A Unique People in a Unique Land: Essays on American Jewish History 9781644697405

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A UNIQUE PEOPLE IN A UNIQUE LAND Essays on American Jewish History

A UNIQUE PEOPLE IN A UNIQUE LAND Essays on American Jewish History

Edward S. Shapiro

BOSTON 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shapiro, Edward S. author. Title: A unique people in a unique land : essays on American Jewish history / Edward S. Shapiro. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Series: Studies in Orthodox Judaism | Collection of mostly reprinted articles. Identifiers: LCCN 2021037714 (print) | LCCN 2021037715 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697399 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697405 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697412 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—United States—History—20th century. | Jews—United States—History—21st century. | Judaism—United States—History—20th century. | Judaism—United States—History—21st century. Classification: LCC E184.354 .S53 2021 (print) | LCC E184.354 (ebook) | DDC 973/.04924--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037714 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037715

Copyright © 2022 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved

ISBN 9781644697399 (hardback) ISBN 9781644697405 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644697412 (epub)

Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: Louis D. Brandeis, Abraham Cahan, Judah Benjamin, Henry Kissinger, Betty Friedan, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein. Book design by Tatiana Vernikov

Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

To my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchild May they contribute in their own unique ways to the history of American Jewish identity

Contents Acknowledgements for Reprinted Material Introduction

VIII X

Part One: Identity Chapter 1. The Mystery of American Jewish Identity Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectuals: Sidney Hook, a Test Case Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique Chapter 4. The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War II

2 17 38 57

Part Two: Religion Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida Chapter 6. The Crisis of Conservative Judaism Chapter 7. Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case Chapter 8. The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism in America

82 99 108 123

Part Three: Antisemitism Chapter 9. John Higham and American Antisemitism Chapter 10. The World Labor Athletic Carnival of 1936: An American Anti-Nazi Protest Chapter 11. The Approach of War: Congressional Isolationism and Antisemitism, 1939–1941 Chapter 12. Antisemitism Mississippi Style Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstrong Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot Chapter 15. The Cognitive Dissonance of American Jews

136 149 169 191 212 235 262

Part Four: Business Chapter 16. Jewish Historians and American Capitalism Chapter 17. The Absent American Jewish Business Mogul Chapter 18. From Participant to Owner: The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports

274 281 298

Part Five: Politics Chapter 19. Waiting For Righty? An Interpretation of the Political Behavior of American Jews Chapter 20. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish Memory Chapter 21. Jewish Intellectuals and the American Conservative Movement Index

320 343 356

374

Acknowledgments for Reprinted Material 1. “Jews,” in A Nation of Peoples: A Sourcebook on America’s Multicultural Heritage, ed. Elliot Robert Barkan (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 330-53; “Judaism: Jewish Identity,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in America, vol. 2, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (Washington: CQ Press, 2010), 1125-33. 2. “The Jewishness of the New York Intellectuals: Sidney Hook, a Test Case,” in American Pluralism and the Jewish Community, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 153-71. 3. “Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique,” in Key Texts in American Jewish Culture, ed. Jack Kugelmass (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 258-74. 4. Published here for the first time. 5. “A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida,” Southern Jewish History 10 (2007): 135-57. 6. “The Crisis of Conservative Judaism,” First Things, May 2013, 27-31. 7. “Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case,” Judaism 51 (Summer 2002): 347-62. 8. “The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism,” First Things, March 2014, 41-46. 9. “John Higham and American Anti-Semitism,” American Jewish History 76 (December 1986): 201-13. 10. “The World Labor Athletic Carnival of 1936: An American Anti-Nazi Protest,” American Jewish History 74 (March 1985): 255-73. 11. “The Approach of War: Congressional Isolationism and Anti-Semitism, 1939-1941,” American Jewish History 74 (September 1984): 45-65. 12. “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 129-51.

