Clash of the Titans: Stephen S. Wise vs. Abba Hillel Silver
Part One

Significant political events often summon forth larger-than-life figures and the inevitable clash of titans. Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, is a tale of international sweep, crammed with longing, passion and, above all, personality. Such contending colossi as Brandeis and Weizmann, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, and Wise and Silver bestride the stage of modern Jewish history and the drama of the creation of a Jewish state.

None, perhaps, proved as contentious as Stephen S. Wise, founder of the Free Synagogue and the American and World Jewish Congresses and an early advocate of tikkun (the repair of the world) through Social Action and Zionism, and Abba Hillel Silver who replaced him as American Jewry’s principal Zionist spokesman during the fateful years of 1943-1948. The change from Wise to Silver was cataclysmic, constituting a shift from a moderate to a militant approach in garnering American support for the creation of a Jewish homeland.

Ironically Wise, who by 1943 was the epitome of moderation, started out his long career as a radical militant, though one would not have known it from his background. Wise was born in 1874 and brought as a baby from Hungary to New York where his father, the recipient of a doctorate from the University of Leipzig, assumed the pulpit of Rodeph Sholom, one of New York’s leading “Our Crowd” congregations.

In the 1890s, Wise took a courageous step by becoming a Zionist at a time when the idea of a Jewish Homeland was looked upon with great suspicion, especially by assimilated Reform Jews who, eschewing the specter of duel loyalties, declared in effect: “America is our Zion and Washington our Jerusalem.”

In spite of such views, Wise together with Richard Gottheil, a Columbia University professor whose father was chief rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, founded America‘s first Zionist federation in New York in 1897, one year after Herzl‘s historic First Zionist Congress in Basel.

In 1898, five years after receiving smicha (being ordained) in Vienna, Wise attended the second Zionist Congress as a correspondent for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. After meeting with Herzl, Wise wrote back to Gottheil: “This is a cause that will allow Jews to fight back. We have been stepped on long enough.”

Where Wise made his mark in America was in translating his refusal to being stepped on as a Jew into his every-bit-as-passionate refusal to tolerate other Americans being stepped on. This was the basis of his commitment to social activism. Thus, in the early 1900’s he served not only as a rabbi in Portland, Oregon, but also as State Commissioner of Child Labor, an unpaid position which he turned into a pulpit for fighting liquor, gambling, and prostitution interests by pointing the finger at municipal and state corruption. A frequent guest speaker before Christian audiences, Wise, like Silver after him, was something of a matinee idol.

A few weeks after coming to New York in 1905, Wise made front-page news by turning down an offer to serve as rabbi of Temple Emanu-El. When asked by an Emanu-El director to explain what Wise meant by a “free pulpit, ” wielding words as weapons Wise held forth as follows:

“I have in Oregon been among the leaders of a civic reform movement. Mr. Moses, your nephew, Mr. Herman, is to be a Tammany Hall candidate for a Supreme Court judgeship. I would if I were Emanu-El’s rabbi oppose his candidacy in and out of my pulpit. Mr. Guggenheim, as a member of the Child Labor Commission of the state of Oregon, if it ever came to be known that children were being employed in your mines, I would speak out against such wrong. And Mr. Marshall, you and your firm are counsel for the Equitable Life Assurance Company. Knowing that Charles Evans Hughes’s investigation of insurance companies in New York has been a very great service, I would in and out of my pulpit condemn the crimes committed by insurance.”

“How can a rabbi be vital and independent and helpful,” Wise added, “if he be tethered and muzzled?” A generation later Abba Hillel Silver would pose the very same question to Wise in his dealings as a Zionist with the FDR administration.
 

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Clash of the Titans: Stephen S. Wise vs. Abba Hillel Silver
Part Two: THE ROAD TO ZION

For American Jewish leaders of the first half of the 20th century, the battle for Zion and the struggle for civil rights was one and the same fight. Prompted by biblical precept and ethical imperative, the struggles proved long and arduous, in each case demanding titanic efforts and culminating in hard-won success. Zionism and justice were thus woven of the same divine fabric.

America’s principal Jewish advocate for social justice and interfaith relations for over forty years, Stephen S. Wise often spoke out from his Free Synagogue pulpit on behalf of the disadvantaged. As a founder of the NAACP, Wise vehemently attacked grandfather clauses blocking voting rights for Blacks, as well as discriminatory practices in hospitals, the armed forces, labor unions, and educational institutions.

Wise soon joined a likeminded circle of liberal-minded Jews largely of Central European heritage known as the Brandeis Group. In addition to Louis D. Brandeis, members included Henry Morgenthau, Nathan Straus, Julian Mack, Felix Frankfurter, Chaim Weizmann and a young Abba Hillel Silver who, as activist rabbi of Cleveland‘s Temple-Tifereth, had caught the group’s attention. The Brandeis Group supported Wise’s outspoken views on Black rights just as vehemently as it backed Harvard Law School Professor Frankfurter’s defense of Sacco and Vanzetti over the objections of Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, originator in the 1920s of Harvard’s quota system against Jews.

