On Jewish values: 'Alfred Kazin's Journals'

Today's email from the New York Review of Books shares an old article, "The Hidden Life of Alfred Kazin," by Edward Mendelson (Aug 18, 2011). The email teases it:

“‘Values are our only home in the universe,’ Kazin wrote in 1962 at the height of his public success, and the more intensely he thought about values, the more intensely he thought about himself as a Jew. ‘For what is it I draw my basic values from if not from the Jews!’ His journals explore a radical, idiosyncratic Judaism informed by the same nonconformist moral passion that drove William Blake’s radical, idiosyncratic Christianity.”

The Book

Alfred Kazin's Journals: Edited by Richard M. Cook. Yale University Press, 2011.

Publisher's description:

At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life.

To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert, adventurous, if often mercurial intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more.

Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

Spotted Kazin here too:

"White nationalists have long identified with Israel: an ethnonational state that violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with its language of ethnic homogeneity, unwavering policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called ‘militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel’ also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes."

— Memory Failure Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Another reflection on Jewish values

Isaac Deutscher identified with the oppressed. Supporting people who are oppressed is what he saw as the important meaning of being Jewish.

"Polish Jewish intellectual Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) insisted," as Rebecca Ruth Gould explains, "that his identity obliged him to adhere to a certain kind of partiality. In Deutscher’s own words: “I am … a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.” Deutscher’s partiality was against racism, and ultimately against Zionism."

As I see it, "solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated" doesn't mean agreeing with anything and everything that person says about any topic whatsoever; it means having solidarity vis-a-vis their oppression and their right to exist and to get free from their oppression. The meaning of solidarity that is "unconditional" is, I think, that we don't impose additional conditions on our solidarity. They do not have to sing and dance for us to earn our solidarity for getting free. They do not have to bribe us. They do not have to work for us. The fact that they are oppressed is in itself a reason — the only reason — for us to have solidarity with them in their fight against oppression.

This is aligned with "what [Indian philosopher Akeel] Bilgrami calls ‘wilful imbalance’," meaning that you intentionally take sides. Your view is not from nowhere. You have a standpoint, and you choose the side you want to take.

Gould concludes her essay: "Justifications of free speech that rely on the liberal emphasis on balance obscure what it really means to silence another person’s voice. To silence is to deny, through the language of moderation and balance, their very right to exist. To respect free speech is to respect life itself."

As I understand it: If there's a debate over maybe these people should be allowed to exist and be free, or maybe they shouldn't? that debate doesn't embody freedom for the people who's lives are at stake, because one of the options being considered is that they shouldn't be free (or that they shouldn't exist at all, which is tightly linked to the idea that they shouldn't be free — those are overlapping concepts). This raises the question of, when we say "free speech," for whom is the speech free? For the person who's running their mouth, perhaps freedom means their right to speak any words it occurs to them to say or that pass through their lips with varying degrees of intentionality. But whether the speech promotes freedom is another question entirely, and it matters for the person who's being talked about. Free speech that undermines the conditions of freedom is a kind of paradox. Should the person being talked about cease to be free, or even cease to exist, in what sense will the speaker continue to have "freedom of speech" to talk about them?

"Against Balance: Why Free Speech Cannot and Should not be Neutral," Rebecca Ruth Gould, Dialogue & Discourse (Medium), Feb 25, 2024

Citing The Non-Jewish Jew: And Other Essaysby Isaac Deutscher (Verso, 2017).

"In childhood, Norman Podhoretz’s world was so liberal that he later claimed he never met a Republican until high school. When Podhoretz took over Commentary, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine was a small, anti-Communist publication. Podhoretz’s initial goal was to move it to the left — he serialized Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd,” published articles advocating unilateral disarmament — and make it more intellectual, with James Baldwin, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe among the contributors. Subscriptions increased dramatically.
But signs of the conservative future also appeared, and of his own confusion over a world in transition."
— Norman Podhoretz, Contentious And Influential Neo-Conservative, Has Died: Norman Podhoretz, a leading neo-conservative and the former editor of Commentary magazine, has died. Hillel Italie, Associated Press, Dec 17, 2025

Another reflection

Omri Boehm, Israeli philosopher and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, was scheduled to speak at the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald - until the Israeli gov demanded Germany cancel his speech due to his political views. Here’s what he would have said: www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025...

