How do you know you’ve got the worst idea ever? It’s unlikely that anyone will come up to you and say, “Your idea is so bad it makes me want to cry,” nor will your idea win a “worst idea ever” vote (masses of people tend actually to prefer bad ideas as a matter of course). Slate has been documenting a visit to Birobidzhan of Masha Gessen and calling it “The Worst Good Idea Ever.” But I think it is simply the worst idea ever and I challenge anyone to come up with a single worse idea.
In the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th, there were actually a whole bunch of ideas put forward as solutions to “the Jewish Question,” which is not a specific question but actually a challenge presupposed by one’s own definition of what it means to be a Jew, and consequently different in every country. Those ideas were:
- Conversion: that all the Jews in a given country should convert, voluntarily or forcibly, to that country’s national church.
- Assimilation: that Jews could, as individuals, give up distinctly Jewish practices and begin to be members directly of society at large.
- Americanism: like assimilationism, except in America, immigrant groups are allowed to retain some of their peculiarities and organize themselves either along “ethnic” (Chinese, Italian, Irish) or “religious” (Jewish) lines.
- Autonomism: limited self-rule, but not independence, for Jews in the exile, usually as an Ashkenazi-Yiddish cultural entity (Birobidzhan is an implementation of autonomism).
- Territorialism: like autonomism, but less Yiddishist and more independent.
- Bundism: that Jews should organize as an element of the working class in social-democratic terminology, usually with Yiddish and typically either assimilationist or autonomist.
- Communism: I only make a separate note of it here because many assimilationist Jews managed their process of assimilation entirely via one of the Communist parties, and recommended it to other Jews.
- “Ultra-orthodoxy”: I hate this term, but I can’t think of a better term for pre-war Haredim that isn’t anachronistic.
- Zionism: that Jews should reconstitute themselves as a nation-state in their own country, Israel.
It doesn’t take any special intelligence to see that most of these ideas were failures, and even terrible failures that cost many lives:
- Conversion didn’t save the converts, or their children, or even their grandchildren, from being gassed to death and their corpses incinerated by the Nazis. It was a fool’s solution, buying only time, and even that unpleasantly. Nobody should ever try to deny what he is.
- Assimilation likewise simply doesn’t work, not in western Europe and not in eastern Europe either. Even a Jew who forgets he’s a Jew will be reminded by his neighbor. And if his neighbor doesn’t remember, his neighbor’s neighbor will remember.
- Americanism has created a generation of people like my parents, yearning and craving for some acceptable way to be Jewish and not finding it, confused about who they are and what it means. My own generation will fare even worse.
- Autonomism’s biggest success is Birobidzhan, a place so ravaged by anti-Jewish policies that its Jewish population was decimated and its Jewish character substantially erased a mere two decades after its creation.
- Territorialism was never even implemented for the obvious reason that creating a Jewish state in the exile would simply be creating another exile.
- Bundism was always despised by the Bolsheviks; Lenin recognized it as crypto-Zionist and Stalin effectively finished it off.
- Communism was so terrible for the Jews that I hardly need to say anything further.
- Haredi Judaism exists and its numbers are strong, but it has created such a bizarre situation that it defies explanation. The Haredi community is retrograde and repressed, disturbed and disturbing, not even anachronistic because at no time in history did Jews ever live as the Haredim live now.
- Zionism, notwithstanding all its faults and failures, has succeeded in creating a state, reviving the Hebrew language, facilitating the immigration of millions of Jews to become by far the strongest Jewish community in the world.
Perhaps to sit on the Upper West Side and speculate about Birobidzhan seems quirky and even charming, but there’s nothing cute about trying to find real solutions to real problems and coming to understand that they all suck. I suppose one man’s quirkiness is another man’s gas chamber or GULAG.