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13. “The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstrong,” in Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present, ed. Eunice G. Pollack (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 138-60. 14. “Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot,” American Jewish History 90 ( June 2002): 97-122. 15. “The Cognitive Dissonance of American Jews,” Society 49 (November– December 2012): 547-52. 16. “Jewish Historians and American Capitalism,” Society 50 (September–October 2013): 518-21. 17. “The Absent American Jewish Business Mogul,” Society 50 (May–June 2013): 293-300. 18. “From Participant to Owner: The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports,” in Jews and the Sporting Life: ed. Ezra Mendelsohn. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87-102. 19. “Waiting For Righty?: An Interpretation of the Political Behavior of American Jews,” Michael 15 (2000): 155-79. 20. “Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish Memory,” Society 51 (September–October 2014): 552-57. 21. “Right Turn? Jews and the American Conservative Movement,” in Jews in American Politics, ed. L. Sandy Maisel and Ira N. Forman (Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 195-211; “Jews and the Conservative Rift,” American Jewish History 87 ( June 1999): 199-215.

Introduction In gathering these essays for publication I was confronted with the questions asked about all such volumes. Do the essays have a central leitmotif? What ties them together? My answer is found in the book’s title. The history of both the United States and America’s Jews has been unique, and this dual uniqueness has been the crucial factor in American Jewish history. While historians of medieval European Jewish history have focused on religious and philosophic thought and historians of modern Israel have concentrated on Jewish sovereignty and state-building, arguably the central theme of American Jewish historiography has been recounting how America’s Jews have defined their Jewish identities in this unique land over the past three hundred and seventy years. Identity has also been a major preoccupation of Americans at least since 1782 when J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, an immigrant from France who had settled in upstate New York, published Letters from an American Farmer. Appearing during the midst of the Revolutionary War at a time when Europeans were trying to make sense of what was taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, de Crevecoeur’s book sought to answer the question “What is an American?” He emphasized that widespread ownership of property and material abundance, religious and ethnic diversity, liberal political institutions and values, and a flexible social system of America were creating a “new man,” one free from the restraints of European rules and way of life. The American, in de Crevecoeur’s telling, was ambitious, liberty-loving, individualistic, ingenious, and honest. De Crevecoeur was followed by many European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Charles Dickens, seeking to understand this new nation, although their conclusions were often not as positive as de Crevecoeur’s. The demographic diversity of America meant that American identity could not be based on any common ancestry, nor could it be based on an ancient history since the United States, when compared to European nations, was relatively young. This led some observers to argue that central to American identity was its newness. Thus the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote a book titled The First New Nation (1963), and the literary scholar Irving Howe titled his book on New England culture during the mid-nineteenth century The American Newness (1986). This emphasis on newness has permeated American culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised Americans to leave behind “the sere remains” of Europe and create a culture more in conformity to American conditions. In Henry James’s 1877 novel The American the central figure is Christopher

Introduction

Newman (i.e., new man) who, in a reversal of Christopher Columbus’s voyages, travels to Europe. American political movements of the twentieth century included the New Freedom, the New Nationalism, the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the New Federalism, while one of the country’s most prominent political magazines has been the New Republic. Americans have exulted in their newness, in being up-to-date, while they have disparaged the old. Closely related to this emphasis on newness is a delight in change, movement, and being up to-date, with the real American perceived as a go-getter and not a stick-in-the-mud. American businesses proclaim that they have the most recent models and most modern technology, and during the 1950s and 1960s the General Electric Corporation claimed that “progress is our most important product.” In America, politicians run for office while in England they stand for office, and Americans believe that social mobility has been more prevalent here than anywhere else and America is the land of the self-made man. In America people can choose to be whatever they want, and their choices have often befuddled observers. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman asked in Leaves of Grass. “Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” American Jewish identity, reflecting the national character, has also been fluid, multi-faceted, diverse, mutable, and often contradictory, and this helps explain the name changing prevalent among Jews. Here a Ralph Lifshitz became Ralph Lauren, a Robert Cohon became Peter Coyote, a Bernie Schwartz became Tony Curtis, a Jill Oppenheim became Jill St. John, a Melvin Kaminsky became Mel Brooks, a Jerome Rabinowitz became Jerome Robbins, a Marion Levy became Paulette Goddard, and a Milton Shapiro became Milton Shapp and governor of Pennsylvania.1 The same freedom that allowed America’s Jews to change their names and reinvent themselves also enabled them to be whatever type of Jew they wished. If America was the land of the self-made man, it was also the land of the selfmade Jew. Jews comprise an enormously variegated community of the religiously Orthodox as well as skeptics, of Zionists and anti-Zionists, of political radicals and political conservatives, and of activists and the apathetic. For Jews, America has certainly been a new nation par excellence, one free of the political and economic restrictions pervasive in Europe and elsewhere 1

