Here is the transcript of my lecture on Ayn Rand at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, University of Texas, Austin.
So, I’m a biographer, not a Jewish scholar. Since last year, when my biography of Ayn Rand came out, it’s been argued that since Rand did not write about Jews and was secular, it’s wrong to view her life through the prism of Jewish experience.
I disagree, for this argument dismisses the experiences of many secular Jews, including Leon Trotsky, who distanced himself from his Jewish origin and, in his biographer Joshua Rubenstein’s words, had adopted “a utopian faith,” revolutionary socialism. Lev Bronstein changed his name and beliefs, but remained a Jew, which he never denied.
In Jews and the American Soul, the study of Jewish psychological and religious thinkers in America, Andrew Heinze remarks: “The term ‘secular Jew’ fails to express the complexity and nuance of Jewish intellectual life, which amounted to more than a mere rejection of traditional Judaism.”
Albert Einstein has famously compared a Jew who abandons his ancestors’ faith with a snail: “…A snail can shed its shell without thereby ceasing to be a snail. The Jew who abandons his faith (in the formal sense of the word) is in a similar position. He remains a Jew.”
Rand had said that she was born Jewish, meaning that she did not live her life as a Jew. She was raised in a practicing Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia, but upon immigrating to the United States in 1926, during the interwar period, had made every effort to assimilate and to bury her Jewishness. Immigration, of course, provides ample opportunities for changing one’s life and self-presentation.
I will speak of how Alisa Rosenbaum had transformed herself into Ayn Rand, a bestselling influential American novelist, whose moral and political philosophy generated a following. She reshaped and mythologized her past and modeled herself on the image of her gentile characters whose pronouncements she quoted to express her own beliefs. As the copy editor, Bertha Krantz, who worked with Rand on Atlas Shrugged remarked, Rand had “built herself” and wouldn’t let people know what she was really like. This suggests a conflict between her inner and public self.
Rand concealed her ethnicity, but while she claimed that her Jewishness did not matter to her, she opposed antisemitism, and when doing so, identified herself as a Jew. She theorized that ethnicity was tribalism, but her close circle of followers, the objectivists, comprised ethnic Jews, to whom alone she entrusted the spread of her doctrine and value-system. She married a lapsed Catholic, but her major disciple and secret lover of many years, Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden), was Jewish.
And since I mentioned Rand’s philosophy of objectivism –– I’d like to go back to Joshua Rubenstein’s remark that Trotsky had distanced himself from his Jewish origin and adopted “a utopian faith.” Although Trotsky and Rand were poles apart, they both rebelled against the Jewish tradition and discovered a secular religion. Rand wrote of individualism as her religion and spent years developing her secular belief system. She argued that objectivism was based on reason, but shielded it from independent examination and discussion.
As the professor of Jewish history and culture Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi remarked, “throughout the nineteenth century Jews who had lost faith in the God of their fathers sought and found a spectrum of novel Jewish surrogates,” such as socialism and Zionism. This observation clarifies what inspired Rand in her single-minded pursuit of a new secular belief system.
I will now turn to Rand’s background and early influences. She was born Alisa Rosenbaum, in 1905, in Russia’s Imperial capital. St. Petersburg had an established Jewish community—cultural and religious Jewish institutions and the Grand Choral Synagogue where, in 1904, Rand’s parents were married. Rand’s family, on both sides, had descended from the Pale of Settlement. The fact that they were allowed to reside in Russia’s imperial capital was a mark of success. Petersburg was the city of aristocracy and the address of privileged Jews (wealthy merchants, bankers, members of the professional and cultural elite, and skilled artisans) who in the mid-nineteenth century, under the liberal Tsar Alexander II, benefited from his policy of selective integration.
The most prominent member of Rand’s maternal clan was her Yiddish-speaking grandfather, Berko Itskovich Kaplan. A skillful military tailor and merchant, he settled in Petersburg during Alexander II’s reign, establishing a steady clientele of officers from Russia’s richest families. Kaplan paid for his sons’ university education and for his daughters’ professional training; in the 1880s, he also sponsored emigration of his sister’s family to America.
