Talk:Itzik Feffer

Allegations in article

The initial stub is cut from Paul Robeson. Mikkalai 00:02, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Are the allegations in the article substantiated? - Xed 18:16, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Which ones? And BTW, since you are an editor, why don't you check them yourself, e.g., by looking for the memoirs of the son? (Are there any?) 20:09, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I am surprised that this article does not mention that in 1944 Feffer became an informer of the Soviet secret police and later, during the persecution of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, his testimonies played the role of the linchpin of the prosecution's case. This information, apparently first unearthed by Kostyrchenko is now considered well established, see e.g., [1] Should we write something about this? BorisG 18:14, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

The facts and point of view in the Robeson article are disputed, particularly as they describe Robeson's relationship to Feffer. The Wikipedia article on Robeson on this topic (and other points) is at variance with several accounts by Robeson's biographers, including two-time Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize winner David Levering Lewis. [[p. 224-225, Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen in chapter 'Paul Robeson and the U.S.S.R.' by David Levering Lewis].

The entirely negative non-nuanced condemnation of Robeson in the Wikipedia article on him is also at odds with the fuller description of the Feffer incident by Robeson biographer Martin B. Duberman. Editors and writers, including myself, have tried to change the Wikipedia account of Robeson, but we have been repeatedly reversed by proponents of viewpoints put forward by the Hudson Institute, which is funded by the Bradley Foundation, which "made hefty grants in the early 1990s for studies intended to prove the genetic inferiority of blacks and other ethnic minorities." [2] skywriter 21:37, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

I am deleting that section on the Feffer page that refers to Paul Robeson as it is a fringe view not represented in the many biographies written of his life. Further, those who have added this material to the Robeson page, make selective use of information from the Rappaport book, which opines about Robeson but offers no new information about Robeson. Rappaport offers a viewpoint very different from this Wikipedia page concerning Feffer.

Rappaport, Louis. Stalin's War Against the Jews: The Doctors Plot & The Soviet Solution, Free Press (October 1, 1990) ISBN 0029258219

xii Feffer was "a colonel in the Red Army and a secret agent of the security organs. Feffer, who helped arrange the murder of his friend (Mikhoels), was himself liquidated..."

p. 62 "Feffer, a Stalinist, JAC deputy chairman, and secret police functionary;"

p. 66 "The JAC's deputy chairman, poet Itzik Solomonovich Feffer, was a very different kind of Soviet Jew, much more in the tradition of those who had helped shapre totalitarian terrorism. Feffer, born in Kiev in 1900 and a Party member from age nineteen, was a devoted Communist, a Red Army colonel, and an operative of "the organs." In his poem, "I am a Jew," he declared that he drank "happiness from Stalin's cup" and praised Kaganovich, "Stalin's friend." Though Feffer boasted of his rabbinic ancestry, his poems jeered at Judaism, while celebrating the slave-labor society. He immortalized the show trials of "traitors, spies and assasins...we shoot you down like mad dogs." He cursed the names of the executed Jewish general Yakir and Chief of Staff Tukhachevsky, "Trotskyist scum...Death to assassins, even today!" "There is no doubt now why Beria chose him as second in command at the JAC--to watch everyone else, and denounce them at the appropriate moment."

There more than a dozen more Feffer references indexed in Rappaport's book, including chapter 6, pp. 80-97 that accuse Feffer of having an active and significant role in what the chapter title calls "An Actor's Tragedy: The Murder of Mikhoels."

I do not know of the significance of Rapoport's statements or of his proofs. Some of his material is based on interviews with Mikhoels' daughters. skywriter 20:55, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

The last three edits introduce personal viewpoint and are a spillover from the editing war at the Paul Robeson article and its talk page. Feffer is a minor character in the span of Robeson's life and Robeson is a minor character in the life of Feffer. Why this article now has a Robeson headline is a mystery and a NPOV. The internal contradictions in the way this article now reads are startling. If Feffer was a KGB agent who helped murder Mikhoels, as Rapoport says he did, why is it important that Robeson did not speak out for Feffer, as he is now accused in this article? This article is now factually and NPOV disputed because of the introduction of misleading and slanted information, and because it offers the viewpoint of vendetta against Robeson. skywriter 23:22, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Skywriter was the one who added the initial reference to Robeson. I merely made the reference more complete. That being said, I am amenable to removing all reference to Robeson.--Jbull 02:04, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

The history of this article easily shows the above statement by -Jbull to be false.

Anyone checking the Duberman biography of Robeson will know that the information introduced by Jbull on that subject is also distorted to the point of being false. That false sentence in this article follows: However, Robeson made no reference to Feffer's fate once back in the West, claiming that he "had heard no word about it", only telling the truth to a few sympathetic people. Feffer was killed in 1952. [7]

The introduction of the word "allegedly" into the following sentence Robeson also allegedly worked in vain to obtain Feffer's release.6 is the editor's point of view, an attempt to introduce personal opinion and weaken the source. I would delete these fake add-ons to this and the Robeson article but am being wikistalked: my contributions on this topic are being deleted, distorted, and reversed. A fuller discussion of this is at http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:Paul_Robeson skywriter 02:26, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-6/robeson3.html Although Feffer's name is misspelled in the interviewer's transcription, Paul Robeson Jr. replies: What happened to Pfeffer is that he and his colleagues, who had been arrested, survived for three more years. They were finally executed just before the Doctors' Plot in 1952 and one of the reasons that they did survive is that dad followed up by writing a letter direct to Stalin, through diplomatic channels, along with Howard Fast, the famous left-wing writer here and Fredericolio Curie, who was the famous French physicist and a Communist. So it was one of the factors at least which deterred their execution for some time. It's also noteworthy that dad certainly took a risk in that it's inconceivable to me that the release of Pfeffer to come see him was ordered by anybody other than Stalin himself, even the head of the Secret Police, Ben Berria would never have dared to do that without checking with quote the boss.

I do not think all references to Robeson should be deleted from this page. I think the article should tell the truth from a neutral point of view.

skywriter 02:26, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

The Feffer material is GARBAGE. I just changed one portion with a much more accurate & literarily grounded appraisal of his work. But before I added this bit there was absolutely no literary appraisal at all except a quote fr. a poem lauding Stalin. How is it fair that an article about a prominent poet says next to nothing about his poetry and spends no time analyzing it. I'm not a literary expert on Feffer, but it seems to me that this article could be vastly improved if one could find a Yiddish literature expert to shed more light on Feffer's literary legacy.

It's fine to criticize Feffer's political views if that's warranted (& I'm making no judgment on that). But Wikipedia needs to do better when it comes to evaluating the lives of writers and when it allows trash like this which doesn't do that (except in the most tendentious & propagandistic way). richards1052

Removal of NPOV tag and viewpoint that gave rise to tagging the page

I have removed the tag from this page and the personal viewpoint of the folk who contend that Robeson should have spoken in defense of Feffer when he returned to the United States and was himself unconstitutionally banned from travel and blacklisted from appearing in public theaters. As this article makes clear, Feffer was himself a controversial character, or at least controversial claims have been made about him. Whether those claims are true or not remains to be seen when examined by other historians. At the moment, we can not know. However, we do know this much. One's opinion of what another person should or should not have done more than half a century ago is quite beside the point, and our opinion of such is inappropriate in a biographical article. I have removed the viewpoint that Robeson should have done this or that because it is viewpoint, pure and simple. In a biographical article about Feffer, it is out of place because the two men knew each other not all that well. If this viewpoint is returned to this page, the NPOV tag will also be returned. Skywriter 12:10, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

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