‘WE MUST BEGIN TO BUILD FOR PERMANENCE’:
NEW YORK JEWISH INTELLECTUALS,
COMMENTARY M AGAZINE
AND THE LEGACY OF THE SECOND WORLD W AR, 1945-1959
Nadja A. Janssen
Department of History, University of Sussex, UK.
ABSTRACT
This paper considers the impact of the Second World War and the Holocaust on a number of leftist Jews, many
of whom belonged to the so-called New York intellectuals. It is demonstrated how and why most of them
remained silent while the slaughter of European Jewry unfolded only to engage in a powerful reclaiming of their
Jewish identity, accompanied by an extensive and often divisive discussion of the Holocaust and its lessons for
American Jews and the American context in the immediate aftermath of the war. The realisation of the real
extent of the Holocaust, the outcome of the Second World War as well as the onset of the Cold War had a
conservatising outcome on a number of these intellectuals. In the process of renegotiating their Jewish and their
American identities they developed a rigid and hyper-nationalist defence of the American status quo as well as
an extremely defensive and ethnocentric approach to Jewish identity – based almost exclusively on concerns
with Jewish safety and vulnerability. Scrutinising how the Holocaust and the Second World War were discussed
in early Commentary magazine issues demonstrates that American Jews were far from silent in discussing the
Holocaust – as most scholars of post-war American Jewry contend. Moreover, in the case of budding
neoconservative intellectuals, Holocaust analogies quickly became an integral part in the development of a
rhetorical repertoire which justified and defined their neoconservative turn and was used to convince fellow Jews
to follow their example in breaking with the radical and liberal left.
KEYWORDS
American Jewry, liberalism, conservatism, holocaust analogies, neoconservatism
ARTICLE
When the Contemporary Jewish Record held a symposium entitled “Under Forty: American
Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews” in 1944, which explored the
impact of Jewishness on the intellectual evolution of Jewish writers and intellectuals in the
U.S., the ongoing carnage of European Jews was barely mentioned. According to historian
Stephen Whitfield, there did not seem any “sense of obligation” on behalf of New York
Jewish intellectuals, such as Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, and Clement
Greenberg “to incorporate the experience of persecution and mass murder in their depiction of
human actuality”.1 Moreover, their apparent disinterestedness in anything Jewish was guided
partially by their perception that Jewish culture in America was uninspiring, “suffocatingly
middle-class”, and “provincial”, directed only at being “safe, in all the Babbitt warrens”. 2
These reactions were emblematic of how a majority of Jewish intellectuals dealt with
issues bearing on their Jewish background and the ongoing destruction of European Jewry.
They generally avoided discussing these matters publicly or relating them to their own
existence as intellectuals. Yet, as Nathan Abrams has noted, their contribution to a
symposium with specific focus on Jewish identity, nevertheless, signified a growing
willingness, however cautious, to ponder Jewish themes as part of their work. Previously,
these intellectuals had avoided discussing the relevance of Jewish matters at all. 3 After the
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„We Must Begin to Build for Permanence‟: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine, and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959
University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 13, (2009-10)
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war, this shift away from a universalistic approach towards a more particularistic paradigm
would intensify amongst a number of them and lead some to embrace not just a more
ethnocentric, even jingoistic, attitude to Jewish identity, but also a more conservative outlook
in terms of politics and society generally. Moreover, within the context of the emerging
conflict with the Soviet Union, many of them became providers of “the philosophical
ammunition for the Cold War” and some of them transformed into apologists for the
American status quo.4
During the war, only a few, such as Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, articulated their
outrage at what was happening in Europe. The fact that a majority of Jewish intellectuals dealt
with the Holocaust as it was unfolding mostly in silence did not mean, however, that they
were unconcerned by it. It signified the extent to which they felt uncomfortable to approach
anything related to being Jewish publicly for reasons, which flowed from the American
environment of the time, as well as from their self-perception as intellectuals. It is from how
they remembered their reaction to the Holocaust retrospectively and how their posture
towards being Jewish underwent a radical change at war‟s end, that we can infer the
magnitude of the impact it had on their self-understanding. These responses help us discern,
how, in the words of Whitfield, “constant has been the pressure of the Holocaust, how
forcefully it has exerted itself on the memory and imagination” of these intellectuals. 5
This paper demonstrates the extent to which the Second World War and the Holocaust
impacted profoundly on New York Jewish intellectuals‟ self-conception, making the memory
of the Holocaust “the touchstone of their identities as Jews”. 6 As these intellectuals sought to
integrate into broader American society and the organised Jewish community in the aftermath
of the war, they contributed seminally to communal and national debates relating to the
lessons of the Holocaust, to ways in which to ensure collective Jewish survival in light of
unprecedented integration into American society, and to the positions Jews should take
towards the emerging Cold War consensus as well as towards the burgeoning civil rights
movement. The contributions of a number of New York Jewish intellectuals as developed in
the pages of Commentary magazine will be the focus of this paper. Overarching these
discussions was the central question of what it meant to be an American Jew in a postHolocaust era, which many New York Jewish intellectuals began to define in highly defensive
and “zero sum groupthink” terms, constantly referring to images of Jewish victimisation and
thereby laying the groundwork for their turn away from progressive liberalism towards what
has become known as neoconservatism. 7
Most scholars have treated Jewish identity politics only as secondary to the evolutionary
history of New York Jewish intellectuals as well as to the emergence of neoconservatism.