As a protestor of the abrogation of the rights of Jews, Wise showed great courage and determination in organizing a mass protest at Madison Square Garden shortly after Hitler’s election as chancellor. He did this despite dire warnings by Joseph Proskauer of the American Jewish Committee that "the blood of German Jewry" would be on Wise’s hands and the prediction by Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald Tribune that the protest would "undermine fatally the position of the liberal opposition in the persecuting countries."

In the matter of a Jewish homeland, Wise had to weigh his words carefully lest he alienate President Franklin Roosevelt with whom he had cultivated a warm relationship over the years. To attack Hitler was doing FDR a favor, as the Hollywood moguls were quick to discover, but to push to the same degree for a Jewish homeland might put undue stress on FDR’s ties to Palestine’s League of Nations-appointed mandate, Britain, for whom, unlimited Jewish migration was tantamount to causing major Arab disruptions. Wise at every opportunity did what he could to persuade FDR to openly support the right of Jews to freely migrate to a future Jewish homeland in Palestine. Ever equivocating, FDR never did.

Initially, Wise and Silver complemented one another as social activists and American Zionists -- Wise as the older sage, Silver as the younger disciple. Born in 1893 in Lithuania into a family of soap and cosmetics manufacturers, Silver was taken to the United States in 1902 and grew up on the Lower East Side where his father eked out a living as a Hebrew School teacher. In 1904, shortly after Theodor Herzl‘s death, Silver co-founded the Dr. Herzl Zion Club where, in the heart of Yiddish-speaking America, Silver and his chums conversed with one another in Hebrew. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College, Silver served as rabbi of Cleveland’s prestigious Temple-Tifereth from 1917 until his death in 1973. The first president of Cleveland’s Bureau of Jewish Education, Silver was also a member of the Chamber of Commerce until he left to side openly with labor.

Impressed with so exemplary a record, Stephen S. Wise and other prominent members of the Brandeis Group encouraged Silver to intensify his involvement in American Zionist affairs. He did so as a member of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) until 1921 when Chaim Weizmann was chosen over Louis D. Brandeis as its principal spokesman. Resigning, Silver and other Brandeis Group members resurfaced as the Palestine Development League (PDL) "for the social economic up building (sic) of Palestine so that it may be populated within a comparatively short time by a preponderance of self-supporting Jews." As head of the PDL, Silver grew adept at circumventing ZOA dictates.

In the wake of Brandeis’s defeat by Weizmann, Wise garnered support in Jewish America as a moderate Zionist. This was in sharp contrast with Palestinian militants like David Ben Gurion who, with Herzl to guide him, looked upon a Jewish state as the ultimate goal of the Jewish people.

In the pre-war years both Wise and Silver viewed the continuation of Jewish existence in the Diaspora and the establishment of a spiritual center in Palestine as two parallel tasks of equal importance for the Jewish people. Unlike Ben Gurion for whom time was running out, Wise and Silver predicted that Zion would come about "not by might or by power but by the spirit." All that changed in the war years, but not right away.
 

Clash of the Titans: Stephen S. Wise vs. Abba Hillel Silver
Part Three: The War Years

War is history's most powerful accelerant, bringing to a rapid boil those social and political forces relatively latent during peacetime. The outbreak of World War II and the subsequent horrors of the Holocaust thrust the fate of Zionism, the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, front and center onto the stage of American Jewish life and quickened the pace of its development. Inevitably, it would radically redraw the political landscape and shift the fortunes of the titans bestriding it.

As chairman of the United Palestine Appeal during the war years, Abba Hillel Silver served as America’s chief Zionist fundraiser. As such, Silver supported ZOA president Solomon Goldman as late as 1940 in opposing illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine, lest President Franklin Roosevelt’s relations with Britain be upset as it fought alone in the war against Nazi Germany.

Increasingly, Silver grew to resent Wise for gaining the ear of FDR only to have the President contradict his promises behind closed doors in his talks with the British. Silver gradually became convinced that only the threat of suffering politically would keep FDR from going back on his word to American Jewry.

Whereas Wise counseled moderation, Silver preferred a more militant approach. Instead of ingratiating himself with the administration, he envisioned the Democrats and Republicans outbidding each other for the Jewish vote. Thus in 1944, over Wise’s objections, Silver was instrumental in adding to each party’s platform the Taft-Wagner resolution pressing for abrogation of the 1939 white paper restrictions against Jewish immigration to Palestine and urging the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish commonwealth.

When David Ben Gurion visited America in 1940, Silver had already attracted a loyal legion of followers, known as the Silverites. Ben-Gurion, as chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Palestine Executive, met with Silver. Immediately, he recognized in Silver the right person to ignite the flame of Zionism in the hearts of Jewish America. Ben Gurion had been told by a trusted Zionist colleague, Moshe Shertok, that American Jews “show deep feeling and a basic natural loyalty for our cause, but this feeling is not utilized or put to practical ends.” Another trusted colleague, Eliahu Golomb, is quoted in Howard Sachar‘s “A History of the Jews of America” as saying to Ben Gurion around this same time: “Zionist feelings are much stronger among American Jews than it would appear. [However,] the American Jew thinks of himself first and foremost as an American citizen. Loyalty to America is now the supreme watchword.” With Silver at the helm, Ben Gurion hoped to change all that.

