Contemporary Authors

• Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2017

• McGill - https://www.mcgill.ca/jewishstudies/faculty/daniel-kupfert-heller

  Daniel Kupfert Heller

  Assistant Professor & Undergraduate Course Advisor
  Areas of Interest:

  Modern Jewish history; 20th century Eastern Europe; Zionism and the State of Israel; history of childhood and youth; Polish-Jewish Relations; history of humanitarianism and international development.
  Education:

  Ph.D, Stanford University, 2012.
  B.A, University of Toronto, 2006.
  Publications:

  Books

  Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)

  Articles

  “The Gendered Politics of Public Health: Jewish Nurses and the American Joint Distribution Committee in Interwar Poland” Jewish History (forthcoming volume)

  “The Jewish User's Guide to Terror and Retaliation” AJS Perspectives (Spring 2017), pp.14-15

  “Obedient Children and Reckless Rebels: Jabotinsky’s Youth Politics and the Case for Authoritarian Leadership, 1931-1933,” Journal of Israeli History 34, 1 (2015), pp. 45-68

  “Between Defense and Attack: Revisionist Responses to Anti-Jewish Violence in 1930s Poland” ["Między obroną a atakiem: syjoniści-rewizjoniści wobec przemocy antyżydowskiej w Polsce w latach trzydziestych"] Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 2 (258), 2016, pp.407-429.
  Teaching Awards:

  -Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching, McGill University (2017)

  -H.Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, McGill University (2016)

  -Prize for Excellence in a Student Designed and Taught Course, Stanford University, (2012)
  Research Grants and Awards:

  -Le Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC): Research Support for New Academics (2017)

  -SSHRC Internal Social Sciences and Humanities Development Grant (2017)

  -Start-Up Grant, Faculty of Arts, McGill University (2013-2016)

  -Elizabeth Spilman Rosenfeld Prize for the best written dissertation in the Department of History, Stanford University (2013)

  -Mellon Foundation Dissertation Scholarship (2011-2012)

  -Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Doctoral Scholarship (2011-2012)

  -Aleksander and Alicja Hertz Memorial Fellow, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2010)
  Lectures and Conference Presentations:

  “How to Write the Right: Historical approaches to Revisionist Zionism” Centre for Jewish Studies Graduate Seminar, University of Toronto (March 2016)

  “Mobilizing the Shtetl: Betar and the Quest to Transform Small-Town Life in Interwar Poland” Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York (November 2015)

  “Terrorism Between Poland and Palestine, 1935-1939” Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Conference (November 2015)

  "Jabotinsky and the Politics of Youth" Forum for Young Scholars, Tel Aviv University (June 2014)

  "Nashim u-leumiut: Hama'avak al zehutan shel nashot betar be-polin" Tel Aviv University (June 2014)

  "Jabotinsky's Daughters: Gender and Nationalism in the Betar Youth Movement" YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (March 2014)

  “Two Fatherlands? Zionist Youth and the Politics of Belonging in Interwar Poland”, Hazel D. Cole Fellow Public Lecture, University of Washington (April 2013)

  “Taming of the Shtetl? Urban Zionist Activists and the Struggle to Shape Modern Jewish Politics in Interwar Poland’s Eastern Borderlands”, The Micropolitics of Small-Town Life in Eastern Europe, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (February 2013)

  “Polish Patriotism in Blue and White? The Betar Youth Movement and the Performance of Zionist ‘Polishness’ ”, Association for Jewish Studies Conference, Chicago, IL (December 2012)

  “Obedient Rebels: Right-Wing Zionism, Youth and Political Power in the early 1930s”, Association for Jewish Studies Conference, Washington DC (December 2011)

  Related Content
  Contact Information

  Office:
  Leacock Building
  Room 832

  Phone Number:
  (514) 398-8775

  Email:
  Daniel Heller

  Winter Office Hours:
  Thursdays 9:00-11:00 am

  Book an appointment:
  https://calendly.com/daniel-heller

• McGill - http://blogs.mcgill.ca/jewishstudies/2013/05/26/new-faculty-member-dan-heller/

