Today is 9/11

Irony of ironies, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in London’s Charing Cross Road, browsing the shelves of a modest Islamic book shop.

There were only a few people in the store. And I noticed that the counter clerk seemed to be smiling enigmatically as he listened to what I assumed was a weird tape-recording of a man who sounded like ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings. Jennings was describing a fantastic occurrence; something about a plane having smashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.
Curiosity got the better of me and I asked the clerk what he was listening to. “The radio – a plane has gone into the World Trade Center,” he politely replied.

I left the shop and hurried to the tube station feeling discombobulated. Given that I had spent several decades of my work life in the vicinity of the WTC, it would have been easier emotionally, at that moment, to have been back in New York City where I grew up, or at home in Jerusalem.
Watching events unfold in London only added to my sense of surrealism.


FIVE YEARS and a day later, the debate about how 9/11 should be understood rages on. From my Jerusalem perch, here’s how this native New Yorker thinks we should conceptualize 9/11:
President George W. Bush isn’t the problem. Progressive Europe’s punching-bag may have exacerbated matters by mishandling the “war on terror,” but obsessive Bush-bashing is an extravagance conscientious folks really can’t afford.

The real problem is the Islamist threat.

It’s this generation’s misfortune that Islamic civilization has been co-opted by those who would exploit its imperialistic and chauvinistic values rather than its more enlightened and reformist traits.

Muslim civilization today is violently catalyzed by antipathy to Western modernity. It’s taken Bush a while to identify the character of the conflict. He still slips back into blurred talk about the “war on terror.” Yet as we all appreciate, “terror” is a strategy – not the enemy itself.
The enemy is militant, rapacious Islam.

Bush sidetracked the war against militant Islam with the ill-conceived, poorly conducted campaign in Iraq. Because of it the West has almost allowed Afghanistan to slip back into Taliban hands.

Bush’s continuing failure to recognize that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time; that until he made it so, Iraq was not a pillar of the Islamist threat, is lamentable.

So too, are America’s losses, and the administration’s misguided obsession with “democratizing” the Middle East. This is a region where popular support invariably flows to the radicals, not to Western-oriented reformers.

But at the end of the day, Bush mishandled the Islamist threat; he didn’t create it. And it will not go away when America elects its next president, or when British Prime Minister Tony Blair leaves 10 Downing Street.

WE MUST NOT give the enemy the rope with which to hang us. We need to find the right balance between the rights we as citizens of the West enjoy versus giving our government the capacity to win. Only a wise, accountable and enlightened political – and judicial – leadership can navigate such a ground-breaking course.

It is essential, for the morale of Western society as well as for the effectiveness of our struggle, that peacetime notions of civil liberties be adapted to meet the crisis we face.

At airports, for instance, such an approach translates into profiling: We need to admit that an elderly African American grandmother from Harlem is less likely to pose a security threat to international aviation than a 20-something British-born Muslim of Pakistani heritage who’s just come back from a year of religious studies in Peshawar. In failing to connect the simplest of dots we are sacrificing enduring values of liberty and tolerance for fleeting political correctness.


JUST BECAUSE there’s a war of civilizations doesn’t mean that every regional conflict involving Muslims can be subsumed under it.

We should avoid self-fulfilling prophesies. Any steps that can be taken to lessen the religious aspect of confrontations with Muslim society should be pursued – not to delude ourselves, but as a tactic in conflict management.

Militant Islam is heterogenous. Iranian and Wahhabi Islamists share an antipathy for the West – and for each other.

We’ve already seen the Palestinian Arab conflict turned into a religious struggle with the emergence of Hamas – making it even more intractable. Now we’re witnessing the Kurdish struggle in Turkey (and elsewhere) becoming transformed into a religious endeavor. That’s bad for the Jews (and not so great for the Kurds, either).

As much as we need to recognize the war of civilizations, we must not so relish the paradigm that we become blinded to alternative forms of conflict analysis.

Palestinian religious fundamentalism, for instance, is plainly part of the larger Islamist struggle. But for practical purposes, operating purely within that framework is counter-productive.
Once can imagine Hamas reaching a point where it decides that the Palestinian interest dictates the movement enter into a long-term hudna with Israel. Clergy could easily be found to provide the necessary religious imprimatur.

