My mom’s brief career as an eight-year-old international jewel smuggler in 1929 began a journey that led her to reject Zionism in 1979. She had an eventful life, one that included moments of very bitter trauma. But I will tell this story as she told it to me, which always emphasized what she learned rather than what she suffered. She rejected any attempt to offer sympathy. Maybe this was a form of distancing, but if so, it was an effective one. She integrated her worst moments into her life without becoming fearful or joyless. She lived happily and eventfully until her death at 98.

When my mother, Ruth Lipow, was eight, her gambler father, flush at the time, sent her on an ocean voyage from her birth city of Baltimore to live with her aunt and uncle in Los Angeles. She traveled unaccompanied by any adult; even by the standards of 1929 her dad was no candidate for a father of the year award. Still, she had a pretty good time on the ship. A cabin and really good meals were included in her fare, but baths were not. For this reason, her father gave her bath money for the voyage. But candy was also available for the same price as baths; with eight-year-old judgment she decided that candy was the wiser use of that fund. The ship also had a band. Ruth decided to become part of it and sing with it every night. She did have a really good singing voice, so maybe the band welcomed her joining it; more likely a combination of compassion and her total lack of adult supervision simply prevented their refusing. Her performances also advertised her status as a child without adult protection.

The voyage included a two day stop in Cuba. Cuba in those days was a brutal dictatorship owned by a coalition of the US sugar industry and US gangsters, often the same people. With no need to fear the police, Cuban fences could afford to pay thieves more than US fences, and still sell to customers at steep discounts. That made Cuba a great place to buy stolen jewelry, something the wealthier passengers took full advantage of.

Buying stolen jewels in Cuba did come with one challenge – getting them past customs upon reentering the US. That is where Ruth came in. Some of the rich ladies got together and approached her, putting on their sad faces. “We bought too many souvenirs. We don’t have room in our luggage. Could you put them in yours, just until we get ashore?”

Ruth, being an eager-to-please eight-year-old, said yes. Eight-year-olds in 1929 were more naïve than today. But she did get a bit of unconscious revenge. As she went through the customs line to go ashore, she noticed that everyone had to have their luggage checked. When the agents waved her through, she asked plaintively “Don’t you want to check my bags?” Like all small children she longed to be treated as an adult. “No, honey it’s OK,” said the customs agent. “Are you sure?” she asked. “We don’t need to look at your luggage sweetheart. We trust you,” the customs agent replied. I hope this gave heart palpitations to the adults taking advantage of Ruth, or started ulcers for them. 

A middle-class eight-year-old today might have kept the jewels. This being 1929, Ruth trustingly returned them before meeting her aunt and uncle. The aunt took one look and one sniff, and rushed her to her new home to plop into a bathtub. But when she later told them her story about putting other passengers’ “souvenirs” in her luggage, her uncle immediately said “just like goys to take advantage of an innocent child. What was her father thinking, to send her off on her own, that way?” The last sentence is quite right. The cavalier travel arrangements showed that sending Ruth to live with her aunt and uncle was the best child-raising decision her father ever made. But the bit about “goys” will prove important as the story continues.

When Ruth was ten or eleven, her aunt became pregnant, a very wanted pregnancy. But her aunt suffered from high blood pressure, which had no effective treatment in the early 1930s. Her best chance of surviving pregnancy and child birth was to minimize stress. And small children, even small children as sweet-tempered and obedient as Ruth, are *always* a source of stress. So, for the sake of keeping her aunt alive, her guardians boarded Ruth in a well-regarded Jewish boarding school/orphanage for seven months. This did not have to be a bad thing. Ruth had cousins who had been sent to boarding schools under similar circumstances, and had the time of their lives. But, unfortunately, this school/orphanage’s reputation was undeserved.

 The place fed the kids two meals per day: unsweetened oatmeal or cream of wheat without milk for breakfast, and beef broth plus a big side of cauliflower for dinner. Visitation was by appointment only, and the kids were bathed only when visitors were due. To keep the kids in line, their hands were smacked with a ruler daily, because “even if we don’t know details, you did something to deserve it.” Maybe the momzers who ran it had read Oliver Twist, and mistook the novel for a “how-to” manual. 

Once her aunt had the baby, Ruth’s ever-adored and adorable cousin Ronnie, Ruth came home. She immediately told her aunt and uncle about the orphanage. Their reaction: “How dare you make up stories about nice Jewish people who take care of little Jewish children. Jews don’t do that, Goys maybe, not Jews.” A few months later, that orphanage/boarding school was caught failing to report an outbreak of scarlet fever, and continuing to accept new charges. Since quarantine was all that could be done about scarlet fever in those days, the place was closed down, and the proprietors prosecuted. Even though it was in the papers, Ruth never received any acknowledgment, let alone an apology. Ruth always insisted that the phrase “Jews don’t do that” was the really important part of that experience for her, though she only overcame her hatred of cauliflower when she turned 70. 