  New Faculty Member: Dan Heller

  A recent graduate of Stanford University’s doctoral program in History, Daniel joins us from the University of Washington, where he was awarded the prestigious Hazel D. Cole Fellowship in Jewish Studies for the 2012-2013 academic year. His dissertation, “The Rise of the Zionist Right: Polish Jews and the Betar Youth Movement, 1922-1935,” explored the history of one of the largest and most influential Jewish youth movements to emerge in interwar Europe, and drew upon archival research across Poland, Israel and the United States. His current research interests include the role of youth in modern Jewish politics, the influence of Polish political culture on the development of Zionism in Mandate Palestine, and Jewish political activism in small-towns across Poland between the two world wars.
  Daniel Heller

  Daniel Heller

  Daniel’s award-winning research and writing have received recognition from the Mellon Foundation, the YIVO institute for Jewish Research, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. While at Stanford, Daniel was also recognized for his teaching, where he he received the History Department’s award for best new course in 2011. Daniel is delighted to join McGill’s Department of Jewish Studies, and looks forward to teaching a range of courses on the history of Jews worldwide—from introductory surveys on modern Jewish politics, culture and society to seminars on Polish-Jewish Relations, the Holocaust and the history of Israel. Daniel will be teaching “Jewish History: 1000-2000” (HIST219) and the “History of Zionism” (JWST366) during the 2013-2014 academic year.

  — Eric Caplan

Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism
Publishers Weekly.
264.24 (June 12, 2017): p58. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism Daniel Kupfert Heller. Princeton Univ., $35 (344p) ISBN978-0-691-17475-4
Heller, assistant professor of Jewish studies at McGill University, looks closely at the nature and evolution of Betar, the youth organization of the right-wing revisionist Zionist movement headed by Vladimir Jabotinsky in Poland during the interwar years. He shows how Jabotinsky occasionally put a damper on the militancy of his young followers and sometimes used it for political leverage against his more cautious older adversaries in the Revisionist executive committee. Heller superbly documents how some "Betarniks" were drawn to fascism and other authoritarian movements that emphasized physical strength, the will to power, and militarism. Given the often antagonistic relations between Poland's Catholics and Jews, it is surprising to learn the extent to which Betar's leaders also used "the iconography and choreography of Polish patriotic culture," both at their own gatherings and when joining Polish ones. Another of Heller's revelations is that into the mid-1930s, almost half of Betar's members were women, although much of the male leadership sought to limit their participation (Jabotinsky himself supported women's political rights). Heller also reveals how Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu appropriated Jabotinsky's views for their own political and polemical purposes. This is a most provocative, solid scholarly work on a heretofore little-explored topic in
1 of 2 3/26/18, 4:52 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
20th-century Polish-Jewish and Zionist history. Illus. {Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism." Publishers Weekly, 12
June 2017, p. 58. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720718 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=97ce61a8. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720718
2 of 2 3/26/18, 4:52 PM

• Times Higher Education
  https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-jabotinskys-children-polish-jews-and-the-rise-of-right-wing-zionism-daniel-kupfert-heller-princeton-university-press
  Word count: 1234

  Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism, by Daniel Kupfert Heller

  A militaristic organisation that emerged in Warsaw in 1929 was accused of fascism – but were its violent actions justified, asks Geoffrey Alderman
  September 7, 2017

  By Geoffrey Alderman

  Vladimir Jabotinsky in the company of Betar commanders, Palestine

  On New Year’s Day 1929, in one of Europe’s great capital cities, and to the sound of trumpets and drums, hundreds of young people in uniform marched to an imposing place of worship, there to listen to a sermon extolling the many virtues of the organisation to which they belonged. At the conclusion of these ceremonies the many journalists present filed their stories. One noted that “Astonished, Jewish Warsaw watched the parade of Jewish fascists across the city.” Another referred to the leader of the organisation as a “Jewish Mussolini”, and to the heavily choreographed march in which they had participated (to Warsaw’s Great Synagogue) as “their March on Rome”. The organisation in question was known as Betar, and its leader was the Jewish soldier, orator and poet Vladimir Jabotinsky.

  The event that so enraptured some Jews, but which angered so many more, was the opening ceremony of Betar’s first international conference. Betar was the name of the last Jewish fortress to hold out against the Romans in 136 CE. But it was also a Hebrew acronym – Brit Yosef Trumpeldor – referring to Joseph Trumpeldor, a close friend of Jabotinsky, who had been murdered by Palestinian Arabs at Tel Hai, in what became Mandate Palestine, in 1920.