Rand’s mother, born Hanna Berkovna Kaplan, was a dentist, a profession that allowed Russian Jews to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Her father, Zelman-Wolf Zorahovich Rosenbaum, was a pharmacist. Zelman, or Zinovy (his Russified name) had served in the Russian army, information I uncovered in the archival collection of the Rosenbaum family letters. It was from these letters that I also learned that Rand’s paternal grandfather was a lawyer. In 1934, upon reading Rand’s courtroom drama Night of January 16th, Zinovy wrote to Rand that her grasp of jurisprudence made him proud because both his father and grandfather had been lawyers. (Regrettably, we know neither their names nor where they practiced law.) This family information, which Rand never revealed, may explain her fondness for including courtroom trials in her fiction.
Of family influences. The Jews of Petersburg were the most acculturated in the empire: before World War I, half of the Jewish population in the city spoke Russian at home, whereas within the Pale almost everyone spoke Yiddish. Rand’s parents spoke Russian, although Yiddish was the language of communication with her grandparents. In Rand’s middle-class family both men and women were educated professionals. One of her maternal aunts owned a pharmacy in Petersburg where Rand’s father had found a job early on. Two uncles were medical specialists; the other two were lawyers; one uncle was an actor. Rand’s immediate and larger families observed Jewish holidays. The Rosenbaums kept dietary restrictions until mid-1920s. So, when growing up, Rand would feel a dichotomy between her family’s inwardness and the Russian world outside, with its mysticism and realities of antisemitism. She would be aware of the Jewish quotas on education, residence, and professions that her family had to overcome.
Rand’s family gave their daughters a solid education, preparing them for professional success, an attitude not uncommon in Jewish families but different from Russian families of the time. In Rand’s maternal family women were literate for generations: her grandmother was a pharmacist as well as her husband’s bookkeeper and adviser. Rand’s mother graduated from the Russian state gymnasium in Petersburg, knew French and German (aside from Russian and Yiddish). She was a good writer and had artistic ambitions, but no opportunities for creative work, so she invested herself in her daughters’ talents.
Rand did not receive a formal Jewish education, but basic moral instruction was provided by her mother. She would also become exposed to certain concepts of Judaism through Yiddish, spoken in her family. According to Ruth Wisse, the renowned scholar of Yiddish literature and culture, Judaism is embedded in the Yiddish language.
Before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution Rand attended the private Stoyunina gymnasium for girls, which had no quota for Jews and was known for its liberal, individual approach to teaching. Rand and her sisters’ education was not interrupted even by the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war, an apocalyptic event. In 1933, Anna Borisovna reminded Rand that during these trying years, “the children were studying, losing not a moment of their time.” In Crimea, where the Rosenbaums fled during the civil war, Rand attended another private gymnasium and received supplementary instruction in music and art. Typically for a Jewish family, education was an important value; it created the basis for high achievement. Not typical was the mother’s belief that professional success mattered more than raising children. Perhaps, not incidentally, Rand and her two sisters chose to remain childless, investing themselves in careers.
Her family’s expectation for high achievement and their belief in purposeful living were some of the values Rand absorbed. In her 1964 interview with Playboy magazine, she declared that the most depraved type of human being was “the man without a purpose.”
Rand’s early diaries do not survive, making it difficult to know when exactly she decided to become an atheist. As she told her first biographer, Barbara Weidman (Branden), this decision was made at fourteen. If so, she became a nonbeliever in 1919, during the violence of the civil war. One of her major reasons for becoming an atheist, she said, was that the concept of God was “degrading to man,” for if God is perfect, this implies that “the highest possible” is unattainable to man. But this rational explanation does not represent Rand’s experiences during the civil war that led to Russia’s economic and moral collapse. The town where the Rosenbaums were staying in Crimea was fought over by the Reds and the Whites; they witnessed lawlessness, looting, and executions.
Later, Rand claimed that she was unaffected by antisemitism while in Russia. Although Petersburg, the capital, never experienced the pogroms, antisemitism was pervasive in Russia. The years 1911–13 marked the Beilis Affair, the most infamous reemergence of blood libel in Europe since the Middle Ages. Rand never mentioned it, but would speak of “Russian mysticism,” associating it “with everything that was dark and evil” and destructive to human life. During the civil war the Rosenbaums had to travel through Ukraine, controlled by military and paramilitary forces, all of which were responsible for the pogroms. Rand refused to see herself as a victim, which may explain her silence about the antisemitism in Russia she had undoubtedly experienced.
