American Jewish Committee Research Articles

The Transatlantic Connection: The American Jewish Committee and the Joint Foreign Committee in Defense of German Jews, 1933-1937

Modern Jewish historiography abounds with national histories. We turn out countless books on the history of the Jews in England, France, Germany, and the United States. I would like to suggest that historians focus more specifically on the international dimension of those national histories, that is, on how the links between Jews in country A and those in country B influenced Jewish policy and behavior in both A and B. To be sure, some subjects by definition, like the well-known stories of Zionism or relief for the persecuted Jews in czarist Russia, were international in scope and involved Jews worldwide. But other subjects ranging from the arts to religious responsa beg for greater attention. We need to evaluate the role of individuals and organizations who con sciously looked to foreign sources for guidance and aid, as well as the role of impersonal social and intellectual forces, such as anti-Semitism or biblical criticism, that transcended national boundaries. When our focus is on the transnational connections of individuals and organizations, the international dimension is manifested in a variety of ways. Two examples: i) A common pattern is that of teacher-student, which posits that the student seeks and follows the guidance of the

Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (review)

Reviewed by: Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership Karla Goldman Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership, by Naomi W. Cohen. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (Brandeis University Press), 1999. 320 pp. $35.00. Jacob Schiff was a singular figure in American Jewish history. He came to prominence at a time when one man, given sufficient financial resources, personal commitment, and communal vision, could dominate and define the public agenda for the entire commun ity of American Jews. From 1880 through 1920, Schiff stood at the center of American Jewish public life, a key figure in shaping its institutions, its relationship to the nation’s political leadership, and its role in international efforts to respond to Jewish persecution and suffering across the globe. The era of Schiff’s communal leadership coincided of course with the greatest period of Jewish immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe to the United States, expanding the nation’s Jewish population from a few hundred thousand to more than a few million. The harsh economic and social conditions encountered by huge numbers of Jewish immigrants placed unprecedented demands on the nation’s acculturated Jewish community as it sought both to cushion the deprivations faced by the new arrivals and to ensure that they learned to behave like proper Americans. Schiff embodied the engaged response of a significant segment of the established community working tirelessly if quietly to push American policymakers to pressure Russia into ending anti-Jewish persecution and pogroms. Publicly, he led the way in creating institutions like the Montefiore Hospital, the Hebrew Free Loan Society, and the Henry Street settlement house directed by Lillian Wald, which were meant to attend to the physical, economic, and social well-being of the newcomers. At the same time Schiff was instrumental in establishing and defining the program of institutions (like the Jewish Theological Seminary and the American Jewish Committee) that would define the broader course of the American Jewish community. There seems to have hardly been one aspect of Jewish communal life in which Schiff did not take a central role. [End Page 139] As suggested by its subtitle, Naomi Cohen’s biography, Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership, etches the public life of a public man. Apart from being told that Schiff enjoyed spending time with his family, we learn little about his day-to- day life or his personal relationships. This seems a reasonable biographical choice, although it is complicated by the extent to which, in Schiff’s world, business and public relationships mirrored private relationships established by marriage and birth. Cohen does make clear that Schiff’s professional opportunities and accomplishments were shaped by the world of German Jewish immigrants he encountered in New York as a new arrival from Frankfurt-am-Main in 1865. Likewise, the organizational structure of his business concern, Kuhn, Loeb, was completely determined by family connections. Schiff married the daughter of his employer Solomon Loeb, and his own son and son- in-law (Felix Warburg) in time rose to take their places among the various kinfolk who constituted the Kuhn, Loeb leadership. Although Cohen offers little insight into Schiff’s personal life, she does convey a sense of his personal style, emphasizing that Schiff’s engagement in all his fields of interest represented much more than the expenditure of cash or the exercise of power. In all the causes close to his heart, Schiff took an active and engaged role both in setting policy and in reaching out to those being served. He was a familiar presence at these institutions. Although he may have felt that his understanding of what it took to succeed in America meant that he knew what was best for newer immigrants and those who served them, Cohen emphasizes that Schiff encountered his beneficiaries as authentic individuals with authentic needs. As she convincingly demonstrates, the regard and esteem that Schiff won among the immigrant community reflected far more than just attempts to please a wealthy donor. At times the deliberately limited scope of Cohen’s portrait is frustrating. The author offers a fascinating account of Schiff’s extensive investment in Japan and how he essentially...

