The Eternal Dissident

Front matter

i o Think and Act s

THE S. MARK TAPER FOUNDATION

IMPRINT IN JEWISH STUDIES a

PART II. INSPIRATIONS Sigmund Freud, May 11, 1956

Commentary by Professor Peter Loewenberg

Bertrand Russell's Autobiography: Three Passions in Life

Commentary by Dr. Joan Beerman

Looking at Kafka, January 8, 1982 Commentary by Professor Saul Friedlander

The Legacy of MLK, January 15, 1982

Commentary by the Reverend James M. Lawson Jr.

First Encounter with George (Regas), April 13, 2005 xi vi

7:

Why the Prophets Are Important, May 20, 1983 Commentary by Professor Jack Miles

PART III. FAITH, DOUBT, AND DUTY Handwritten Reflections on Doubt, undated

Commentary by Rabbi Rachel Timoner

Can We Excommunicate God? April 30, 1965

Commentary by Professor Rabbi Rachel Adler

Duty of the Rabbi, undated

Commentary by Rabbi Richard Levy

From the Diary of a Leo Baeck Temple Rabbi, February 5, 1971 Commentary by Rabbi Kenneth Chasen

Rabbi Beerman’s To-Do List Yom Kippur Eve—Vocation of a Rabbi, September 17, 1972 Commentary by Rabbi Sharon Brous

Fast between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to Protest Munich and Vietnam, September 1972

Commentary by Professor Steven J. Ross

My Troubles with God; God’s Troubles with Me, February 9, 1979 Commentary by David Rintels

The Beginnings of an Outline for Jews to Consider, undated

Commentary by Aziza Hasan

PART IV. SOCIAL JUSTICE The Kindest Use a Knife, October 16, 1953

Commentary by Rabbi John L. Rosove

Is There a Relationship between Judaism and Social Justice? April 14, 1954

Commentary by Rabbi Zoé Klein

The Problems of the City: A Jewish Dilemma, February 4, 1966 Commentary by Professor Rabbi Aryeh Cohen

UCLA Teach-In on Vietnam War, March 24, 1966

Commentary by Rabbi Sanford Ragins

21,

Notes for Symposium on Black Power, January 6, 1967 Commentary by Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller

Letter to President Lyndon Johnson, April 13, 1967 Commentary by Judith Viorst

Rosh Hashanah Eve, September 30, 1970 (5731) Commentary by Professor Jonathan D. Greenberg

How I Lost the Election in St. Louis, July 9, 1971 Commentary by Professor William Cutter

Invocation for Religious Leaders for McGovern, June 1, 1972 Commentary by the Reverend J. Edwin Bacon

Survival in a Nuclear Age, February 17, 1984

Commentary by the Reverend George F. Regas

California People of Faith against the Death Penalty, October 16, 2001; April 20, 2002

Commentary by Mike Farrell

Piece on Human Condition Written for the Office of the Americas, November 2, 2002

Commentary by Stephen Rohde

A Vision for a Bewildering Time: Commencement Address at Washington & Jefferson College, May 18, 2007

Commentary by Professor David Ellenson

Letter to President George W. Bush, April 11, 2008 Commentary by Norman Lear

Human Rights Watch, November 17, 2009 Commentary by Jane Olson

A Sermon for All Saints, July 3, 2011

Commentary by Mel Levine

Part V. Israel/palestine

Time in Israel, Parts I and II, November 1967 Commentary by Daniel Sokatch

CCAR Breira Statement, 1977

Commentary by Professor Michael A. Meyer vii viii

Yom Kippur Morning, October 11, 1978 Commentary by Milton Viorst Yom Kippur Eve, September 26, 1982

Commentary by Connie Bruck

Visions of Peace in the Middle East, October 31, 1992 Commentary by Salam al-Marayati

