"There are Times When Silence is a Sin": The Women's Division of the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement

Abstract

From 1933 to 1941 the American Jewish Congress helped lead a consumer boycott of German-made goods in the United States in an effort to undermine the Hitler regime and alleviate the crisis of German Jews. While failing to bring an end to Hitler's antisemitic campaign, the anti-Nazi boycott movement—and the Congress's participation therein— is still regarded as one of the most significant examples of American Jewish mobilization on behalf of European Jewry. Scholarly accounts of the boycott effort, most notably Morris Frommer's American Jewish Congress: A History, 1914-1950 and Moshe Gottlieb's Ameri can Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-1941, illuminate the central role of the American Jewish Congress in organizing the boycott effort as well as the tensions within and between American Jewish organizations that inhib ited a united protest front.1 These assessments, though, have neglected one of the boycott movement's essential features: from 1934 to 1941 the Women's Division of the American Jewish Congress assumed a pivotal role in the day-to day operation and local supervision of boycott work. Reflecting a gendered distribution of activist labor, division members took on the jobs of neighborhood organization, consumer mobilization, and storefront picketing. Their work was critical to the functioning of the protest effort through the early years of World War II and thus vital to understanding the complex dynamics and mechanics of the boycott movement. Historians' neglect of the Women's Division part in boycott work is not anomalous. The historiography of American Jewry and the Holo caust speaks little of Jewish women. Landmark studies of American Jewish mobilization during World War II focus primarily on the leadership of major American Jewish defense organizations, such as the