Nationalizations by the Bolsheviks had introduced her to what communism was about. Rand’s father lost his pharmacy twice—first time, after the 1917 Revolution, and for the second time, after the Bolsheviks took over Crimea. Revolutionary and post-revolutionary mob violence became responsible for Rand’s intolerance of the irrational. One of the themes in her fiction, in which Jewish fear of mobs is recognizable, is mass irrationalism. Mob rule is juxtaposed to a rational world of educated professionals.
After the civil war Rand studied social sciences at the Petrograd University. As a student she entered a circle of future engineers, young men and women from Jewish families. There she met her first love, Lev Bekkerman, an inventor who specialized in motor design. Bekkerman served as an inspiration for Leo Kovalensky in We the Living and the brilliant engineer and motor designer, John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s fixation was so powerful that fifty years later, when she connected with her sister Nora, in Russia, she wanted to know whether Bekkerman was still alive.
To Rand’s intellectual influences. In her late teens Rand read Thus Spoke Zarathustra and became influenced with Nietzsche’s critique of religion and tradition, along with his endeavor to establish values that are not based on supernatural sanction. Her interest in Nietzsche was not unusual for a secular European Jew. The message of cultural renewal and self-realization appealed to early twentieth-century European Zionists, such as Chaim Weizmann and Martin Buber. As Steven Aschheim writes in The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, they were not interested “in harmonizing Judaism with Nietzscheanism.” What moved them was Nietzsche’s “radical antitraditionalism,” an affirmation of freedom of individual choice. Reading Nietzsche helped Rand reject the notion that traditional morality was a given. The first books she bought in America were English translations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and Anti-Christ. When drafting The Fountainhead, she used direct quotations from Nietzsche to set the theme. Thus, the book’s main epigraph, which she later dropped, came from Beyond Good and Evil: “The noble soul has reverence for itself.” Self-reverence, or self-esteem, would become one of Rand’s major values. She invested Howard Roark with traits of a superhero, which would also become a part of her own image.
In Jews and the American Soul Andrew Heinze observes that “… ‘Jewish values’ have never existed in a vacuum, subsisting unchanged from generation to generation, immune to the winds of history.” He goes on to say that a number of Jewish thinkers, including Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, “had assimilated ideas and values from European society. This, however, did not mean that they magically erased the fundamental values of their upbringing. The moral education of secular Jews originated in lessons they learned from parents and teachers in a fairly segregated Jewish environment.”
The Rosenbaums’ influence stretched beyond Rand’s emigration in 1926. She corresponded with her family for another decade and consulted them when writing her novels We the Living and The Fountainhead. The Jewish theme of choosing life is captured in We the Living where life is the main value; this idea is also perceptible in her mother’s and cousin Nina Guzarchik’s letters sent to Rand in America. The central concept in The Fountainhead, of prime movers versus second-handers, was inspired by her father’s letter. In 1934, when she solicited her father’s ideas on human motivation, Zinovy replied that “exceptionally gifted individuals,” a select few, become “prime movers in science, art, and progress in general; also, in spheres of philosophy and morality.” He went on to say that “masses of mediocrities” create impediments to genuine talent, “but despite this … the talent will achieve recognition.” This letter contains, in a germ, a central theme of The Fountainhead. Years later, in her introduction to the novel’s anniversary edition, Rand extoled individual achievement by “those few” who “move the world and give life its meaning.” When during her exchange with her father Rand mentioned “inner integrity” as a source of motivation, Zinovy replied that she aptly expressed what mattered to him most. In Yiddish, the concept mentsh designates a person of superior integrity, honor, and moral character. The idea of intellectual and creative integrity is pivotal in The Fountainhead.
Integrity provides protection against the opinions of others and mass conformity. In the novel, this concept is embodied by Howard Roark, an architect, who works to realize his vision alone. In 1943, upon publication of The Fountainhead, Rand wrote in her journal that integrity was “the first, greatest, and noblest of all virtues.” Rand, of course, was not alone to contemplate these issues: according to Heinz, “the defining question” for Jewish psychologists of the post-war era was overcoming pressures of conformity.