Operationally, we need to de-link our struggle from the larger civilizational war, and exploit those Palestinian religious (and political) sensibilities that would allow a long-term cease-fire.
Pragmatically, we need to find ways to bridge the religious gap, using the language of religion to find ways of accommodation.


LET’S NOT frighten ourselves to death about the terrorist menace. It’s real and scary enough.
But for the most part, this is a slow-burn conflict. We’re going to need the stamina to confront it over the long haul.

Authorities in the West should not be afraid to expose probable terrorist plots, but they ought to temper such readiness with a recognition that their credibility is at stake. For instance, of the 417 people charged with terrorism in the US since 2001, only 143 have actually been indicted, and only 38 convicted.

If you cry wolf too often, folks might discount the genuine peril they face. On the other hand, if authorities fail to expose plots that are real, though hard to prove in court, they risk allowing the conspiracies to come to fruition.

The political system (and that includes the media) needs to adapt to the nature of this unique war in which subversive groups that support the enemy and engage in espionage or sabotage really are in our midst. And we must find a way to balance threat alertness with paralyzing fear-mongering.


FINALLY, WE need a united front and wise leaders. Militant Islam’s war against Western civilization is not aimed at Neo-cons or the Christian Right alone.
It also targets people who summer at Martha’s Vineyard, live in North London or on the Upper West Side, and subscribe to The New York Review and The Guardian. Its war is aimed at the entire range of Western values: from conservative to liberal, and from religious to secular.
We are all infidels.

Regrettably, the Muslim world is all too united in its battle against Judeo-Christian civilization. Only a brave Muslim minority opposes the Islamists outright. Such solidarity in the Muslim camp demands greater cohesion on the Western side.

As the war evolves, as Bush and Blair fade from the scene, the real essence of the struggle may become apparent for some of those now blinded by myopic hatred of Bush.

Trading IDF soldiers for Arab terrorists

For the good of the many

The headline in Sunday's mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot caught my eye: "800 prisoners to be released in exchange for Gilad Shalit."


Shalit was taken captive, and two IDF soldiers were killed, during a daring Hamas attack launched via a tunnel into Israel from Gaza on June 25.


While the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert denies it, there are reasons to believe that Jerusalem is planning to trade 800-1,000 Palestinian prisoners (excluding Marwan Barghouti, say some reports, including him, say others) for Shalit. The proposed exchange would take place over a period of three months. It's a deal being brokered by Fatah elements close to PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Egypt, acting as go-betweens for Hamas.


There are some 9,000 Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons. I'm sure a handful are as pure as the driven snow, but most are heartless killers (or their facilitators). People like Amana Muna, who lured a naive Israeli teenager named Ofir Rahum via the Internet to a rendezvous with death in Ramallah; or Ahlam Tamimi, the guide of the suicide bomber who blew up Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant in 2001, murdering 15 Israelis.

Days after Shalit's kidnapping, the prime minister said something that made me proud I voted for his Kadima Party: "Israel will not give in to extortion by the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government, which are led by murderous terrorist organizations. We will not conduct any negotiations on the release of prisoners. The Palestinian Authority bears full responsibility for the welfare of Gilad Shalit, and for returning him safe and sound to Israel."


With that as a basis, Israel launched Operation Summer Rain, a series of military incursions into Gaza - the first since disengagement. In roughly three months the IDF has justifiably taken a heavy toll on Palestinian infrastructure (a power station, bridges, training camps and government offices - not to mention more than 200 Palestinians killed; mostly gunmen but, regrettably, civilians too).

True, the IDF has failed to track down Shalit - but we've made them pay dearly for the kidnapping and killings. The Hamas government is hurting; so is the Palestinian polity which elected it.


THEN, ON July 12, Hizbullah attacked across the Lebanese border, killing eight IDF soldiers and capturing Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.

Once again Olmert made me proud when, in a seminal speech before the Knesset on July 17, he declared: "Citizens of Israel, there are moments in the life of a nation when it is compelled to look directly into the face of reality, and say: No more! And I say to everyone: No more! Israel will not be held hostage - not by terror gangs, or by a terrorist authority, or by any sovereign state."