She heard the phrase again, following an even more harrowing experience, the kind that trigger warnings were invented for. When Ruth was 11, in 1932, all the little girls in her neighborhood knew to avoid her next-door neighbor and his vicious dog. But one day, he managed to trap her alone. Using the threat that his dog would tear her throat out if she did not do exactly what he said, he raped her. When it was over, she ran home to tell her aunt and uncle what had happened. You guessed it; their response was “how dare you make up such a story about a nice Jewish boy. Jews don’t do that. Goys maybe, never Jews.” I know this disbelief ties to rape culture, and not listening to women or girls. But, remember, the same thing happened with the orphanage. And, it did not happen with the jewel smuggling. Again, when my mother told me about this, she firmly shut down any expressions of sympathy. For her, the point was the phrase “Jews don’t do that” and how it integrated into what she learned and experienced later.

Ruth became a socialist at the age of eleven, after attending an “End Poverty In California” (EPIC) meeting, an organization centered around the Upton Sinclair campaign for governor. Upton Sinclair scared the hell out of the political establishment of the time by winning the Democratic nomination for governor of California on a socialist platform. Democratic bigwigs united with Republicans to rally behind the Republican nominee; with help of one of the first video campaigns, in the form of slanderous newsreels shown in every movie theater in California, they defeated Sinclair soundly. 

By the time she was sixteen Ruth’s aunt and uncle had kicked her out of their home for joining the Communist Party. The CP, in those days, did their best to take care of their own, so she couch-surfed for a few years from CP member home to CP member home until her life stabilized when she was eighteen. 

Ruth gained an extensive political education, both from the CP and from the books in the homes where she stayed during her couch surfing period. The CP had a very nuanced position on nationalism; the CIO slogan of “black and white, unite and fight,” though a fair statement of part of the immediate CP agenda, did not reflect the CP analysis of Black oppression in the United States; that analysis saw Black people not just as victims of prejudice or even of what today is called structural racism. They saw Black people as an oppressed nation. To Leninist Marxists of the time, an oppressed nation was a category that was co-equal with the working class as a basis for opposing capitalism. National liberation struggles were as important as struggles for working class rights. Any call to downplay the struggle for racial equality in the name of working-class unity was firmly rejected; people could be expelled from the CP for hinting that racism would have to wait until “after the revolution.” 

Now, the CP of that time was, to some extent, feminist. But freedom for women was not necessarily seen as something as fundamental as class or race. Fortunately, Ruth had a friend and comrade named Gerda Lerner who had recently fled the Nazi takeover of Austria, and was teaching herself English from US movies. Lerner was, much later in life, to become the godmother of women’s studies; but she already was a serious feminist, and influenced Ruth to take feminism more seriously than the CP (or most Marxists at the time) did. I don’t want to exaggerate; plenty of women in the CP took no shit from anyone. But Gerda Lerner steered Ruth towards specifically feminist works by Marxists and non-Marxists alike, and in general helped make feminism fundamental to her understanding of socialism. That integration of feminism and socialism was not common among Marxists then. It was not unknown; Marx’s own daughter wrote on the subject. But ut was not common.

Having class, race and gender as equally fundamental pillars of her political understanding put Ruth very close to what today is called “Intersectionality,” long before the term was invented. 

The CP in the 20s through the 40s played a central part in many anti-racist fights. Ruth personally remembered participation in the anti-lynching movement, in seeking justice for the Scottsboro Boys. and in campaigns against segregation. She also learned about Black civil rights history, including diversions like Marcus Garvey and the “Back to Africa” movement, which ended before her time. And suddenly the phrase “Jews don’t do that” clicked with Marcus Garvey trying to ally with the Ku Klux Klan over shared support for segregation. Now, she already knew that all Jews were not saints and that all gentiles were not devils. But, while she had learned the Jewish version of “All skin folk ain’t kin folk,” the hard way, the story of Marcus Garvey let her see it as a political principle rather than merely a personal one. I know many radicals admire Garvey for his internationalist analysis of the African Diaspora as a nation in exile. They also admire his pioneering work in advocating for Black pride, seeking equality without assimilation, promoting love of Black culture. Martin Luther King said in tribute to Garvey in Jaimaca in 1965 “he gave to the millions of Negroes in the United States a sense of manhood, a sense of somebodiness.” But Garvey was also a proud admirer of fascism; he claimed to have invented it . His ambition was to become President of Africa; his ideal state was one where the President had absolute authority. 