  Betar was founded by Jabotinsky in Riga, Latvia, in 1923, and from then until his death in New York 17 years later it served as a powerful weapon that he hoped would assist him in wresting control of the world Zionist movement from a leadership that he and his “Revisionist” followers regarded as far too accommodating to the British and in any case dangerously moderate.

  Jabotinsky was no moderate. But was he a fascist, and was Betar really a collection of genuine Jewish fascists? These are questions that Daniel Kupfert Heller has set out to answer in a meticulously researched and elegantly crafted monograph, not the least virtue of which is its deep mining of sources in several languages across several continents.

  As Heller admits, the answers depend in part on how one defines fascism. Members of Betar were certainly instilled with the cult of the leader (Jabotinsky) and with the supreme virtue of sacrifice for the greater good. Betar was – or at least became – militaristic in outlook, sometimes violently so. But while at times severely autocratic, Jabotinsky was at heart a democrat, and if we find this apparent contradiction almost too much to swallow, it’s as well to remember that during the 1920s even stalwarts of the British Labour Party could be heard muttering that a future Labour-controlled Parliament might be persuaded to pass enabling legislation giving sweeping powers to a socialist government.

  Betar – in short – was a child of its time, and at that particular time Poland, from which it largely recruited, was home to 3 million Jews who were subject to daily harassment, economic and educational boycott and gratuitous violence – all at the behest of Catholic extremists and their government cheerleaders. Jabotinsky’s answer was to meet violence with violence and even to instigate attack as the surest means of defence.

  Had he been listened to, many more Jews might be alive now.

  Geoffrey Alderman is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, working on a book about the Jewish contribution to crime in the UK since Cromwell.

  Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism
  By Daniel Kupfert Heller
  Princeton University Press
  352pp, £27.95
  ISBN 9780691174754
  Published 12 September 2017
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• Mideast Outpost
  http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/jabotinskys-children-polish-jews-and-the-rise-of-right-wing-zionism-by-daniel-kupfert-heller-reviewed-by-david-isaac.html
  Word count: 1620

  Written on November 27, 2017 at 8:22 am by Ruth King
  Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism by Daniel Kupfert Heller Reviewed by David Isaac
  Filed under Mideast no comments

  Jabotinsky’s Children is a hatchet job, cloaked in a tone of historical objectivity. The “children” are Betar, the youth movement founded by Zionist leader Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, which boasted some 65,000 members in the 1930s, most of them in Poland. The book’s thesis is that Betar youth, whom the author says Jabotinsky originally viewed with “a mix of pity, disdain and suspicion,” ultimately shaped his world view, making him open to fascist ideas. The author, Daniel Kupfert Heller, an assistant professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University, further asserts that Jabotinsky deliberately wrote “provocative and ambiguous prose” to allow “Betar activists to interpret their leader’s writings as they saw fit,” in line with what the author views as their own authoritarian and violence-prone ideology.

  The first hundred pages are devoted to a tedious setup describing Jabotinsky’s growing interest in Poland’s Jewish youth and an overly detailed examination of the various existing Jewish groups that would eventually coalesce to form Betar. That the book originated as a Ph.D. thesis probably explains the minutia of this section. Although the author attempts to explain why Jews were attracted to Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski’s right-wing government (not hard to understand as the situation of Jews under his regime was better than either before or after), he doesn’t adequately convey the daunting challenges facing Polish Jews—given the growth of anti-Semitic hatred, the escalating economic hardships, and the progressive closing off by Britain of Jewish immigration to Palestine, one of their few avenues of escape. Neither will the reader learn what the Revisionist movement was about or even what issues preoccupied the Zionist leaders of the day.

  That some Betar members flirted with fascist ideas is not in doubt. The question is: So what? It is not surprising that youth movements would be influenced by the politics of the day. Early on, Italian leader Benito Mussolini was not considered anti-Semitic which is why as late as 1934, Zionist leader Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the very face of establishment Zionism, could visit Mussolini as part of a diplomatic initiative without raising eyebrows. Heller admits that in the 1920s and part of the 1930s, fascism was not a dirty word. In the 1920s, Churchill himself wrote that Italian fascism had “rendered a service to the whole world.” As late as 1933, Roosevelt expressed his admiration for Mussolini.

