Letters, Winter 2025
Life and Capital
An amusing quote attributed to the Reverend Sydney Smith and later appropriated by Oscar Wilde says: “I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.”
This fully applies to Gary Saul Morson’s review of my biography of Ayn Rand (“Atlas Schlepped,” Fall 2024), published by Jewish Lives. Morson is captivated by an article of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, “Ayn Rand: Engineer of Souls”—a discussion of the 2009 biography of Rand by Anne Conover Heller. It’s Daniels’s article, rather than my book, that has provided major arguments for Morson’s piece.
Among the most divisive American writers, Rand had inspired her critics’ polarizing views. My goal was to write about her without preconceptions while examining Jewish influences on her life and prose. Unlike Heller, I received access to the Ayn Rand Archives in California. I’m the only biographer to have studied a large cache of Russian letters from Rand’s birth family to her in America, beginning in 1926. I wrote of her traditional family (Rand knew some Yiddish), her Jewish friends and milieus. Rand did not describe herself as a Jew and married a lapsed Catholic but felt more comfortable with ethnic Jews. Her major followers in New York, the circle of Objectivists, were descendants of Eastern European Jewry, as was her lover Nathaniel (Blumenthal) Branden.
Morson reiterates the argument made by Daniels that Rand’s literature and thought belong to the Russian rather than American tradition. Like Daniels, he divides Russian nineteenth-century writers into two opposing camps: the greats, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, on one side, and angry revolutionary radicals, such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky—whose socialist utopian novel What Is to Be Done? influenced Lenin—on the other.
Whereas the radicals expressed their views with total certainty, the great writers embraced nuance and complexity. This is a faulty theory, for both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were drawn to extremes. Tolstoy, during his religious phase, was intolerant and dogmatic and had renounced all social institutions. If the world was built on his moral principles, there would be anarchy. Dostoevsky was virulently antisemitic. In his “Notebooks” (I’ll quote from David I. Goldstein’s Dostoyevsky and the Jews), he wrote: “The Yid and his bank are now reigning over everything: over Europe, education, civilization, socialism—especially socialism, for he will use it to uproot Christianity and destroy its civilization.” Antisemitic poison even penetrated his best fiction.
According to Morson, all Russian radicals admired Chernyshevsky’s tendentious novel, whereas the great writers despised it. Rand, by virtue of being a radical, falls into the first category: “Anyone who knows Chernyshevsky’s book will recognize its enormous influence . . . on Rand’s fiction.” I grew up in the Soviet Union where this abominable novel was mandatory reading but fail to see similarities. True, both were bad stylists and moralists, but not every author of stilted prose owes it to Chernyshevsky. There is no proof that Rand read it. If she had, she would have despised the socialist writer rather than imitate him. But Chernyshevsky is still rescued from obscurity by Western professors: Derek Offord in his short book Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia mentions him eighty-four times.
“Rand’s fiction,” writes Morson, “closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism.” In fact, Rand’s novels (with the exception of Atlas Shrugged, which can be ironically described as “capitalist realism”) were influenced by the works of Soviet ideological enemies—Nietzsche and Yevgeny Zamyatin (his dystopian novel We), and, as apparent from her novel Anthem, also by the Torah.
Rand, whose family was dispossessed by the Bolsheviks, witnessed the 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War, with its violence and hunger. These experiences determined her Manichean view of the world. She was not in the habit of reading Chernyshevsky or Lenin. Regardless, Morson proceeds to quote passages from Lenin matching them with quotations from Rand’s prose to reveal that both have demeaned their political opponents. He doesn’t hide his contempt for the writer when referring to “Rand and her Soviet counterparts.” Unlike Daniels, who discusses both Rand’s virtues and vices, Morson focuses on the vices alone, presenting her as a hopeless writer and shallow thinker. This fails to explain her broad appeal in America. Rand’s political philosophy, best analyzed in Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market, was influential among the American right; her moral philosophy, written in late life, was indeed murky and dogmatic. Her major novels were endorsed by the Austrian Jewish economist Ludwig von Mises, who believed that Atlas Shrugged contains “a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society.”
When Morson turns to my biography, he deals offhandedly with my text: “As Popoff observes, [Rand] attributed all doubt to wickedness, much as Lenin deemed it counterrevolutionary.” I checked my book—I didn’t write this. Rand “never wrote about Jews,” Morson insists; he proceeds to say that her characters have Russian or American names. Rand’s first novels appeared during the interwar period and the peak of antisemitism in America when Jewish studios in Hollywood also avoided using Jewish names and portrayals—
although films were made by Jews. But a number of Rand’s characters had Jewish models.