Only a few have recently begun re-evaluating the extent to which these intellectuals‟ gradual
reclaiming of Jewish identity, primarily defined in ethnic terms, impacted fundamentally on
their intellectual maturation and the political development towards a neoconservative position
amongst a number of them. Yet, these studies are often driven by political agendas and/or
focus too closely on specific actors at the expense of scrutinising the ideas of New York
Jewish intellectuals as part of a broader, Jewish communal discourse about Jewish identity
after 1945. Moreover, while they concede the centrality of Jewish identity politics, they tend
either to overlook the role played by early Holocaust consciousness or fail to investigate the
subject in any meaningful and comprehensive way, generally discussing the issue in
dissociation from the communal debates about the meaning of Jewish American identity in a
post-Holocaust world. Lastly, these interpretations tend to give far too much weight to proZionist ideas in the intellectual development of New York Jewish intellectuals. While Israel‟s
security and its strategic importance to the U.S. would take on great importance for those
New York Jewish intellectuals who became neoconservatives, they were and continue to be
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„We Must Begin to Build for Permanence‟: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine, and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959
University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 13, (2009-10)
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concerned primarily with the state of American power and democracy, as well as Jewish
security therein. 8
Investigating the repercussions of the Holocaust and the Second World War on New York
Jewish intellectuals and the positions they developed within the context of Jewish intracommunal discussions of the post-war era also revises the traditional interpretation according
to which the Holocaust was, in the words of Gabriel Schoenfeld, “shrouded in taboo and
seldom discussed in public or print” up until the later 1960s.9 Traditional narratives interpret
the emergence of Holocaust consciousness amongst American Jews as the result of processes
of ideational and emotional realisation, set in motion by the Adolph Eichmann trial in 1961
and the Six Day War in 1967. 10 While both events contributed seminally to making the
Holocaust into an official symbol for collective American Jewish identity, they did not initiate
discussions about the meaning and relevance of the Holocaust amongst American Jews. As
demonstrated below, these issues were bitterly debated long before the mid-1960s. The
Eichmann trial and the Six Day War only reinforced consolidation of the Holocaust as a
marker of Jewish identity and rendered the communal discussions relating to the Holocaust
and identity politics generally even more divisive than they already were.
Moreover, scrutinising the evolution of early Holocaust consciousness amongst a number
of Jewish intellectuals demonstrates that the reassertion of their Jewish identities through the
prism of the Holocaust, had a politically conservatising effect on a number of them. The
process of breaking with the left and moving towards a neoconservative position was
undergirded at each step by a specific type of Holocaust analogising, which ultimately
contributed not only to establishing widely-shared conceptions about the presumed lessons of
the Holocaust for American Jewish life but also to define the Holocaust as “a negative marker
of American identity” from the 1980s onwards. In what Peter Novick has referred to as the
“Americanization of the Holocaust”, the Holocaust and the political system that made it
possible were turned into markers that stood for everything that the United States was not
when the nation was “at its best”. 11
The Second World War was a cataclysmic event for American Jews, introducing what is
often referred to as „the Golden Age‟ of American Jewry. The near destruction of European
Jewish life relocated the demographic and cultural centre of world Jewry from Europe to
America, confronting communal leaders with the responsibility of creating affirmative
patterns of Jewish identification, which would ensure collective Jewish survival. 12 While
public expressions of anti-Semitism had been widespread and uninhibited in the U.S. during
the 1930s and early 1940s, they began to recede relatively quickly after the war. Exclusionary
measures against Jews in certain colleges and universities, the housing sector and the business
world were gradually dismantled over the next two decades. Furthermore, a more pluralist
approach to American democracy began to replace the pre-war and wartime tendency towards
accommodationism, allowing Jews to begin perceiving themselves as an integral part of
American mainstream society, while retaining their Jewish attachments.13
Hence, the main task facing mainstream communal leaders was to redefine Jewish
American identity within this changing set of circumstances, in ways that would enable Jews
to be full participants in mainstream society, and yet remain a distinct group. It should be
noted that there was at no time a single ideological position that marked a “normative” Jewish
stance. Indeed, in his work on Jewish American political culture Arthur Goren demonstrated
that “Organizational diversity, ideological ambiguity, and even contentiousness appear to be
endemic to the communal experience of American Jewry”. 14 This would remain the case after
the Second World War, even as, or maybe because, American Jewish society became more
homogenous and experienced unprecedented levels of integration into mainstream society,
raising a new and different set of concerns to grapple with. As Stephen Whitfield pointed out,
the ancient danger of persecution that had characterised Jewish Diasporic existence and selfNadja A. Janssen
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University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 13, (2009-10)
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understanding for centuries was in post-Second World War America replaced by issues
relating to collective continuity and survival, driven not by persecution but by the imminent
lack thereof. 15
Before investigating how the Second World War and the Holocaust impacted on New
York Jewish intellectuals and how they discussed the Holocaust in analogy to present times, it
is important to look at the point of departure from which these intellectuals journeyed. Irving
Howe, himself a New York intellectual, referred to them as “perhaps the only group America
has ever had that could be described as an intelligentsia”. They were united by “a common
political outlook”, which nevertheless was “marked by ceaseless internecine quarrels”.