What ensued was a month of difficult war in which 117 IDF soldiers were killed. Because we took a justifiably tough stance, Hizbullah launched 4,000 rockets against northern Israel. Forty-two civilians were killed and over 4,000 wounded. It will take the North years to recover from the damage to homes, farms and forests.

Hizbullah strongholds in Beirut and south Lebanon were decimated. Enemy reports claim that some 1,000 Lebanese non-combatants died in the war. Hundreds of Hizbullah gunmen were reportedly killed. Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah remains in hiding.

BUT NOW it turns out that negotiations are also under way, via a German intermediary, to ransom Regev and Goldwasser in return for 27 Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails, plus the bodies of a number of Hizbullah fighters killed in the war.

The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday that the government is not ruling out freeing Samir Kuntar - responsible for the brutal 1979 murders of three members of the Haran family in Nahariya, as well as policeman Eliahu Shahar - as part of the deal.

Shlomo Goldwasser argues that "anything is justified" to get his son released. That's an understandable position for a father. But it's not the position a prime minister should take.
How does Olmert plan to explain his about-face to the parents of the soldiers killed trying to free Goldwasser and Regev? What will he tell the Terror Victims Association, which has warned against a prisoner swap?

We've been down this road before. In 1985 Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC traded three Israeli soldiers captured in the 1982 Lebanon war for over 1,000 Palestinian terrorists. One of them was Ahmed Yassin. Many analysts believe that the Jibril release helped set the stage for the first intifada in 1988.

In 2004, in one of the murkier exchanges conducted, some 400 Arab terrorists (and the remains of 59 others) were exchanged for "businessman" Elhanan Tennenbaum and the bodies of three IDF soldiers.


IF OLMERT'S pledge that Israel would not be held hostage doesn't preclude ransoming our soldiers for terrorists - what exactly did it mean?

One could argue that an Israeli military retaliation (against Hamas and Hizbullah) was called for even if we planned to trade prisoners for kidnapped soldiers all along. In that case, however, our actions should have been more carefully calibrated. Instead we acted as if a new-found principle was at stake: that Kadima, unlike Likud and Labor, wouldn't cave in to terrorists. And on the basis of that principle a million Israelis stoically accepted a hellish summer.

One might also argue that both Hizbullah and Hamas have learned that although Israel does eventually cave in when faced with a ransom demand, Jerusalem will exact a heavy price before throwing in the towel. But couldn't such a deterrent message have been sent - especially on the northern front - with greater dexterity?

I have no problem with trading "fresh" Palestinian prisoners - taken since Gilad Shalit's capture, like members of the Hamas-led Palestine National Council; or Lebanese and Hizbullah POWs (and corpses) taken during the war itself. But anything beyond that would be a clear reversal of Olmert's principled, indeed revolutionary, stand.

THIS IS not one of those grey areas. Either we went to war because a principle was at stake, or it wasn't. Either we trade hostages for prisoners, or we don't.

History shows that every time we free killers, at least some of them go back to their line of work. And giving terrorists their liberty lifts the enemy's spirits. Arab society can more easily tolerate "martyrs" than the lengthy incarceration of husbands, sons, brothers and daughters.
Don't we want to undermine enemy morale - not bolster it?

Granted, we've meted out sufficient punishment to make Hizbullah and Hamas think twice before embarking on further cross-border hostage-taking attacks. But at the end of the day, the temptation to try again remains.

There's another principle at stake: Palestinians convicted of killing Israeli civilians are criminals. They should not be exchanged as prisoners of war.

It makes sense that Palestinians and Hizbullah Shi'ites want their kinfolk released. That desire should serve as an incentive for them to negotiate an end to the conflict. But releasing under duress Arab prisoners while the war is in progress only encourages the Palestinian "resistance."
As for the families of the captured IDF soldiers, they should be made to understand that the good of the many must outweigh the need - no matter how heartfelt and understandable - of the few.

Today is 27 Rajab

It’s been a hard, tense summer and many of us share a lingering feeling that our troubles are not over yet. The indecisive war with Hizbullah has revived existential worries that are never far from the surface.

