In this series we are featuring profiles of leading secular and humanistic Jews from various countries and eras. These profiles are written by Bennett Muraskin, a regular contributor to Outlook, Humanistic Judaism and Jewish Currents.

In the halcyon days of the New Left, when youth was considered a virtue,
I.F. Stone was one of the few people over thirty whom young radicals
trusted. In fact, he was pushing sixty, but he was universally respected as
an indispensable source of news and commentary for the anti-establishment movements that were sweeping the college campuses.

Stone was a survivor. He was a journalist at age 14; an editorial writer
for the New York Post, a liberal daily, during the thirties; Washington
correspondent for The Nation, a progressive weekly, during the forties; and a reporter for various leftist New York dailies until the early fifties. In
1953, during the depths of the McCarthy era, he avoided the blacklist by
founding the I.F. Stone Weekly, which he and his wife Esther ran out of
their home in Washington, D.C. It began with 5,300 subscribers. Fighting a courageous battle against McCarthyism, J. Edgar Hoover, Jim Crow and Cold War foreign policy, I.F. Stone was a voice in the wilderness, but by the mid-60s his weekly, which early and often denounced U.S. intervention in Vietnam, achieved a circulation of 70,000.  Stone was a frequent speaker on college campuses and in April 1965 he addressed the first anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C., organized by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). He ceased publication of his weekly in 1971, but continued his journalistic career as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Stone was born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia, the son of non-observant
Russian-Jewish immigrants, and grew up in a small town in southern New
Jersey.  He joined the Socialist Party and served on its NJ State executive
committee before he was old enough to vote. The impact of the Depression and the rise of Nazism in Germany convinced Stone of the need for more radical solutions, and for a few years he moved close to the Communist Party. It did not take long for him to be offended by its dogmatism. As an independent leftist, he greeted the New Deal and attempted to deepen its commitment to social reform. In foreign policy, however, he sympathized with the Soviet Union because of its anti-fascism, averting his eyes from the massive political repression of the thirties. The Stalin-Hitler Pact appeared to shatter his illusions, although after the war he initially welcomed Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In 1948 the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and Stalin's attempt to oust Tito in Yugoslavia convinced him that the Soviet Union was no longer a force for progress. His report in the 1960s on Soviet use of psychiatric prisons to punish dissidents was one of the best exposés of his career
Stone called himself a "Jeffersonian Marxist," which was his idiosyncratic
way of saying he valued political freedom as much as social justice. Unlike
the Communists, he defended the civil liberties of Trotskyists, and unlike
nearly all liberals, he took the same position when the government
persecuted the Communists for their beliefs. "When socialism comes," he
insisted, "I'll fight for the right to spit in the nearest bureaucrat's
eye." The only lapse in his record as a civil libertarian was his silence
during the roundup of Japanese-Americans during World War Two.

Stone was one of the first American journalists to address the Nazi
extermination of European Jewry. In an article for The Nation in June 1944, entitled "For the Jew-Life or Death?" he wrote of "the authenticated
horrors of the Nazi internment camps and death chambers for JewsŠ" "which had already murdered between 4 and 5 million European Jews" and urged his fellow journalists to pressure the Roosevelt administration to open America's borders to Jewish refugees. He condemned the inaction of the U.S. and British governments and proposed that FDR set an example for neutral nations by establishing "free ports" that would admit Jews fleeing German-occupied Europe.

As soon as the war ended, Stone called for the right of Jewish Displaced
Persons  ("DPs") to emigrate to Palestine. His articles in support of
breaking the British blockade attracted the attention of the Haganah, the
Zionist defense force that was smuggling Jews into Palestine. They invited
him to accompany Jewish concentration camp survivors on an illegal sea
voyage. Stone wrote about his experiences in Underground to Palestine
(1946) "as a kinsman fulfilling a moral obligation to my brothers." Just
before Israel achieved independence, Stone wrote This is Israel (1948), in
which he praised the efforts of Jewish settlers to develop the land and
create a haven for persecuted Jews, but even in the euphoria of the times,
he did not forget the status of the Arab population.

"I understand why the Palestinian Arab, to whom Palestine is also a home,
who have fully as much right there as a Jew, does not wish to live as a
minority in a Jewish nation. No one likes to be ruled by an alien people,
and though I, as a Jew, found the friendliest sort of welcome visiting with
Arabs, I found no Palestinian Arab in favor of a Jewish state. The Arab
does not hate the Jew, but fears being dominated by him, and this fear must be allayed."

Stone's preferred solution was a binational state; however, when that did
not prove possible, he supported the UN Partition Plan. In covering the War of Independence for the New York liberal daily PM and the weekly magazine The New Republic, he called on the U.S. to lift its arms embargo and extend immediate recognition to the new Jewish state. He visited Israel again in 1949 and warned against the emerging class and ethnic divisions among Israeli Jews. In 1956 he opposed Israel's invasion of Egypt in the Suez War and wrote prophetically of the Arab refugee problem: "We dare not treat the Arabs as human dirt swept out of the land, without dirtying ourselves."

After the Six Day War in 1967, Stone wrote a number of articles in The New York Review of Books calling on Israel to return the territories it had
conquered and for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
Stone became the target of an avalanche of attacks from Zionist sources for being "anti-Israel", especially for his celebrated review/essay "Holy War", but he held his ground and replied to his critics in a 1978 article,
"Confessions of a Jewish Dissident." His stand inspired other dissident
Jews to establish groups like New Jewish Agenda, and years later he joined the Socialist-Zionist group, Americans For A Progressive Israel.
Although Stone called himself "a proud Jewish atheist," he was not much of a Jew in his private or family life; it does not appear that he celebrated
any Jewish holidays or gave his three children a Jewish education.

Nevertheless, he wrote perceptively (in "Holy War") about the tension
between Zionist and democratic values:
 "Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the
outside world, the welfare of Jews depends on the maintenance of secular
non-racial pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a
society whose ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews must fight everywhere
for their security-against principles and practices they find themselves
defending in Israel."

Stone capped his career by learning classical Greek in his old age and
writing The Trial of Socrates (1988) while suffering from near-blindness.
Yes, he was one of a kind.

For further reading, see the collections of Stone's articles and essays,
The Haunted Fifties (1963), In a Time of Torment (1967) and Polemics and Prophecies, 1967-1970. See also Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone by Robert C. Cottrell (1992).
 

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