W. E. B. Du Bois and Jews: A Lifetime of Opposing Anti-Semitism

The decline of comity in Black-Jewish relations during past thirty years has been acknowledged by several scholars on both sides of this ethnic divide. (1) Unfortunately, as Cornel West has observed, there was no golden age in which blacks and Jews were free of tension and friction. (2) Even prominent black novelist James Baldwin, writing in Commentary, a publication of American Jewish Committee, noted as early as 1948 that just as society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol. Georgia has Negro and Harlem has Jew. (3) In last decade of twentieth century strain between these two groups that had frequently been allies in previous generations seemed stretched beyond breaking point with publication of anonymously authored Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews which claimed that Jews were key operatives in slave trade and bore responsibility for creating 'black holocaust. (4) This prompted Chair of Harvard's Afro-American Studies dep artment to write in New York Times that 'while anti-Semitism is generally on wane in this country, it has been on rise among black Americans. (5) After Lee Alcorn, president of Dallas NAACP, responded to selection of Senator Joseph Lieberman as Democratic Vice Presidential candidate by asking, on a radio talk show, If we get a Jew person...what is this movement for, he elicited immediate censure from Kweisi Mfume, national president of civil rights organization. Fortunately, one book, Jews and Blacks--Let Healing Begin, attempted to promote reconciliation. (6) Throughout last century many well-known African Americans consistently decried anti-Semitism of any origin, among them A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Bayard Rustin, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But no black voice was heard more often, more eloquently, and for a longer period of time than W. E. B. Du Bois in his denunciation of anti-Semitism and his praise of Jewish people in general. Because early in his career Du Bois had unflattering words to say about some transatlantic steerage passengers and a particular landlord in Georgia, whose practices may well have deserved rebuke from any sensitive observer, many scholars have erroneously questioned his sincerity, or even worse, ascribed anti-Semitic sentiments as motivation. Long overdue is a recounting of charges leveled at Du Bois, which can be rebutted in his own words, and an explanation of possible reasons for this inaccurate, unfair, and academically indefensible portrayal. The first biography of Du Bois stemmed from a doctoral dissertation at Harvard, same university that granted him his doctorate. Francis L. Broderick, to whom Du Bois had granted access to his personal notes and correspondence, acknowledged that Du Bois had witnessed anti-Semitism in his post-doctoral studies in Europe, but added accusation that: Du Bois appears to have absorbed some anti-Semitism himself. In his Diary of My Steerage Trip Across Atlantic (summer 1895) he says that he had seen aristocracy of Jewish race and low mean cheating pobel, but he had seldom seen the ordinary good hearted good intentioned man. He found two congenial Jews on trip, but he shunned rest--There is in them all that slyness, that lack of straight-forward openheartedness which goes straight against me. (7) Three publications in 1970s tarnished Du Bois's image vis-a-vis Jews in varying degrees. Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein conceded that Du Bois's opinions about Jews were virtually all sympathetic, but also quoted his editorial in The Crisis of September 1933 to claim that he believed that Jews, under attack by Hitler's Germany, were not sufficiently vocal about oppression of African Americans: When only inferior peoples were niggers it was hard to get attention of The New York Times for little matters of race, lynching and mobs. …

Neglected Areas of American Jewish History at the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History

The Feinstein Center for American Jewish History was created twelve years ago at Temple University in Philadelphia. Working with consor tiums of scholars as well as with individual researchers, the Center seeks to identify and to fill vacuums in the field of American Jewish history. The Feinstein Center began by emphasizing the Philadelphia story. As thousands of Jewish immigrants poured into the country at the beginning of the twentieth century and seemed likely to disappear into the melting pot, an unusually talented group of Philadelphians, including Judge Mayer Sulzberger, Rabbi Sabato Morais of Congregation Mikveh Israel, and scholar Cyrus Adler, joined with a number of prominent New York Jews to create several of the major institutions upon which modern American Jewish life would subsequently be built. They included, among others, the American Jewish Committee, the rejuvenated Jewish Publica tion Society, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The Center convened a conference of scholars to explore the role of the Philadelphia group, and later published their papers under the title When Philadelphia Was the Capital of Jewish America (1993) [ed. Murray Friedman-Ed.]. A vacuum exists at times because of a subject's newness. This was the case with the Soviet Jewry movement, which in the late-twentieth century succeeded in assisting more than a million and a half Jews to emigrate, primarily to Israel but also to the United States. The Feinstein Center focused attention on the movement in a conference of activists and scholars in New York City that yielded another collection of papers, A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews (1999) [ed. Albert D. Chernin and Murray Friedman-Ed.]. A subsequent volume by Andrew Harrison, Passover Revisited (2000), focused on efforts in Philadelphia to assist Soviet Jews between 1963 and 1998. The Center has also commissioned Professor Henry Feingold to write what it hopes will be the definitive history of one of the great exoduses of the entire Jewish historical experience.

The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 569-575 Benjamin Ginsberg. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1993]. Pp. xii + 286. Paperback $13.00. First time readers will come to Ginsberg's discussion of Jews and politics because of its arresting title—The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Ginsberg seconds Hannah Arendt's (1966) well-known proposition that the relationship between Jews and political power has been the principal trigger for organized antisemitism, therefore, the title, The Fatal Embrace. Ginsberg states his primary thesis thus: "The question with which this book is concerned, however, is not so much the roots of anti-Jewish sentiment as the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be politically mobilized " (p. 8). Ginsberg, true to his word, does not provide an extensive history of antisemitism so much as he attempts to show the ways in which antisemitism has been used as a political weapon to defeat or take over the established order (p. 10). Ginsberg contends that for decades America's Jews (as was the case with their European counterparts) have been protected and enriched by their political alliances with the state (which they frequently helped build), but that they were also expendable when the reigning order believed itself secure in office and no longer in need of the Jews. Therefore , according to Ginsberg, Jews are and continue to be an expendable political commodity, and anti-Jewish attacks and rhetoric are permanent social artifacts that can be used repeatedly to upset the current political reign. An accomplished writer and political historian, Ginsberg treats the reader to an informative history of European Jews, politics, and antisemitism that ranges over 900 years. I found his discussion of French antisemitism particularly satisfying. His main focus, however, is on Jews, politics, and antisemitism in America from the Civil War period to the early 1990s. In the early years of the 20th century, Eastern European Jews poured into America in huge numbers, and with them came increasing incidents of anti-Jewish behavior. The Jews who had arrived earlier in the 19th century (the Sephardic and German Jews) were already comfortably settled, economically successful, and deeply involved in the American political scene when the new Jewish immigrants arrived by the millions. These well-settled Jews differed in a number of ways from the later immigrants. Significantly, they had encountered very little anti-Jewish animus during the time they had been in the U.S. There were some notable exceptions, such as Grant's Civil War Order #11, which attempted to expel all Jewish traders from the war zone. President Lincoln rescinded it almost as soon as Grant signed the order. Then 570THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW there was the well-known refusal on the part of a posh resort in Saratoga Springs, New York, to admit Joseph Seligman and his family in 1877. But America remained remarkably free of anti-Jewish sentiment until the late 19th and early 20th century. In the late teens and early 1920s, antisemitism began to increase noticeably , in no small part because of the efforts of the Immigration Restriction League, America's Nativist Movement, and the warped concepts of the pseudo-science of eugenics. By 1921, it was the U.S. government versus the Jews of Eastern Europe, as well as immigrants from other parts of Southern and Eastern Europe. The Jews had only themselves and their young advocacy organizations (the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith) to defend them from wholesale exclusion. These organizations were unable to prevent the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act, signed in 1924, which limited the number of immigrants who could enter America, and particularly restricted the entry of Jews for decades to come. It is from the 1930s that Ginsberg provides his reader with the first in a series of carefully explained examples of the increasing participation of Jews in American government, and the antisemitism that was allegedly part and parcel of that involvement. The Roosevelt administration brought several Jews into its administration and into significant cabinet jobs. Some examples include the Secretary of...

Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945 Jeffry M. Diefendorf Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945, by Shlomo Shafir. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 508pp. $44.95. The title of the book summarizes the author’s argument quite well. From the moment that Americans began to discuss postwar policy toward Germany through the unification of West and East Germany in 1990, most American Jews, whether American or European born, were loath to have friendly or cooperative relations with postwar Germany. However, since the United States, pursuing what it considered its own national and strategic interests, rather quickly became set on first the economic recovery and then political and military rehabilitation of West Germany, neither organized nor individual Jews were able to mount effective resistance. Furthermore, in order to solve pressing problems that were of specific interest to Jews, such as reparations, the restitution of property, or the resettlement of Jewish refugees, the American Jewish commun ity had to deal directly with German authorities and not get hung up on the continued existence of German antisemitism or the presence of former Nazis in the German government or in German business. Such key figures as German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and American occupation chiefs Lucius Clay and John McCloy, not to mention the political and diplomatic representatives of the new Israeli state, were all hard-nosed realists, and if Israel could negotiate directly with the Adenauer government, how could American Jews contend that Germany should be shunned? Any improvement in German-Jewish relations and German-Israeli relations would facilitate German-American relations and further the foreign policy aims of all parties. Whatever the American Jewish community thought, it had little choice but to fall in line, and usually it could exert but marginal influence around the edges of larger policy questions. Naturally, since the United States had no formal relations with East Germany until the 1970s, and since even then relations with West Germany remained of primary importance, Shafir devotes only one chapter to the contacts between organized American Jewry and the East German state. Shafir’s study is based on exhaustive research in many archives and a thorough reading of the secondary literature. His approach is encyclopedic in nature, and readers may want to flag for quick reference the three pages of abbreviations liberally used in the text. American Jewish organizations and influential individual American Jews seldom, if ever, spoke with one voice, and Shafir is very good at clarifying the differences between, for example, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Conference, the American Jewish Congress, and the World Jewish Congress. Whatever the issue, such as the Morgenthau Plan, German reparations, or the trials of Nazi perpetrators, Shafir discusses the varied views of organized Jewry and of Jews speaking on their own behalf. Over and over again he shows that where Jewish organizations agreed with broader American policy—examples are the need for German reeducation for democracy and the importance of extending the German statute of limitations law [End Page 148] to make possible the continued prosecution of Nazi criminals—they could exert some influence. But when those organizations were bucking the trend, such as the acceptance of West Germany as an ally and bulwark against Communism, they had little influence. This is no surprise. The American Jewish community may have been prosperous, well-educated, and articulate, but it was a small minority. Readers should not pick up this book expecting to find an analysis of how American Jews responded over time to the Holocaust. This is not Shafir’s main concern. Nevertheless, there is an interesting, if brief, treatment of the American response to the Eichmann trial and to Hannah Arendt’s controversial book on that trial. On several occasions Shafir mentions the outcry against Ronald Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg mili tary cemetery, perhaps because the symbolism of the event and the protests against it were so clear, but Shafir’s overall portrait of relations between Germany and the Ameri can Jewish community suggests that, in fact, Bitburg should not be given too prominent a place. It is too bad that Shafir’s book was completed before the...

The Herzliya Conference on the Balance of National Strength and Security in Israel

On 19––21 December 2000, the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya held the first of what is to be a series of annual conferences dealing with the strength and security of the Israeli state. With welcoming remarks by Israeli president Moshe Katsav, the conference was sponsored by eight institutions, including the American Jewish Committee, the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, the Israeli Defense Ministry, the Israeli N ational Security Council of the Prime Minister's Office, the Jewish Agency, the National Security Center of Haifa U niversity, and theWorld Zionist Organization. Among the some fifty speakers were Moshe Arens, U zi Dayan, Galia Golan, Ronald Lauder, Dan Meridor, Shaul Mofaz, Benjamin Netanyahu, Robert Satloff, Uri Savir, Shimon Peres,and Ariel Sharon (see conference program below). The 300 participants were said to constitute a veritable who's who of the Israeli establishment (government, security, academic, business, and media) aswell as Jewish leaders from the United States and elsewhere in the Diaspora.The significance of the conference, as it emerged when its report was published in March 2001, was the extent to which the ideas and findings of an Israeli mainstream elite appeared to coincide with views traditionally associated with the country's far Right. Most noteworthy were the recommendations concerning ways to address the "demographic threat" posed by the Arab citizens of Israel, which involved the principle of population transfer.The fifty-two-page conference report, Policy Directions , was written by Conference chairman Uzi Arad, with the assistance of Ilan Amit, Brig. Gen. (Res.) Amos Gilboa, and Maj. Gen. (Res.) Aviezer Ya'ari. Issued in English in April, it is divided into seven sections: the geodemographic aspect, the political aspect, the military aspect, the economic aspect, the technological aspect, and the social aspect. Reproduced below are the "Main Points" of the conference, the entire geodemographic section, as well as the conference program and list of task forces charged with the preparation of the conference.