A Sermon for Yom Kippur Morning, October 1, 2006 Commentary by Rabbi Brant Rosen

Exchange of Letters with Bruce Ramer, October 2006-January 2007

Commentary by Bruce Ramer

A Sermon for Yom Kippur Morning, October 4, 2014 Commentary by Professor Nomi M. Stolzenberg

Sayings of Leonard I. Beerman Notes

List of Contributors

Index

247 251 259 263

A eB

ON

ILLUSTRATIONS

Leonard Beerman with Judah Magnes, Ezra Spicehandler, and two unidentified people at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1947) 8

“A Dissident Rabbi Speaks Out” (1982) 11

Invitation to installation at Leo Baeck Temple (1949) 12

Leonard Beerman and Dr. Nelson Glueck at installation (1949) 13 Leonard Beerman with Dr. Leo Baeck and Rabbi Phineas Smoller (1952) Leonard Beerman getting an award from CLUE with others,

including Rev. James Lawson (2004) 16

Leonard Beerman with Israeli diplomat Abba Eban (undated) 21 Leonard Beerman with Yasir Arafat (undated) 24

9. Leonard Beerman with Rev. George Regas and Dr. Hassan Hathout,

10. 11.

brother of Dr. Maher Hathout (undated) 25

Leonard Beerman with Rev. Jesse Jackson (undated) 26 Announcement of award to Leonard Beerman from Levantine Cultural Center (2012) 27

Leonard and Joan Beerman getting booked after arrest at “Justice for Janitors” protest in Los Angeles (2000) 28

Leonard Beerman at Hebrew Union College graduation (1949) 36 Rabbi Beerman’s To-Do list 84

Tommy Lasorda, veteran Dodgers manager, signed photo 102 UCLA Teach-In I (1966) 130

UCLA Teach-In II (1966) 131

Leonard Beerman’s letter to President Johnson (1967) 140 CCAR letter on Breira (1977) 200

Breira letterhead (1977) 201

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first debt is to Leonard Beerman himself. He was a remarkable mentor, friend, and inspiration. My conversations with him were unfailingly spirited, challenging, and profound. Only in the last months of his life did he agree to work with me on a volume of his sermons and writings. I am sorry that he did not live to see this volume take concrete shape—or to know how seriously his ideas were taken.

Profound thanks are due to his wife, Dr. Joan Willens Beerman, who is also a close friend. Joan opened her home to my frequent intrusions, allowing me to make my way up the spiral staircase to Leonard’s study to pore over his papers for hours on end. Td also like to thank Leonard’s daughters, Judith, Eve, and Elizabeth, who supported the project from its inception and permitted me to make use of their father’s papers and photographs. I’m delighted that the Beerman Papers will be housed at the UCLA Department of Special Collections, where Genie Guerard and her colleagues will attend to them with their customary care.

One of the distinctive features of this book are the commentaries that follow each selection. Pm most grateful to the distinguished roster of commentators who have graced and elevated this volume. Invaluable research assistance was provided by Lindsay King, Nadav Molchadsky, and Kathy Rubio. Talia Graff invested a great deal in this project and contributed significantly as both researcher and proofreader. Thanks are due to the University of California Press editorial team including Eric Schmidt, Cindy Fulton, and Jolene Torr, as well as to Marian Rogers for her meticulous copyediting.

Finally, I would like to express thanks to David Hoberman, a deep admirer of Leonard Beerman, who instantly provided generous support to allow this project to get off the ground.

Introduction

David N. Myers

Capturing the multifaceted personality of Rabbi Leonard Beerman (1921-2014) is not a simple task. He was a deeply inquisitive thinker who posed probing philosophical and theological questions from his early to his last days. He was an impassioned preacher who lavished attention on his weekly and seasonal sermons, which alternately dazzled, moved, and angered his congregants. After his retirement from Leo Baeck Temple, he continued to give a much anticipated and often controversial sermon every Yom Kippur, delivering the final one two and a half months before his death on December 24, 2014.