Furthermore, all of them were in the past, and some continued to be in the present, “antiCommunist…radicals”, with “a fondness for ideological speculation” and “literary criticism
with a strong social emphasis”. According to Howe, “they strive self-consciously to be
“brilliant”; and by birth or osmosis, they are Jews”.16
Membership in the group was informal and its boundaries porous. A core group, which
spanned roughly three generations, was accompanied by a large number of sympathisers, all
of which contributed to magazines, such as the Partisan Review, Menorah Journal, the New
Leader and later Commentary, the Public Interest, and Dissent. As adumbrated above, they
were not all of Jewish descent but those who were, were mainly offspring of Eastern
European Jewish immigrants and had grown up in predominately Jewish neighbourhoods in
New York and in Chicago. Its main proponents were Lionel and Diana Trilling, Elliot Cohen,
Sidney Hook, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Hannah Arendt, Phillip Rahv, William
Phillips, William Barrett, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Clement
Greenberg, Robert Warshow, Daniel Bell, Melvin Lasky, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Nathan
Glazer, Susan Sontag, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Walzer, and Midge Decter. 17
While a number were academic scholars, most liked to think of themselves as public
thinkers. According to Ruth Wisse, they were a “literate street gang”, willing to employ
“whatever tactics they had at hand in defense of their shifting territory”. 18 Many of the
original and second-generation New York intellectuals were Trotskyites in politics and
embraced modernism in literature and art, seeking to upend the WASP-dominated hierarchy
of cultural values. During the inter-war period this self-conscious cadre of intellectuals
existed on the margins of American as well as Jewish cultures. The overall attitude that
characterised them was one of double alienation, partly enforced, partly self-imposed. Many
felt suspended between a home, which they no longer belonged to and a society in which they
did not yet feel at home. Due to their leftist politics and to the fact that they were not yet
completely part of the intellectual establishment, they looked upon American society with
suspicion. According to Norman Podhoretz “They did not feel they belonged to America, or
that America belonged to them”. 19
The perceived parochialism of their Jewish heritage interfered with the cosmopolitan leftist
communities they aspired to be part of, leading them, in the words of Howe, “to subordinate
[the] sense of Jewishness to cosmopolitan culture and socialist politics”. He claimed that they
“did not think well or deeply on the matter of Jewishness – you might say we avoided
thinking about it.” However, as opposed to what they wrote and discussed, there was also,
again Howe, “what we felt, and what we felt was rarely quite in accord with what we wrote
or thought”. With respect to everyday life, “the fact of Jewishness figured much more
strongly than we acknowledged in public”. 20
As self-professed public thinkers and Trotskyites, they preferred, not to discuss their
Jewish heritage publicly, for fear that it might impact negatively on their intellectual
credibility. Moreover, perceiving themselves as cosmopolitans, they considered ethnic and
religious expressions of Jewishness as the stronghold of a complacent and chauvinistic
bourgeoisie. Even though most New York Jewish intellectuals did not “deny its presence or
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„We Must Begin to Build for Permanence‟: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine, and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959
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seek to flee its stigma”, they discarded the idea that their Jewish background had any
significant influence on their thinking. In light of the fact that Jews were popularly perceived
as “a race apart” in American society of the 1920s and 1930s, they had experienced
Jewishness as limiting, since it held them from entering broader society and for a number of
them, it interfered with pursuing academic careers.21
As a consequence, in relation to their Jewishness, many “felt no particular responsibility
for its survival or renewal. It was simply there”. 22 Within this context, most New York Jewish
intellectuals refrained from publicly voicing a sense of special responsibility for the fate of
European Jewry during the war. Up until the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, many of them initially refused to support either the Allies or
the Axis powers, preferring to maintain a “third camp” position which held out hope for the
establishment of a democratic socialist alternative in the U.S. after the war.23
This double alienation underwent radical change at war‟s end. The outcome of the war and
the public exposure of the magnitude of the Holocaust caused many of them to repudiate
long-held ideas about American society and Jewish identity. It forced them to reconsider their
allegiances to both their Jewish as well as their American legacies and to look for new ways
in which to reconcile the two. According to Ruth Wisse, it confronted them with performing
“an audacious act of appropriation, to take a kind of responsibility for American culture, and
to do so without necessarily relinquishing their identity as Jews”. 24 Many felt that the
Holocaust, in the words of Norman Podhoretz, had demonstrated once and for all “the
inescapability of Jewishness” and therefore set in motion efforts to take responsibility for
their heritage. 25
Most concluded that since leftist panaceas had failed as bulwarks against the rise of
totalitarianism, of both the left and the right, it was essential to move towards a renewed
appreciation of American style democracy and culture, while simultaneously developing a
more assertive approach to their Jewish identities. Alfred Kazin, who, in the past, had
proclaimed the revolt against Jewish chauvinism, described the Holocaust as “the allconsuming event in my life”, the memory of which “will haunt me to my last breath”. 26 Since,
“but for an accident of geography we might also now be bars of soap”, Howe concluded that,
“blessing or curse, Jewishness was an integral part of our life.” Howe referred to the
Holocaust as “the most terrible moment in human history”, which introduced “timid
reconsiderations of what it meant to be Jewish”. 27
The patriotic sentiment that swept America after the Second World War also overwhelmed
its intellectuals. The former mouthpiece of disaffected Trotskyite intellectuals, Partisan
Review, for instance, devoted two successive issues in 1952 to a symposium entitled “Our
Country and Our Culture” where the intellectual establishment declared that it no longer felt
alienated from American mass culture. 28 Luminaries such as Lionel Trilling, Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jacques Barzun, Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr, Leslie Fiedler, and David
Riesman voiced their newly arrived-at appreciation of the American system. They believed
that their formerly „non-conformist‟ stance had to be overcome in light of the Second World
War and the onset of the Cold War. Many of the contributors expressed regret for the
positions they had embraced in the past and recognised that the new threat posed by
communism and the Soviet Union – perceived in analogous terms to Nazism - left them no
choice but to reconsider previously held leftist beliefs about culture, politics and the role of
intellectuals in society. 29
The war had diminished the perceived conflict between their identities as Americans and
as Jews. According to Diana Trilling, New York Jewish intellectuals came to believe that the
near destruction of European Jewry demanded of them “to find their Jewish identities” and to
create “a home for the Jews who had been made homeless by Hitler”. 30 It was now of utmost
importance not only to fight anti-Semitism decisively, but also to take responsibility and
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„We Must Begin to Build for Permanence‟: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine, and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959
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stimulate the development of a proud and lively Jewish community in the United States. To
these intellectuals, America now became central - not as a force of evil but as a force of good.
