Summary
Zionist leader, later a post-Holocaust president of the World Zionist Organization, whose recollections Lenni Brenner uses both for Chaim Weizmann’s refusal to fight for Diaspora Jewish rights in the 1930s and, in his Autobiography, for Edvard Benes’s 1935 warning that closes the book’s appraisal of the Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement) (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.14, p.59).
Details
- Goldmann described fierce arguments between Weizmann and Stephen Wise: Weizmann rejected every interest beyond Zionist work and could not spare time for the World Jewish Congress or the fight for Jewish rights, while Wise argued the Diaspora and Palestine were “part and parcel of the same problem” (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.14).
- Goldmann, with other knowledgeable Zionists, saw Lewis Namier — former Political Secretary of the WZO, who prefaced Arthur Ruppin’s Jews in the Modern World with an ‘understanding’ of anti-Semitism — as an intense Jewish anti-Semite (PDF p.53-54).
- After the war and the Holocaust, a contrite Goldmann, “mortified at his own shameless role during the Hitler epoch”, wrote of his 1935 meeting with Czech Foreign Minister Edvard Benes, who shouted that by reacting with nothing but half-hearted gestures the Jews were endangering their future and human rights all over the world: “What matters in a situation of this sort is a people’s moral stance, its readiness to fight back instead of helplessly allowing itself to be massacred” (PDF p.59).
Related pages
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement), Chaim Weizmann, Stephen Wise