Leonard Beerman was also an indefatigable activist for social justice whose renown extended well beyond Los Angeles to the wider nation. His commitment, like his life, was forged in a time of dramatic historical change. Beerman’s early years were marked by the profound economic uncertainty of the Great Depression, out of which emerged his empathy for the less fortunate. As an adolescent, he encountered racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism in America, while developing a nascent awareness of the rise of murderous totalitarianism in Europe that culminated in the Holocaust. And in the first decades of his professional career, he devoted a great deal of energy to combating the scourges of McCarthyism, racial injustice, and later, nuclear arms.

Beerman was not alone in these commitments. During this tumultuous period in American history, the rabbinical profession was propelled forward by powerful new currents in American society such as progressivism and the social gospel movement.' Towering figures such as Stephen S. Wise, Judah L. Magnes, Abba Hillel Silver, and later Joachim Prinz and Abraham Joshua Heschel reimagined the rabbinate as a vehicle for broad social engagement, consistent with their vision of an ethical Judaism rooted in the ancient Hebrew prophets’ demand for justice. By the 1950s, the American Reform movement at large was assuming an increasingly activist and public stance, issuing books, guidelines to congregations, and proclamations that echoed the famous charge from Deuteronomy, “Justice, Justice Shalt Thou Pursue,” as a 1953 rabbinical proclamation was titled.

Leonard Beerman came of age in this charged midcentury era as a Reform rabbi inspired by predecessors such as Wise, Magnes, and Heschel (who was not a Reform rabbi, but whom Beerman met at the Reform seminary Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati). At the same time, he was very much his own man. The sight of injustice of any sort induced a raw pain in him. He was especially vigilant and outraged when he believed that fellow Jews were complicit in causing injury, either through direct action or indifference. Never content to settle for the easy path, Beerman challenged and chastised his fellow Jews—and himself—with fiery intensity. He was willing to alienate, indeed, to afflict the comfortable in order to comfort the afflicted, as the well-known phrase has it.

Leonard Beerman was an unusual mix. He was a thinker, a vastly literate reader, and a scholar manqué who was somewhat hesitant to commit his spoken word to pen. And he was a doer, who proudly lived the Heschelian principle of praying with his feet by frequenting and leading protests against injustice. In both of these domains of activity, Beerman was animated by a deep humanity. He loved people in the abstract, and he loved people in the flesh. He loved his fellow Jews, and he loved human beings in general. He knew the healing powers of love in personal relationships. And he knew, as his brother-in-arms, the legendary civil rights activist the Reverend James Lawson, put it, that “love in action” was the defining force of social justice.’

It would be easy but inaccurate to suggest that Leonard Beerman’s personality was free of tension. He was filled with love, but also anger at injustice. He was a bold pacifist, but also an unrelenting fighter. He marched, demonstrated, and was arrested with people in South Central, but served a wealthy congregation in upscale Bel-Air. He was his own kind of Jewish particularist and an unbounded universalist.* These dissonances and disjunctures reflected a spirit of restlessness, a constant fear of inadequacy, and a fair measure of inner turmoil. But they also gave real force to his sense of prophetic vocation. Like his rabbinical forebears, Beerman looked to the Hebrew prophets for inspiration. They were his models for thinking and doing in the world. It was they, he declared in a sermon from 1983, who “address our condition of being Jews and yet at the same time being citizens of the larger society.”

What especially spoke to Beerman’s sense of mission in the prophets was their courage to remonstrate, to fight against inequality, to look inside themselves with critical eyes. This captured for him the essence of what it meant to be Jewish. Beerman articulated this sentiment already in his first major sermon—the one that every graduating rabbinical student gives at Hebrew Union College. In his “Chapel

Sermon, of October 1948, Beerman stated: “Israel is the eternal wanderer and sufferer, like man himself, fighting against thistles and thorns, shadows and abstractions. Israel is the eternal dissident, the great disobedient child of history.” This had more than a trace of autobiographical insight, for Leonard Beerman was himself an “eternal dissident,’ fighting against convention and comfort not in the name of tearing down, but rather with a deep belief in the possibility of repairing the world.