Rand rarely admitted to influences on her thought and literature, making notable exceptions for the French nineteenth-century romantics Victor Hugo and Edmond Rostand, whom she read in adolescence. In her 1962 column for the Los Angeles Times, she named Victor Hugo as the only writer who had influenced her career and destiny. She was introduced to his novel Ninety-Three at age seven, when her mother read it aloud to her grandmother. So, the values she absorbed early on were not easily erased: they left a strong mark. Over the years she spoke of her love of values; however, not the same moral values that her family professed, for she struggled to overcome their influence.
When Rand rebelled against the Jewish tradition, she also rejected family values as collectivist. Families in her fiction are either missing (to emphasize Howard Roark’s individualism) or evil (like Rearden’s socialist-leaning family in Atlas Shrugged). Yet, Jewish family values were chiefly responsible for Rand’s emigration to America: her immediate and extended families on both sides of the Atlantic united in making this happen.
In 1924, upon graduating from the Petrograd University, Rand studied film at the State Institute for Screen Arts. Her dream of coming to America to work for DeMille became attainable when her Chicago family sent an affidavit of support and her mother connected with her Jewish network of family and friends along the route. The Rosenbaums were aware of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 that had severely reduced the flow of immigrants from Eastern Europe. To help Rand persuade the American consul in Riga of her intention to return to the USSR the Rosenbaums bought expensive 1st class return tickets for the crossing. In January 1926, when Rand received an American visa, she was among a handful of eastern European Jewish immigrants to have succeeded. A list of alien passengers on the French liner S.S. De Grasse included questions about spoken languages (Rand listed Russian, French, and English) and “race of people” (she stated Hebrew). Upon arriving in New York, she sent a telegram to her family in Russian and to her grandfather––in Yiddish, the language she did not include on the form.
Later, in the note “About the Author” that appeared in the afterward to Atlas Shrugged, Rand stated that she was “born in Europe” and “came to America because this was the country based on my moral premises and the only country where one could be fully free to write.” As an immigrant she had “a difficult struggle… No one helped me, nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me.” The last statement is consistent with the oath of individualists in Atlas Shrugged. Rand, of course, did ask for help and received it. During the initial two years in America her family sent financial support. Cecil DeMille, whom she met in Hollywood, had given her jobs as an extra in his film The King of Kings and later employed her for a year as a junior script writer.
Meeting DeMille and having him as her mentor was vital for Rand in many ways. As she wrote to him in 1934, “I was a very inexperienced, very bewildered and frightened little immigrant from Russia.” This letter provides a glimpse into her sense of self during her early years in America. Later, she projected herself into her strong male characters, who struggle and succeed entirely on their own. Rand was famously untransparent about her life. Following the publication and success of The Fountainhead, when readers requested information about the author, she did not give anything away: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings,” she wrote. “Ask me about the things I think.” Her life had to become a postscript to her novels.
In Jews and the American Soul Andrew Heinze speaks of “the fluidity of personal identity” of the immigrants. As Neal Gabler shows in An Empire of Their Own, the Jewish executives of the Hollywood studios who had immigrated from eastern Europe, chose to relinquish their pasts to succeed professionally. They “wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews,” writes Gabler. Louis B. Mayer, the head of the MGM studio, had embraced America to the point that he celebrated the 4th of July as his own birthday. Rand, upon arriving in America, revealed a similar “hunger for assimilation,” to use Neal Gabler’s words. On a City of Los Angeles document she altered her father’s surname to the German-sounding “Fronz.” From there it traveled to Barbara Branden’s biography, who interviewed Rand long after her father had died.
To Rand’s literature. Rand came to America to realize herself as a writer. Her first literary attempts suggest strong Nietzschean influence. “The Little Street,” a sketch produced in 1928, is a story of a defiant pariah, who kills a priest and is lynched by a mob. The author’s sympathies are on the side of the criminal, a Superman who rises about the crowd and their conventional morality, and whose rejection of established values she condones. His tragedy, she writes in her notes for the story, is that “of a man with the consciousness of a god, among a bunch of snickering, giggling … regular fellows.” His “crime takes the aspect of a blow against the church, religion, civilization, humanity.” At 23, she was attracted to this type of rebel and outcast because, in a way, it reflected her own sense of self. She was living alone in America, and had already rebelled against traditional values.