  What is worth noting—and Heller does not note it—is that Jabotinsky refused to meet with Mussolini when given the chance. The reason: Jabotinsky hated fascism. In a world that still admired it—yes, including some of his followers—Jabotinsky decried the spread of the Leader cult. Indeed, he might have been the first Zionist leader to use the word fascism in a pejorative sense.

  Faced with Jabotinsky’s many antifascist articles, Heller has his work cut out for him. He nevertheless insists that Jabotinsky’s writings were “provocative, elusive, and contradictory.” He repeatedly refers to Jabotinsky’s devotion to democratic ideals as a “persona,” implying that Jabotinsky believed something more sinister in his heart of hearts. He fastens upon a letter Jabotinsky wrote to a follower in 1930. It says: “The cult of the Duce awakens disgust in me”—hardly an “elusive” message. But wait, says Heller, later in that same letter Jabotinsky “tempered” his message, saying, “Fascism has many good ideas.” The trouble with treating this as evidence of Jabotinsky’s alleged slouch toward fascism, is that we have a clear declaration of his opposition to fascism coupled with a vague statement about fascism’s positive aspects. Heller doesn’t include the text of the letter so we don’t know what were the “good ideas” to which Jabotinsky referred.

  In fact, we do know what Betar members admired about fascism. In one of his more cautious moments, Heller himself tells us: “While many Betar leaders admired the fascist calls for discipline, obedience, and military might, and occasionally idealized their economic system, they never celebrated institutions of the fascist state designed to suppress political dissent, whether through censorship, the secret police, or squadristi. Leaders of Betar’s parent organization, the Revisionist movement, were especially reticent to identify with a movement that infringed on basic freedoms of association and sought to dictate the attitudes and behaviors of its citizens.” In short, Betar rejected those aspects of fascism for which we today judge the political ideology to be so repugnant.

  The author is also guilty of serious historical inaccuracies. In his discussion of agreements between Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion in 1934, which the two men were eager to reach in order to unify the Zionist movement with the looming threat of Hitler, Heller says they fell apart due to “members of both the Left and the Right rejecting the initial agreements forged by their leaders … negotiation and compromise could not overcome the hatred that Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion had fomented among their ranks throughout the previous years.” What actually happened was the Revisionists confirmed the agreement (after prolonged debate according to Joseph Schechtman’s biography of Jabotinsky) while Labor did not. In March 1935, the Labor Zionist trade union Histadrut held a referendum, which rejected the agreement with Jabotinsky by 15,227 votes to 10,187. Ben-Gurion biographer Shabtai Teveth writes: “Ben-Gurion was his own victim, undone by the hard line he had formerly taken against Jabotinsky and his movement.” So it was Labor and only Labor that couldn’t overcome its hostility. On what then does Heller base his assertion that both sides rejected the agreement? According to the footnotes, on two letters by Jabotinsky. Heller doesn’t provide their contents. If Heller has new information, unknown to previous Zionist historians that the Revisionists repudiated these agreements, he ought to produce it, not base this revelation on his interpretation of letters we are not allowed to see.

  The passing reference to the hatred fostered by Ben-Gurion is the first inkling the reader will get that such attitudes existed in Labor Zionist ranks. This is a striking oversight. Labor Zionists were responsible for nearly all violence between the two Zionist sides. Presumably Heller doesn’t want to speak about this because it would undercut his assertion that Betar “culture made clear the necessity of waging war on socialists,” which suggests Betar was the source of violence. But time and again it was the Labor Zionists who responded with physical violence when Revisionist workers wanted to work outside the socialist Histadrut. After an incident in which adult Labor members with sticks attacked 15-year-old Betar youths marching in Tel Aviv, Labor leader Berl Katznelson resigned in protest, writing: “No compromise is possible between my outlook and the slope down which our movement is sliding ineluctably. I am prepared to go down with the movement in its struggle, but I am not prepared to join it on the road of intoxication and suicide.”