The roots of this distinctive commitment extended back to early childhood. Leonard Beerman was born on April 9, 1921, in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three siblings. His father Paul (1896-1983) belonged to the great wave of Jewish immigration to the United States that commenced in the late nineteenth century, moving to this country at the age of three from Kovno in Lithuania. His mother Tillie (1896-1982) was born in New York to Hungarian Jewish parents. Neither of his parents went to school beyond seventh grade; both were needed to care for their families. In Altoona, Beerman and his parents lived in close proximity to his maternal grandparents, Rose and Jacob Grossman, who kept a kosher home and introduced Beerman to Jewish rituals.’ Life in Altoona was not easy, especially in economic terms. His father moved from peddling fruits and vegetables on a horsedriven wagon to selling notions, small objects, and toys.*

When Beerman was six and a half, his father took a more stable job as a department store manager in Michigan. The Beermans were one of seven Jewish families in their small town, and Beerman was one of two Jews at his high school. The town itself was, as Beerman remembers it, “ultra-Republican.”® His oppositional tendencies were evident already at this early stage. In a student poll at his high school in 1932, twenty-nine of thirty students voted for Herbert Hoover; one, Leonard Beerman, voted for FDR. Not only did the local newspaper, the Owosso Argus-Press, regularly inveigh against Roosevelt and Communists, but the Ku Klux Klan was a presence in town. Antisemitism was also part of the general milieu; his father would regularly tune in during the 1930s to the weekly broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, the rabidly anti-Jewish Catholic priest from Detroit.’

Beerman learned from his father that it was possible and even necessary to hold to unpopular positions. Paul Beerman had returned from his service in the US military in World War I as a pacifist. Beerman recalls: “He didn’t believe in war. I mean, he didn't make a big deal of it but that was what he was. He basically was a man of peace and gentleness?” Paul was also a person who identified with the plight of the workers, as would his son throughout his life.

Beerman’s teenage years were challenging ones, and inculcated in him a lifelong empathy for the underdog. In the first instance, he was unusually short, 4'10", paired with a partner on the high school tennis team who was 6'3". This led to a certain lack of confidence, as he remembered: “Puberty really didn’t come to me until I was about 16, and that was a problem, a big problem in my glands and in my mind.” Compounding these difficulties was the fact that his father was forced to take a major pay cut in 1937, at the tail end of the Depression, sending him into a depression that culminated in the loss of his job—and then a nervous breakdown. After a period of rehabilitation for Paul in a sanatorium, the cash-strapped family was forced to move back to Altoona to live with Rose Grossman. Beerman remembers being very angry that he had to leave his Owosso high school after his junior year to commence his senior year in Altoona.”

One year later, the family again picked up and moved from Altoona for State College, Pennsylvania, where Beerman was to begin his college studies in the fall of 1939 at what was then the Pennsylvania State College. To make ends meet, the family took in boarders in its new house. Penn State was extremely important in Beerman’s formation in several regards. There, he joined the local Hillel chapter, and began to develop a much richer connection to and intellectual interest in Judaism. An important guide was the Hillel director, Benjamin Kahn, a Conservative rabbi whom Beerman respected and learned from.” At that point, though, he had given no thought to becoming a rabbi himself. Rather, he was coming into his own intellectually, discovering a passion for serious study, especially in his three favorite subjects: literature, history, and philosophy. He also took mathematics and physical education virtually every semester and was enrolled throughout his time in college in ROTC.” At Penn State, he found contemporaries with whom he could converse in stimulating fashion as well as a talented faculty that challenged him. One professor, the medieval historian Francis Tschan, thought highly of Beerman, but was apparently no lover of members of the Mosaic faith. While giving him a ride home once, he said approvingly: “Beerman, you're not like those Jews from New York” Another faculty member, a Jewish biochemist with whom his parents were friendly, encouraged Beermam to go into that field. In the same period, he took a test designed to identify career options at Penn State. The person who administered it said that it revealed that Beerman had the aptitude to be a professor in the humanities, but added that it was virtually impossible for a Jew to attain such a position in the year 1941.”