The death of American antisemitism

Preface Introduction Jews, America and Antisemitism Measuring Antisemitism: Fifty Years of Decline The History and Structure of the Jewish Advocacy Organizations The American Jewish Committee The Anti-Defamation League The American Jewish Congress The Jewish Community Relations Council A Collective Portrait of the Jewish Advocacy Organizations Three Antisemitic Incidents Incident Number One--Nation of Islam distorts a Black/Jewish Historical Exhibit Incident Number Two --Antisemitic Book Is Used to teach Black History Incident Number Three --Minister Louis Farrakhan Antisemitism, America's Jews and the Future Bibliography Index

Shul with a Pool: The "Synagogue-Center" in American Jewish History (review)

156 SHOFAR Fall 2000 Vol. 19, No.1 course, the fact that race, class, gender, and the nature ofthe economic system sharply defme the paths that most people take in their lifetimes. Repetition ofthis observation, however, is unnecessary. Who disputes these contentions? It is important, though, for a scholar to show how other factors, such as religion, defense organizations, and governmental policies, have also affected change and development. The author often notes that opportunities for Jews, especially males, expanded after World War II, but never once does she acknowledge the influence and activities of groups like the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the AntiDefamation League of B'nai B'rith, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Japanese American Citizens League, et aI., which helped bring about these changes. Nor does she connect in any way the decline ofbigoted behavior with specific legislation passed by cities, states, and the federal government. It took a great deal ofeffort to move society in a more democratic direction after World War II; changes did not take place simply because ofthe economy and the move to the suburbs. Brodkin's final sentence states: "The challenge for American Jews today is to confront that whiteness as part ofdeveloping an American Jewishness that helps build an explicitly multiracial democracy in the United States" (p. 187). Let me suggest to her that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American Jews who think neither about "multiracial democracy" nor about "American Jewishness." They lead their lives as they see fit, incorporating or eliminating those aspects oftheir heritage that suit their needs. They are rarely troubled by the problems ofothers. An outrnarriage rate ofover 50 percent indicates that most Jews have more pressing issues in their lives. And while few Jews oppose "multiracial democracy," even fewer are now on the front lines of the battle. Leonard Dinnerstein Judaic Studies University of Arizona Shul with a Pool: The "Synagogue-Center" in American Jewish History, by David Kaufman. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England and Brandeis University Press, 1999. 329 pp. $50.00 (c); $24.95 (p). From "open temples," "peoples' synagogues," and JCC's to the Celibates, a Jewish singles society of the early twentieth century, American Jews over the years have repeatedly tried their hand at rendering Jewishness fresh, appealing, and timeless. Finding just the right balance between the weight oftradition and the pull ofmodemity has not been easy, especially when, as Rabbi Leo Franklin observed in 1902, "it is the curse ofour day that the club and not the synagogue has become the centre ofour life." Some American Jews, seeking to attract the "unsynagogued," believed that shifting the Sabbath to Sunday might do the trick. Placing more of a premium on the sermon Book Reviews 157 than on worship, advocates of the Sunday Sabbath eagerly likened the sanctuary to a university auditorium and the rabbi to an educator. Others sought salvation in the "bowling alleys, athletic grounds, fashionable bathrooms" and gymnasiums of the Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA) where young men-and later still, young women as well-might enjoy the company of their own kind. By the 1920s, growing numbers of American Jews began to place their faith in a brand new venture: the synagogue-center or, as it was more widely known, the "shul with a pool." As historian David Kaufman writes in his exceedingly detailed account of its origins, the synagogue-center fired the collective imagination of postwar American Jewry. Spearheaded by the laity and sanctionedby its rabbis, shuls with pools spread like wildfire throughout the country, prompting one eyewitness to observe that it had become a "daily occurrence" to read in the Jewish press of yet another synagogue-center in the works. With a young, energetic staff, a dazzling array of programs-lectures, clubs, classes, anddances-and a beautiful complex ofarchitecturally distinguished buildings, the "shul with a pool" had a lot going for it. More to the point, it had an ideology. Fashioned in large measure by Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, who would subsequently draw on his experiences as founder of Manhattan's Jewish Center to develop the Reconstructionistmovement, the synagogue-center was designed...

‘America is home’: Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945–60

This article examines one of America's most celebrated periodicals, Commentary magazine, founded by the American Jewish Committee under the editorship of Elliot E. Cohen in 1945. The article describes the process by which young Jewish intellectuals, who had removed themselves from their communities, would edit and write for a magazine of the organised Jewish community. It examines Commentary's formative years during the 1940s and 1950s, in particular the nature of the relationship between the editors and its sponsors. In doing so, the article shows the effects of this literary and cultural effort in producing a new Jewish-American discourse of America as ‘home’.

Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?: The Place of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment

The penultimate section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, of Anti-Semitism was composed in the summer of 1943, four years after work on the book had begun, and after all the other sections were completed. As was the case with the first chapter, the Elements were a collaborative enterprise. Leo Liwenthal contributed to the first three theses, and it is likely that the remaining three, and certainly the fifth and most original thesis on idiosyncrasy and mimesis, were jointly dictated by Horkheimer and Adorno in July 1943.1 The seventh thesis, added in 1947, was solely the work of Horkheimer. Not initially intended for the volume published in 1944, the Elements are usually described as theoretical elaborations destined for the Institute for Social Research's anti-Semitism project begun in 1939 and announced in the 1941 issue of the Institute's journal.2 In mid-1943 the anti-Semitism project took on renewed importance when the institute was entrusted by the Jewish Labor Committee to conduct a massive study of American labor's attitudes towards Jews. The following year, the American Jewish Committee selected Horkheimer as its Director of Scientific Research and launched an ambitious program culminating in the five part Studies in Prejudice series published in 1949 and

Forgotten Godfathers: Premature Jewish Conservatives and the Rise of National Review