  Heller really goes off the rails at the conclusion where he appears to treat Betar as the fount of Labor Zionist violence against Arabs. He writes that, “When the moment arrived for the ‘native born’ young Jews of Palestine to join underground Labor Zionist battalions that at times targeted civilians, they had at their disposal an arsenal of thousands of articles from Betar’s journals that offered moral justification for employing violence against Palestine’s Arab population.” It is laughable to think that young Labor Zionists needed Betar reading material—which it is highly doubtful they saw—to finally abandon havlagah, the purely defensive reaction to Arab violence that left the initiative in Arab hands and which the Labor establishment itself was eventually forced to discard.

  As with the example above, Heller never bluntly declares anything. Everything is done through suggestion, implication, insinuation. While it seems that Heller would love nothing more than to pin all violence on Jabotinsky and his Betar, he appears equally cautious so that no one should pin on him the accusation that he has done so. It makes his writing appear, dare we say it, “contradictory,” even “elusive.”

  The book does have one interesting section. It is on the autobiographies of young Betar members from far-flung branches in Poland. What emerges is that Betar’s largely urban leaders had a tough time communicating their political message to their distant village and small town members. One gets the impression that much as a piece of gossip can change beyond recognition as it gets passed down a human chain, Betar’s political ideology also underwent metamorphosis. The most humorous example does not concern Betar, but is told by a Betar autobiographer about his sister, who ran a local Hashomer Hatzair branch. When she received propaganda from Hashomer’s rabidly secular, socialist HQ, she simply stuffed it in a drawer and ran the organization as a religious group, where they debated such matters as how to rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. There are probably lessons here for any organization struggling to keep its people on point.

  All in all, this is a profoundly depressing book, dredging up long buried calumnies as if they were historical truths. But Daniel Kupfert Heller can take heart. He has ensured himself a cushy position at his choice of any number of Jewish Studies departments where political uniformity eclipses historical accuracy.

  David Isaac is the creator of a Zionist history site, ZionismU.com. This appeared in The Washington Free Beacon on November 5.

• Jewish Journal
  http://jewishjournal.com/rosnersdomain/225971/jabotinskys-children-exchange-part-2-great-zionist-leaders-flirtations-fascism/
  Word count: 1359

  The Jabotinsky’s Children exchange, part 2: On the great Zionist leader’s ‘flirtations’ with Fascism
  BY Shmuel Rosner | PUBLISHED Oct 18, 2017 | Rosner's Domain

  Zeev Jabotinsky

  Daniel Kupfert Heller is assistant professor of Jewish studies at McGill University. Dr. Heller received his PhD from Stanford University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto.

  This exchange focuses on Dr. Heller’s new Book, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism (Princeton University Press, 2017). Part 1 can be found right here.

  ***

  Dear Dan,

  The second chapter of your book examines one of the most controversial aspects of Jabotinsky and the movement he started: their curious, complicated relation to Fascism. I’d like to quote a particularly interesting excerpt:

  Prior to Jabotinsky’s split with the Zionist Organization, he told Weizmann during a trip to Italy in 1922 that Zionists would be able to find a “common language” with several Italian Fascist leaders. Perhaps bearing in mind his comments to Weizmann, he wrote to Mussolini that very same day and explained Zionist behavior in the following way: “If you want to understand our level of vitality, please study your own fascists and add only some tragedy, some tenacity—perhaps more experience.”

  Even if Jabotinsky’s comments were designed to impress Mussolini, rather than accurately describe the Zionist movement, many of his acolytes took seriously the claim that fascism and Zionism had much in common…

  Throughout the book you describe Betar members learning from, discussing, admiring, but also sometimes criticising, fascism. The picture you paint is a multi-layered one that could surely move different readers in different ways.

  My question: What do you think modern-day Zionists, both on the right and on left, can learn from your complicated narrative of Jabotinsky and Betar’s “flirtations” with fascism?

  Yours,

  Shmuel

  ***

  Dear Shmuel,

  For some of my readers, the notion that a Jewish political movement in interwar Poland could embrace, let alone admire, the beliefs and behaviors associated with fascism might seem outrageous. Antisemitism, after all, was a critical, if not central, component of most fascist movements throughout interwar Europe. When we hear the term “fascism,” the first images that often come to people’s minds are those of Hitler and the Third Reich.

