On my mind Henry Schwarzchild I invested a good many years of my life fighting for racial justice. I have been told convincingly th at I am a racist by definition. My regard for the dignity of people has always m ade me reject any form of condescension toward women. I have been cogently informed that I am a sexist, not- withstanding. My personal experience with totalitarianism has strongly inclined me toward activist libertarian and radical politics. I am widely and persuasively depicted as an establishmentarian counterrevolutionary. The two of us, my wife and I, have procreated two children - mere replacements. The statisticians and population analysts convict me of overpopulating the earth and contributing to the imminent exhaustion of its resources. From my earliest years, I have had an intense concern for and involvement in the well being of the yishuv and of the State of Israel. I am denounced, and un- derstandably so, as an enemy of the Jewish state and an agent of the P.L.O. By the influence of my parents' passionate commit- ments, I have always considered myself a socialist. I have been accused, with much justice, of being an elitist bourgeois. Though I have ever held willing consent to be a pred- icate of agreeable sex, I am revealed to be a co-con- spirator in the rape of every woman in history, from the Sabines to JoAnn Little. Together with my wife and the mortgage bank, I own less than a quarter of an acre of land, on which I do not eradicate the crab grass or poison streams or spray arsenate of lead on the apple tree or pollute the air with clouds of charcoal fumes. Yet I am held guilty of being a destroyer of the natural environment. I weigh about 140 pounds, eat moderately (being nei- ther gourmet nor gourmand), and do not complain about left-overs. I have been made to feel responsible for the starvation of millions in Africa and Asia. I have always wanted to choose my enemies. It now sometimes seems that I can choose nothing else. It is all quite melancholy, and I feel the resentment grow- ing stronger in me. If the world insists upon defining me, I may submit. There is a real danger that, some fine day, I would be hung for a wolf as soon as for a sheep. Draft epitaph: He did what he could. Gra ffito : He couldn't. A Jew, malgre lui. A tribute to gustav landauer Irving Levitas Amidst all the contemporary discussion of the role of authentic Jews in the contemporary world, relatively little attention has been paid to those Jews who re- jected institutional Judaism for a Judaism that was to play a significant part in their participation in socio- political affairs. Certainly any examination of the Jewish situation from the French Revolution onwards should provide adequate reason for a more thorough study of Jews of this category, ranging from Heine through Brandeis. In a certain sense, most, if not all of these Jews saw the world through "the lenses Spinoza ground," and their admiration for the Jew of Amsterdam was oft-expressed. Among those who were so motivated, the name of Gustav Landauer stands very prominently. Born in 1870 in Germany, he was to be murdered by the Ger- man Social Democrats under Noske in 1919, in Munich, with proto-Nazi assistance. Were it not for the efforts of Martin Buber, whose relationship with LandaUer was very close, and who wrote a chapter on Landauer in his book, Paths to Utopia, devoting many years to collecting and editing Landauer's works, we would know little of the thought of this Anarchist-Socialist who was to steadfastly proclaim his Jewish identity throughout his life. Committed to jewish identity and peoplehood A fervent anti-Marxist, he was to proclaim that if social changes were to occur, they would have to emanate from the individual himself, not from any "class-struggle," or political reforms, the latter being more seductive than palliative and corrective. With his emphasis on the necessity of individual change as being prior to any form of cooperative action to abolish the state, he was to call on his Jewish tradi- tion frequently to explain his actions. This attitude was best reflected in his correspon- dence, edited by Buber, in which he constantly refer- red to his identity as a Jew. A close frie nd of Landauer's was Constantin Brunner, who had pub- lished articles by Eugen Duhring, an opponent of Marx. But he was also an anti-Semite of sorts, and Landauer once said to him, "I have not the slightest 6
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