How Jewish was Ayn Rand? a new Rand biography
Plus, the feds raid Polymarket; and the US October CPI
I previously reviewed the two biographies of Ayn Rand that came out in 2010. A new Rand biography has appeared as part of Jewish Lives series, a collaboration between Yale University Press and the Leon D Black Foundation that aims to illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life. Alexandra Popoff, whose other work includes biographies of Vasily Grossman and Sophia Tolstoy, was commissioned to write the book. She had the cooperation of the closely guarded Ayn Rand Archives at the Ayn Rand Institute, as well as the estate of former Libertarian Party presidential candidate John Hospers. Much of the new material in this short biography comes from these and Russian language sources less accessible to previous biographers.
Popoff shares with Rand an ethnic background as a Russian secular Jew and immigrant to North America, making Rand a very relatable subject. Popoff aims to recover the distinctly Jewish themes in Rand’s work, especially her literary output.
This is an interesting but far from straightforward lens to apply Rand’s life and work. Rand was 12 at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and her experience growing up as a middle-class Jew amid pervasive anti-Semitism in pre-and post-revolutionary Russia was bound to be a decisive influence.
She was 14 when she decided she was an atheist. This was not a repudiation of her Jewish identity as such, more a reflection of an evolving world view that renounced traditional values as well as Russian mysticism. She would later write that ‘the Reds’ deepest atrocity was intellectual…the thing which had to be fought…was their ideas. But no one answered them…The Whites had icons. The Reds won.’
Rand escaped Russia in 1926 and would almost certainly have perished had she stayed. She was saved from deportation from the US only through a marriage of convenience. She would later say that ‘ours was a shotgun wedding – with Uncle Sam holding the shotgun.’
Rand made little of her Jewishness and claimed it did not matter to her, although she denounced anti-Semitism and would end close friendships with people who expressed anti-Semitic sentiments. She is reported to have said ‘the only time I’m Jewish is when I hear anti-Semitism.’ When asked, she would volunteer views on developments in the Middle East, which she would express with characteristic moral clarity, but rarely made direct reference to the Jewish people in her non-fiction. She gave a speech on 8 May 1945 without even mentioning the end of the war.
Rand’s inner circle was made up almost exclusively of the children of eastern European Jewish immigrants ‘transitioning from the religion of their fathers to secularism.’ Alan Greenspan was representative of the group. Popoff concludes ‘she felt most comfortable with ethnic Jews.’
While anti-communism was her driving force, Popoff notes the parallels between her work and socialist realism, such as the Soviet industrial novel populated with cardboard characters heroically devoted to manufacturing steel and cement. She would also often employ the violent and divisive language of Soviet propaganda in order to denounce the enemies of capitalism. Her intellectual movement would become a cult of personality, complete with purges rationalised on the basis of ideological deviance.
Popoff seeks to identify distinctly Jewish themes in Rand’s literary work. She maintains that Rand’s characters have recognizably Jewish traits such as pride and defiance. Her ‘characters received gentile names but remain perceptibly Jewish in their otherness, defiance and morality.’ Howard Roark, for example, ‘resembles the type of “new Jew” imagined by Zionists’ and his court room speech ‘acknowledges centuries of Jewish discrimination in the Diaspora.’ She suggests that Rand’s essay ‘America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business’ views industrialists ‘through the prism of Jewish experience’ as a small, productive minority. The theme of choosing life is both explicit and prominent throughout her work. Popoff argues that ‘Rand aspires to overturn the most persistent stereotype of Jews as greedy businessmen and financiers.’
These interpretations are not always completely convincing, but they are not obviously wrong either. Rand sought to distance herself from traditional values and many aspects of her early life. But she was also inescapably a product of those influences. Even after four biographies, Rand remains an understudied and underappreciated figure for someone who had such an enormous and persistent influence on American intellectual life. While Rand herself pushed her Jewish identity into the background, Popoff performs a valuable service in illuminating these important undercurrents to her work.