Great Regulars: The Hebrew literary critic Natan Grinblat,

for example, pronounced that "poems written 'in honor of the land of Israel' could not be considered by any serious 'lover of poetry and person of good taste . . . as poems at all.'" Yet as Moss points out, Grinblat was hardly an apolitical aesthete. He "was an active member of the socialist Poale Tsion party who had even spent time in tsarist jails for his revolutionary activity . . . and would soon leave Russia for the Yishuv." If Grinblat insisted on the freedom of art, despite his own political commitment, it was because, for Jewish culturists of his generation, only a Jewish culture that could produce the best, freest art was worth having.

Such a liberal and humane attitude could not long withstand the crushing ideology of Bolshevism.

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Awakenings

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