HB: Dawidowicz worked for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the oldest Jewish advocacy organization in the US, for almost 20 years, during the heyday of its work for civil liberties and civil rights. But by the ’70s, like many New York Intellectuals, she started calling herself neoconservative. How did she move from the liberalism of the AJC to neoconservatism?
NS: The standard historiography is that neoconservatism begins in the mid-to-late ’60s. But Dawidowicz was prescient. At the AJC she was a committed liberal, the way most Committee members were: she supported the separation of church and state, she was anti-communist, pro-Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, and supportive of civil rights. Those were all part of the program, and she did the Committee’s research on all those topics. But she began to question whether these commitments on the part of the Committee actually paid enough attention to Jewish continuity, or what she would call “Jewish survival.”
American liberalism is predicated on individual rights. What happens when there’s a group that wants to create structures in an open society to maintain itself as a group? That was the question of the day—and it still is today, really. The complexity of Jewish group rights is that there is deep ambivalence about defining what a Jew is and what a Jewish group is, both because of the fear of antisemitism, and because there’s no agreement among Jews in the modern period on these questions. Are Jews an ethnicity? A religion? A linguistic group? In the imperial context and later in the Soviet period, Jews could argue for group rights because other people, like Ukrainians and Belarusians, were arguing for group rights. But in the US, the only groups that began to argue for group rights were racial groups and, now, groups with diverse sexual orientations. Jews are in this conundrum because their definitions of “groupness” do not fit the categories in which contemporary Americans discuss oppression or exclusion. They’re not Christian, but they’re also coded as white. So to argue for white rights—well, I don’t need to tell you the problem there! From Dawidowicz’s perspective, the Committee’s liberalism meant that there was actually a weakening of any commitment to articulating the need for Jewish group rights. Dawidowicz said the only people who were trying to continue their religious identity were Catholics, and perhaps Jews should take a page out of the Catholic playbook—for instance, by asking for federal money for parochial education.