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There is a scene in Mike Gold’s 1930 novel Jews without Money that links the many strands of left-wing Jewish identity formation to political Zionism at midcentury. Mikey, the novel’s narrator and proletarian icon for the “red decade” of the 1930s, travels with his father, Herman, to the outer suburbs of Brooklyn to buy what his father hopes will be a suburban dream house. Herman, a Romanian Jewish house painter, has been offered the house through his associations with the “Zionist leader” and “big dry goods merchant” Baruch Goldfarb—a man Herman believes will rescue him from a life of poverty.1 Herman joins a gaudy Jewish lodge, full of ritual and costume, pays substantial dues to Goldfarb’s burial association, even when Goldfarb ignores Herman’s repeated requests for a loan to restart his tailoring shop. Believing that his association with wealthy Jews is his ticket to success, Herman becomes friendly with an associate of Goldfarb’s, a real estate agent, and agrees to move his family to the suburbs, where he imagines he will no longer be an “East Side beggar.”
While the above scene is Jews without Money’s lone comment on Zionism, it is worth pausing to consider what Gold’s sly intervention on the topic suggests about his view of Jewish colonialism in mandate Palestine. Goldfarb is introduced as “a Zionist leader” who not only cheats Herman out of his money through his burial association but also inducts Herman into the reactionary political formation of his lodge: organizing vote rigging and labor spies, and aligning Jewish workers with the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie. That Zionism is further associated with Herman’s desire to move out to the suburbs is also telling: Mikey’s class-conscious mother wants to remain on the multiethnic Chrystie Street, rather than move to the isolated and assimilationist suburbs. “God’s country” of the suburbs—a not-so-subtle dig at God’s country of Zion—is associated not only with bourgeois con men but also with whiteness, assimilationism, and class betrayal.
Ultimately, Herman’s acts as a labor spy for Mr. Cohen can be read as a tragic just deserts, as Herman pitches to his near death from a faulty catwalk at Mr. Cohen’s worksite that might have been fixed had a union been allowed to organize. Herman’s dreams...