When Arun Gandhi, the grandson of one of history's greatest political actors and thinkers writes publicly that “Israel and the Jews” are the greatest promoters of “a culture of violence,” he speaks with an inherited authority—not to mention the implied comparison between this violent culture and the pacifism of his family legacy. But what did Mahatma Gandhi actually think of the idea of Israel, and of the fate of the Jews of his time?
As it turns out, M.K. Gandhi engaged in sustained conversation with Jewish intellectuals of his day—many of whom were dismayed by the great man’s insistence, for example, that Jews in Germany should have willingly “offered themselves to the butcher’s knife.”
In this essay, Shalom Goldman sketches out the little-known background to a contemporary controversy. Click here for a preformatted PDF booklet of this article, and here for Letters to the Editor in response to it.
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In early January, Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, posted a short essay on Newsweek/Washington Post’s “On Faith.” The response to his posting was so passionate and violent that Gandhi was forced to resign his position as director of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester.
The topic of discussion on the blog that day was “the future of Jewish identity.” The moderators, Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn, had posed a question that week that was linked to the airing of the PBS television series “The Jewish Americans.”
The question was: We know what ‘Jewish identity’ has meant in the past. What will it mean in the future? How does a minority religion retain its roots and embrace change?
From a scholarly standpoint Meacham and Quinn’s question was not sufficiently nuanced. (Students of Jewish history would be quite surprised by their assertion that “we know what ‘Jewish identity’ meant in the past”—in fact, what constitutes modern Jewishness has been the subject of vigorous debate since the French Revolution!) But if the question lacked nuance, Arun Gandhi’s answer, posted (perhaps too hastily) on the same day that the question was posed by the moderators, lacked all proportion or sense of civility.
As the essay was brief, and its effect powerful and still reverberating months later, it is worth reproducing in full:
JEWISH IDENTITY CAN’T DEPEND ON VIOLENCE
Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience—a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of how a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.
The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak. Any nation that remains anchored to the past is unable to move ahead and, especially a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs. In Tel Aviv in 2004 I had the opportunity to speak to some Members of Parliament and Peace activists all of whom argued that the wall and the military build-up was necessary to protect the nation and the people. In other words, I asked, you believe that you can create a snake pit—with many deadly snakes in it—and expect to live in the pit secure and alive? What do you mean? they countered. Well, with your superior weapons and armaments and your attitude towards your neighbors would it not be right to say that you are creating a snake pit? How can anyone live peacefully in such an atmosphere? Would it not be better to befriend those who hate you? Can you not reach out and share your technological advancement with your neighbors and build a relationship?
Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don’t befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.
The University of Rochester, which had only recently become the Institute’s host, was deeply embarrassed by the essay and the many angry responses to it. The president of the university, Joel Seligman, said that Gandhi’s statements about Israel and Jewish identity were “fundamentally inconsistent with the core values” of the university and requested his resignation. For many readers the posting’s parenthetical remark about a culture of violence in which “Israel and the Jews are the biggest players” was the most offensive line in the essay. Also troubling to many readers was Gandhi’s assertion that Nazi murder of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews “was the result of the warped mind of an individual.” To reduce a profound historical question—what enables genocide in the context of war?—to a psychological formula seems facile at best.
Deborah Howell, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, wrote that she regretted that her newspaper had published Gandhi’s article. But she rejected requests that the article be deleted from the newspaper’s website and that Arun Gandhi be removed from the panel of commentators. Howell noted that “it is the policy of washingtonpost.com editors not to remove articles; they equate that with trying to change history.”
Arun Gandhi resigned three weeks after posting his essay. He told the Rochester City Newspaper that he resigned in order to protect the institute, which he feared would have been closed down if he remained at the helm. Responses in the English-language international press to this American media event were quite predictable. The Jerusalem Post titled its article “Gandhi Resigns after Blasting Jews,” while the Tehran Times offered the headline “Gandhi Grandson Falls Victim to Zionist Lobby.”
The press response in India, where each of the five Gandhi grandsons is a public figure, was more varied and complex. The Telegraph of Calcutta was fiercely protective of the Mahatma’s youngest grandson; using the familiar term of endearment for Gandhi (Bapu, little father), the newspaper titled its article “Jews Fell Bapu Grandson—Arun Forced to Quit U.S. Institute Over Online Views.” I was in India at the time the story broke, and in Bombay when Arun Gandhi and his supporters staged a protest. Thus a news story that did not get wide coverage in the American print media (the New York Times chose not to cover the story) made headlines in India—in today’s media world, it seems, there are no more “backpage stories.”
Exactly a month after his resignation from the institute, Arun Gandhi and his son Tushar Gandhi attempted to organize a protest in Bombay. Unlike the Calcutta Telegraph, Bombay newspapers reported the story but didn’t editorialize about it. Accompanied by twenty followers, the protesters planned a demonstration at the Mahatma Gandhi statue near the Maharashtra State Secretariat building. The police intervened, held the demonstrators for a few hours and then released them. Interviewed by the press after his release Arun Gandhi said, “I was prohibited from touching the feet of my grandfather” (The Hindu, Feb. 27, 2008). (The reference here is to the Hindu custom of bowing to touch the feet of one’s parents and grandparents as an act of respect.)
Arun Gandhi, now seventy-four years old, is the youngest of the Mahatma’s five grandsons. Born in South Africa, where he spent his first twenty-three years, he is the son of Manilal, M.K. Gandhi’s second son. Of the Mahatma’s sons, Manilal had the least troubled relationship with his father and the closest link to his campaigns for social justice. He joined his father’s movement for racial justice in South Africa and spent over a decade in South African prisons. As Arun Gandhi noted in Kasturba: A Life, a biography of his grandmother, “my father was the only one of the four Gandhi sons to adopt voluntary poverty and devote his life to nonviolence…” Arun left South Africa in 1956 and moved to India, where he spent the next thirty years working as a journalist, activist, and social worker. Arun Gandhi and his wife Susanda moved to the United States in 1987 and within a few years founded the Gandhi Institute in Memphis.
Tags: buber, gandhi, hindu, identity, israel, jew, shalom goldman
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