"Irresponsible, Undisciplined Opposition": Ben Halpern on the Bergson Group and Jewish Terrorism in Pre-State Palestine (1)‪.‬

I. Introduction In December 1946, the Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier published an exchange between Daniel Bell (b. 1919) and Ben Halpern (1912-1990), two rising intellectual stars of twentieth-century American Jewry. The exchange highlighted the most pressing philosophical and existential dilemmas faced by the Jewish world in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Bell, a young instructor at the University of Chicago, opened his essay with a statement by the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "Woe to man who has no home." He proceeded to raise and answer a series of probing questions: "What meaningful role can the young Jewish intellectual play in [today's] world?" "How can one maintain a critical temper?" "Where are we to go?" "What of the relation of this position to Zionism?" Taking his cues from Nietzsche, Bell asserted the futility of an ethnic-religious worldview and argued instead for the harnessing of Jewish passions to a universalist and this-worldly Weltanschauung. "The plight--and glory--of the alienated Jewish intellectual," he concluded, "is that his role is to point to the need of brotherhood.... He can only live in permanent tension and as a permanent critic." (2)