Her first fictional story in English, “The Husband I Bought,” written in 1926, deals with the heroine’s adoration of an extraordinary individual. The protagonist is godlike in his beauty and intellectually superior to the rest. The heroine idolizes him and kneels before his photograph, a provocative episode that may suggest Rand’s rebellion against the Jewish tradition. Another way to interpret it is that Rand’s quarrel is actually with mysticism of the Russian Orthodox Church: instead of bowing before icons the heroine kneels before an individual. Whichever interpretation is true, Rand later created a number of god-like male characters and wrote repeatedly of “man-worship.” This suggests a search for a new religion—without a supernatural component, and dealing with exaltation and reverence. In We the Living, her first novel, the main protagonist Leo Kovalensky has a proud face “of a god, a face promising a superior, profound, fascinating man.” In The Fountainhead Roark has “the face of a god.” The Jewish concept, enshrined in the book of Genesis, that man is created in God’s image may have served as a starting point for these portrayals. Later, Rand employed parables from the Hebrew Bible in her novels Anthem and Atlas Shrugged.
But it was Nietzsche’s influence that dominated Rand’s literature through the 1930s. Her philosophical diary opens in April 1934 with an argument that a good life is lived intensely in pursuit of one’s selfish goals. “Isn’t it as Nietzsche said, ‘Not freedom from what, but freedom for what?’” A decade later, in 1943, she writes in her diary about “freedom from others.” Her interpretation of freedom is a major departure from Jewish tradition. For Jewish people freedom does not mean “freedom from what.” According to Ruth Wisse, it means freedom to assume responsibility.
In 1935, Rand makes an entry about finding a new faith: “That faith is Individualism in all its deepest meaning and implications. . . . Individualism as a religion and a code, not merely as an economic practice.” Rand’s ideal of individualism was vastly different from Jewish individualism, which respects the importance of a community and combines “I” and “we.”
The main theme of her dystopian novel Anthem, written in 1937, is individualism versus collectivism, I versus we. Rand borrowed the idea for a collectivist state that turns people into numbers from Evgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We, an early prophesy of totalitarianism. But unlike those in Zamyatin’s complex philosophical work, her characters are abstractions, signifying two poles of a moral universe: collectivism is presented as total evil and individualism as absolute good. Anthem’s final part is saturated with themes and language from Thus Spoke Zarathustra; it tells a story of overcoming collectivism in one’s soul. Zarathustra, upon descending from the mountain, announces that the basis of all moral judgment is removed. The Superman, as the inheritor of God, will revitalize traditional morality. In Rand’s novel the protagonist, named Prometheus, after escaping the collectivist world, arrives at the mountain summit to issue “a first commandment.” He utters the word I, banned by collectivists, and renounces all that has enslaved him—his birth, his kin, and his race: “to be free, a man must be free of his brothers.” In 1943, when formulating individualist ethics, the nucleus of her philosophy of objectivism, Rand coined a maxim: “Man is not his brother’s keeper.” In Anthem Rand first formulated a code of individualism: “I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others.” In Atlas Shrugged a similar message, carved in granite, becomes an oath for members of a utopian community of individualists.
Anthem was a blueprint for creating Rand’s first truly American novel, The Fountainhead. Through the character of Howard Roark, an architect dedicated to his own talent and artistic vision, Rand established the theme of individualism. In notes for the novel, she defined Roark as “the man who lives for himself.” Roark serves his talent alone and, overcoming all obstacles, designs the tallest high scraper in New York. In the novel’s famous climax, after his design is compromised by government commissions, he dynamites the building that was to house the poor.
Roark’s speech at his ensuing trial is an individualist’s manifesto: “The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself.” America, Roark argues, was built on “the principle of individualism,” not altruism. The principle—each man’s right to the pursuit of his own happiness—is responsible for the country’s achievements. By referring to a natural rights theory derived from the Declaration of Independence Rand promotes the values she believes are quintessentially American.