For name changing among American Jews, see Kirsten Fermaglich, A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (New York, 2018). As Fermaglich notes, “the United States offered American Jews extraordinary opportunities to change the names that marked them as Jewish” (22).

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where Jews had settled. As Jonathan Sarna has noted, “Discrimination and persecution, the foremost challenges confronting most diaspora Jews through the ages, have in America been far less significant historical factors than democracy, liberty of conscience, church-state separation, and voluntarism.”2 From the very beginning of their presence in this New World, Jews realized that their condition was unique. As Washington noted in his famous letter of 1790 to the Newport, Rhode Island synagogue, both Jews and Christians will “possess alike liberty of conscience” and equal citizenship. For Jews, the motto on the Great Seal of the United States—“novus ordo seclorum” (a new order of the ages)—was a reality. Here the government did not concern itself with the affairs of Jews, no official rabbinate or communal structure had the power to define Jewish identity, discipline recalcitrant members, and impose financial and social obligations on Jews. Isaac Mayer Wise, the most important American Jewish religious figure of the nineteenth century, understood that American Jews faced a new reality, and he, in turn, advocated for a “Minhag America” (American custom) that would reflect the unique Jewish identity emerging in this new land.3 I first became interested in American Jewish identity while an undergraduate in the late 1950s at Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution. A debate was then taking place within the American Roman Catholic Church over its seeming failure to retain and attract major intellectuals. Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, then the leading historian of American Catholicism, published his famous 1955 essay, “American Catholics and the Intellectual life,” which emphasized the paucity of serious Roman Catholic intellectuals, especially when compared to the many first-rank intellectuals within the Jewish community. Ellis wondered as to the reason for this disparity, overlooking the fact that there were crucial differences between Jewish and Roman Catholic identity. A Roman Catholic was by definition religious. A lapsed Irish-Catholic remained Irish although he was no longer considered a member of the church. Secular non-believing Jews, by contrast, remained Jews in good standing. Thus Yeshiva University, an Orthodox institu2

Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism in Historical Perspective, David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs (Ann Arbor, 2003), 9.

3

For the subsequent diversity of this identity, see Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (Waltham, 1997); Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York, 2000); Abigail Pogrebin, Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish (New York, 2005); Michael Marmur and David Ellenson, eds., American Jewish Thought Since 1934: Writings on Identity, Engagement, and Belief (Waltham, 2020).