In 1941, with Ben Gurion‘s encouragement, the Cos Cob Formula advocating, “unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine which a Jewish majority may organize into an autonomous commonwealth” was signed at a meeting of prominent Jews in the Connecticut town of that name. Though vetoed by the American Jewish Committee, the Formula was resurrected at the Biltmore Conference in May 1942.

Ben Gurion and Silver set the tone for the Conference by calling unequivocally for a Jewish army and the transformation of postwar Palestine into an independent Jewish commonwealth. “The day of appeasement is passed,” the ZOA organ “The New Palestine ” declaimed. “Zionism must recover the missionary zeal of its early years.” Ben Gurion and Silver were in the ascendancy.

On August 1, 1942, less than three months after the Biltmore Conference, Gerhart Riegner, Swiss representative to the Wise-founded World Jewish Congress, learned of Hitler’s plan to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews, even specifying the instrument of murder as Zyklon B gas. Due to State Department interference, Wise was told nothing for nearly a month and then only in exchange for his promise to remain silent until the news was confirmed.

Wise did so for three months before holding a press conference. Of the nineteen largest newspapers in America, only ten, mostly in the East, reported the news at all, and then largely on the back pages. “I beg you, Mr. President,” Wise appealed to FDR, “as the recognized leader of the forces of democracy and humanity. to initiate the action which … may yet save the Jewish people from utter destruction.” Roosevelt’s response was typically vague, promising his government’s determination to help victims of persecution, insofar as “the burden of war permits.”
 

Clash of the Titans: Stephen S. Wise vs. Abba Hillel Silver
Part  Four: Selling Israel to America

The enormity of the Holocaust not only destroyed much of European Jewry but left humanity's moral compass in shambles. Time-tested responses no longer proved adequate against state-sponsored genocide. Careful deliberation, diplomatic decorum, backdoor channel--the cherished posture of American Jewish leadership in less cataclysmic times--could scarcely serve in the face of gas chambers and crematoria. Little wonder that few reputations remained intact in the horrific wake of World War II.

In November, 1942 Stephen S. Wise brought news of the Holocaust to America before pleading with FDR “to initiate the action which … may yet save the Jewish people from utter destruction.” Roosevelt’s response was typically vague, promising his government’s determination to help victims of persecution, insofar as “the burden of war permits.”

Some months later at an American Jewish conference of Zionist and non-Zionist leaders held at the Waldorf-Astoria, Abba Hillel Silver launched into a savage attack of Wise. Berating him for sacrificing “principle” to expediency, Silver called Wise’s brand of compromise for the sake of unity a sham and the issue of free immigration a snare because of its dependence upon the good will of the great powers.

Pounding the lectern, Silver went on to declare: “There is but one solution for national homelessness. That is a national home. … From the infested, typhus-ridden ghetto of Warsaw, from the death-block of Nazi-occupied lands, where myriads of our people are awaiting execution by the slow or the quick method, from a hundred concentration camps which befoul the map of Europe, from the pitiful ranks of our wandering hosts over the entire face of the earth, comes the cry: Enough! There must be a final end to this, a sure and certain end.” With this speech Silver captured the hearts and minds of Jewish America.

Though Silver and Wise continued to co-chair the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), America’s premier Zionist agency during World War II, Silver was clearly in charge. In October, 1943, Silver organized mass meetings, surprisingly similar to Wise’s anti-Nazi protests in the thirties, in New York and other large cities. The next month 118 rallies were held throughout the nation. Yet Roosevelt’s indecision continued unabated. A month before his death, FDR met for two hours with Bernard Baruch and declined once more to publicly support open migration to Palestine.

Undeterred, Silver through AZEC continued rallying U. S. support of a sovereign Jewish state. In a matter of months, Silver won over a large sector of American public opinion. Meanwhile, AZEC was assisting the "illegal" immigration of survivors to Palestine and their struggle for a Jewish state.

Though Silver’s militant Zionism often worked, occasionally it backfired, as during a July 1946 White House meeting when Silver pounded his fist on President Truman’s desk. From then on the president refused to see him. Had not cooler heads prevailed, Truman might not have come to the fateful decision of recognizing Israel, by which time the careers of both Wise and Silver had been eclipsed.

Wise by now was too ill to do much of anything, and as for Silver, even though he spoke eloquently on behalf of a Jewish state before the UN in 1947, “he and other diaspora Zionists,“ notes Mark Raider in an invaluable collection of essays edited by him, Jonathan Sarna and Ronald Zweig, “were soundly defeated by the political machine of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.” Moreover, in the eyes of a now Federation-dominated American Jewish consensus, Silver had become extraneous.

Their political eclipse notwithstanding, we have not done proper justice to the memories of Wise or Silver, for as much as any other leaders of Jewish America of the twentieth century they strengthened our confidence in ourselves by expanding our social and political consciousness.

This essay was originally published in 2004.