On the backdrop of the Holocaust and with the onset of the Cold War, a number of these
former Trotskyites would come to champion not only a hard-line anti-communism but also a
hyper nationalism that aimed not simply at containing communism at home and abroad but
also at actively promoting American values and power worldwide.
One central agent for what Howe had critically described as the new “Age of conformity”
amongst intellectuals was Commentary magazine, founded in 1945 under the aegis of the
American Jewish Committee (AJC). Commentary wanted to refocus American Jews on their
Jewish heritage, while simultaneously engaging in a process of harmonising Jewish and
American values and culture.31 Elliot Cohen, the first editor of Commentary, saw the journal
as “an act of faith in our possibilities in America”. Since European Jewry had been
obliterated, he believed that “there falls upon us in the United States a far greater share of
responsibility for carrying forward…our common Jewish cultural and spiritual heritage”. 32
Cohen‟s objective was to “harmonise heritage and country into a true sense of at-home-ness
in the modern world”. He concluded, “Surely, we who have survived catastrophe, can survive
freedom too”.33 According to Norman Podhoretz, who would take over editorship of
Commentary in 1960, the intent of the magazine was the creation “a kind of Jewish Harper‟s,
only more scholarly” – a general-interest magazine, which sought to “exemplify the
intellectual dignity of Judaism”. 34
In order “to normalize” Jewish existence in the U.S., Commentary‟s main strategy was to
refashion what it meant to be Jewish in America. Its main message was that Jews were an
integral part of the American polity and that their security here and around the world was
intricately tied to the perseverance of American capitalist democracy.35 Commentary therefore
set out to demonstrate a synergy between both cultural heritages, expressing the belief that
Jews could contribute something valuable to American society and that Jewishness facilitated
rather than detracted from being a „good‟ American. Previously, Cohen had spelled out his
vision of what a Jewish magazine should do for Jews in the U.S., which was nothing short of
a “complete rehabilitation of the Jewish tradition and the most thoroughgoing reconstruction
of Jewish intellectual values”. 36
Under the leadership of Cohen, a number of New York Jewish intellectuals, such as Sidney
Hook, Robert Warshow, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Clement Greenberg, led the way
in conveying the message “that this is home” and that the Jewish experience in America
“must be at once unique and universal”.37 Reconsidering their Americaness and their
Jewishness through the prism of the Second World War and the Holocaust, these intellectuals
came to realise the radical difference between their situation and that of European Jewry,
rendering them buoyantly optimistic about the Jewish future in the U.S.
As such, Commentary became, in the words of Michael Staub, “fairly obsessed with how
to dramatise the synergy of Jewish and American values and traditions”, which it organised
around the alleged abhorrence of both cultures for communism. 38 Jews, according to
Commentary, made the best and most loyal Cold War Americans precisely because they had
suffered mass annihilation that had taught them to defend U.S. democracy ardently against the
excesses of totalitarianism in all its forms. Moreover, Jewish religious and cultural traditions
presumably were antithetical to communism and their full and explicit inclusion would
strengthen American democracy in the face of totalitarian adversity. 39
The process by which these Jewish intellectuals began to re-assert their American and
Jewish identities enthusiastically was, according to Alfred Kazin, “made slightly hysterical by
the need to cast off Marxist ideology”.40 A case in point was the Rosenberg trial. When Ethel
and Julius Rosenberg were arrested in 1950, brought to trial in 1951 and eventually executed
for conspiring to pass atomic secrets on to the Soviets in June 1953, Jewish leaders were
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„We Must Begin to Build for Permanence‟: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine, and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959
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alarmed by the potentially negative repercussions the case could have for Jews. 41 Major
Jewish defence agencies such as the American Defense League (ADL) and the AJC had been
battling the “the Jew-as-communist-canard” since the First World War. 42 With the onset of
the Cold War, it seemed more vital than ever to dissociate Jews from communism in the
public mind. The Rosenberg case, according to historian Deborah Dash Moore, was crucially
instrumental in making “opposition to communism a criterion” of whether one was part of the
Jewish community or not.43 Even though many Jewish leaders remained ever watchful of the
potential threat emanating from certain extreme forms of anti-communist activity for
American Jews, a majority believed, nevertheless, that liberal anti-communism could function
as a vehicle for further integration. 44
As opposed to the ambivalence felt within leading Jewish organisations about how to
position themselves within the anti-communist consensus, Commentary was one Jewish voice
that expressed little qualms about subscribing to and emphatically supporting hard anticommunism. As opposed to the majority of the Jewish establishment, Commentary and its
writers located themselves further to the right on the issue of anti-communism. Irving Kristol,
for instance, taunted the relatively moderate AJC for being far too lenient on communists and
communist sympathisers and for not being able to “make what I would have regarded…as the
necessary distinctions within American liberalism, of what was worthy of support and what
was not”. He, therefore, believed that the AJC‟s “exaggerated liberalism” dangerously
interfered with protecting American democracy and Jewish security therein. 45
Similarly, a number of Commentary articles dealing with the Rosenberg case charged
fellow Jews with allegedly not drawing the appropriate conclusions from the Holocaust. Lucy
Dawidowicz, for example, accused the Rosenbergs and their supporters of abusing their
Jewish heritage and specifically the legacy of the Holocaust. Commentary argued that by
implying anti-Semitism on behalf of their accusers, the Rosenbergs were manipulating their
identity as Jews in order to divert from their „real‟ identity as communists. Dawidowicz,
therefore, rejected the appeals to rabbis and secular Jewish communal leaders on the
Rosenbergs' behalf as insincere and part of a communist strategy to de-legitimise the case
against them by linking it to anti-Semitism.
