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Who Are You Michael Walzer?

Astrid von Busekist: Michael Walzer, the long conversation we are about to begin in Tel Aviv will continue in Paris, resume via email or viva voce somewhere in between New York and Paris. We will need some time to talk about the many important topics you address in your work. You have written or edited more than forty books, hundreds of articles, you have spoken at countless conferences and seminars, too many to enumerate here: we will have to choose the most relevant contributions. Your curiosity, your commitment to pluralism, your empathy as well, have led you, I believe, to take paths that history, your readings, or simply life have opened up in front of you.

What does the topic of your PhD, The Revolution of the Saints - the Protestant saints - and your latest writings on Jewish political thought and the Hebrew Bible have in common? What is the relationship between your texts on war and your reflections on justice and equality? How much do your analyses of political doctrines and practices owe to your activism on the ground or within Dissent? I believe there is a natural coherence in your way of thinking about social and political issues. You have built some new walls, broken down old ones, but your house stands firmly on its foundations. You do not repeat yourself, you do not contradict yourself, but you modify sometimes, and you enrich always.

I suggest we talk first about some pertinent moments in your biography and move on to the following topics from your long bibliography: your political activism, your editorial work for Dissent, your reflections on war, political theory, social justice, Israel-Palestine, and your reading of the Hebrew Bible. We will probably spend less time on other aspects of your career - they will not be entirely absent from our conversation but, as you have written much, we have to make choices, with the firm ambition to hold onto the thick thread of your thought.

When did you begin thinking about the topics that would shape your writings? How has your childhood and your early education influenced and nourished your adult life as an American, Jewish, and public intellectual? This is where I think we should start. But where exactly?

Michael Walzer: We should start in the Bronx - or just a little before. My father was born in the United States, in New York, on the lower East side. His family was from Austrian Galicia, the part of Poland that had been incorporated into the Austrian empire. Moses Walzer, my paternal grandfather, renounced his allegiance to the Emperor of Austria when he became a citizen, in the 1880s, in Chicago. I have no idea how he got to Chicago. My father grew up in New York. My mother was born on a farm in Connecticut in 1906. Both my parents were born in 1906. Her father had come over sometime around 1900, leaving the family behind. He worked in New York in the garment industry. And then, with the help of the Baron de-Hirsch Foundation, he bought a farm in Connecticut and brought his family over. My mother was the child of the reunion. All her siblings were born in Europe. She was the American. I visited the site of the farm many years later, on the way back from my graduation at Brandeis, with my parents. The farm was now a summer camp. My mother knocked on the door of her primary school teacher, who opened the door, looked at her and said: "Hello Sadie Hochman." So, she had made an impression!

My mother went to elementary school in Wallingford, and then the family sent her to live with a Jewish couple - relatives I suppose - in New Haven, because the nearby high school in Wallingford had its graduation ceremony in a church, and my grandfather insisted that she go to a high school where she wouldn't have to graduate in a church. She lived in New Haven for four years with this family, going back on weekends to her parent's home. She started college in New York, but her father died shortly afterwards, and the farm had to be sold and she had to go to work, so she spent only one year in college, nothing more. My father did not go to college; he went into the fur business, which was the family business. My parents met in the late 1920s. I remember my mother describing how they argued over the 1928 presidential election.1 It was the first time a Catholic had run for president. My mother was in favor, my father against - or maybe the other way around, I can't remember.

Busekist: Both your parents came from religious families?

Walzer: My mother came from a religious family, my father not. My mother's family was certainly religious - as the high-school story tells. After my grandfather died, my grandmother moved to New York and lived with my mother and then with both my parents after they were married. She died in 1943 or early 1944, when I was eight. My mother worked for a law firm as a secretary, a firm where John Foster Dulles was a senior partner. She was the first Jew employed by that firm. She doesn't know exactly why they took her, but they did. She worked for one of the junior partners. I was born in 1935 in the Bronx. We were living on the Grand Concourse in a huge apartment building with a large courtyard, almost entirely Jewish. Next to our building was another big apartment building, which was almost entirely Irish, and there was a playground in between the two, where we sometimes played together, or sometimes fought or "challenged" each other without fighting. I was the first child; my sister was born five years later.

My father went bankrupt in the fur business during the downturn of 1937, and then he went to work in a factory that became a defense factory during the war, making some kind of precision tools for the army; he worked there through the war. He was exempt from the draft because he was the father of two children. My mother was not working at that time. With two children she didn't work - that was the way things were then; there was no day care. I remember her sitting in the courtyard with other women, watching the kids. I went to an elementary public school nearby, PS 64, and to a Cheder in the afternoon. When my grandmother died, my parents took me out of the Cheder and hired a private Hebrew tutor who came to the house. Mister Bain. I remember his name. He taught me the prayers, the alphabet; we read simple stories. I was eight.

In 1944, the war was obviously growing to a close, and the defense factory where my father worked was beginning to shut down or slow down. My mother had an uncle in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who offered my father a job as the manager of a jewelry store. Fur and jewelry are similar businesses - the luxury trade. We moved to Johnstown in November 1944. I was nine. My mother pushed me up one grade. I should have been in 4th grade but I went into the 5th grade. We lived in Westmont, a small suburb of Johnstown, built on a hill after the big flood of 1889. At first the Bethlehem Steel executives and managers lived up there, but Jews were moving in during the 1940s. That became easier when the Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants (written into the deed, forbidding sale to Negroes or Jews) unconstitutional. Johnstown had a Jewish community of about 2,000 people, and three congregations, naturally. A small orthodox congregation, and two pretty big conservative and reform congregations. My parents joined the reform congregation, whose rabbi was Haim Perlmutter, a student of Stephen Samuel Wise,2 who was one of those people pushing classical Reform toward something closer to a traditional service; Wise and Perlmutter were also strongly Zionist.

Johnstown had an interesting Jewish community. There is a book about the Jews in Johnstown3 by Ewa Morawska, a Polish sociologist who left Poland when the Polish army repressed Solidarity and came to the University of Pittsburgh. I met her when she was a fellow at the Institute many years later. Looking for a place to do fieldwork, she decided on Johnstown, a steel-town, seventy miles east from Pittsburgh. She first wrote a book about the Slavs in Johnstown,4 and then about the Jews, with some interesting findings. First of all, the Slavs in Johnstown were traditional antisemites, they knew all the Christian antisemitic language and recited it to her, but they nevertheless preferred to deal with Jewish shopkeepers, Jewish doctors, and Jewish lawyers. These people the Slavs were familiar with; the Yankees were unfamiliar .

The "little steel strike" directed against the smaller companies, including Johnstown's Bethlehem Steel5 had been broken in Johnstown in 1937. A Senate investigation had shown that the mayor and half of the city-council were actually on the payroll of the steel company and had broken the strike with hired vigilantes. But after the investigation and the scandal that confirmed the involvement of the mayor, the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) organized a vote and in 1941 the Steel Workers Organizing Committee won a 4 to 1 victory and the union came to Johnstown. By 1944, when we arrived, the town was booming. The steel industry was doing very well, and because of the new union contract, the workers had more money than they ever had before. So they could come to my father's jewelry store and buy a sixteen-year-old daughter her first necklace or bracelet. The jewelry store was called Rothstein's, and it too was prospering.

Busekist: You said Johnstown had an interesting Jewish community. I...