It doesn’t help that the renowned Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis recently raised the possibility that Shi’ite Islamists in Iran will do something nasty on the 27th day of the Muslim month of Rajab – which this year falls on August 22 – because the date is religiously propitious in the struggle against infidels.

While I’m hopeful we’ll all make it to August 23, this sort of gloomy talk makes me think maybe we Jews shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket. Maybe – for lots of reasons – Theodor Herzl was wrong in advocating the negation of the Diaspora.

The longer I’m in Israel, the more appreciative I become of the Diaspora. It’s not just the extraordinary outpouring of emotional and financial support we’ve received in the course of the war with Hizbullah; it’s also a recognition that Israeli society needs the cross-pollination offered by a healthy relationship with a pluralistic Jewish world.

And it’s not just the warning from Bernard Lewis that got me thinking along these lines. This week also marks the first Jewish settlement in Manhattan, in 1654, as well as Herzl’s arrival in Basle to prepare for the first World Zionist Congress in 1897.

The Diaspora came to North America when Jacob Barsimson of Holland arrived on the Pear Tree precisely 352 years ago tomorrow, August 22. In September 1654 an additional 23 Jewish settlers arrived in New Netherlands, probably from the West Indies, on a ship called the Saint Catarina.

The “diversification” of Jewish civilization to the New World had begun in earnest, and a golden era of American Jewry was on the horizon. Whatever the many challenges faced by US Jews today, they do not detract from the community’s unique contribution to the larger Jewish narrative.


AS FOR Theodor Herzl, he arrived in Basle on August 25 to prepare for the Congress (which opened on August 29) and brought together some 200 delegates from 20 countries, including the United States. The Congress proclaimed that “Zionism seeks to secure for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally secured, home in Palestine.”

It is sobering that 58 years after Israeli independence what we thought was “publicly recognized” and “legally secured” apparently isn’t; that assurances offered by the “international community” don’t seem to have much of a shelf-life.

In his address to the Congress, Herzl forecast that once the Jewish state was established world Jewry would be transplanted to Israel, and the Diaspora would wither away: “Those who are able or who wish to be assimilated will remain behind and be absorbed.”

In this way, anti-Semitism (caused, Herzl was certain, by Jewish statelessness) would gradually decrease as Jews either assimilated or immigrated to Palestine.
“Thus it is,” he said, “that we understand and anticipate the solution of the Jewish problem.”

Not quite.

Far from putting an end to Jew-hatred, Israel has tragically – and metaphysically – become a lightening-rod for Jew-haters.

Over the years we’ve had no luck in fighting – or talking – our way out of the existential conundrum we find ourselves in. And all the while, an amalgamation of well-meaning friends, deceitful allies and intransigent enemies urge us to withdraw to vulnerable armistice lines that are even more dangerous today than they were when established in 1949.


ALL THIS makes it hard to be sanguine about Israel’s future. Herzl, for all his genius, misjudged the nature of the Jewish problem as well as the utility of the Diaspora.
It turns out that one of his critics, Asher Zvi Ginsberg – better known as Ahad Ha’am – was in some respects a better prognosticator than Herzl.

Ahad Ha’am, the father of “cultural Zionism,” envisioned the Zionist state as the spiritual home of Jewish civilization. But he accepted that there would always be a Diaspora, which was fine by him so long as it maintained firm Jewish values.

Ahad Ha’am was no wimp. He favored Jewish self-defense and actively opposed efforts to establish the Jewish homeland in any place but Zion. Yet he was by nature a pragmatic pessimist with little faith in the political promises of the international
community.

Moreover, where Herzl was oblivious, Ahad Ha’am anticipated that the aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs would have to be addressed.

In a sense, the man was also an elitist. He didn’t want just anybody making aliya. He wanted immigrants to be adequately prepared intellectually for the sacrifices life in the Jewish state would demand. He himself came here in 1922.

For him, creating a Jewish state was not an end in itself. He expected it would help Judaism in its encounter with modernity. As opposed to the Jewishly illiterate Herzl, Ahad Ha’am was identified with Jewish tradition, though also ambivalent about it.