Introduction

tion, had no problem naming its medical school after Albert Einstein, a religious agnostic. Few prominent Jewish intellectuals have been religious in the traditional sense of that word, and Judaism has not been the crucial element in the identity of most American Jews. Their Jewishness has been more a matter of ethnicity, culture, fighting antisemitism, and supporting the state of Israel than of accepting Moses Maimonides’s Thirteen Articles of Faith, attending religious services, and observing religious rituals. The sources of American Jewish identity, why Jews feel strongly about being Jewish even though they are often fuzzy as to what this involves, is undoubtedly the greatest mystery within American Jewish history. The paradox of American Judaism is that the great majority of its putative members reject its fundamental tenets and practices. Religion is widely respected in America, and one of the reasons that American antisemitism has been a marginal phenomenon is that Jewishness has been equated with Judaism, and Jews are viewed as comprising a religious rather than an ethnic or cultural group. This equating of Jewishness with Judaism is also seen in academia, where courses in Jewish Studies, even when they focus on sociology and history, are often located in departments of religion. The response of Jews to American newness has been a major theme of America’s most important Jewish novelists, including Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska. In Cahan’s 1917 novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, one of the great novels of immigrant acculturation in America, the eponymous figure related that “The United States lured me not merely as a land of milk and honey, but also, and chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, of marvelous transformations.” In her story “Mostly About Myself,” written early in the twentieth century, Yezierska declared that “America was a new world in the making. . . . I find that in no other country has the newcomer such a direct chance to come to the front and become a partner in the making of the country. . . . In the old countries things are more or less settled. In America, the soil is young, and the people are young blossoming shoots of a new-grown civilization.”4 The central theme of Yezierska’s fiction, the historian Joyce Antler noted, is “the pain of becoming a real American,” of liberating herself from the constraints of traditional Judaism. In her short story “We Can Change Our Moses but Not Our Noses,” Yezierska wrote that despite the benefits this liberation had brought her, it had gone too far. “The day I gave up my Jewish name I ceased to be myself. 4

Anzia Yezierska, “How I Found America”: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska (New York, 1991), 126-27, 142-43.

XIII

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I ceased to exist. A person who cuts himself off from his people cuts himself off at the roots of his being; he becomes a shell, a cipher, a spiritual suicide.”5 For Yezierska as well as for many other Jews, America was a blank slate upon which they projected sometimes visions of American Jewish identity. The importance of identity in American Jewish history is attested to by the fact that the three most famous paradigms of immigrant acculturation were written by Jews, each of whom had in mind the massive migration of Jews to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus paid tribute to the Statue of Liberty, a gift of the French people that stands in the New York City harbor, the major gateway of immigrants into America. In contrast to the “storied pomp” of “ancient lands,” the statue was the “Mother of Exiles” holding a “lamp beside the golden door” welcoming the immigrants flowing into the United States. Here the immigrants, described by Lazarus as “the wretched refuse” of the teeming shores of Europe, would be purged of their foreign dross and transformed into good Americans.6 Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot by contrast argued that all Americans, natives as well as immigrants, had been tossed into a vast melting pot, and that this amalgam was creating a completely new person embodying the best that both the immigrants and native Americans had to offer. (The possibility that the amalgam might incorporate the worst that the immigrants and natives had to offer was not considered.) In his famous 1915 article “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” the philosopher Horace M. Kallen rejected both the Americanization process implicit in Lazarus’s poem as well as Zangwill’s melting pot concept. He argued instead for a “cultural pluralism” which allowed the immigrants to hold on to the customs, institutions, and languages that they brought with them from Europe. In America each ethnic group “would have its emotional and involuntary life, its own peculiar dialect or speech, its own individual and inevitable esthetic and intellectual forms.” Attempts to transform the immigrant, Kallen said, were inherently anti-democratic and hence antiAmerican.7 5

Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America (New York, 1997), 26-35.

6

For Lazarus, see Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus (New York, 2017).

7

For Zangwill and Kallen, see Edna Nashon, ed., From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit, 2005); Matthew Kaufman, Horace Kallen Confronts America: Jewish Identity, Science and Secularism (Syracuse, 2019).