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 11:06 AM

Something has gone very wrong with Holocaust memory when the Israeli-born grandchild of Holocaust survivors is disinvited from the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, because the moral lessons he takes from the Shoah are not those of the nation-state that claims a monopoly on Shoah memory.

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 12:03 PM

Eternal love, deepest affection: A young gay man spent six years in Nazi camps

Josef Kohout knew he was gay when he was 16, and disclosed it to his mother when he was 19. She accepted him, wanted him to be happy, and simply hoped he would keep himself safe.

He did not, and he told his story in The Men with the Pink Triangle (originally published in German by Merlin Verlag in 1972, as told by Kohout's acquaintance Hans Neumann, who used the pen name Heinz Heger). The English translation I'm using here is by David Fernbach in 1980.

The Nazi party had a student organization at his university in Vienna, but he didn't belong to it, as he was not especially "interested in politics" and came from a family that considered themselves racially tolerant. Instead, he and other gay students found each other and began an informal club, through which "at the end of 1938 I met the great love of my life." This was Fred, "the son of a high Nazi official from the Reich, two years older than I" and bound for medical school. For Christmas 1938, he gave Fred "a snap someone had taken showing Fred and me with our arms in friendly fashion round each other's shoulders." On the back, he wrote: "To my friend Fred in eternal love and deepest affection!"

Train tracks at Birkenau.
Photo by Ron Porter from Pixabay.
Digitally filtered by Tucker Lieberman.

The problem started in March 1939 when he was 22. "It was on a Friday, about 1 p.m., almost a year to the day since Austria had become simply the 'Ostmark', that I heard two rings at the door." It was the Gestapo, calling him in for a 2 p.m. questioning. He had no idea what it was about. He said goodbye to his mother, not suspecting "that we would not meet again for six years..."

At the Gestapo's headquarters, he was shown the evidence against him: the photograph. He had to acknowledge it was his handwriting and signature on the back. "That's all, then," said the officer. Two weeks later, he was convicted at trial under Paragraph 175 in German law which broadly prohibited "lewdness" of the male homosexual sort, and he was sentenced to six months in the Vienna district prison.

Charges against Fred, however, were dropped, likely because Fred's father pulled strings with the Nazis.

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For more information about how Nazis made "homosexuality" illegal, please read "When the Nazis Criminalized Gay Men". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Using this link gets you around the paywall. I want you to read — and never forget.

See also:
"Between 1918 and 1933, before Hitler seized power, German authorities had convicted nearly eight thousand men of 'unnatural indecency.' Those numbers ballooned under the Nazi regime...some estimates suggest the Nazis arrested as many as one hundred thousand homosexuals." — Michael Waters, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports (2024)

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Kohout's cell was kept unlocked between 5 a.m. and 6 p.m. so he could do work: serving meals, collecting laundry, and mopping the corridors. "Several times," he recalled, "I had to serve someone condemned to death their last meal, generally a wiener schnitzel and potato salad, knowing that at 4 a.m. the next morning they would be hanged or beheaded." (Later, the Nazis ceased "even this little humanitarian gesture.") For everyone else, conditions at the prison were survivable: "Never once during my six months there did I hear of a prisoner being beaten."

He was not released. On the final day of his sentence, they told him he'd be transferred to a concentration camp. He was put on the train in January 1940. On the long train ride, when the other prisoners learned he was a "175er," they forced him to suck them.

The Sachsenhausen camp was surrounded by barbed wire, and guards with machine guns stood on platforms.

Prisoners were categorized by triangle patches sewn onto their uniforms. The colors: "yellow for Jews, red for politicals, green for criminals, pink for homosexuals, black for anti-socials, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, blue for emigrants, brown for gypsies." He adds: "The triangle was about five centimetres across and placed point down, and was stitched onto the left breast of the jacket and coat and the outside right trouser leg....The pink triangle, however, was about 2 or 3 centimetres larger than the others, so that we could be clearly recognised from a distance."

Upon arrival, he was categorized with other men charged under Paragraph 175. "We were left naked and barefoot on the snow-covered ground," and then were taken to a cold shower and made to trim their pubic hair. "Our block was occupied only by homosexuals, with about 250 men in each wing. We could only sleep in our night-shirts, and had to keep our hands outside the blankets..." They could not speak to prisoners with different colored triangles, since, it was explained to them, "we might try to seduce them."