Ruth’s view on nationalism was probably best summarized by her favorite playwright, George Bernard Shaw in his “Preface for Politicians: The Curse of Nationalism” to his play about Ireland, John Bull’s Other Island :

Nobody in Ireland of any intelligence likes Nationalism any more than a man with a broken arm likes having it set. A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation. 

Fast forward to 1979. Ruth, like most left-wing Americans at the time was a left-Zionist, seeing Israel as a socialist state in embryo, under attack from Arabs calling themselves Palestinians for unfathomable reasons of Jew hatred. The repressive regime of the Shah of Iran had been overthrown; the Shah was seeking entrance into the United States, entrance that then-President Jimmy Carter would ultimately approve. 

What seems to be undocumented is that there was extensive US left support for the Iranian revolution at that time, when people still hoped it would be a progressive secular revolution rather than an Islamic one. (For those who shake their head at this, people always make the alliances they need to in life-or-death struggles. The Allies included the Stalin-led Soviet Union in order to stop Hitler. Heck, the American Revolution against the British depended upon support from the repressive French monarchy. Some slaves fought for the British during that same revolution because the British promised to free them.) Supporters of the Iranian revolution rallied against admitting the former Shah of Iran into the United States, largely led by Iranian American and Palestinian activists. Ruth, always willing to show solidarity with a good cause, attended one of these rallies in Los Angeles, along with myself. 

We were seated beside a couple of young Palestinian women. And Ruth, always open and friendly started chatting with them. They mentioned Israel, linking Israeli oppression of the Palestinians to what the Shah had done in Iran. Ruth asked them what they were talking about.

The two young women told Ruth about their lives before coming to the United States and what their parents and grandparents had gone through, being driven out of villages, the loss of land and of homes. How they fled to avoid being killed, usually under threat from Israelis, but sometimes under threat from the Palestinian Resistance. When they had finished, Ruth said “My God, that is the same thing the United States did to the American Indians.” Ruth asked how she could learn more, and the young women gave her their contact information, and also recommended some books by Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.

At that time, the two-state solution was taken for granted by most Palestinian activists in US as the way forward for Palestinian liberation. Chomsky saw it as an intermediate step to a bi-national federation. Said criticized the PLO’s negotiating strategies fiercely. However, he never denounced a two-state solution categorically, though he was extremely skeptical of both the fairness and practicality. So, Ruth did not outright reject it either. But she understood from that point on that the core of Zionism (at least as it existed once Israel was formed) was wrong; Jews had historical ties to the land that is today called Israel, and had the right to return there. (She believed in open borders; so really, she thought anyone other than violent criminals had the right to emigrate to any nation they chose to enter.) What she no longer believed was that Jews had the right to create a Jewish dominated state, or to be guaranteed a Jewish majority. Even aside from her support for open borders, she felt that Palestinians had at least as strong a historical tie to the same land, and in most cases much stronger. There was no right to expel them and take their land, no right to deprive them of citizenship, or subject them to second class citizenship, nor any right to prevent them from returning after driving them out.

In forming these views, Ruth did not, of course, simply take this new information for granted. She asked a hardcore Zionist friend her take on this. 

“You should know better than to listen to this nonsense about Israel as an oppressive nation” the friend replied. “Jews don’t do that.”

=========Sources=========

Marcus Garvey’s attempts to ally with the Klu Klux Klan:

Stein, Judith. “The UNIA Goes South, Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan,” in The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society(LSU Press,1991) pages 153-159. 

National Archives, 2020. “Marcus Garvey (August 17, 1887 – June 10, 1940).” National Archives (September,15, 2020). https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/marcus-garvey

Martin Luther King tribute to Garvey:

The Daily Gleaner(June, 23, 1965) Front Page. https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/esponsored/20220624/dr-martin-luther-king-honours-marcus-garvey

Garvey’s proud support of fascism and claim to have invented it:

James, Leslie. 2022. “Blood Brothers Colonialism and Fascism as Relations in the Interwar Caribbean and West Africa.” The American Historical Review(127,2) p 168. (June 2, 2022.) http://bit.ly/4isA3W4 (Note unshortened URL requires a huge token.)

Garvey’s ideal government: President with absolute authority. 

Garvey, Marcus. 1925. Pp 27-32. Ed. Hill, Robert A. and Barbara Bair. Marcus Garvey Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers:P27-32. University of California Press(1987).

Shaw on Nationalism:

Shaw, George Bernard. 1912. “Preface for Politicians: The Curse of Nationalism.” John Bull’s Other Island: In Four Acts. (Constable and Company Ltd:1912) v – lix. https://ia903008.us.archive.org/33/items/johnbullsotheris0000shaw/johnbullsotheris0000shaw.pdf

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