Introduction

Because of the freedom allowed Jews in America, America’s Jews have been less a chosen people than a choosing people who prioritize newness and novelty. This is particularly true with respect to religion. A variety of new expressions of Judaism have appeared in America, including Reconstructionism, Conservative Judaism, Modern Orthodoxy, Jewish Renewal, the havurah and Kabbalah movements, Jewish feminism, and Jewish Science.8 The range of Jewish religious identity has spanned the spectrum from insular Hassidic sects to messianic Jews, while for most American Jews Judaism has been relegated from an all-encompassing regimen to simply a religious “persuasion.” Just as patrons at a Chinese restaurant choose items from columns A and B, so Jews became adept at selecting those aspects of Jewishness and Judaism which harmonized with their identity as modern Americans. Secular Jews who have little affinity for Judaism can identity Jewishly in a variety of cultural, social, and political ways. Echoing Whitman, the Jewish community contains a multitude of often contradictory institutions. The slogan of the United Jewish Appeal was once “We Are One,” but this hardly been true of American Jewry. The major question facing the Jews in America is whether the freedom, opportunities, diversity, and newness of America portends assimilation and acculturation or a flowering of Jewish life. Perhaps it portends both. * * * This volume would not have appeared without the forbearance of my wife, Daryl, who has tolerated me for over half a century during the writing and publication of these essays. She has carefully read them and made countless cogent recommendations for improving them. I am daily thankful for the joy she has brought into my life. My eldest son Marc, who holds the Weinberg Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton, was instrumental in editing the essays and securing the publisher. I also take pleasure in acknowledging the assistance of the librarians at the various libraries I have used, particularly those at Seton Hall University, who have patiently answered my queries and facilitated my research. I also thank the various scholars who have assisted me along the way. Of these, the most important has been Steve Whitfield of Brandeis University, with whom I have had a long and lengthy correspondence covering many fields, 8

This diversity has also characterized American Christianity. There are, for example, several Lutheran and Baptist churches, organized along ethnic, regional, and ideological lines. The division of Baptists dating from the Civil War has continued to the present day.

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especially politics over which we have managed to disagree without being disagreeable. Finally, I am grateful to the editors of the journals and books in which the essays originally appeared for granting permission to republish them. Only the essay “The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War II” has not been previously published.

Part One

I d e n t i ty

Chapter 1

The Mystery of American Jewish Identity Of all the European ethnic groups that immigrated to the United States, the Jews were the most idiosyncratic. Not only were they culturally and socially different from the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) native population, but, in contrast, say, to Polish, Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, they were not Christians. Thus added to the normally difficult acculturative process which all immigrant groups experienced, the Jews had an additional problem of adapting to a culture which was overwhelmingly Christian. The Jewish situation in America was even more problematic because the Jews were not always clear themselves as to what it meant to be a Jew. The question of “Who is a Jew?”, which has vexed contemporary politics in Israel, was also a question which Jews in Europe and the United States continually asked themselves during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1950, the Jewish sociologist Nathan Glazer declared that America’s Jews were “a social group with clearly marked boundaries,” but “the source of the energies that hold [it] separate, and of the ties that bind it together, has become completely mysterious.” Defining Jewish identity is one of the great themes of modern Jewish history. Prior to the nineteenth century, Jews considered themselves to be members of a distinctive religion. But during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the nature of Jewishness expanded to encompass an ethnic group, a nationality, and a people with a common history and similar cultural, social, and political values. There were multiple causes for this. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment led many Jews to reject much of traditional Judaism and to develop new religious forms more compatible with modern thinking. In Europe during the nineteenth century the growth of nationalism, Jewish economic and social mobility and acculturation, and the emergence of new political ideologies such as socialism, anarchism, communism, and Zionism led to new definitions of Jewish identity, and in America this process was enormously accelerated. “No group in twentieth century America,” wrote the historian Moses Rischin, “has been so