The Holocaust rhetoric used by the Rosenbergs and their supporters and the fact that Ethel
Rosenberg likened the behaviour of Jewish leaders towards them to that of the Judenräte in
war-torn Europe, was, according to Dawidowicz nothing but an attempt to “pick up sympathy
and support from individual Jews who may be suckers for this particular bait”. 46 She
contended that this strategy constituted a communist propaganda effort, which sought to
convince the world that the U.S. was turning into Nazi Germany and “that the conviction of
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage is a 1952 version of Reichstag fire, prelude to an
American version of Auschwitz”.47 Their agenda of “fabricating evidence of anti-Semitism”
and equating anti-communism with anti-Semitism, she concluded, was dangerous and
deceitful, since it ran the risk of making all Jews appear potentially guilty of communist
sympathies.48 The Rosenbergs, Robert Warshow argued, were impostors who had taken on
the role of victimised Jews that the communist propaganda machine “demanded of them”. 49
Implying that the Rosenbergs were not to be considered as real Jews, Commentary began to
articulate the message that being Jewish was no longer compatible with being a communist.
It is generally assumed that the Holocaust and its lessons emerged as a central topic of
debate and as a symbol for collective American Jewish identity during the later part of the
1960s.50 Yet, as the debate surrounding the Rosenberg case shows, the Holocaust was referred
to repeatedly and in analogous terms in intra-communal debates during the 1950s. Moreover,
Jeffrey Shandler has shown that the 1940s and 1950s not only saw Holocaust memorialisation
on behalf of Holocaust survivors and individuals personally affected by it, but also “the
writing of the first hundreds of personal and communal memoirs, the establishment of the
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„We Must Begin to Build for Permanence‟: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine, and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959
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earliest memorials”. Additionally, Shandler has demonstrated that the Holocaust was very
much present on American television long before the 1960s. 51
Scrutinising early issues of Commentary, therefore, contributes to a revision of traditional
interpretations of when and how Holocaust consciousness emerged in the U.S. Far from being
silent during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Jewish commentators of diverse
politics used Holocaust analogies or invoked its supposed lessons when debating domestic
and international issues. While the Holocaust had not yet emerged as a dominant symbol of
collective American Jewish identity and no one seemed to agree about what the actual lessons
of the Holocaust were, the idea that there were lessons for the present, nevertheless, appeared
to be relatively universal and widespread.
The perceived need to prove that Jews were „good‟ Americans and loyal Cold Warriors
was intricately connected to Commentary‟s mission to create a bulwark against potential
future holocausts. Commentary‟s creation was in itself a direct answer to the murder of six
million European Jews. In the first issue, Cohen wrote, “As Jews we live with this fact: 4,
750, 000 of 6, 000, 000 Jews of Europe have been murdered. Not killed in battle, not
massacred in hot blood, but slaughtered like cattle, subjected to every physical indignity –
processed…At this juncture…we light our candle, Commentary”. 52 Hence, the near
destruction of European Jewry and the Nazi killing machinery were discussed in almost every
issue during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. The traumatic events were debated from
every possible angle, along with the conditions that had caused them, and how reoccurrence
could be avoided. Cohen published “wide-ranging analyses of the Nazi era and its
consequences for the post-Nazi world”53 and thereby framed, according to Dawidowicz,
“more than any other medium…our contemporary outlook on Hitler‟s Germany”. 54 Many of
the pieces, such as “The Common Man and the Nazis” and “The Complex Behind Hitler‟s
Anti-Semitism”, tried to psychologically and sociologically understand National Socialism
and the mechanics of mass extermination. 55 Commentary was also the first American
magazine to print extracts from The Diary of Anne Frank in 1950. 56
Since it was Commentary‟s mission not only to memorialise but also to create meaning out
of chaos and destruction, the articles debating the issue of the Holocaust per se diminished
throughout the 1950s. Intending to be a creative force in the wake of the devastation of
European Jewry, Commentary shifted its focus towards discussing its lessons for the
American context. While Commentary had initially connected the fight against anti-Semitism
with the struggle against other forms of bigotry, especially white racism, it quickly began to
address the Holocaust and anti-Semitism almost exclusively in terms of the fight against
communism at home and abroad. The rhetoric of citing Holocaust analogies in support of the
burgeoning civil rights movement gave way by the early 1950s to analogies between Nazism
and communism.57
Commentary argued repeatedly, for example, that the Soviet system was especially cruel
towards Jews and that a new holocaust was in the making behind the Iron Curtain. In
“Hungary's Jewry Faces Liquidation – Again the Concentration Camps”, former president of
the Hungarian Independent Democratic party, Bela Fabian, cautioned American Jews that
Stalin posed as much a threat to Central and Eastern European Jewry as Hitler had in the past.