Rand’s novel We the Living captures her experiences under the Bolsheviks. I wrote that “the Jewish theme of choosing life is most perceptible in this novel.” Morson comments:“It is true that the book of Deuteronomy advises its readers to ‘choose life,’ but it is doubtful that Rand knew that.” If she referred to the book of Genesis and the book of Ruth in her prose, how would she miss the book of Deuteronomy? Speaking of the Jewish tradition, in The World As I See It, Einstein observed: “Life is sacred—that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.” This major value is emphasized in Atlas Shrugged, where Rand advocates “a single choice: to live.”
As a lecturer Rand kept her audiences spellbound. Her 1961 talk “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” defends her cause of laissez-faire capitalism and makes an explicit reference to Jews. American businessmen, she maintained, are a small and productive minority who hold the economy on their shoulders but who, nonetheless, have to function under especially restrictive laws. Like the bourgeoisie in Soviet Russia or the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, they are penalized exclusively for their virtues. According to Morson, there are no Jewish themes in this passage either.
Morson writes: “Popoff detects Jewishness in Rand’s support of capitalism (and her dollar sign jewelry).” Here is what I wrote: “For a Jew to endorse wealth in defiance of the stereotype of ‘selfish greed’ manifested chutzpah.”
In Morson’s view, it would be better if Rand’s Jewish background remained hidden. Here’s his rationale: “The less this terrible author of lifeless prose and repellent ideas owes to Judaism, the better.” Rand was an atheist, and I have not written about Judaism. In the end he proposes to “assign [Rand] to the Russian tradition, which features so many repellent thinkers.” One’s identity cannot be assigned or reassigned: Rand said she felt Jewish when faced with antisemitism; she also supported Israel.
Alexandra Popoff
Gary Saul Morson Responds:
My essential point in “Atlas Schlepped” was that Rand’s Jewishness is at best incidental to her shallow work, whereas her debt to the Russian tradition of tendentious fiction is essential. The resemblance of her novels to Soviet socialist realism is striking: both display smug ideological certainty; a contempt for all skepticism and ambiguity; an insistence that art describe not what is but what should be—cardboard positive heroes; long tendentious speeches expressing a prefabricated ideology; and tedious, graceless, didactic prose. The main difference is that whereas for the Bolsheviks, what they called “socialism” solved all problems, for Rand, what she calls “capitalism” does. I say, what she calls capitalism because she understood little about it except that it valorizes selfishness. She makes mistakes that would earn her a low grade in first-semester microeconomics.
Popoff maintains that because I consulted work other than her biography and include information she does not—for example, about the cruel and ignorant way Rand treated her husband suffering from dementia—I must not have read it. Then she goes on to cite my quotations from her book and refute the conclusions I draw from them. Which is it?
She says I present Rand “as a hopeless writer and shallow thinker. This fails to explain her broad appeal in America.” Yes, I regard Rand as an awful writer and thinker. But that is precisely what does account for her appeal to those looking for simplistic solutions and membership in a cult of superior people. Or does Popoff think that only the greatest writers ever exercise “broad appeal”?
Since her biography appears in a Jewish Lives series, Popoff was bound to find some connection between Rand’s ideas and her Jewishness. Her examples are so forced that I wondered how there could be so little connection. Anthony Daniels is right that Rand belongs heart and soul to one current of the Russian literary tradition, the one leading from the tendentious fiction that repelled Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov straight to Soviet socialist realism. When historians look back on American literature, they will discover sociological, not literary, reasons for Rand’s influence.
Picking Up the Tablets
I was very grateful to read Allan Arkush’s generous review (“World of Their Children,” Fall 2024) of my recently published book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life. Despite the political distance between us, Arkush is one of the few reviewers to have grasped the nature of my critique of American Jewish life and the ideological consensus that once held it together. Indeed, where others have demonized or grossly mischaracterized parts of my argument—accusations of neoconservatism from the radical left, of anti-Zionism from the right—Arkush has given a fair hearing to my admittedly unsystematic attempt to articulate a left-wing postliberal challenge to mainline American Judaism.
Many of Arkush’s points of criticism are also well taken. Were I to start such a book now, the Holocaust and Holocaust memory would likely occupy a more central place, and the dawning of Holocaust consciousness would be more accurately dated to the early ’60s, as Arkush rightly observes. As for the absences that Arkush identifies, a more straightforward theological discussion of orthopraxis and modern faith will, I fear, have to wait for another project and could not have been elaborated in a text that already brushed against the limit of how much Judaic exegesis a mainstream audience will tolerate. I do, however, regret not devoting space at least to justify my exclusion of Modern Orthodoxy from the book, which, as Arkush rightly guesses, is due to the overwhelmingly patriotic, integrationist, and hawkishly Zionist politics of most Modern Orthodox communities. And perhaps because the progressive edge of Modern Orthodoxy is where I make my religious home these days, I feared a section devoted solely to this niche would read as boosterish.