Rand, of course, was not the only one to rethink the concept of selfishness. Erich Fromm, the German Jewish psychologist and philosopher, who immigrated to America in 1934, objected to the Christian indictment of self-love. As he wrote in his 1947 book Man for Himself, “Modern culture is pervaded by a tabu on selfishness. We are taught that to be selfish is sinful and to love others is virtuous. To be sure, this doctrine is in flagrant contradiction to the practice of modern society, which holds … that the most powerful and legitimate drive in man is selfishness and that by following this imperative drive the individual makes his best contribution to the common good.”
Joshua Loth Liebman, an American Reform rabbi and proponent of Freud, discusses the concept of selfishness in Peace of Mind, his 1946 bestselling book. Rabbi Liebman writes that “the condemnation of selfishness and exaltation of altruism is the traditional attitude of religion…” But are we “spontaneously good to ourselves?” He argues that “a proper self-regard” is “a prerequisite of the good and moral life,” and that if we treat ourselves respectfully, we will be good to others.
In contrast, Rand entirely dismisses the concepts of neighborly love and welfare of others, in accordance with her maxim: “Man is not his brother’s keeper.” In 1941, in “The Individualist Manifesto,” her first nonfictional work, she argued for the primacy of the individual over the collective and provided a strong moral defense of capitalism as the best social system that employs “a man’s natural, healthy egoism.” And while collectivism found its moral defense in Marx’s Communist Manifesto, capitalism never received such ideological endorsement. In Atlas Shrugged her intention was to defend laissez-faire capitalism on moral grounds.
Rand believed that a lasting influence of Marxist economics was due to its moral appeal. In 1946, in a letter to Leonard Read, who had launched the Foundation for Economic Education, she wrote that to “sell capitalist economics” one must reject the “collectivist” morality, along with its premise of the “common good.” The objective of capitalist economics is “the personal, private, individual profit motive. When that motive is declared to be immoral, the whole system becomes immoral, and the motor of the system stops dead.” This metaphor carries her argument in Atlas Shrugged.
In his book Morality Jonathan Sacks points out that the moral principles defining our humanity are different from economic and political ones: ideals, such as “love thy neighbor,” deal “with conscience, not wealth or power.” For Rand, the principle of common good was forever compromised as one of the ideals exploited by communists. Hence her absolute rejection of altruism. She believed that totalitarian ideologies, such as communism, employed “the religious-altruist ethics” and only substituted “‘society’ for God…” As she wrote to a fan, in 1946, “Until the morality of altruism is blasted out of people’s minds, nothing will save us from Communism.”
In her book Jews and Power Ruth Weiss writes that “Jews always believed that they were meant to help repair the world…” This was also Rand’s ambition: although, unusually for a Jewish intellectual, her politics were on the extreme right (she called herself “a radical for capitalism”), she aspired for more than a successful writer’s career. In 1949, during her work on Atlas Shrugged and her battle against communism, she made an ambitious statement: “My most important job is the formulation of a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth.” Her new emphasis on rationality was inspired with a compendium of Aristotle she read at the time. Rand was also establishing a link between the moral and the rational. As she wrote in her journal, “A code of ethics must be . . . completely practical—or else it is a means of self-destruction (as altruism is).” In the Moral Defense of Individualism, the nonfictional work she wrote as a lead-up to Atlas Shrugged, Rand outlined her “three cornerstones: man is an end in himself; no man exists for the sake of another man; each man exists for his own happiness.” By placing the self at the heart of moral life, she rejected Judeo-Christian ethics.
It took her thirteen years to complete Atlas Shrugged, a colossal novel, where heroic industrialists and businessmen, who succeed on sheer ability, are cast against those who undermine competition through the agency of liberal politics. Pro-capitalist, individualist morality, is expressed through monologues, such as Francisco d’Anconia’s on the moral significance of money. This monologue, the most effective in the novel, was endorsed by Alan Greenspan, who in 1951, at twenty-six, joined Rand’s circle of followers. Francisco proclaims that “money is the root of all good.” America is “a country of money,” which also means “a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement.” The monologue is a response to Marx, who castigated capitalist industrial society as dehumanizing and money as having the power to turn everything into its opposite. Rand argues that wealth is created by human intelligence, not through exploitation of labor. The novel defines creation of material wealth as a basic American value and celebrates money as a measure of success. Thus, it also overturns the most persistent stereotype of Jews as greedy businessmen and financiers.