To drive home his point, he claimed that Stalin‟s policies ran “parallel to the policy of Nazi
extermination” – “the only difference”, he claimed, “is the denial that “Jews as Jews” are
being mistreated, and the fact that, at the end of the line, instead of the extermination camps
of Auschwitz and Treblinka, there are the slave labor camps of Karaganda and Kolyma and
the cotton fields of Tashkent and Alma-Ata”.58
The ultimate conclusion of such reasoning was that if Jews were interested in their survival
as Jews they had to reject any sort of association with communism. Repeatedly, articles cited
the Holocaust as a reminder of what could happen if Jews remained “bystanders” or were
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unable to differentiate „friend from foe‟ in the struggle against communism at home and
abroad. The implication was that those who were supportive of communism or unwilling to
dissociate themselves vehemently from it were not only guilty of dishonouring the memory of
those killed during the Holocaust but also posed a direct threat to Jewish security and
collective survival. 59 Conclusively, communism, like Nazism, could end in “charred
bodies”.60 Throughout the 1950s, analogies between Nazism and communism intensified and
were not only directed at the radical left but also specifically designed to target liberal Jews
who, in the eyes of a number of Commentary writers, were willing to sacrifice Jewish
concerns and interests when they conflicted with a left-wing agenda. Commentary repeatedly
cautioned liberals, and especially Jewish liberals, not to be blinded by communist rhetoric and
continually referred to Nazism and the Holocaust as a reminder of what could happen if Jews
did not defend Jewish interests more assertively, i.e. approach politics in terms of more
narrowly defined group interests. As if Commentary wanted “to wash away the stain of guilt”
that supposedly hung over American Jewry because of its supposed passivity during the war,
the magazine began to urge Jews to no longer engage in inconspicuous political behaviour
when Jewish interests were at stake.61
In a similar vein, Irving Kristol drew parallels between communism and Nazism, implying
that both end in mass murder, when reflecting on the trial of the State Department employee
and Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who was convicted of perjury in 1950. “Many of us have known
Communists, and most of them conveyed no impression of being conspirators”, he wrote “But then, some of us have known Nazis too, and they conveyed no immediate association
with gas chambers”.62 Leslie Fiedler added that the Hiss case demonstrated the extent to
which liberals were “unwilling to leave the garden of…illusion” because they allegedly
refused to condemn communist and supposed communists.63 Accusing liberals of being blueeyed about the imminent threat communism posed, they wondered how liberals would react if
Nazis were allowed to promote their views freely and concluded that the issue at stake here
were not the civil liberties of communists but the deadly threat posed by domestic
communism to American democracy and by extension to Jewish security. In the light of what
Nazism had wrought, and because communism was equally dangerous, they concluded,
removing communists and communist sympathizers from their government jobs therefore was
entirely legitimate.64
As these examples show, participants on all sides of the political spectrum used reference
to the imagery of the Holocaust and Nazism in order to sustain their arguments, always
implying that they were thereby adhering to the lessons of the Holocaust and honouring the
memory of the „six million‟. Immediately after 1945, the Holocaust became a reference point
with which pundits and activists underscored the moral righteousness of one position or
another. Overarching discussions of the appropriate lessons of the Holocaust at each step were
concerns as to the meaning and essence of Jewish identity in post-Second World War
America. As the Cold War progressed and Jews became integral part of mainstream American
society, one central question that came to dominate the agenda of the organised Jewish
community was whether the essence of Jewishness lay in a commitment to social justice
activism and progressive liberalism generally or whether this allegiance had become an
unviable option for Jews. As the 1960s progressed, number of New York Jewish intellectuals
would come out to promote the idea that being Jewish in America after 1945 was no longer
compatible with affiliation to causes of the radical or progressive left but rather demanded a
more conservative approach to politics, one informed by ideas of Jewish group survivalism on
the one hand and an excessive pro-Americanism on the other.
Commentary took on a central role in propagating this critique of Jewish liberalism and
progressive liberalism generally, thereby redefining Jewish interests in an ethnocentric, highly
defensive, and narrow manner. As hard-line anti-communist liberals from the late 1940s
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onwards, a number of New York Jewish intellectuals began to contend that a perverted
liberalism had taken over mainstream politics, which was anti-middle-class, anti-American
and anti-Jewish in nature. Driven by the desire to fit in with American mainstream society and
yet assert their Jewishness more aggressively, these intellectuals ultimately fashioned the
rationale for what became known as neoconservatism in the 1970s. At each stage of
developing their critique of American liberalism, the Holocaust and Nazism systematically
served as ultimate reference points in support of their arguments, becoming such an integral
part of neoconservative thought that critics have suggested that from a neoconservative
viewpoint, we are constantly approaching 1939. 65
1
Stephen J. Whitfield, Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books, 1984), p. 33.
2
Clement Greenberg and Alfred Kazin cited in Norman Podhoretz, “Jewishness & the Younger Generation”,
Commentary, April 1961, p. 307.
3
Nathan Abrams, “„America Is Home‟: Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of
Memory, 1945-1960”, in „Commentary‟ in American Life, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2005), pp. 9-37.
4
Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s
(New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 76.
5
Whitfield, Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau, p. 39.
6
Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 17.
7
Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard
University Press, 2006), p. 198.
8
Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jacob Heilbrunn, The Knew They Were Right: The Rise of
the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2008); Nathan Abrams, „Commentary‟ Magazine 1945-1959: “A
Journal of Significant Thought and Opinion” (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006).
9
Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Death Camps As Kitsch”, The New York Times, March 18, 1999.
10
The idea that the Holocaust was little discussed amongst Jews before the mid-1960s is widespread in generic
histories of American Jewry after 1945. See for example Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American
Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 123; Peter Novick
argues that the Holocaust was “hardly talked about for the first twenty years or so after World War II”. The
Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 1. Debunking this “myth of silence” was
the aim of a recently published in depth study of how the Holocaust was integrated into communal activities
from 1945 onwards. Hasia R. Diner, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth
of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
11
David B. Macdonald, Thinking History, Fighting Evil: Neoconservatives and the Perils of Analogy in
American Politics (Lanhman, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009); Peter Novick, “Is the Holocaust
An American Memory?”, Ernst Fraenkl Vorträge zur amerikanischen Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft,
Geschichte und Kultur, eds. Susanne Rohr and Sabine Sielke (Berlin, Germany: JFK Institut für
Nordamerikastudien der Freie Universität Berlin, 2002), p. 9.