Their punishment: to move snow back and forth. "In the morning...from the left side of the road to the right side...In the afternoon we had to cart the same snow back from the right side to the left." They were not given shovels, but had to lift the snow with their bare hands. They were not given wheelbarrows, but had to carry the snow inside their coats, which they wore "with the buttoned side backward." After six days of this, "new pink-triangle prisoners" arrived to take over this task.

Having endured that week, their hands were raw, and they "had become dumb and indifferent slaves of the SS." They were then sent to "the clay-pit of the Klinker brick-works," which the prisoners called "the death-pit," and which was "the 'Auschwitz' for homosexuals" until 1942. In all temperatures, the starving prisoners were made to descend into a deep pit, fill a cart with heavy clay, and, in groups of a half-dozen, push the cart by hand up steep rails. The carts tended to roll back, maiming or killing prisoners. Some, exhausted, hoped to lose a finger or toe, as then they would go to the infirmary — but "they were never seen alive and well again. They just went to fuel the constant flow of human guinea-pigs for 'medical' research."

Then, the Nazis got the idea of coming to see the prisoners while they were pushing the clay carts and using the prisoners for target practice. At least 15 prisoners were killed over two weeks. It was then that Kohout made a deal with a Capo: in exchange for sexual favors, Kohout would only have to load the carts, not push them, and he would get a little more to eat.

He was transferred to Flossenbürg in a group of over a hundred prisoners. Only four others in that group had pink triangles. Here, they quarried granite. Any prisoner who came within 5 meters of the barbed wire fence was considered to be attempting escape and was immediately shot. "I myself witnessed at least ten occasions when SS men seized a prisoner's cap and threw it against the wire. They would then demand that the prisoner fetch his cap back. Naturally enough, the prisoner tried to refuse, as everyone knew this [i.e., approaching the fence] meant certain death. The SS men then started beating the poor devil with sticks, so that he could only choose the way in which he was to die." Another Nazi game was to put a metal bucket over a prisoner's head, bang it with sticks until "his sense of balance was destroyed," then remove the bucket and push the man toward the fence, where he would be "fired on in the usual way." They also had a torture in which a pink-triangle prisoner was bound stomach-down to a bench and whipped up to 25 times on his bare buttocks. The 45-year-old SS-Obersturmführer (the man who commanded the camp) openly masturbated during these beatings. Kohout goes on to describe more tortures.

Pink-triangle prisoners were "the lowest caste" and usually sent first for extermination. He also explains how, "despite my pink triangle," he was accepted as a Capo.

In late 1943, Himmler decreed that

'any homosexual who consented to castration, and whose conduct was good, would shortly be released from concentration camp. Many of the pink-triangle prisoners actually believed Himmler's promises, and consented to castration...But...[they were] sent to the SS Dirlewanger penal divison on the Russian front, to be butchered in the partisan war and die a hero's death for Hitler and Himmler....I steadfastly refused to be castrated...'

At sunrise on April 20, 1945, the camp was woken, allegedly to celebrate Hitler's birthday, but actually to evacuate prisoners, given that the Nazis were losing the war. Kohout was grouped with five other pink-triangle Austrians and told they would be marched on a winding path through Cham, Straubing, Mengkofen, Landshut, and Freising. Waking in Cham on April 23, "we found that our SS guards had simply vanished in the night and left us alone." They assumed that "either the Americans or the Russians must be quite close, or else the SS would not have let their prisoners flee." A farmer fed and housed them. The next day, they met American soldiers who came out of their tanks and "gave us piles of cigarettes and mountains of chocolate."

He needed an entry permit from the Russians to go to Vienna to visit his mother, so he went first to his sister in Linz, who, he discovered, was married and had two children. From her, he learned he would not see his father again, as his father, "a high civil servant," had been "forced to retire on reduced pension in December 1940" mostly because of his son's imprisonment for "homosexuality." The father felt socially outcast, and died by suicide in 1942. After staying with his sister for a month, he went to Vienna to see his mother.

He never saw his lover, Fred, again. "After 1945, I tried to find out what had become of him and whether he was still alive, but in vain. His father is said to have shot himself at the end of the war."