  I hope that my book will allow readers, no matter their political orientation, to see Jabotinsky and Betar’s flirtations with fascism within their historical context.

  The history of fascism does not begin with the rise of the Nazi state in 1933. In the mid-1920s, when the Betar movement was founded, Europeans were turning to Fascist Italy, not Germany, as the model for what a country could look like if right-wing politics reigned in full force. At the time, antisemitism was not a critical component of the Italian fascist worldview. When Mussolini seized the reins of power, several Jews could be counted among his innermost circle. Fascist Italy also had many admirers worldwide. On more than one occasion, government officials in Britain, France and the United States turned to Fascist Italy for inspiration to restore order, reinvigorate their economies, prevent the spread of communism and create a mobilized community of loyal followers.

  Fascist Italy appeared all the more successful to onlookers when they compared the country to the new parliamentary democracies of Eastern Europe. Established following the First World War, these new democracies were plagued by political corruption, factionalism, legislative gridlock and violence. Poland was one such country. In the first eight years of Poland’s existence, fifteen governments collapsed, wreaking havoc on the country’s already miserable economy. Many Polish Jews viewed Poland’s democratic political process as a breeding ground for antisemitism. In the lead-up to parliamentary elections, Polish Jews could expect a surge in antisemitic propaganda from Polish nationalist parties. When an opponent of right-wing Polish nationalists, Gabriel Narutowicz, was chosen as Poland’s first democratically elected president in 1922, his opponents branded him a “Jewish president.” Within hours of his victory, bloody antisemitic riots shook Warsaw. He was assassinated less than a week later.

  Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that some Polish Jews could admire Fascist Italy’s calls for order, unity and stability, or that or that some Zionists in Poland viewed authoritarian politics as a potential political vehicle for bringing about their aspirations.

  We also have to understand the nature of Fascist ideology between the two world wars in order to make sense of Betar’s flirtations with fascism. As much as Italian fascists issued sweeping political declarations, they saw little need to present an ideologically seamless world to their followers. They were constantly redefining their aims and practices. As a result, Betar leaders who described themselves as fascists often disagreed about what the term “fascism” meant in the first place. Throughout the interwar period, when Betar leaders wrestled with whether or not Fascism offered a compelling ideological and behavioral code, they continually debated its very definition.

  Keeping in mind the historical context of interwar Europe as well as the elusive nature of fascist ideology, I set out in my book to assess the extent to which Betar adopted components of Fascism’s ideological repertoire. Drawing upon the youth movement’s curriculum guidelines, newspapers, and meeting minutes, I found that the Betar’s relationship to Fascism was as dynamic as it was complex.

  On the one hand, most of the youth movement’s leaders in Poland made clear Betar’s unapologetic, unflinching support for several crucial features of Fascist Italy’s ideological repertoire. When Betar members proposed models of economic relations for the future Jewish state, they were likely to turn to Fascist Italy’s corporatist policies. The movement’s leaders and members insisted that only a society mobilized along military lines could bring about nationalist goals. In the context of Betar, this meant subordinating oneself to the needs of the Jewish nation and obeying one’s commander. Like others on Europe’s radical right, Betar made clear the necessity of waging war on socialists, communists and any other enemies of their project to create a nation-state. Some of them envisioned violence as a cleansing, cathartic experience, and insisted that it was a national imperative to murder anyone who sought to kill Zionists.

  At the same time, however, Betar leaders and members in Poland rarely, if ever, celebrated institutions of the fascist state designed to suppress political dissent, whether through censorship, a secret police or a militia. Although some Betar members and leaders continued to draw links between their youth movement and fascism after Hitler’s rise to power, many if not most of the youth movement’s members from 1933 onwards shied away from directly invoking Fascism as an ideology to emulate.

  Jabotinsky’s attitudes towards fascism were no less complicated. As much as he cherished his role as Betar’s commander, he also relished his persona as a champion of democracy and individual rights. He criticized fascist movements that infringed on basic freedoms of association and sought to dictate the attitudes and behaviors of its citizens. He occasionally insisted to his followers that he was repelled by Fascist Italy’s cult of leadership for Mussolini. In 1933, in no uncertain terms, he condemned several Betar leaders who expressed admiration for Hitler’s leadership style and elements of Nazi movement’s nationalist program.