12
U.O. Schmelz, “The Demographic Impact of the Holocaust”, in Terms of Survival: The Jewish World Since
1945, ed. Robert S. Wistrich (Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005), pp. 42-55.
13
Leonard Dinnerstein, Uneasy At Home: Anti-Semitism and the American Jewish Experience (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987); Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); Edward S. Shapiro, We Are Many: Reflections of American Jewish History and
Identity (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 68-86.
14
Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington, In.: Indiana University
Press, 1999), p. 29.
15
Whitfield, Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau, p. 98.
16
Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle & A Critique”, Commentary, October 1968, p. 29.
17
For a genealogy of the New York intellectuals, see “Arguing the World – The New York Intellectuals”,
http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_geneology.html; also see: Alan M. Wald, The New York
Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals
Nadja A. Janssen
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University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 13, (2009-10)
11
And Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five
Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1983); William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures
Among the Intellectuals (New York: Doubleday, 1982); Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of The New York
Intellectuals: „Partisan Review‟ and Its Circle, 1934-1945 (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press,
1986).
18
Ruth R. Wisse, “The New York (Jewish) Intellectuals”, Commentary, November 1987, p. 29.
19
Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 117.
20
Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1982), p. 251.
21
Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006); Karen Brodkin Sachs, How Jews Became White Folks And What That Says About Race in
America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Eric L. Goldstein, “„Different Blood Flows
in Our Veins‟: Race and Jewish Self-Definition in Late Nineteenth Century America”, American Jewish
History, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March 1997), pp. 29-55.
22
Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 151.
23
Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right, p. 43.
24
Wisse, “The New York (Jewish) Intellectuals”, p. 36.
25
Podhoretz, Making It, p. 118.
26
Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 26.
27
Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 253.
28
“Our Country, Our Culture: A Symposium”, Partisan Review, May - June 1952; “Our Country, Our Culture:
A Symposium”, Partisan Review, September - October 1952.
29
Hannah Arendt‟s concept of totalitarianism and comparisons between communism and Nazism were highly
influential amongst New York Jewish intellectuals. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).
30
Diana Trilling, Oral History Interview with Gertrude Himmelfarb (Bea Kristol), February 29, 1976, 21, Box
48, Folder 9, Diana Trilling Papers, 1921-1996, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library,
New York.
31
A number of New York intellectuals, however, did not agree with this overly optimistic celebration of the
American status quo. Out of the 24 intellectuals writing for the symposium, Irving Howe, Norman Mailer,
and C. Wright Mills, while appreciative of the new inclusiveness they found within mainstream culture,
disagreed with what he considered a new conformism. Irving Howe claimed to be disturbed by “the
eagerness of former radicals to join in the national mood of celebration.” Irving Howe, “This Age of
Conformity”, Partisan Review, January - February 1954; Howe, A Margin of Hope, pp. 214-216. In reaction
to what he perceived as the conformism of fellow intellectuals, he and Lewis Coser founded Dissent
magazine in 1954. The magazine‟s aim was to “dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that
pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States”. Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowack, The
Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1977), p. 239.
32
Elliot E. Cohen, “An Act of Affirmation”, Commentary, November 1945, pp. 1-3.
33
Ibid., p. 2.
34
Podhoretz, Making It, 128; Elliot Cohen, Interview in Time, January 29, 1951.
35
Abrams, „Commentary‟ Magazine 1945-1959, 14; Lionel Trilling, “Young in the Thirties”, Commentary, May
1966, p. 46.
36
Elliot Cohen, “The Age of Brass”, Menorah Journal, October 1925, pp. 425-47.
37
Israel Knox, “Is America Exile Or Home?: We Must Build For Permanence”, Commentary, November 1946,
p. 408.
38
Staub, Torn At the Roots, p. 38.
39
Sidney Hook, “Why Democracy Is Better: The Three Pillars of Our Civic Heritage”, Commentary, March
1948, pp. 195-204.
40
Alfred Kazin, “Introduction: The Jew as Modern American Writer”, in The Commentary Reader: Two
Decades of Articles and Stories, ed. Norman Podhoretz (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. xxii.
41
After the end of the Cold War, new evidence has led to the emergence of a consensus amongst historians,
which opines that at least Julius Rosenberg was in actuality guilty of espionage. The exact nature of the
secrets passed on remains, however, unclear. Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, “Cryptic Answers”, The
Nation, August 14-21, 1995.
42
Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice, p. 114.
43
Deborah Dash Moore, “Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: Symbol and Substance in Second-Generation
American Jewish Consciousness”, Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Fall 1988), p. 26.
Nadja A. Janssen
„We Must Begin to Build for Permanence‟: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine, and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959
University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 13, (2009-10)
12
44
Marc Dollinger, Quest For Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000), p. 130. For more information on anti-communist activity of national Jewish
organisations, see: Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice, pp. 113-134; The ADL, for example, often considered
to be a relatively conservative organisation in terms of politics, received much criticism from conservative
Jews for its repeated critique of extreme forms of anti-communism. In 1951, for instance, Eugene Lyons of
the National Review challenged the ADL for its “vicious attack” against the American Jewish League
Against Communism. Eugene Lyons, “Our New Privileged Class”, American Legion Magazine, September
1951, p. 37.
45
Irving Kristol, Interview for the William E. Wiener Oral History Library, February 13, 1980, Tape 1,
Transcript, 16, Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library, New York.
46
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “„Anti-Semitism‟ and the Rosenberg Case: The Latest Communist Propaganda Trap”,
Commentary, July 1952, p. 44.
47
Ibid., p. 41.
48
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Reprint: “False Friends and Dangerous Defenders”, The Reconstructions, May 1, 1953,
Box 8, Folder 13, Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz Papers, 1938-1990, American Jewish Historical Society,
New York, cited hereafter as LDP.
