Hayim Greenberg - Essays and Ideology

Essays and Ideology

He created the ideological vision of the 1950s and 60's vision, where all American Jews of all creeds could unite behind the Zionist cause.

His seminal, still used today, is entitled "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties" wherein Greenberg discusses the accusation of dual loyalty directed at American Zionists. This essay has been compare to the recent multi-cultural work of K. Anthony Appieh in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism.

He recast Zionism in an American idiom, Labor Zionists in the 1920s and 1930s drew upon America’s own pioneering past, comparing the halutzim—the Labor movement’s pioneers in Palestine—to the Pilgrim settlers of New England, to the cowboys of the Wild West, and even to Horatio Alger. American Jews viewed Palestine as the new Jewish frontier. Steeped in American mythology, they romanticized the settling of the ancient Jewish homeland as a celebration of “independence, adventure, industry, physical strength, youthful optimism, surety of purpose and expansion.”

Zionism is more than the expression of a positive attitude to Israel; it is also more than Aliyah. Zionist ideology represents an all-encompassing approach to the problems of the Jewish People. Zionism derives from Judaism and can not be separated from it. It finds its fullest expression in the individual for whom it represents the culmination of a sound Jewish education.

Without such education, Zionism may be a doctrine, a convincing theory, a program, a plan, an undertaking of desperate urgency, an appeal to sentiment, a noble humanitarian enterprise, but not a profound creative experience." "Jewish education "is not necessarily limited to formal schooling or to a systematic course of studies. It may be, and often is, obtained through a variety of informal channels.

Becoming a Zionist means more than the acquisition of a body of knowledge of Jewish history, of Hebrew, of developments in Israel. Becoming a Zionist means adopting an action-oriented ideology a way of perceiving the Jewish people and its problems, A change from a non-Zionist to a Zionist position involves a change in perception, values and valences, and action. Such total change is generally achieved by a person's acceptance of a group with the appropriate ideology as his source of reference.

In 1942 when news of the Holocaust reached America, he was involved in bringing the news to the public.

When 180 chaverim of Habonim gathered for the national convention at the Hechalutz farm in Cream Ridge, New Jersey. On the opening night, Hayim Greenberg pointed to the loss of moral values and principles, the loss of the sense that "values are valuable," as perhaps the basic cause of the deep crisis of our civilization. COntinuing his prior rejection of European socialism, he said, In the post-war world there must be no separation between freedom and equality such as brought about the rise of the totalitarian states. The soldier who has a tragic function to perform is a passing phenomenon. The permanent elements of civilization are the constructive ones—the workers, the farmers, the builders.

He blamed the Socialists for telling Jews that they have nothing to fear by remaining in EUrope. he felt more would have been saveds if not for the utopian vision of the socialists.