  That said, Jabotinsky also conceded, as he did to one admirer in 1930, that fascism had “many good ideas,” and willingly borrowed from fascism’s ideological repertoire. In the previous year, for example, he thanked a right-wing Zionist living in Italy for teaching him the value of describing Jews as a race in order to mobilize support. Throughout my book, I trace how Jabotinsky was increasingly willing, when it was politically expedient to do so, to embrace a leadership style that his contemporaries associated with fascism, even if it was at the expense of his self-image as a democrat.

• AJS Perspectives
  http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/transgression-issue/the-jewish-users-guide-to-terror-and-retaliation/
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  The Jewish User’s Guide to Terror and Retaliation
  Daniel Kupfert Heller

  Yirmiyahu Halperin (1901–1962) poses with Betar leaders in Warsaw 1932. Courtesy of the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel.
  On November 11, 1937, a bomb packed with iron shards and nails tore through a narrow side street in Jerusalem, killing two Arab bystanders. With the explosion, the right-wing Zionist terrorist group known as the Irgun Zva'i Le'umi (National Military Organization) proclaimed its opposition to the policy of self-restraint (havlagah) promoted by most of Mandate Palestine's Zionist leadership at the start of the Arab Revolt (1936–1939). While the Irgun's opponents accused the group of transgressing the ethical principles of the Zionist movement, its members, drawn mostly from the Revisionist faction of the Zionist movement established by Vladimir Jabotinsky, insisted that terrorist attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Jewish civilians would only cease if Jews responded in kind. Along with its splinter group (and sometimes rival) Lehi, the Irgun's terrorist activity against Mandate Palestine's Arab population, and later, its British rulers, helped end British control over Palestine and hastened the emergence of the State of Israel.

  While the activity of these groups is well known, more surprising, perhaps, is the moment and location where rightwing Zionists began to make a case for terrorism and develop a plan to carry out acts of radical violence. It was in Warsaw, not Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, that a blueprint for right-wing Zionist terrorist activity first appeared. Its author, Yirmiyahu Halperin (1901–1962), was provoked by events in Europe, not Mandate Palestine, to write his user's guide to terror and retaliation.

  Yirmiyahu Halperin (1901–1962), Betar’s coordinator for military training, supervises a course for Betar leaders in Austria, 1932. Courtesy of the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel.
  Born in Smolensk but raised in Ottoman Palestine, Halperin was a prominent military instructor for Betar, the Revisionist faction's popular youth movement. In 1931, Jabotinsky urged him to travel to Poland, the Revisionist movement's heartland, and serve as the director of Betar's military training program. Over the course of three years, Halperin organized military courses for Betar branches across central and eastern Europe, led a Revisionist veterans' association (Brit Ha-hayal), and in 1934, founded the youth movement's naval academy in Italy. His students idolized him for his rugged physical features, stern demeanor, and reputation as a fearless fighter alongside Jabotinsky during the 1920 Jerusalem riots.

  Halperin's arrival to Warsaw in 1931 coincided with a rise in violent antisemitic attacks on university campuses in Poland, Austria, Germany, Romania, and Hungary. Betar members insisted to him that their only option was to launch mass protests in the hope that world leaders would take notice and put pressure on Europe's governments to intervene. Horrified by their reaction, he quipped that their tactics fit comfortably with the longstanding Jewish tradition to "suffer quietly and shut up."

  During his first two years in Europe, Halperin had remained begrudgingly faithful to Jabotinsky's public statements on the purpose of Betar's military program. The youth movement's goal, Jabotinsky insisted, was to train chivalrous soldiers for the Zionist cause who would abide by a strict ethical code and only resort to violence in the name of self-defense. Hitler's rise to power and the persistent anti-Jewish violence on university campuses across Europe convinced Halperin to change course.

  In the spring of 1933, he published a radical new manifesto in Poland's weekly Betar newspaper. Its title was "Defense through Attack." Drawing attention to the plight of young Jews on European university campuses, Halperin insisted that protests were useless. Even Jewish self-defense groups, he continued, would not deter antisemitic rioters. There was only one option: launch retaliatory attacks. Only when antisemites trembled at the thought of being maimed or killed by groups of vigilante Jews would they think twice about committing an attack.