Rand’s model for an ideal society is presented through “the men of the mind,” a utopian community of individualists (business people and creative intellectuals), who declared a strike on the socialist-oriented world and retreated to the Colorado Rockies.
The strikers are flown to their retreat on private jets, a modern version of Noah’s Ark. While the community of individualists prospers, the collectivist world outside is perishing without its best and brightest. Here the archetypal story of Noah and the flood reach a climax: the socialist world perishes because of corrupt morals and social structure. Rand knew the value of biblical stories, having used the flood narrative from the book of Genesis to re-create her fictional world on capitalist principles.
In the novel’s finale John Galt makes his broadcast to the nation to declare that the morality of collectivists that requires one “to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare” has become obsolete. Through Galt, whose “implacable voice” comes from the Rocky Mountains (television audiences cannot see his image), Rand delivers her philosophy of objectivism. However rational, Galt’s moral code cannot be analyzed or debated; it comes down as a final revelation.
Rand’s rational philosophy emphasizes objective reality, reason, self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism. She called herself a philosopher-novelist, but her philosophy of objectivism was essentially an ideology, a gateway to interpreting all aspects of life from a single perspective. It gave young followers a strong sense of certainty about the world, but to use Hanna Arendt’s words, certainty is “the end of philosophy.” John Hospers, a philosopher Rand befriended at the end of the 1950s, attended lectures on objectivism delivered by Nathaniel Branden who popularized Rand’s ideas. Hospers wrote to Rand that the audience never questioned the premises but only asked about applications of the doctrine. When Hospers wrote that the attitude of “‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong’ . . . tends to MAKE slavish dogmatists out of the audience,” Rand replied that moral uncertainty would not help this audience and that the purpose of the course was to deliver the ideas “we know to be true.” In contrast, Jewish education is question based; Judaism encourages debate and dispute. This also shows Rand’s transformation from a writer who opposed mass conformism to the leader of the objectivist movement who defended it.
In her 1963 talk “The Goal of My Writing” delivered at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon where she received an honorary doctorate, Rand said that her ultimate goal was “the portrayal of a moral ideal.” She advocated “a free, productive, rational system,” laissez-faire capitalism, that made it possible for “ideal men to exist and to function.”
Rand’s fictional world rests on moral absolutes, and this makes her prose strikingly different from that of her contemporary writers, including the post-war generation of American Jewish intellectuals, such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Herman Wouk. Unlike these novelists, who focused on the complexities of life, human nature, and relationships, Rand described life as it should be, not as it was.
Heroes and villains of her fiction are abstract representations of her ethical principles. Unlike Bellow, Roth, and Wouk she did not portray Jewish characters and milieus. In her interview by Playboy magazine, Rand named Mickey Spillane, a popular author of police detectives, as her favorite novelist. “Because he is primarily a moralist,” she explained. “In a primitive form, the form of a detective novel, he presents the conflict of good and evil, in black and white. He does not present a nasty gray mixture… He presents an uncompromising conflict.” As Rand’s contemporary Jewish film critic Robert Warshow remarked, “Something more than the pleasures of personal cultivation is at stake when one chooses to respond to Proust rather than Mickey Spillane…” Rand wanted to capture intellectual as well as popular audiences, but her one-dimensional characters and dualistic view of the world did not appeal to intellectuals.
She referred to The Fountainhead as a religious novel: “It gives the modern reader the same thing which simpler people get from a Biblical story—a sense of faith, courage and moral uplift.” For Nathaniel Branden, who grew up in the family of East European Jewish immigrants, the novel became a moral beacon: it rendered irrelevant, he writes, the morality of selflessness he had been taught. For other Jewish followers, who became estranged from Judaism, Rand’s system of thought provided a substitute.
Of Jewish themes and antisemitism. Some of Galt’s statements in Atlas Shrugged can be traced to the Jewish tradition. For example, “Man’s life is the standard of morality” and the main “irreplaceable value.” Galt advocates “a single choice: to live.” (In Deuteronomy: “Choose life.”) Rand emphasized rational choice, dignity of the individual, and need for a purposeful life. In her talk “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” she viewed successful industrialists and business people through the prism of Jewish experience. American businessmen, she maintained, are a small and productive minority who hold the economy on their shoulders, but who nonetheless, have to function under especially restrictive laws. Like the bourgeoisie in Soviet Russia or the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, they are penalized exclusively for their virtues. Following publication of Atlas Shrugged Rand defiantly wore a dollar sign on the lapel, which for a Jew manifested chutzpah.