I’M STILL sentimentally attached to Herzl. But especially after the summer we’ve been through, and the likely troubles ahead, don’t we Jews need to reduce our risk and diversify – demographically, culturally and politically? After all, ideological purity isn’t much use to a country at risk of annihilation.

Looking beyond Rajab 27, the pragmatic pessimism championed by Ahad Ha’am may well serve strategic Jewish interests better than the messianic optimism of Herzl.

View from the Reichstag

Europe's world is one of live and let live


Berlin is a city embarrassingly easy to fall in love with, notwithstandingeverything we know about its history. London, linguistically and politically familiar to an American-born Israeli visitor, is strangely more off-putting.

But whatever their differences, both cities are equally oblivious to whatappears obvious from Jerusalem: Islamists have embarked on a multi-front war against Western civilization. I don't blame the Europeans for not connecting the dots. The hostilities against our shared civilization have been declared in so veiled and anarchic a manner that Europe has a reasonable basis for being in denial.

Today's free and mostly-thriving Europeans are as laid-back as the Islamists are mobilized. They feel they have paid their dues. Europe was the battlefield for the anti-Nazi struggle, while throughout the Cold War the threat of nuclear hostilities hung eerily over both London and Berlin.

So instead of obsessing over the intentions of Muslim fanatics, today'sBritish and German elites are exercised about global warming, banana fungi, and how to construct non-judgmental societies.

Understandably, it's too painful for them to ponder the possibility that, 60 years after Hitler and not two decades after the Soviets were pushed into the dustbin of history,Western civilization is being threatened again.


YOU WOULDN'T sense that peril lurks from taking a stroll through the streets of Berlin. Walk your feet off, as I did, from the Fernsehturm (the giant radio tower built by the East German communists) to Checkpoint Charlie, and from the Tiergarten (Berlin¹s central park) to Potsdamer Platz, and you can¹t stop marveling at how livable and civilized the place is.

Despite their enviable underground transportation system, thousands of Berliners were taking advantage of the sunny weather to commute by bicycle. At a busy four-way intersection near my hotel automobile drivers yielded politely to each other, and to bicyclists and pedestrians.

Europe's world is one of live, and let live.

Only steps from the Brandenburg Gate stands the new, architecturally contentious Holocaust memorial. Jewish-interest sites, including the Judisches Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, and the partially rebuilt Neue Synagogue are filled with mostly non-Jewish visitors. To say that today's generation of Germans has been politically socialized to remember the Holocaust is an understatement.

But their socialization has, understandably, focused on the lessons that they as Germans can derive. The preeminent Jewish lessons of the Shoah ­-- that the Jewish people must have a secure homeland, and that Jews must never again depend wholly on the goodwill of strangers ­ are not part of Germany's universalistic Holocaust curriculum.


I'D ARRANGED to meet up with a young German at the Reichstag parliament building, a formidable Middle East specialist whom I had met a few months earlier in Jerusalem. He is a senior staffer with the opposition Green Party and has good Hebrew (having studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's overseas school) as well as a solid command of Arabic.

The Reichstag, now crowned by a glass dome, is a perfect venue for viewing Berlin¹s skyline. An unintended consequence, however, is that in broiling weather the dome feels like the interior of a hothouse.

Wilting as I climbed, I heard from my contact that his party was vigorously urging Chancellor Angela Merkel's government to use its influence with Washington to press for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hizbullah. This was even before the Kana tragedy claimed 28 civilian lives.

I protested that we'd hardly achieved any of our war aims: think of the message that an unfavorable and premature halt in the fighting would send to the Islamists, and especially to Iran. Showing weakness would also undermine Germany's efforts to keep Teheran from going nuclear.

Sensing no progress, I tried a different tack: A bad outcome could finishEhud Olmert politically, and he certainly would not be replaced by anyone more accommodating regarding the Palestinians.

My arguments were unpersuasive. What could be more right-wing than what Olmert was doing to Lebanon's infrastructure? Violence, said the German Middle East expert, can only make things worse; you can't achieve your goals militarily. Negotiation is the only way forward.


FUNDAMENTALLY, German elites see the Palestinian issue as the crux of the Middle East conundrum and Hizbullah as a sideshow.

