Isaac Brosilow reflects on the complex nature of radical political legacies and what it takes to write history honestly
I
I found the newspapers in a box in a research library. “Chutzpah,” in groovy letters, printed on brittle, yellowed paper. A hand-drawn border of broken chain links framed a picture of kippah-wearing protesters surrounding the Pentagon. A familiar quote from Hillel the Elder graced the corner of the front page: “If I am not for me, who will be…” This was issue number one of Chutzpah from 1972. I spent hours with the stack of newspapers. When I got back to my apartment, I lay down on the floor and buzzed with excitement.
II
The summer I came across Chutzpah, I took my first crack at writing about the history of the small collective of Jewish radicals in Chicago who produced the newspaper, the Chutzpah Collective. I never finished the draft. I was forced to return to it, though, because that draft contained a seed of a piece that was accepted for publication more than two years later. Confronting the draft meant confronting my former self. When I had written that draft, I assumed that I could understand this topic quickly, in a matter of months. Since then, I have continued to fall down the rabbit hole of research, and I don’t see its end any time soon. I had been a much greener writer. And most importantly, that draft was written when Myron Perlman, a founder of the Chutzpah Collective, was still alive.
III
In a way, I met Myron because I had begun to work through what being Jewish meant to me. I had spent the 2016 election certain that Trump would be elected, oftentimes kept awake by a Jewish fear of pogroms. Daily bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers and the destruction of more Jewish cemeteries than I could keep track of made me anxious for the support of other Jews. A group of friends started celebrating Shabbat together. I began to make challah almost every Friday night. I became involved in Jewish activist groups. I became the person who showed up to protests with signs in Yiddish.
Chutzpahnik Robbie Skeist, and the Chicago Seed, underground newspaper, at the Jewish Currents release party in Chicago, 2018
It was raining that year at the May Day rally. Myron noticed our signs and introduced himself. That was the first time I heard of the Chutzpah Collective. He told me that when he had been my age, he had interviewed elderly people who had been members of the Jewish Labor Bund.
Romantically, selfishly, I arranged a lineage that began in the storied past of Yiddish socialism in Europe and continued through me. I got Myron’s contact information and began to search for everything I could find about his activism in the 1970s.
IV
I tracked down another former Chutzpah member who agreed to meet me. He asked if I recognized the pattern on his mug. The blue, maroon, and dark green brush strokes were familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Jerusalem pottery, he told me. He seemed disappointed. He asked me what I thought about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement and Rasmea Odeh, the Palestinian activist who was deported from Chicago to Jordan. I sensed a hostility for which I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t tell him that I had gone to the farewell event for Rasmea a few months before, at which Angela Davis gave the keynote speech. I struggled to square my experience of him, which conformed with what I had come to expect from hostile older liberals, with my impression of Myron, who was remarkably patient.
I sensed that I was wading into a half century of Jewish intra-communal conflict and social movement history, but more immediately I wrestled with my own expectations. I desperately wanted a linear narrative of Jewish radicalism to exist, one that only needed to be acknowledged and remembered. I continued my historical research on Jewish organizing, and I charged myself with understanding how my desire for a linear narrative influenced the story I aimed to tell, but I did not know where to begin.
V
The clatter of plates and silverware and the talk at nearby tables forced me to lean in to hear Myron Perlman and another former member of Chutzpah, Miriam Socoloff, at Cafe Selmarie. It was one of the first objectively nice days of late Chicago spring, before the brutal descent into summer. I typed furiously on my laptop. Myron and Miriam described their working-class backgrounds. Myron recounted his days of college activism, when he had been part of a group that invited Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. of the Black Panther Party to speak at the University of Illinois. A few months later, Hampton would be murdered in his sleep by the FBI. I learned about Chutzpah’s trip to Israel/Palestine and Miriam’s trip to China. I had asked Myron for a copy of Chutzpah issue number 15 because the research library didn’t have it. My heart leapt when I saw the image of two people holding a banner: Special Issue: Nazis and the New Right.
Members of the Chutzpah Collective and the author, 2018
“I want that back,” Myron said. I gave him my word.
I put the newspaper in a plastic bag and rode my bike with one hand, so that I wouldn’t bend it on my way home. I never got the chance to return it to him.
VI
Through my research into Chutzpah and my interactions with its former members, I had encountered the remains of the Jewish radical movement, as it is sometimes called. This was a generation profoundly transformed by both the ’67 war in Israel and the uprisings of 1968. In Chicago, the Chutzpah Collective formed out of a larger havurah (an independent, lay-led religious community). They put out a newspaper, demonstrated, and held teach-ins in order to spread their views and build a movement that combined a broad leftist agenda with a specific concern for Jewish oppression. The collective represented a range of political views and personal experiences. Its members came from the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, Gay Liberation, draft resistance, and the underground press. Using a consensus-based decision-making process, Chutzpah members worked out their principles and political ideology on a range of topics over the course of a decade. Some members, but not all, had come to Jewish radical organizing out of a sense of betrayal by the Left, particularly in the aftermath of the ’67 War, and from experiencing antisemitism both personally and structurally in left-wing spaces. Simultaneously, the Chutzpah Collective was a positive expression of Jewish identity that was in conversation with the identity politics that its members were exploring as women, gay men, lesbians, and working-class people, in varying combinations and degrees.