Rand would identify herself as a Jew when faced with antisemitism. When her friend Isabel Paterson said, in reference to the dramatist Morrie Ryskind, “I don’t like Jewish intellectuals,” Rand responded: “Then why do you like me?” Rand’s follower Harry Binswanger wrote to me that in such circumstances Rand believed “it was morally obligatory to say you were Jewish, and that she had done so herself, even though she was an avowed atheist.” Binswanger recalled Rand’s illuminating words: “The only time I’m Jewish is when I hear antisemitism.”
Rand had expressed her support for Israel. She spoke of Israel as the only “beachhead of modern science and civilization” in the region. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973 Israel became the second international cause to which she donated money.
In the 1960s she resigned as a speaker from WBAI-FM radio station without explaining the reason. It’s known from her unsent letter to the station: “The specific reason is that WBAI permitted an obscene antisemitic ‘poem’ calling for the killing of Jews, and an obscene utterance, praising Hitler’s atrocities, to be broadcast over its facilities.” The agonized drafts of her unsent letter reveal to me that antisemitism concerned her deeply.
Rand’s self-identification with her fictional characters stands out in literature as unique. In life, she clung to these characters for strength. After Atlas Shrugged was attacked by critics and Whittaker Chambers, in his review, cast Rand both as a fascist and as an enemy of Christianity –– the latter being an old accusation to Jews, she became severely depressed. As she told Nathaniel Branden, she was ashamed of herself: John Galt would have handled this situation differently.
Rand was not as confident as she presented herself in public: she relied on her followers to defend her. (They still do.) She was addicted to amphetamines, suffered from phobias, and feared to explore New York beyond her secure district. In 1957, while outlining “To Lorne Dieterling,” the last novel that she never produced, she wrote that it would be the story of a woman “totally motivated by love for values—and how one maintains such a state when alone in an enemy world.” Why did she feel this way about the world? There were certain objective reasons: Rand had alienated herself by attacking both Democrats and Republicans. Her political views won support of the American right, but conservatives never accepted her entire philosophy and her mockery of religion.
Conclusion: Rand’s legacy. With her novel The Fountainhead Rand established herself as an idealist, who believed in unlimited human possibilities. Explaining her book’s lasting appeal, Rand wrote that it inspired “the sense that one’s life is important, that great achievements are within one’s capacity…” I think it’s possible, with some limitations, to speak of Rand’s moral idealism, in a secular understanding of the term Ruth Wisse has given it in Jews and Power: “Jewish moral idealism remains invaluable to the world for encouraging, despite much evidence to the contrary, faith in human potential of mentsh.”
Rand aspired to revitalize traditional morality and to repair the world on the principles that would not allow a reemergence of communism. Beginning in late 1950s, as a speaker on campuses, television and radio shows, she promoted her morality of rational self-interest and advised individuals, as she said in the interview by Playboy, “to live by three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.”
Rand’s overwhelming focus on morality is apparent from all her writings, interviews, lectures, and letters. Andrew Heinze places Rand among the influential Jewish American female moralists, such as Betty Friedan, Ann Landers, and Joyce Brothers. In the second half of the twentieth century their syndicated columns, radio and TV shows, and books attracted millions.
Joyce Brothers (born Joyce Bauer), a Jewish psychologist and feminist, preached the pursuit of happiness to millions of American women whom she advised on combining careers with marriage. As a professional psychologist, Brothers was an authority in her male-dominated field. Rand, an anti-feminist who entered the male dominated sphere of morality, spoke through the authority of her male characters, Roark and Galt. The Austrian Jewish American economist Ludwig von Misses called Rand “the most courageous man in America,” the compliment she treasured, for it matched her self-image. Rand’s moral courage in challenging tradition is an important part of her legacy.
Rand’s ambition and achievement were typical of East-European Jewry who immigrated to America in the twentieth century –– hence the epigraph in my book from Neal Gabler: “All lives are metaphors. All lives resolve themselves into themes.”