I For historians of the ideologically riven twentieth century the migration of writers and artists from Left to Right is a familiar phenomenon. But sometimes those who make it are not familiar, and sometimes their ultimate destination is a surprise. The subject of this essay is seven American Jews who made this intellectual journey: seven men who, by the mid-1950s, found themselves "prematurely" on the political Right at a time when most intellectuals--including Jewish intellectuals--stood somewhere to the left of center. Unlike the pilgrimage of the often Jewish neoconservatives who came to prominence in the Reagan era, the trek that these seven took did not begin with the traumas of the 1960s. Instead, it took place an entire generation before the epithet "neoconservative" was coined. Our subject is seven Jews, but in a way our story begins with a gentile. In November 1955 an adventurous young conservative named William F. Buckley, Jr., founded a magazine that was destined to alter the ideological climate of late twentieth-century America. Much has been written about Buckley's National Review. 1 But one fact has not been given as much attention as it deserves: of the 31 names which appeared on the original masthead of National Review, no fewer than five were Jewish. 2 In some respects the association of these men with the fledging venture was not surprising. Each (as we shall see) had a good reason for being there. Nor was their appearance on the masthead an act of tokenism. Each was a personal friend of Buckley's, and each contributed substantially to the insurgent journal in the years ahead. [End Page 123] But from another perspective the conspicuous Jewish presence at National Review at its inception presents a puzzle, for in 1955 much of the American Right was not exactly attractive to American Jews. Many conservative activists of the early 1950s--including Buckley himself and Senator Robert Taft--had been isolationists before Pearl Harbor, not a position shared by many Jews. Moreover, after World War II Taft--the Mr. Conservative of his day--had angered Jews and others by his publicly expressed constitutional objections to the Nuremberg war crimes trials. 3 Another conservative hero, Senator Joseph McCarthy, seemed to many Jews a dangerous demagogue reminiscent of Adolf Hitler. Behind all this discomfiture lay the unpleasant fact that parts of the American Right were not free from anti-Semitism--a taint, as it happened, that Buckley was determined to efface. Not surprisingly, then, few Jewish intellectuals embraced Buckley's embryonic magazine. In 1956, barely six months after National Review started publishing, the American Jewish Committee's monthly journal Commentary published a ferocious assault on it by Dwight Macdonald. His article was entitled "Scrambled Eggheads on the Right," a caption supplied by a young assistant editor named Norman Podhoretz. 4 In its first decade of existence National Review and its editor-in-chief clashed heatedly with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, particularly over what Buckley regarded as the ADL's own defamation of Dr. Frederick Schwarz and his Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. 5 For their part, Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein of the ADL, in their 1964 book Danger on the Right, labeled Buckley "one of the leading fellow travelers of the American Radical Right." 6 Not surprisingly again--given all this commotion and the negative stereotype of conservatism that Buckley had to overcome--National Review's influence on the American Jewish community was initially slight. In 1960 Buckley revealed to a friend that less than one percent of his magazine's readers were Jewish. 7 [End Page 124] Nevertheless, the fact remains that a striking number of National Review's original luminaries were Jews. Indeed, without them the magazine might never have gotten off the ground, for if Buckley was the founding father of the journal, its unlikely godfather was an Austrian Jewish emigré journalist named William S...

Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (review)

146 SHOFAR Summer 1999 Vol. 17, No.4 diamond and ruby buttons. In his left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeks out ofhis waistcoat pocket." Davison, following some earlier critics, says flatly, "Rudy has become a Jewish 'fairy boy of eleven'" (his emphasis). And he sees in that image a confirmation of Bloom's commitment to Judaism. Not very likely. The Jews ofDublin in 1904, the time ofthe novel, were almost entirely Eastern European immigrants-Orthodox Jews-and their fust generation progeny, refugees from restrictive Russian laws of the 1880s and accompanying pogroms. Reading from right to left and a white lambkin, which could as easily be the agnus dei as the paschal lamb, do not make the image of Rudy "Jewish"-certainly not in a world in which Jews tended to mumble and sway when they prayed and wore somber clothes. The ostentatious continued kissing of the text while reading and the bizarre dress, with echoes in that dress of Christian, classical, and Celtic lore, would be outrageous as a symbol of Judaism to Jews of any persuasion, let alone Eastern European, Orthodox Jews at the turn ofthe century; and most of Joyce's Jewish friends, even though assimilated, would have told him so. I can only read mockery in the image. Davison's book is useful as a discussion ofhow Joyce's concept of Jews probably evolved; but I do not see it as a useful explanation of Leopold Bloom, one of the three central characters in Ulysses. Erwin R. Steinberg Carnegie Mellon University Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties, by Stuart Svonkin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 364 pp. $32.50. As Nathan Glazer famously lamented, "We are all multiculturalists now." Stuart Svonkin, in his well-researched history, shows that today's seemingly orrmipresent multiculturalism springs in part from the activism ofJewish defense groups ofthe 1930s and 1940s who expanded their campaigns for self-defense to an organized attack on the existence ofprejudice itself. Svonkin shows how Jews during this period developed an ideology centered upon a new "unitary theory ofprejudice." That is, the then radical idea that prejudice itself, no matter what group it was directed at, was a problem that all minority groups needed to be concerned with. This allowed Jewish groups like the Anti Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee to move beyond strictly Jewish issues to work with other minority groups, especially Blacks in the civil rights movement. Svonkin is especially strong in showing how these two Jewish groups were able to successfully mount and maintain a public education--or rather re-education-program Book Reviews 147 that ranged from films to ads on public transportation to the publication of a string of tremendously influential academic studies, the most famous of which was The Authoritarian Personality. The author then shows how these groups worked in tandem with the World Jewish Congress, which was successful in bringing about legal change in the form of anti-discriminatory laws in the areas of housing and employment practices. The major weakness of Svonkin's book is his failure to fully consider the reasons why Jewish activism, which until around 1967 identified itself with a kind of universal liberalism and the fight against the idea of unitary prejudice, once again became telescoped into a more narrow identity group politics that we see today and which men like Glazer lament. Svonkin places a great deal ofemphasis on the Six-Day War of 1967 for the change in Jewish activism. Yet he fails to consider that, at this same time, women, Blacks, Latinos, Chicanos, Gays, American Indians and others were all also abandoning the goals of liberal universalism to focus almost exclusively on the problems of their respective groups. Svonkin points out that the old idea of universal liberal activism had an "inherent contradiction"; that is, it did not make allowance for conflicts between minority groups. This, however, would seem to be begging the question. What we really need to know is why these conflicts arose and why they did so at this particular time and not at another. In a similar vein, Svonkin...