At that point in the summer of 1941, with few prospects awaiting him, though close to completion of his course work, Beerman left school and began to hitchhike around the country. Eventually, he landed in Flint, Michigan, where he got a job at the AC spark plug factory, which had been repurposed to make guns for the war effort. Beerman worked on the assembly line seven nights a week. In this setting, he stood out. In the first instance, he was an intellectually inclined and curious college student. In the second instance, his political instincts tended toward socialism, which was hardly popular in the jingoistic war years. And finally, his religion set him apart. He recalled that he once was socializing with a group of coworkers at the YMCA where he lived when he told them that he was a Jew. They responded:

“If we had known you were Jewish, we never would have had anything to do with

you.” Another one said, “In fact, were not going to have anything to do with you,” and

they walked out of the room."

Given his later trajectory, it is surprising that this and other encounters with antisemitism as a youth and young man did not turn Beerman inward or render him defensive toward the world. On the contrary, these experiences seemed to heighten his own sensitivity for the plight of other victims of group discrimination. At the same time, he was learning and reading more about Jewish history and thought, working his way through the Judaica section of the Flint public library. This led him to develop a stronger sense of Jewish identity, and he began to think for the first time of a career as a rabbi.” Soon thereafter, Beerman returned to Penn State to complete his studies. This was a period of further intellectual growth and existential tumult. He spoke with a close friend at Penn State, Leonard Feldstein, who would later become a psychoanalyst in New York, about his thoughts of becoming a rabbi. Feldstein immediately blurted out: “You cant become a rabbi; you don't believe in God?” Indeed, Beerman harbored his own serious theological doubts, even as he was deepening his knowledge of Judaism. He felt some measure of solace when he discovered the great Dutch thinker of Jewish origins, Benedictus Spinoza (1632-1677), who helped give him a philosophical and theological handle on the world. He was particularly drawn to Spinoza’s notion that God was essentially equivalent to nature (Deus sive natura): “The god of Spinoza, I thought, could be my god, and that’s the god I think I could believe in and affirm, so I was comforted by that?” Indeed, this intense engagement with Spinoza became the philosophical foundation of Beerman's lifelong agnosticism, which lent his rabbinate a curious quality, but also a tension-filled authenticity.

Throughout his life, Beerman asked tough questions of himself, refusing to accept pat answers or easy resolutions. He was a man of courage and boldness, but not of certainty. Moreover, he took steps in his life that were as much a challenge to his value system as an affirmation of them. One such step came after he returned to Penn State in the summer of 1942 to complete his degree. He finished his requirements in the fall semester and was awarded a bachelor’s degree with Phi Beta Kappa honors on December 17. He then decided immediately thereafter to enlist in the Marine Corps, prompted both by his need to fulfill his ROTC obligation and, in choosing the US Marines, by the desire to overcome his own sense of physical inadequacy.” He shipped off to Parris Island, South Carolina, spent three months in grueling training camp, and emerged, as he recalled, with “a butch haircut, very lean, muscular’? Because of his intellectual aptitude, Beerman was recommended for Officer Candidate School, but could not pass the final physical test required of new recruits. Faced with a variety of options, he took an honorable discharge after only seven months.