They are resolutely convinced that the Palestinian Arabs are not out to destroy Israel and that our two peoples are destined, with time and patience, to live peaceably sideby side. Indeed, West Germany first invoked the idea of self-determination for the Palestinians back in 1974.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the Middle East, Germany walks on egg shells.

"As Germans," Merkel said last week "we should proceed in this region with utmost caution."

Nor does Berlin want to see NATO involved in our region.

And Germany is unlikely to be part of any European force stationed on Israel's border (though the possibility of Bundeswehr troops patrolling Lebanon's boundary with Syria, to combat Hizbullah arms smuggling, is only slightly moreplausible).

The German Jewish leadership is also not keen on Berlin'sparticipation in any multinational force for Lebanon.


FOR THEIR part, the Greens are disappointed that Merkel, a ChristianDemocrat, explicitly blamed Hizbullah for the war but hasn't also unambiguously joined France's Jacques Chirac in demanding an immediat cease-fire.

In more recent days, her spokesman did complain that Israeli bombing raids have been "exaggerated."

Merkel's Social Democrat Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has, however, made the requisite European noises about the need for Israel's response to the Hizbullah threat to be "proportionate."

The war is drawing attention to the inherent foreign policy differences among the coalition partners.

Steinmeier, incidentally, has valuable experience in the region, having worked with Lebanese terrorist factions on past prisoner exchanges. It would not surprise if the Germans were now engaged in helpful behind-the-scenes efforts to bring Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev home from Hizbullah captivity.

Berlin's less than robust support for Israel in the current conflict is disappointing, but not unexpected.

Germany does not want to champion Israel's cause inside the EU.

The German government's overriding national interest is to toe the consensus line of the 25-member union.

Still, 40 years after the establishment of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel, it's distressing that the best one can say about Berlin's policies is that they handily beat those of Paris.

But as the Germans see it, they are trying to be helpful.

Committed to the principle that nations can negotiate their way out of virtually any tight spot, late last week the Foreign Ministry in Berlin tried to mobilize support within the EU to bribe Syria into breaking with Iran (and its Hizbullah proxy) by offering Damascus duty-free access to the EU market.

[Steinmeier is in Israel today having spent yesterday in Beirut]


BACK IN parched London, it was almost painful to behold Prime Minister TonyBlair¹s isolation.

He was being unremittingly derided not just by the media and the Conservative opposition, but by his own cabinet ministers for refusing to break with Washington over George Bush's refusal to demand an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon.

And yet, together with Germany, Britain had been striving mightily to keep the EU from forcing Israel into an untimely cease-fire.

The formulators of public opinion in Britain so critical of Blair range narrowly from befuddled moral relativists to implacable opponents of the Zionist enterprise.

My European sojourn reminded me that nations pursue policies based on a combination of ethos, domestic and regional influences, power politics, historical perceptions and economic interests.

That being the case, there is no magic bullet, no public relations scheme, and no appeal to sentiment that could transform the policies of London or Berlin into those of Washington.

What ultimately turned the tide in US perceptions ­-- what makes this White House different from Ronald Reagan's during the 1982 Lebanon War ­-- was 9/11.

Despite German authorities' worry that Islamists are now preparing an operation on their soil, and the attacks already carried out in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005, European decision makers prefer not to connect the dots.

I envy them them their serenity.

Upton Sinclair, guileless muckraker

After a day of lessons at a nearby public school, Mr. Israel (I never learned his given name) would come to our yeshiva on New York’s Lower East Side to teach English to a somnolent 10th grade.
He wore an oversize black yarmulke – provided by his employers – over a receding hairline. His bohemian credentials were conveyed by his longish black hair, goatee and ubiquitous turtleneck worn under his shirt.

I recall looking forward to his arrival, four afternoons a week; he was like a herald from another planet. Our enforced insularity otherwise sheltered us from the rebellious early 1970s.
I was reminded of Mr. Israel by the publication this month of Upton Sinclair, Radical Innocent by Anthony Arthur, a retired Los Angeles English professor. The connection: Mr. Israel had assigned Sinclair’s most well-known work, The Jungle, to our class, and its message made a powerful impression on me.

The Jungle is, to paraphrase the afterward by Robert B. Downs in my 60-cent Signet edition, a saga of unrelieved tragedy, pessimism and despair.