Die Velt, Yene Velt, Roosevelt: The Legacy of Jewish Liberalism in American Political Culture

Die Velt, Yene Velt, Roosevelt: The Legacy of Jewish Liberalism in American Political Culture Marc Dollinger (bio) Murray Friedman. What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance. New York: Free Press, 1995. vi + 423 pp. Notes and index. $24.95. Stuart Svonkin. Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xi + 364 pp. Notes, bibliographical references, and index. $32.50. In an oft-quoted Yiddish remark, Judge Jonah J. Goldstein, a Republican, lamented that his co-religionists lived in three velten (worlds): die velt (this world), yene velt (the world to come) and Roosevelt. Exaggeration aside, Goldstein’s muse foretold a generations-long connection between Jews and liberal politics. American Jewish support for Franklin Roosevelt, which started at 82 percent in the 1932 election, rose to an astronomical 90 percent in the 1940 and 1944 contests. In the sixty-five years since the creation of the New Deal coalition, American Jews have voted Democratic more than any other white ethnic group in the nation. They led many of the nation’s largest labor unions, wrote and implemented some of the New Deal’s most important social reform legislation, and spearheaded a drive for intergroup cooperation. In the postwar years, American Jews and the national organizations that represented them lobbied for anti-lynching legislation and an end to the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in the South. By the mid-1960s, though, many Jews retreated from liberal political activism. While American Jews celebrated passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, they could never recapture the spirit of interracial cooperation which eroded in the wake of the Black Power movement, ethnic nationalism, and calls for quotas in affirmative action programs. The chaotic political journey of American Jews has long captured the attention of historians. Intent on solving the mystery of a relatively wealthy and powerful Jewish community clinging to liberal social ideas, scholars have debated a series of interpretations. The first school of thought to emerge in the [End Page 599] postwar period attributed the community’s social reform posture to Jewish religious beliefs. The main proponents of this argument cited prophetic Judaism, the centrality of tzedakah (charity) and gimulut hasidim (acts of loving kindness) as well as the Jewish people’s historic sympathy for the oppressed in their analyses of Jewish social reform. Many Jewish civil rights activists embraced this position since they considered both racism and anti-Semitism a threat to American democracy. 1 The end of the modern civil rights movement inspired a new generation of historians to challenge many of the traditional assumptions undergirding Jewish political culture. Hardened by the movement’s failure to translate civil rights into genuine equality, they charged Jewish liberals with paternalism: what was once a credit to a shared history and a sacred tradition degenerated into Jewish self-interest. Murray Friedman’s What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance and Stuart Svonkin’s Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties revisit the two most recent historiographic schools as they continue a provocative debate on the nature of liberalism, inter-racial cooperation, and the legacy of the civil rights movement. Murray Friedman, the mid-Atlantic regional director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and vice chairman of Reagan’s U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, offers a grand overview of black/Jewish relations from its earliest beginnings in colonial America to the current controversy over Afro-centrism. He takes aim at many of the post-Martin Luther King era historians who have sought to redefine our understanding of the black/Jewish alliance. In Friedman’s estimation, recent historical scholarship on Jewish participation in the civil rights movement minimizes, if not eliminates, the important sacrifices Jews offered in defense of racial equality. While some historians point to the reasons for the alliance’s collapse, Friedman considers remarkable “that it held together for so long—or indeed that it ever existed” (p. 3). His is an effort against those racial extremists and scholars who seek “to minimize and sometimes deny the existence of a black-Jewish alliance” (p. v). Friedman argues that...

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor William D. Rubinstein Dear Editor, The scattered references provided by Professor Wyman do not show what he thinks they do. Of course the bombing of Auschwitz was publicly discussed in Jewish newspapers and news bulletins in the summer of 1944. But it is striking how little impact they made at the time. In 1942 and 1943 there were numerous large-scale demonstrations by American Jewish groups, attended by thousands, demanding the rescue of European Jewry. (None of their proposals included bombing Auschwitz, of course). When the suggestion to bomb Auschwitz first surfaced in May–June 1944, no demonstrations of any kind were held in favour of the bombings, and I must reiterate my point that the reception to the bombing proposals, among Diaspora Jewish groups, was generally either surprisingly lukewarm or overtly hostile. Most emphatically, it must be stressed that such proposals were not viewed at the time as a panacea and remained almost entirely unknown (see below) for several decades. There were two main reasons for this surprisingly ambiguous attitude. First, there was real and genuine concern that any bombing raids would simply kill more Jews (a concern which was probably quite well-taken). Secondly the bombing proposals coincided with D-Day and the opening of the Second Front, upon which the fate of Europe depended, and whose success alone would rid the world of the Nazi scourge. It is not surprising that most American Jewish leaders pinned their hopes on the Allied invasion and did not forcefully pursue the proposals to bomb Auschwitz, even if they viewed these as a panacea (which they didn’t). An example of American attitudes at this time may be found in the following extract from a Report of a meeting between John W. Pehle, head of the War Refugee Board, and five prominent Jewish leaders on 16 August 1944. There is no reason to believe that either Pehle or the Jewish leaders were misrepresenting the prevalent view of the bombing question at this time. “REPORT OF MEETING WITH JOHN W. PEHLE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND MESSRS. LESSER AND FRIEMAN OF THE WAR REFUGEE BOARD August 16, 1944 STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL The committee consisted of Mr. Eugene Hevesi, of the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, of the Vaad Ha-Hazalah, [End Page 113] Dr. A. Leon Kubowitzki, of the World Jewish Congress, Mr. R. Sherman of the Jewish Labor Committee, and I.L. Kenen, secretary, Rescue Commission, American Jewish Conference. Mr. Kenen introduced the delegation as a committee representing all Jewish organizations, including those affiliated with the Conference and a number outside the Conference, such as the American Jewish Committee and the Vaad Ha-Hazalah. In addition, he continued, the World Jewish Congress was represented by Dr. Kubowitzki. The organizations had united to expedite rescue measures in view of the situation in Hungary. He said that it was the intention in the future to have representations to the Board made, if possible, by a committee representing all the organizations and thus eliminate duplication of activity. Mr. Pehle said that when he had first taken office, he had hoped that such a unified representation might be achieved but found it impossible at that time. . . . Dr. Kubowitzki raised the question of the destruction of Nazi extermination facilities. Mr. Pehle doubted that this could be done. He said that a proposal to bomb the facilities had been objected to by Jewish organizations because it would result in the extermination of large numbers of Jews there, and the alternative, he said, was to send an underground detachment. He asked whether we had taken this up with the Polish Government in Exile and he expressed doubt that the Poles could muster the strength for such engagements. (Original at YIVO, AJC Archives, Waldman Series, Box 18, Folder 1.)” Prof. Wyman’s handful of post-war, pre-1970s references to the bombing of Auschwitz must also be queried. First, however, since writing The Myth of Rescue I have become aware that these proposals were indeed mentioned at the time of the Eichmann Trial (1960–62), especially in the London Jewish Chronicle. One might, however, place this fact in a much wider context: since Prof. Wyman’s list...

Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II (review)

Book Reviews 137 Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II. By Glen Jeansonne. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; pp. xi + 264. $29.95 cloth; $16.95 paper. Mention Father Coughlin's name, and many will know or remember the isolationist priest who, with his dynamic and compelling voice, could convince his radio listeners of just about anything—even that Hitler's anti-Semitism was some kind of defense against Jew-Communism. Mention Gerald L. K. Smith, and many will recognize him as no less oratorically gifted and outrageous as Coughlin in that era. Indeed, mention the "America First Committee," and people still will recall their divisive activities. But mention such names as Elizabeth Dilling and Catherine Curtis, or organizations like "We the Mothers Mobilize for America," and fewer people wül know who they are. Fewer will know of their extremist isolationist positions in the 1930s and 1940s, of their rabid anti-Semitism, or of the consequences of their determined efforts to get their hate-filled rhetoric heard and accepted nationally. True, they were relatively inconsequential when contrasted to Coughlin, Smith, or "America First." Yet their strength—particularly in combination with their more prominent contemporaries—amplified the bigoted right-wing voice in America. And that right wing would help make it especially difficult for a president, concerned with a unified and supportive public opinion, to proceed "expeditiously" with any initiatives vis-à -vis the Axis powers (2). Only Pearl Harbor would alter the increasingly forceful course of the political right. Thus, Glen Jeansonne's volume, Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II, is an important contribution to the historical record and a must read for researchers interested in rhetoric's influence on public affairs. Additionally, this work should be of unique interest to students of women's studies. Were these respective women and their mothers' organizations feminists, motivated by emerging feminist precepts? Where are they situated in the march of women's history? The author does not shy away from dealing with these questions, and in so doing he enhances the value of his scholarship. Jeansonne bases his argument in the scrupulous examination of primary and secondary resources. Since "only Elizabeth Dilling and Catherine Curtis left papers," he notes at the outset, his chief sources are "investigative reports compiled by the federal government and organizations such as the American Jewish Committee." These and all other court transcripts and archival supports were authenticated and corroborated with cross-references (xiii). Women of the Far Right is well written and cleverly organized—even as the author notes that the "paucity of information" at times not only dictated the substantive nature of chapters, but their arrangement. For while an introductory chap- 138 Rhetoric & Public Affairs ter offers context—and concluding sections summarize, analyze, and evaluate—the ten chapters that make up the heart of this book are, in fact, ten individual narratives . Each narrative/chapter focuses on leading women, the development of the various and varied mothers' groups, and pivotal events in the life of the movement. Collectively, the narratives underscore the extent of the mothers' activities from coast to coast, intimate the intricacy of the movement's historical and rhetorical evolution, and underline mothers' ties to the larger network of fascist extremists. In chapter one, Jeansonne delineates a 1920s-1930s America increasingly insecure over political, economic, and social turbulence. One effect of the turmoil was a growing number of women—predominantly "white, middle-class" and "Christian" (2)—who believed that hearth and home were under attack. So they looked for a villain. Elizabeth Dilling, we learn in the first extended narrative, emerged as an ardent and articulate advocate in the quest to locate and define an appropriate scapegoat. An early movement leader and an exceptionally powerful speaker, Dilling identified for her audiences the villain who put the larger culture at risk: "Jew-Communists. Jew-Communists everywhere!" In time, one leading "magazine in Germany [described] her as the 'female fuhrer' of the United States" (22). Jeansonne proceeds to detail the linkage between the mothers' movement and "Fifth Columnists" like Coughlin and Smith (chapter three). Mothers, on the right's reasoning, had the right and...