Anti-Nazi demonstrators in downtown Chicago, 1978
By 1969, the Freedom Seder, organized by Jews for Urban Justice (the first radical Jewish group of its kind) and led according to a Haggadah created by Arthur Waskow, seeded a powerful conversation between the Jewish radical tradition, New Left, and Black Power politics. A few years later in Chicago, Chutzpah activists made their own connections, protesting the Vietnam War on Tisha B’Av, leading education workshops on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and forming coalitions to protest neo-Nazis later in the 1970s. By the end of the decade, Chutzpah disbanded, rocked by personal and political changes. In Israel, Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) had formed, which was a mass movement to end the occupation, and some Chutzpah members pivoted to form the first chapter of American Friends of Peace Now. Others responded to the national call to join and organize with New Jewish Agenda, a broad, multi-issue progressive Jewish organization that supported peace in the Middle East, nuclear disarmament, and sought to create a home for progressive Jews during the Reagan era.
Now, as a young Jewish radical, the differences may overwhelm the similarities when it comes to this history, contrary to what I hoped. The rise of the right (both in the United States—including in Jewish communal politics—and in Israel) and the neoliberalization of the peace movement that emerged from two decades of war following Israel’s founding have altered the political terrain. Broken treaties and settlement expansion after the Oslo Accords are just a few of the realities that have changed the stakes of Jewish activism. While sometimes I find the living history of the Jewish radical movement in the late ’60s and ’70s to be clarifying, the deeper I go, the more disoriented I become.
VII
In August of 2017, I was working with oral historian Aliza Becker, director of the American-Jewish Peace Archive, and getting updates from my friend who had gone down to Charlottesville to work as a medic at the counter-demonstration to the Unite the Right rally. I saw the news about the murder of Heather Heyer and felt sick. For two days I worked furiously on an article about the attempted Nazi march in Skokie in 1978 and the Chutzpah Collective’s organizing history, including their attempt to rally a coalition to oppose the Nazis. I used the newspaper that Myron had given me.
VIII
That winter, I got an update that Myron had suffered a heart attack while on a bike ride during an unusually warm day. A few days later, he was gone. I began working on a hesped, a honorary statement for a person who has passed away. During this process, I met more members of the Chutzpah Collective than I could keep track of. Some, I recognized from articles they had written fifty years ago. In a few cases, I remembered more about a part of their past than they did.
At his funeral, I met even more former members of the Chutzpah Collective, along with people from throughout Myron’s life, including his sons, who are a few years older than me.
In Rosehill Cemetery, where many of my relatives are also buried, I said the Mourner’s Kaddish. I waited for the brutal tradition of shoveling earth onto his grave. Robert Skeist, a founder of Chutzpah whom I had interviewed on the phone, introduced himself to me. He was wearing a bright red kippah decorated with white menorahs. We held each other and cried.
I baked two babkas for the shiva. Maralee Gordon, another founder of the collective who had worked as an editor at the Chicago Seed and in later life became a rabbi, led the service in a crowded living room. As I put a piece of archival material given to me in my coat pocket, people came in the front door. They were talking about my hesped, which had been published in Jewish Currents. They were appreciative of it and curious about me. A new experience, a feeling of pride, collided with grief.
I walked up the stairs to my apartment and desperately wanted to see Myron one more time. I could very clearly see his face. I wanted to deny the fact of his death.
My research into the Chutzpah Collective and the Jewish radical movement picked up again. I became obsessed. And yet, the vast majority of people around me, including other leftist Jews, had never heard of it. I became more determined to change that.
IX
Eventually, my article about the attempted Nazi march in Skokie was published. I had stopped trying to relate the history to the events in Charlottesville. I was finally able to publicly share an important piece of the Chutzpah Collective’s history—which I believe is part of a larger conversation about post-war American Jewish identity.
In Chicago, I helped organize a release party for the issue of Jewish Currents in which the article appeared. I reached out to Maralee Gordon, Miriam Socoloff, Robert Skeist, and Aliza Becker to present. More than one hundred and fifty people showed up. I felt vulnerable and very nervous. We shared audio of an interview with Myron. Chutzpah members shared their stories and their perspectives and spoke to this new generation of radical Jews that filled the room. There was a lot of confusion and heartbreak in their stories, and also admiration for this new generation, which they understood to be taking on new challenges.
Maralee asked me where all these people had come from. I started to cry. In that moment I could feel the impact of her work: in the 1970s she had sent out a Jewish feminist newsletter called Lilith’s Rib across the country, breaking ground for Jewish feminism. I felt how I benefited from the work of the Chutzpah Collective and the journey it has been taking me on. To see these different generations—who put forward different but interconnected definitions of Jewish radicalism—intermingle and collide moved me beyond my earlier, grief-fueled yearning for a linear political legacy.
X
So much of my relationship to being Jewish comes out of the experience of death, the fear of being killed, and the communal means of processing grief. I came to both a radical Jewish identity and the history of the Chutzpah Collective for somewhat one-dimensional reasons: to process fear and to feel affirmed across time. What I found in the archives was a different dynamic. Instead of affirmation, I found constant discomfort, in confronting the gaps between our personal and political experiences and the Chutzpah Collective’s attempts to reconcile anti-imperialism with support for the State of Israel. It is through that discomfort that I began to make sense of things.
I am yearning to know what being Jewish means to me, to process my grief, to learn what has been kept from me, and to hold on to what the world has tried to take away. But I am also compelled to unsettle everything by historical examination.
Facing that first draft, written back when Myron was alive and when I had made many assumptions about this subject and myself, compelled me to write this. Now I can begin again and plunge back into discomfort, confusion, and contradictions. It is my relationships to the people, traditions, and activism of the past, their traces in the present, and the movements yet to come that give me purpose.