Kohout told his story shortly before Austria decriminalized homosexuality in 1971. "The contempt of our fellow-humans, and social discrimination," he complained, "is the same as it was 30 or 50 years ago. The progress of humanity has passed us by."

nobody learns about nazi genocide of gay and trans people because then theyd also learn the allies thought the nazis had the right idea when they learned about it

— Nicole DeWitt (@catastro-v.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 8:33 PM

Related

“Back in the 1930s, the FBI used the epithet ‘sex criminal.’ FBI director J. Edgar Hoover seized on this term for homosexuality in the wake of a famous unsolved kidnapping case. In 1936, in the dead of winter, ten-year-old Charles Mattson was abducted…[he] had clearly been beaten to death. …Hoover used the crime to argue that the FBI needed to put homosexuals under surveillance, thus cementing in the public mind that there was no difference between LGBT Americans and murderous pedophiles.
* * *
This 'homosexual as sex criminal' psyop also suggested that LGBT people were specifically a danger to children, which meant that upstanding parents should join the government effort to stamp them out.
In the 1970s, right-wing activist Anita Bryant founded Save Our Children, one of the first organizations aimed at parents who wanted to keep LGBT people out of public life. Bryant, a former beauty queen and pop singer, was a charismatic influencer who had been radicalized by anti-feminist movement leader Phyllis Schlafly. Bryant said she founded Save Our Children because the district where she lived in Florida had granted LGBT people housing and employment protections.
* * *
In the late 2010s, the QAnon conspiracy crowd began to use the term 'groomer' to evoke the same myth, and the word quickly made its way into political and legal speech."
— Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. W. W. Norton, 2024. Chapter 5: School Rules.

"Evangelicals, Orthodox Christians and Fundamentalists were not Nazis as such. Many resisted heroically. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others paid with their lives. But institutions shaped by authoritarian theology were more likely to accommodate power, rationalize injustice or retreat into apolitical obedience.

Nazism did not require people to abandon religion. It required them to reframe it: to see obedience as holiness, hierarchy as moral order and myth as truth."

— Faith, Authority, and the Lure of Certainty: Religious Mindsets and the Architecture of Authoritarianism, by Gordon Gamm, The Humanist, 25 March 2026

Read: The night Nazis tried to burn and erase queer history, Jamie. P, Gaysbie, 29 April 2026. As posted to Instagram:

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'The Veterans of History' is a bright new contribution to Jewish studies

A new book by Jewish educator Mitchell Silver presents a fresh, detailed history of Jewish people over the millennia. This article was originally posted to Helium Network on April 2, 2014. Image: Watchmaker, painted by Yehuda Pen, 1914. Megapolis.org. © public domain Wikimedia Commons.

The Veterans of History: A Young Person's History of the Jews is a new work by Mitchell Silver that gives a history of the Jewish experience, aimed at a young adult reading audience. As the author explains in the acknowledgements, he has long been interested in sharing "a secular interpretation of Jewish history shaped by progressive values," and in the preface, he describes his new book as "analyzing social, economic, and ideological forces into their simpler components".

He has accomplished this admirably as, in 336 pages, The Veterans of History wrestles with three or four thousand years of Jewish history. The result is appealing and informative to adults as well as to younger readers. Drawing from his decades of experience as educational director of the Y. L. Peretz School of Boston Workmen's Circle, and as cultural director of Camp Kinderland, Silver weaves old stories in a new way.

He begins by explaining that Jewish history is wide and varied, that history is selective storytelling, and that he has chosen to particularly emphasize the cultural detail that is most likely to be of personal significance to his American Jewish readership. In highlighting how he constructs his story, Silver prompts readers to imagine multiple possibilities for how they might choose to think about history.

The book's narrative begins with the Biblical era. The author does not run through a long list of Bible stories, but rather mentions a select few of historical relevance without delving into mythic or symbolic interpretations, paying greater attention to the politics and culture of that time. From there, he proceeds to Jewish life under Persian, Greek and Hasmonean rule in the last few centuries B.C.E., followed by Roman rule.

