish community in Palestine opposed his policy as capitulation; nor did important Arab leaders respond to his overtures.
In 1942, a small group of intellectuals, mainly professors at the Hebrew University, joined Magnes in creating the Ihud (Unity) Association for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement. Four years later Magnes appeared before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, whose investigations marked the beginning of United States involvement in the search for a solution to the Palestine question.
His testimony, given despite a decision of the duly constituted Jewish bodies that their representatives alone present the Jewish case, influenced the committee's recommendation rejecting the partition of Palestine into separate states.
In April 1948, encouraged by an apparent change in American policy from support of partition to support of a temporary United Nations trusteeship for Palestine, he came to America to back trusteeship. With the establishment of the state of Israel the following month, Magnes drafted a plea calling for a confederation of sovereign Jewish and Arab states in Palestine.
In the midst of efforts to rally support for his position, he died in New York City of a heart attack. He was buried in Shearith Israel Cemetery, Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, and in 1955, his body was reinterred in Jerusalem.
Magnes was a Pacifist activist. According to Israeli professor Aryeh Goren, he considered himself a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and the prophet Jeremiah and opposed all forms of nationalism by military force. He had developed Pacifist views in 1898 as a result of the Spanish-American War. Magnes believed it to be an "unrighteous" war.
Following the assassination of President William McKinley, who had led the United States into war with Spain, by an anarchist activist, Magnes wrote to his parents from Europe that he was not "enraged at the anarchists for it at all. In my opinion, dishonest men in the public office are greater anarchists than those who kill a president once in twenty years".
Following the United States' entry into the war in Europe in the spring of 1917, Magnes switched all his attention to campaigning against it. He became one of the movement's high profile leaders. Like most of its leaders, his sympathies were with the working classes.
People such Eugene Debs who was sentenced to ten years in prison for his activities; Norman Thomas; Roger Nash Baldwin; Scott Nearing; Morris Hillquit, who took 22% of the vote in New York's Mayoral elections on an anti-war platform; and Oswald Garrison Villard. Most of these men were involved in what became the People's Council of America for Democracy and Peace with Magnes its first chairman.
Views
Magnes emphasized Zionism as a cultural force for group survival and was less concerned with the political aspirations of the movement. Essentially a preacher who left the Reform pulpit to become a reformer, Magnes placed principle, as he perceived it, above institutional interest or political gain, often disregarding the immediate consequences of his action for the community.
The titles of two collections of his essays Like All the Nations? (1930) and In the Perplexity of the Times (1946) allude to the inner tensions of the religionist turned political man, striving to translate moral compulsions into public deeds. In his work, he was guided by religious and social precepts which drew upon Jewish sources and the American experience. These influences are especially evident in his War-Time Addresses (1923), which chronicles his opposition to the war, his civil-libertarian position, and his critique of official Zionist policy.
The inherent conflict between the man of the spirit and the man of action found expression, on the one hand, in the bold leadership he gave to such undertakings as the Kehillah and the Hebrew University and, on the other hand, in the alienation of supporters to the detriment of those institutions. Few failed to recognize the moral fervor and generous sentiments that motivated his dissenting and frequently unpopular views. It was, however, precisely his integrity and candor that became the source of his greatest influence.
Quotations:
"Just as Hanukkah candles are lighted one by one from a single flame, so the tale of the miracle is passed from one man to another, from one house to another, and to the whole House of Israel throughout the generations. "
"We seem to have thought of everything - except the Arabs"
Personality
Magnes could speak Hebrew eloquently on great occasions, but it was with an American accent and in a literary style. He was more comfortable with English. In New York he had been capable of moving large audiences with his public speaking, such as his 1915 fundraiser for the Joint Distribution Committee at the Carnegie Hall, or the Madison Square Gardens anti-war rally in 1917; but in Palestine, where Hebrew was insisted on at public gatherings, he was not able to have the same impact.
Connections
On October 19, 1908, Magnes married Beatrice Lowenstein, of a German-Jewish family which had settled in Memphis, Tenn. , prior to the Civil War. She was the sister-in-law of Louis Marshall, an outstanding lawyer and president of the American Jewish Committee. Three sons were born to the Magneses; David, Jonathan, and Benedict.