49
Robert Warshow, “The „Idealism‟ of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: „The Kind of People We Are‟”,
Commentary, November 1953, p. 417.
50
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Charles E. Silberman, A
Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (New York: Summit, 1985), pp. 182-183.
51
Jeffrey A. Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp. 46-47; Jeffrey A. Shandler, “Aliens in the Wasteland: American Encounters with the Holocaust on
1960s Science Fiction Television”, in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum
(Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 33-44; On the usage of early Holocaust
analogies in a national context: Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early
Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965 (Waltham, Ma.: Brandeis University Press,
2006). Fermaglich shows how the socio-scientific usage of Holocaust analogies by Stanley Elkins, Betty
Friedan, Stanley Milgram and Robert Jay Lifton reflected a seminal trend during the 1950s and 1960s to use
comparisons between the U.S. and Nazi Germany in order to address fears of alienation and conformity in
modern mass society.
52
Cohen, “An Act of Affirmation”, pp. 1-2.
53
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Aborted, unfinished manuscript for Commentary Symposium, drafted August 4-6, 1985,
1, Box 49, Folder 7, LDP.
54
Ibid.
55
For example: Salo Baron, “The Spiritual Reconstruction of European Jewry”, Commentary, November 1945,
pp. 4-12; Irving Kristol, “The Nature of Nazism”, Commentary, September 1948, pp. 271-282; Gertrud M.
Kurth, “The Complex behind Hitler‟s Anti-Semitism: A Psychoanalytic Study in History”, Commentary,
January 1948, pp. 77-82; Solomon F. Bloom, “The Dictator of the Lodz Ghetto: The Strange History of
Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski”, Commentary, February 1949, pp. 111-122; Joseph Leftwich, “Songs of the
Death Camps” A Selection with Commentary”, Commentary, September 1951, pp. 269-274; L. Poliakov,
“The Mind of the Mass Murderer: The Nazi Executioners – and Those Who Stood By”, Commentary,
November 1951, pp. 445-459; Herbert Luethy, “The Wretched Little Demon That Was Hitler: He Possessed
the „Mass Soul‟ of the Third Reich”, Commentary, February 1954, pp. 129-138; Theodore Frankl, “My
Friend Paul: One Who Survived”, Commentary, February 1957, pp. 147-160.
56
“The Diary of Anne Frank: The Secret Heart Within the Secret Annex”, Commentary, May 1952, pp. 419-432;
“The Diary of Anne Frank II: First Love and Finis”, Commentary, June 1952, pp. 529-544.
57
For example: Charles Abrams, “Homes for Aryans Only: The Restrictive Covenant Spreads Legal Racism in
America”, Commentary, May 1947, pp. 421-427; Felix S. Cohen, “Alaska's Nuremberg Laws: Congress
Sanctions Racial Discrimination”, Commentary, August 1948, pp. 136-143; James A. Wechsler and Nancy F.
Wechsler, “The Road Ahead for Civil Rights”, Commentary, October 1948, pp. 297-304.
58
Bela Fabian, “Hungary's Jewry Faces Liquidation: Against the Concentration Camps”, Commentary, October
1951, p. 334. Also see: George Lichtheim, “Will Soviet Anti-Semitism Teach the Lesson?: For Most
Britishers It Has”, Commentary, March 1953, pp. 221-226; Peter Meyer, “Stalin Follows in Hitler‟s
Footsteps”, Commentary, January 1953, pp. 1-18; Peter Meyer, “The Jewish Purge in the Satellite Countries:
Behind the Communist Turn to Anti-Semitism”, Commentary, September 1952, pp. 212-218.
59
The term Holocaust entered the public vocabulary during the later 1950s. In the 1940s and early 1950s, it
usually was referred to as “the catastrophe”, “disaster”, or as “the destruction of European Jewry”. One early
example of usage of the term “Holocaust” dates back to an address by AJCongress‟ executive director to
southern Jews in 1958. Referring to the Holocaust, Toubin called on southern Jewry not to be idle in the
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13
struggle for African American civil rights. Isaac Toubin, “A Message to Southern Jews: Recklessness or
Responsibility”, Congress Weekly, March 17, 1958, pp. 5-6; For more information about the term‟s
etymology see: Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed. Thinking About the Holocaust: After Half A Century (Bloomington,
In: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 121; Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, “Why Do We Call the
Holocaust „The Holocaust?‟ An Inquiry into the Psychology of Labels”, Modern Judaism, Vol. 9, No. 2
(May 1989), pp. 197-212.
60
Labour Zionist Max Lerner used the analogy between the Holocaust and white racism in the United States as
follows: “We know that racism ends in death. We know that racism ends in charred bodies”. Max Lerner,
“The Role of the American Jew,” Congress Weekly, January 16, 1950, p. 10.
61
Shapiro, We Are Many, p. 24.
62
Irving Kristol, “Civil Liberties, 1952 – A Study in Confusion: Do We Defend Our Rights by Protecting
Communists?” Commentary, March 1952, pp. 234-235.
63
Leslie A. Fiedler, “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence: Who Was Guilty – And of What?”,
Commentary, August 1951, p. 119.
64
Robert Bendiner, “Civil Liberties and the Communists”, Commentary, May 1948, pp. 430-431; Sidney Hook,
“Does the Smith Act Threaten Our Liberties?: American Law and the Communist Conspiracy”, Commentary,
January 1953, pp. 63-73.
65
Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: The Conservative Ascent to Political Power (New
York: Union Square Press, 2008), p. 119; Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors”, The Nation, February 5,
2004.
Nadja A. Janssen
„We Must Begin to Build for Permanence‟: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine, and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959
University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 13, (2009-10)