Some religious history buffs who are accustomed to reading about Christianity might be surprised that, from a section headed "The Beginning of Christianity," a scant five pages advances the reader to the second century C.E. But this is fitting, as Silver has chosen a distinctly Jewish perspective for the book. (For those who are interested, there is an abundance of other material on this influential window of time in religious history. Take, for example, the recent book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan, which focuses on Jewish sects.) Why, indeed, should this particular time period demand more attention for the study of Jewish life than other influential periods, such as the Muslim caliphates, or medieval Europe, for that matter? The section on medieval life includes a number of fascinating, little-known details, such as the introduction of a mandatory yellow badge for Jews in 1215 and the "court trial" of a Talmud (religious book) in 1240. Silver's history continues through the messianic aspirations of Sabbatai Zevi during the Renaissance; the growth of Reform Judaism in the United States in the 19th century and the peak of Yiddish culture there in the early 20th century; and the Holocaust and the founding of Israel.  

One key feature that is important to understand is that this is not really a history of Judaism, but rather of the Jewish people. That is, it is not limited to a theological or ideological analysis; it takes a broader view of the many forces that shape people's lives. It is about Jewish people in the many places and times in which they have lived, influenced by different cultures and languages, and how they have been affected by their interactions with people who are not Jewish as well as with Jews who live in other lands. It is about the experience of persecution and of living in the Diaspora (outside of Israel). Theology and ideology are only parts of this tapestry. Silver manages to shape the backbone of his narrative according to his beliefs and values without allowing his opinions to noticeably intrude on his presentation of the facts. He does not overtly pass judgment of right and wrong on subtle or thorny theological issues. He therefore does not attempt to define how "Judaism" ought to be understood.

The book has great value for anyone interested in an outline of the long history of Jewish life and thought - especially one that is delivered in accessible language and does not assume prior knowledge of its topics - or for anyone who is curious about what a humanist approach to Jewish history and culture can look like.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

The challenge of protecting ancient scrolls that are in high demand

Popularly known as "the Dead Sea Scrolls", they are a set of 900 manuscripts about two thousand years old. Most of the texts are in Hebrew; some are in Aramaic; a few are in Greek. Many of them are Biblical texts from the Second Temple era. Others are sectarian texts like the Book of War, the Community Rule, and the Nahum Commentary. The texts predate the New Testament of the Bible.

Originally posted to Helium Network on May 19, 2013.

As physical objects, they are extremely fragile. The first discovery of the scrolls occurred in 1947 when Bedouin shepherds following a stray goat in the Judaean Desert came across earthenware jars in a cave. Soon, the scrolls came into the possession of scholars. The scholars investigated additional caves in the area and found many more manuscripts. Most were in an extremely fragmented condition, so there were thousands of pieces to connect.

It was the "ultimate jigsaw puzzle," as Pnina Shor, head curator of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Dead Sea Scrolls Project, put it at a lecture given at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass. in May 2013.

From the beginning, scholars used what they thought were the best preservative methods available. Unfortunately, some of the scroll fragments disintegrated because they were stuck to plates with various tapes and glues. These misguided attempts continued for decades. Today, conservators are forced to make painstaking efforts to remove the adhesive residue. Efforts related to preservation are determined by an international committee devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This image of the War Scroll shows why preservationists work to protect ancient scrolls. Image by: Eric Matson of the Matson photo service, 21 May 2012. © Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Library of Congress. Wikimedia Commons.

Due to their age, some fragments are illegible to the naked eye. In the 1950s, when infrared technology was new, infrared photographs were taken to clarify the contrast of the aged ink on the parchment and papyrus scrolls. In the 1990s, spectral imaging was used for similar purposes. The most recent photography has been done with a 39-megapixel camera that creates images from 28 exposures on the visible and near-infrared spectrum. These photographs are posted online at The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. Digitizing the scrolls enables inquisitive people worldwide to examine the content without damaging the physical scrolls themselves.

Today, the scrolls are kept in a climate-controlled storeroom. Even when they travel for museum exhibitions, they must be stored in this kind of environment, protecting them against heat and humidity. Additionally, they must be showcased in a darkened room, since prolonged exposure to light causes them to deteriorate.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are an important piece of the religious history of Jews and Christians. The content doesn’t turn any received religious doctrines upside down and there were no conspiracies to cover up their revelations, as Prof. Gary A. Rendsburg assures in a lecture for The Teaching Company's "Great Courses" series, but the scrolls are nevertheless fascinating from a sober historical perspective. That is why so much attention is given to their physical preservation.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

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Relatedly:

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

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— Hetan Shah (@hetanshah.bsky.social) November 18, 2025 at 1:27 AM