  Betar members in Austria participating in Yirmiyahu Halperin’s (1901–1962) Military Instruction Course, 1932. Courtesy of the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel.
  Several months later, Halperin followed his manifesto with a guidebook in Hebrew devoted to the techniques of guerilla fighting. Published in Warsaw, it provided detailed instructions for forming an underground cell; using knives, grenades, and guns; catching opponents by surprise in streets, alleyways, and homes; and vanishing into a crowd after committing an attack. Halperin also stressed the power of using theatrical techniques to surprise one's enemies and generate publicity. No matter how well armed or numerous their opponents were, young Jews could reduce them to panic and "fear in the presence of terror" if they wore masks and shouted distinctive rallying cries. In the closing pages of the guidebook, Halperin urged them to "double their fulfillment" of a well-known biblical commandment on retribution. In his rendition, the commandment read: "two eyes for one eye, and two teeth for one tooth."

  Halperin's guidebook is not only striking because it is the first instruction manual published by a Zionist organization to promote fighting techniques associated with terrorism. It also highlights how conversations among Zionists about their use of force in Mandate Palestine were inextricably connected to their conversations about anti-Jewish violence in Europe. Halperin saw little need in his guidebook to specify where Betar members should engage in battle. At several points in the text, he would move abruptly from an example of anti-Jewish violence in Europe to one in Mandate Palestine. His descriptions of Jewish retaliation strategies similarly blurred the lines between the Yishuv and Europe.

  To what extent did right-wing Zionists embrace Halperin's belief that violence against Jews, no matter their location, merited the same response? During the Arab Revolt, nearly all of the Revisionist movement's leadership echoed his call to fight terror with terror on the streets of Mandate Palestine. But Poland was another matter altogether. Just days before the outbreak of the revolt in April 1936, Jabotinsky began his courtship with the Polish government, seeking military and diplomatic aid for the Revisionist movement's activity in Mandate Palestine. His overtures to the government, which proved fruitful for a time, impacted the extent to which Revisionist leaders responded to antisemitic violence perpetrated by Polish nationalists. Well aware that the Polish government forbade the formation of armed Jewish groups to combat anti-Jewish violence, Revisionist leaders were careful to avoid any public discussion of instances in which their members defied government regulations. Readers of the Revisionist movement's press were far more likely instead to find articles showcasing the similarities between the Zionist and Polish quest for national liberation, and the readiness of right-wing Zionist youth to defend Poland's borders.

  Members of Betar, however, tell a different story. Writing in memorial anthologies (yizker bikher) dedicated to Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust, former Betar leaders in Poland recounted their decision in the 1930s to form armed squads to combat anti-Jewish rioters, and in doing so, reject the "Polish-Jewish alliance" peddled by their superiors to Poland's government officials. Halperin's guidebook was even cited by some as an inspiration. Describing his efforts in 1938 to form an armed group to confront antisemitic rioters in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Leon Markowicz noted that Halperin's guidebook not only taught him "how to organize the defense of settlements . . . in the Land of Israel, but also how to organize self-defense from rioters in the Diaspora." Recounting an incident in which Betar members stabbed and critically wounded two Polish rioters in the town of Luboml, Ya'akov Hetman echoed Halperin's call for retaliatory attacks; "It was obvious," he wrote, "that we had to 'pay back' the attackers."

  These accounts, written decades later, have to be read with tremendous caution. Many memorial anthologies were published decades after the historical events they describe. Their accounts of the past bear the imprint of the trauma of the Holocaust, nostalgia for a "vanished world," as well as the political and religious commitments of their authors. At the very least, they alert historians to the dangers of presuming that the ideological declarations of Revisionist leaders accurately reflected the beliefs and behaviors of their followers. Right-wing Zionist leaders may have touted their use of retaliatory violence in Mandate Palestine as the ultimate transgression of the rules followed by mainstream Zionist organizations. When it came to Poland, however, the decision of some Betar members to retaliate against antisemitic rioters proved to be a transgression directed against their very movement's leadership.