Over the course of his time at Penn State, Beerman had discussed the option of rabbinical school with Rabbi Kahn, the Hillel director. Because Beerman did not have a strong background in Hebrew or other traditional Jewish subjects, Kahn recommended that he consider the Reform movement’s seminary Hebrew Union College (HUC), where the fact that he was not familiar with traditional

Jewish sources would not be a disqualification. And in fact, Beerman had written to HUC’s president, Dr. Julian Morgenstern, before heading off to Parris Island. As he remembered it, Dr. Morgenstern told him that hed be happy to admit him if he returned in one piece from the Marine Corps.” Accordingly, after being discharged, Beerman made his way to Cincinnati, Ohio, and enrolled in the fall of 1943 in HUC.

There he took a wide range of courses, including Hebrew, the Bible, Jewish ritual, and rabbinic literature.” He studied with a number of leading Jewish studies scholars, including Israel Bettan, Jacob Rader Marcus, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. And yet it was a lesser-known faculty member who influenced him most, Abraham Cronbach, a Reform rabbi and scholar with radical pedagogical and political ideas. In his classroom, which was festooned with magazine covers expressing political views from Communist to Fascist, Cronbach did not allow argument. One had the right to express an opinion, but not to oppose another's. Cronbach himself was a deeply committed pacifist with strong socialist inclinations, whom Beerman remembered as “an absolutely brilliant man’—and one of the first to write on Judaism and psychoanalysis.”

Meanwhile, the students at HUC were informally divided by their various interests. Beerman remembers three such groups: the “kavanah” boys (including Samuel Dresner and Richard Rubinstein), who came together on the basis of their common desire to make prayer and liturgy spiritually meaningful;” the “theology” boys (including future luminaries such as Eugene Borowitz, Arnold J. Wolf, and Steven Schwarzchild), who were the intellectual vanguard of the student body and were searching for a more vigorous theology than what they were taught; and the “social justice” boys, who were committed to the prophetic spirit of bringing equality and peace to the world. Beerman had little to do with the first group, had strong ties to those in the second, but was a mainstay of the third, along with his close friend Robert Goldburg, with whom he shared a passion not only for activism, but for fine literature and rigorous intellectual exchange as well. The “social justice” boys read the texts of Marx and other Marxists, and engaged in their own forms of activism. For example, they undertook, together with a black student from the University of Cincinnati, a sit-in at a segregated restaurant in town, refusing to leave before being removed hours later.”

Beerman’s participation in the informal social justice group gave expression to an ethical-political commitment that had been developing in him for years. It reflected his view that to be a Jew was to act in the world for the betterment of all humanity. It is thus somewhat curious that he decided that he would travel, along with his wife, Martha, and his fellow HUC student, Ezra Spicehandler and his wife, Shirley, to Palestine to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the fall of 1947. Although the American Reform movement had moved away from its unequivocal opposition to Zionism (in the Pittsburgh platform of 1885) to a position of qualified support (in the Columbus platform of 1937), many Reform rabbis remained opposed or agnostic about Zionism. Given Beerman’s own universalist rendering of Judaism and disdain for all forms of chauvinism, one might think that he would simply sidestep Zionism and avoid Palestine. But Beerman was insatiably curious and liked to learn for himself. Palestine was a source of intense controversy even then, and it was important to go to visit. At the same time, he harbored within him a vestige of his grandparents’ world, traces of a certain Jewish ethnic bond, as well as pride in the fortitude and accomplishments of the Zionist settlers. Notwithstanding his profound concern and frequent criticism, Palestine (and later Israel) held a special place in his heart.

