My Love Affair With The Jews
Hy Gold
Rosh Hashanah 2002
My active interest and love affair with the Jews of Israel was a late blooming affair. Let me explain. My family, though proudly Jewish, was strictly secular in regard to religion, and in regard to politics, quite a bit to the left of center. With our devotion to working people of all nations, we regarded Palestine as the natural home for Jews and Palestinians living in peace and cooperation. It was understandable then, that the concept of Zionism was a no-no to us, even though we knew of several Zionist-Socialist organizations.
In the years from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, any attention we paid to foreign affairs involved the anti-fascist struggles in Spain and later in Europe. When Hitler’s war against the Jews became known, I will be frank to admit that I recall no special horror that I didn’t also accord to his decimation of other groups. The Jews were simply among the many victims of his genocidal program. In those years, we looked to the Soviet Union as the leading anti-fascist power.
After the war, I regarded the establishment of Israel with a relatively mild degree of approval. My major interest in those days was the Cold War and its threat of a possible nuclear conflagration.
Two developments began to change this mind set. Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin’s hideous crimes ended my slavish defense of all things Soviet. I adopted a habit of thinking independently and not accepting anything solely on the basis of pre-conceived ideology. The second series of events was the attacks by the Arab countries on the State of Israel in an attempt to annihilate it. I then began to think that, yes, the Jews have a right to their own state, especially when I learned that the Arabs had been offered a partition of Palestine and had turned it down, and instead had launched a war on Israel’s recently declared State.
With my acceptance of the right of the Jews to have their state, I realized that, yes, I was a Zionist!