Published 101 years ago (originally in installments in The Appeal to Reason magazine), the book is both a novel and a muckraking work of socialist propaganda. It tells the heroic story of Jurgis Rudkus, a new Lithuanian immigrant to Chicago at the turn of the century, whose American dream turned into a nightmare as he labored in the horrific meat-packing industry. Sinclair described the factories as “the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place.”


THE NOVEL is the graphic account of how Jurgis and his family are relentlessly victimized by the heartless capitalists who own the slaughterhouses, by the strike-breaking police who are in their pockets, and by the merciless landlords who feed off this environment of exploitation.
The downtrodden workers persevere as long as they don’t admit – most importantly, to themselves – that the capitalists are defeating them. But even the resourceful Jurgis is eventually crushed, his family left to starve, his wife forced into prostitution, his infant son drowned in a stinking pool outside his wretched shack.

“Nowhere does Sinclair spare the squeamish reader in his realistic portrayal of the filth, the stench and cruelty of the stockyards,” summarizes Downs in his afterward.

At the end of the day, writes Sinclair of the workers, “They are beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside… They had dreamed of freedom; of a chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean, to see their child[ren] grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone – it would never be!”

With the realization that under capitalism defeat was inevitable, Jurgis concludes that socialism is the workers’ only salvation.


THIS WAS precisely the kind of straightforward morality tale, having clearly-defined good and bad guys and not a whole lot of nuance, that any adolescent with a budding social conscience could appreciate. Maybe that’s why Mr. Israel assigned the book.

When Sinclair wrote The Jungle socialism was still a unblemished ideology. Lenin, Stalin, the Soviet gulags and the Khmer Rouge killing fields were all in the future.

So I’ll excuse Sinclair’s naivete when, toward the end of the book, he rhapsodizes about a messianic era in which a class-conscious proletariat rises up to create a world in which the means of production are commonly owned and democratic management provides the necessities of life; an era when the labor of humanity belongs to humanity.

Sinclair wasn’t just a dreamer. His expose led the US Congress, in 1906, to pass the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act providing sanitary standards those of us privileged to live in the developed world now take for granted.

But Sinclair didn’t want to reform the system, he wanted it overthrown.


IN A telephone interview, I asked Prof. Arthur how long it took Sinclair, who died in 1968, aged 90, to accept that the answer to “extreme capitalism” was not “extreme socialism.”

Sinclair stuck with his dogma, the author of Upton Sinclair, Radical Innocent told me, through the 1939 Soviet-Nazi Pact, and probably didn’t have serious doubts until the early 1950s.

Perhaps that was to be expected.

The problem with ideological politics – and not just for socialists – is that it places you in a philosophical straitjacket. On the one hand, ideology gives you a coherent set of beliefs which provide meaning and context to events, personalities, and policies. On the other hand, it can rob you of the ability to creatively analyze the changing world, to value gradualism, to see nuance, to embrace solutions at variance with your original tenets.

Sinclair, who has been described as both a humorless crank and an idealist, used the proceeds of The Jungle to establish a socialist commune in New Jersey. He unsuccessfully sought election to the US House of Representatives and the governor’s mansion in California.

Eventually he devoted himself to writing a series of 11 novels featuring the hero Lanny Budd, illegitimate son of an arms dealer (the third volume won Sinclair a Pulitzer Prize).
All told, Sinclair wrote over 80 books and probably went to his grave still believing that if only socialism prevailed, so would the natural goodness of man.


SURPRISINGLY, The Jungle is still selling (it ranks in the top 2,000, give or take, on Amazon’s bestseller list). And I wonder: Is Mr. Israel still out there assigning Sinclair to a new batch of high-school students?

Can the book really speak to Generation Y? Perhaps. It’s not that hard to read between the lines and view the Chicago stockyards of 100 years ago as symbolizing the evils of globalization today.
I just hope students who make that connection realize that, as history shows, the solution to “extreme capitalism” is not necessarily its opposite.

The further along the road you are from high school, the more you realize that political life isn’t a straightforward morality tale with clearly-defined good and bad guys; and that the serious work of politics demands thinking in shades other than black and white.