Article: Transformation Through Crisis: The American Jewish Committee and the Six-Day War

L'A. evoque l'evolution de l'attitude de la communaute juive americaine a l'egard de la Guerre des Six Jours. De la peur d'une destruction totale d'Israel, les juifs des Etats-Unis sont passes a l'euphorie de la victoire. L'A. focalise son attention sur l'American Jewish Committee pour mesurer l'ampleur de cette transformation due a une situation de crise. Il en profite pour montrer que c'est aussi un des rares moments de consensus dans l'histoire du peuple juif

Jews against prejudice: American Jews and the fight for civil liberties

America's dark history of anti-Semitism, racism, and ethnic bigotry-and many of the efforts to combat such prejudice-has received growing attention in recent years. Yet one of the most important stories in America's struggle to overcome ethnic and religious hatred has gone largely untold. From the Depression to the late 1960s Jewish organizations-working as the leaders in a broadly based social and political movement-waged a determined campaign to eliminate all forms of discrimination and prejudice from American society. Stuart Svonkin delves into the archival records of America's three major Jewish defense groups-the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, and the American Jewish Congress-to offer the first comprehensive account of organized Jewish political activism against bigotry and for human rights. Jews Against Prejudice chronicles American Jewry's political ascendance, from the era before World War II, when Jewish defense groups first organized to fight mass anti-Semitism, to their emergence as the leaders of a liberal movement determined to address the nation's most pressing political and social problems. Svonkin explores the impact that these Jewish groups had in the fight against racial and ethnic stereotypes. Beginning in World War II Jewish social scientists and other intellectuals began a concentrated effort to investigate the social and psychological bases of prejudicial attitudes, outlooks, and behavior. By the end of the war these social scientists became convinced that all forms of prejudice, including anti-Semitism, shared the same social and psychological causes, which, if discovered, could be successfully treated and eliminated. For over twenty years Jewish intellectuals and activists worked hand in hand to formulate practical programs to combat prejudice. They pioneered tactics-including educational programs in the schools, appeals for tolerance broadcast through the mass media, and legal challenges in the courts-that remain among the principal weapons of today's civil rights activists. Svonkin shows how ideology and the shifting models of prejudice greatly influenced the means that each Jewish group used in its fight against bigotry and racism. He considers the far-reaching effects of anticommunism in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Jewish political groups moved to support liberal anticommunism as well as to oppose the demagoguery of such figures as Senator Joseph McCarthy and the leaders of the John Birch Society. Exploring the tensions between American and Jewish identities, Svonkin argues that the revelations of the Eichmann Trial, the growing concern over Israel's security, and the persistence of anti-Semitism all shaped Jewish activism- driving the shift from the universalistic liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s to the cultural assertion and political neoconservatism of the late 1960s.

To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State (review)

Book Reviews 161 for promotion to brigadier general, Spiegel took a ball in the abdomen . while. aboard the steamer City Belle; that vessel was one of five Federal boats destroyed by Confederate calvary along the Red River in the series ofactions known as Alexandria, Louisiana, part ofthe Red River Campaign. Spiegel died the next day, May 4,1864. All ofthe surviving officers and 250 men of the regiment became Confederate prisoners. While editing these letters the editors came to admire Colonel Spiegel. . Readers are likely to share that admiration. He was a passionate family man, a brave and skilled officer, and a patriot. His letters include frequent references to his religious faith. As a Jew Spiegel had infrequent encounters with religious compatriots both in the North and South (there were in 1860 only 150,000 Jews in a population of 31.5 million), and the book reveals only a single episode of antisemitism, a snide remark made by one of his political rivals in Ohio. In his Forward to the book, Jacob R. Marcus of the AmericanJewish Archives writes that," For immigrants, for Jews, the war was an Americanizing forcing house" (p. viii). Marcus Spiegel, an immigrant Jew from Germany, shared the experience of several hundred thousand other immigrant soldiers in the Union army, an experience that demonstrated their devotion to their adopted country and their increasing assimilation into American society. William 1. Burton Department of History Western Illinois University To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State, by Gregg Ivers. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. 272 pp. $37.50. In his book, To Build a Wall, Gregg Ivers tells the story of the role played by the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League in the successful efforts to use litigation to remove Christian prayers and other religious elements from the public schools and to block public funds for private, religious schools. He tells this story in a masterful fashion. He writes in clear, engaging prose, organizes his facts well, and makes sound interpretations. The book is especially strong in relating the different approaches taken to church-state litigation by the three Jewish groups to their origins and social compositiori. The American Jewish Committee was founded in 1906 by German-Jewish settlers in the United States, who by the twentieth 162 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No. 2 century were economically secure and acculturated. It tended to favor quietly using its considerable contacts with societal elites to work against continuing discrimination, fearing too much overt, public pressure would stimulate a backlash from society that would do the Jewish cause more harm than good. The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913, largely to combat negative stereotypes ofJews in the news and entertainment media. It was committed to influencing public opinion, education, and persuasion, and it largely had its roots in the broad Jewish middle class. The American Jewish Congress, founded in 1918, was rooted in recently arrived East European Jews. It was non-elitist in nature and committed to winning its goals by open, public confrontations with existing discrimination. It struggled with financial and organization problems until the early 1940s,but by the end ofthe 1940s had come into its own as a well organized, effective group. Ivers tells the story ofhow these three groups cooperated-and sometimes clashed-in their efforts to rid public schools of Christian religious aspects and to block public tax support for religious schools. As such it is largely. the story of the AJCongress and its legendary legal counsel, Leo Pfeffer. For it was the AJCongress that-under the leadership of Pfeffertook the lead in developing an aggressive litigation strategy. Both the AJCommittee and the ADL time and again expressed their hesitations and reservations to what the AJCongress was about, and had to be persuaded or embarrassed into supporting the more activist strategies of the AJCongress. This is an important story and Ivers tells it well. For anyone interested in the current church-state law and understanding more deeply the role played by the Jewish community in its development this book is indispensable . Ivers' interpretations also shed light on the field of public...

To build a wall: American Jews and the separation of church and state

To Build a Wall represents the first extensive study of the effect of Jewish interest groups on church-state litigation. Ivers carefully traces the evolution of the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the ADL from benevolent social service agences to powerful organized interest groups active on all fronts of American politics and public affairs.He argues that the ethnic, economic, and religious differences that led to the formation of competing Jewish organizations eighty years ago continue to drive a dynamic pluralism within the Jewish community, manifest in part in divergent approaches to litigation and public affairs.