No Good Jew Goes Unpunished

“I’m a bad Jew” is a common admission among American Jews, sometimes sheepish, sometimes boastful, and typically containing a dose of truth. But in her new book, Bad Jews, journalist Emily Tamkin sets out to prove that the subject of her title is a myth. “It is my best attempt,” she writes, “to wrestle with what I believe to be the one truth of American Jewish identity: It can never be pinned down.” The result is alternately perverse and insipid beyond belief. Let me show you what she means.

“The story of Ethel Rosenberg is, in many ways, a Jewish story,” writes Tamkin, after an uneven sketch of the 1950s spy case. “Who, in this, is the Good Jew or the Bad Jew? Is it the Communist Jewish woman who was executed? The Jews who stood by her? Or the Jews who called for her death? The sons, years later trying to push for the exoneration of their mother? Or Roy Cohn, the Jewish man who helped create the environment that killed her?”

Like most questions in the book, these are left unanswered, presumably because Tamkin thinks they are unanswerable. But the answers are blindingly obvious.

Ethel Rosenberg was a bad Jew. We know from Soviet cables and KGB memos that she urged and aided in the recruitment of her relatives as nuclear spies. She betrayed her country, the United States, the best home in exile the Jews have ever known, to arm Joseph Stalin, a demon responsible for the murder of millions and an anti-Semite who tried to stamp out Jewish religion. Ethel was “totally uncritical” in her devotion to communism, a totalitarian ideology that crushes the human spirit and seeks the dissolution of all Jewish identity. Right until the last moment, Ethel had an opportunity to save her life and spare her children from becoming orphans. All she had to do was tell the truth. Instead, she continued to lie, choosing loyalty to Stalin over duty to her children.

The Jews who stood by Ethel were duped or were themselves fellow travelers. The major Jewish organizations that Tamkin scolds, along with the bulk of American Jewry, for supporting the prosecution, saw more clearly than she does. Historian Lucy Dawidowicz, singled out for her support of the Rosenbergs’ execution, devoted her career to the study of the Nazi War Against the Jews and the Jewish tradition that the Nazis