And in fact, Beerman’s time in Palestine proved to be formative. He settled in Jerusalem, and quickly went about meeting people and making new friends. He planned to enroll at the Hebrew University in the fall semester, though there is no record of his actually taking courses.” That said, he did seek out and forge in this period a connection with one of the most controversial Jews in Palestine, who happened to be the president of the Hebrew University and a Reform rabbi: Judah L. Magnes. The American-born Magnes (1877-1948) had served congregations in the Bay Area and New York before taking a most unusual step for an American Reform rabbi in 1922: he immigrated to Palestine. He became a leading force behind the efforts to create a new university in Jerusalem, and presided over the opening of the Hebrew University in April 1925 as its founding chancellor. Beerman was drawn to Magnes not only because of his role in creating the Hebrew University, and not only because he was a Reform rabbi. Magnes was also one of the most notable Jewish pacifists in Palestine and was heavily involved in efforts to achieve peace between Jews and Arabs from the time of his arrival in the country. Magnes did not hesitate to voice his political opinions, which were decidedly out of step with the sensibilities of Jews in Palestine during the British Mandate period (1922-1948). Even at the Hebrew University, whose faculty included a number of well-known liberals and progressive, Magnes’s words were not always well received. For example, students hissed at his speech at the opening of the winter semester in 1929, three months after the murderous Western Wall riots. On that occasion, Magnes declared:

If the only way of establishing the Jewish National Home is upon the bayonets of some empire, our whole enterprise is not worthwhile and it is better that the eternal people that has outlived many a mighty empire should possess its soul in patience and plan and wait. It is one of the great civilizing tasks before the Jewish people to try to enter the Promised Land not as Joshua, but bringing peace, culture, hard work, sacrifice, love and determination; to do nothing unjustifiable before the conscience of the world.”

In virtually every regard, Judah Magnes was a model for Leonard Beerman: his pacifism, his commitment to Jewish-Arab peace, his vision of a prophetic Judaism defined by its ethical norms, and his willingness to brook controversy with his words. In fact, a recent biographer of Magnes described him in terms that could

FIGURE 1. Leonard Beerman (far right) with Judah Magnes, Ezra Spicehandler, and two unidentified people at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1947).

well suit Beerman: “American Jewish nonconformist?” Among other affinities, Beerman was drawn to Magnes’s most controversial of stances—his opposition to a self-standing Jewish state in favor of a Jewish-Arab binational state.* And yet, he did not publicly endorse Magnes’s proposal. As a matter of fact, he took another action in Jerusalem that is surprising in light of his own instincts as well as his new relationship with Magnes. Following the United Nations General Assembly vote in favor of the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state on November 29, 1947, he joined the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force associated with the Labor Zionist Mapai Party. He renewed his knowledge of how to use a gun from his time in the Marine Corps, and was even sent out on a mission shortly after the outbreak of hostilities between Jews and Arabs that followed the approval of the United Nations partition plan on November 29, 1947. On that mission, which he undertook with his HUC friend Ezra Spicehandler, he recalled carrying but not detonating hand grenades in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem.»

The experience of serving in the Haganah and countenancing the prospect of doing serious harm to another human being, along with his conversations with

Judah Magnes, solidified what would become an iron-clad principle for Beerman from this point forward: pacifism. He returned to the United States in the spring of 1948, and was invited to speak about his experience. In a speech entitled “I Saw Palestine Betrayed” at the Penn State Hillel chapter on April 30, 1948, he followed in Magnes’s path by taking aim at the British, whom he scored for failing to prevent violence between Jews and Arabs. Unlike Magnes, though, he supported the idea of partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, but on the condition that “Arabs are given access to educational and cultural opportunities such as the Jews have.” While clearly drawn to the ideal of binationalism, he remained committed throughout his life to the principle of independent states for both Jews and Arabs. Over time, though, one notices a shift in his rhetoric regarding the relations between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. Soon after his return in 1948, he expressed the view of fellow Jews about the desire of local Arabs to “impose their feudal rule on the country and overturn the achievements of the Jews.”® In later years, from the late 1960s onward, such sentiments gave way to frustration over the errant path of Zionism, especially in denying to Palestinians their national rights. Incidentally, Beerman never identified himself as a Zionist, though he felt a strong connection to Israel and, on a subsequent visit in 1964 while on sabbatical with Martha and their three daughters, even considered moving there—yet another evocation of the life path followed by Judah Magnes.