There remain, of course, important disagreements I have with Arkush’s piece as well. I will focus on just one, perhaps minor, point here. In a few places, Arkush puts in a good word or two for the American Jewish establishment and pro-Israel advocacy groups as a subtle rejoinder to what he deems my “familiar indictment” of their politics. Arkush, I think, missed two opportunities here. First, especially in light of the nightmare of ethnic cleansing and destruction being wrought by Israel in Gaza—take Moshe Ya’alon’s word for it, if not mine—Arkush appears unconcerned with the moral and spiritual implications of American Jewish support for Israel’s conduct of the war; the word “Gaza” itself appears only twice and both times in quotations from my book.
Second, even if one disagrees with my critique of the establishment ideology, it seems clear that the establishment bears some responsibility for the evaporation of sympathy for Israelis among the country’s educated class—that its labeling of critics of Israel and casting them out of the camp has played a part in all but eliminating any form of progressive Zionism as a living politics for people under forty-five. Still, I take it as a positive sign that Arkush has read my book with such attention and good faith. Perhaps there may be room in the tent yet again.
Joshua Leifer
Tel Aviv, Israel
Your publication is extraordinary, and the Fall 2024 issue is no exception. Thank you. I write only to comment on a theme I’ve seen repeated in the Jewish Review of Books, as exemplified by this review of the Leifer book (“World of Their Children,” Fall 2024).
I think the characterization of Reform and Conservatism Judaism as Judaism-lite does not hold up. True, the synagogues of the 1950s and 1960s have suffered membership losses, and the fate of these movements is not clear. But they constitute the large majority of Jews in America without whom Judaism would not have the presence that it has in our country. More importantly, liberal Judaism has a spiritual and particularistic core that these observers ignore. Many of us study to learn Torah and our philosophers, travel to Israel, struggle with Hebrew, and attend services. Not just on High Holidays. We hold events like the aliyah given to a Ukrainian delegation that miraculously made it to Jerusalem in May 2023 to attend the Connections conference of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Rabbis like Ammiel Hirsch, Angela Buchdahl, and David Saperstein inspire us to deepen our commitment to our faith while at the same time remaining committed to social justice as preached by Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and other prophets. No one could confuse such leaders with Unitarians.
We Jews are a questioning people. “Israel,” the very word, means wrestling with God. We have a gift for conversation, which began in the Tanakh with Abraham and Jacob, continued in the Talmud, and remains vital today for liberal Jews. As Micah Goodman has so brilliantly demonstrated in his recent lectures on the book of Job, our rabbinic forebears had the brilliance to include a book which challenges theodicy and God’s role on this earth in our holy canon. We liberal Jews are heirs to that spirit.
I think liberal Judaism deserves a more sympathetic rendering. I hope that your most distinguished journal accords it that rendering in the future.
Peter Buchsbaum
Superior Court of New Jersey
via email
Allan Arkush Responds:
One of the things I found most striking about Joshua Leifer’s book was his passionate refusal to sever himself from Israel, despite his disgust at many of its policies, including its conduct of the current war in Gaza (which he denounced forcefully, albeit infrequently, in Tablets Shattered). In my effort to relay the essence of what I took him to be saying in the book, I did not think it was necessary to respond in detail to his not uncommon criticisms of Israel—the country in which he has now chosen to live. I admire his decision to move closer, particularly at this painful moment, to the center of the big Jewish tent that we inhabit together. I am also grateful to Peter Buchsbaum for his reminder that liberal Judaism still has its vigorous defenders.
Work Conquers All
Thank you for the fascinating piece about Emanuel Litvinoff (“Tread Lightly Lest My People’s Bones Protest,” Fall 2024). Looking at the photo of him in his British Army uniform, it seems he is wearing the badge of the Pioneer Corps, in which my father served before transferring to the Royal Engineers. The Pioneer Corps was largely made up of European Jewish refugees, many of them rabbis, professors, and professional musicians. The Corps insignia comprised a rifle, pickax, and shovel, with the motto Labor Omnia Vincit (Work Conquers All), and the main task of the Corps was to dig latrines. The members knew that this was their way to defeat Hitler, and they did it with all their might.
Charles Heller
Toronto, Ontario
via email
Suggested Reading
The Ukrainian Question
"If I had to choose between Hitler and Stalin, Adam Michnik once said, I pick Marlene Dietrich." Vladimir Putin's propaganda notwithstanding, this is not the choice facing Ukrainian Jews.

Tradition, Creativity, and Cognitive Dissonance
What are the conditions for a Jewish intellectual renaissance? Disagreement is one, inconsistency might be another; look at the early Zionists.
In the City of Killing
The Kishinev pogrom originated in a rumor, widely disseminated and believed around the area that Easter, that the imperial authorities had given permission for several days of uninterrupted violence against the Jews.

A Tour Guide for the Perplexed
Is Noah Feldman's new book a modern Guide for the Perplexed or simply a perplexing tour?
Comments
You must log in to comment Log In