Mike Gold, born Itzok “Irwin” Granich, was perhaps the foremost practitioner and promoter of the proletarian literary movement in the US. As a founding editor of the leading left-wing arts journal during the Popular Front, the New Masses, Gold became the cultural arbiter of literary taste for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), pugnaciously denouncing both high modernism and middlebrow literature alike.
And to say Gold was merely a novelist is something of an understatement: as Alan Wald and others have noted, “creative literary practice” took precedence over other forms of cultural output for those in the Communist orbit. For Gold to denounce Zionism in such terms, as both the editor of the most prestigious socialist arts journal of the era and the most popular Jewish literary figure of the Popular Front era, suggests that it is more than just the idle opinion of a lone eccentric.
For Gold’s Jewish readers, the idea that a “Zionist leader” is a petty bourgeois scammer who ensnares gullible working-class house painters into his utopian schemes would be immediately recognizable, part of the left-wing common sense of the era.
Criticism of Zionism was common on the Jewish left in the 1930s and 1940s, so common that a historian of Zionist cultural literature could find only one left-wing Jewish author, Meyer Levin, who took up pro- Zionist themes (and his novels were widely panned).
As Yuri Slezkine writes, of the three Jewish “Promised Lands” of the twentieth century, citizenship in the United States, immigration to Israel, and the Bolshevik Revolution (that is, assimilation, nationalism, or Communism), Communism remained by far the most popular solution to the “Jewish question” in the decades between the wars.
Or as writer and Communist Party critic Robert Gessner put it bluntly in New Masses, “In America, about one percent of America’s Jews are Zionist.” Derided as nationalists, imperialists, and the petty bourgeoisie, Zionists were a small and often-mocked minority within the Jewish socialist left, so much so a recently revived Yiddish song ridicules Zionists as “little” and “foolish,” out of touch with “the workers’ reality.”
While there has never not been an anti-Zionist Jewish left, that Zionists could be referred to as small-minded idiots, relegated to the ash heap of history, is clearly a sentiment one must regard—in our current conjuncture—with wonder.
The erasure of this left-wing, working-class, anti-Zionist common sense can not only be laid at the feet of Israel and its defenders. Or rather, its erasure is complex and, as with Mike Gold’s prescient trip to the suburbs, part of a larger ideological and material project that included an incomplete but nonetheless wide incorporation of immigrant Jewish life into dominant American ideas of race, politics, and identity.