Chapter 1. The Mystery of American Jewish Identit

consistently and clinically concerned with the problems of human identity, its relation to group morale, psychology, personal fulfillment, inter-group relations, and inevitably to group survival as have America’s Jews.” The historian and Conservative Rabbi Abraham J. Karp agreed. The Jew, he noted, “more than anyone else, has struggled with the challenge of how to live creatively in such a society, how to partake most fully of the political, social and cultural life of America while at the same time fashioning a creative communal, cultural, and religious life of its own. To do so the American Jew had to work out a conception of America and his own identity within it.” But Karp was mistaken in using the word “a.” There were many such conceptions, and these were often in conflict. Tracing the history of these conceptions and this conflict has been one of the great tasks of historians of American Jewry. The American stress on individualism has, in the words of the sociologist Paul Hollander, encouraged individuals “to reinvent themselves in order to achieve a sense of self that will be most gratifying.” In his “American Scholar” address of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged his fellow Americans to free themselves from “the sere remains of foreign harvests,” to cease listening “to the courtly muses of Europe,” and to “walk on our feet,” “speak our own minds,” and to reinvent themselves. The American Jew especially took to heart Emerson’s advice to leave behind “ancient prejudices and manners” and to receive “new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new ranks he holds.” America’s Jews were particularly eager to immerse themselves in this American newness, and they have never been more American than when pondering the nature of American and Jewish American identity. In this “novus ordo seclorum,” religious and ethnic groups have reshaped themselves. It was inevitable then that in this land of the self-made man, new forms of Jewish identity would be invented and old ones discarded. Here all Jews were less a chosen than a choosing people when it came to defining themselves. Judaism had become a “religious persuasion” to be accepted or rejected as one might decide, and Jewish identity a matter of prescription rather than ascription. “Never had a Jewish community been to such an extent voluntary and so divided,” the historian Robert Seltzer noted. The choices they made were generally those that were the least demanding and which did not challenge their status as modern and affluent Americans. American freedom and the absence of ghetto walls meant that Jews could choose not only whether to remain Jews but also to select the content of their Jewish identity. In the late twentieth century a United States senator named Cohen chose not to identify as a Jew, while a Black intellectual named Julius Lester

3

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Part One. Identity

did. The most extreme case was the phenomenon of “Jews for Jesus” who saw nothing incongruous being Jews by ethnicity and Christian by religion. (They ignored Heinrich Heine’s witticism that Jews could not be good Christians because no Jew could believe in the divinity of another Jew.) This willingness to reinvent Jewishness, this combining of “the immediate and the transcendent, the quirky and the hallowed,” the historian Jenna Weissman Joselit noted, “was virtually without parallel in modern Jewish history.” From the very beginning of American Jewish history, Jews have sought to reconcile Judaism with American values and middle-class norms, and they were encouraged to do so by the fluidity of American life and its openness to religious diversity. At the dedication of the building of Beth Elohim synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina in 1841, Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski declared, “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine.” This reconciling of Jewish and American identities was the life work of Isaac Mayer Wise, the greatest figure in the history of American Judaism during the nineteenth century. Wise preferred to use the term “American Judaism” rather than “Reform Judaism” when referring to the form of Judaism he hoped would spread throughout the land. He even believed that an Americanized Judaism could become the majority American religion. He titled his 1857 prayer book Minhag America (American custom); he named his organization of synagogues the Union of American Hebrew Congregations; and he called his organization of rabbis the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Other American Reform rabbis of the nineteenth century besides Wise also sought to Americanize Judaism. In 1885 a group of Reform rabbis enunciated what came to be known as the Pittsburgh Platform. This statement of religious principles stressed the complete compatibility of Judaism with American values and rejected those elements of Judaism that distinguished Jews from other Americans. These included the dietary laws and the wearing of skullcaps in the synagogue. (Reformers, it was quipped, were willing to throw over the tenets of traditional Judaism “at the drop of a hat.”) The Reformers revised synagogue services to correspond more closely to the dignified and solemn religious rites of upper-class Protestantism. References to Zion and the Temple sacrifices were eliminated since these implied that Jews were not at home in America and hankered to restore the Jewish commonwealth. The use of the word “Temple” by Reform congregations made clear that the temples of America’s Jews were not in Jerusalem, but in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” the platform proclaimed, “and therefore expect

Chapter 1. The Mystery of American Jewish Identit

neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” One of the rabbis present in Pittsburgh declared that Jews were at least free from “the yoke of Mosaico-Talmudical Judaism.” This effort to make Judaism conform to American patterns of behavior extended beyond the Reform movement. A new form of Orthodoxy called Modern Orthodoxy or Centrist Orthodoxy emerged in the early twentieth century. Its advocates were convinced that European-style Orthodoxy had no future in the United States, and that only an Orthodoxy attuned to middle-class norms, such as sermons in English and decorous behavior within the sanctuary, would appeal to native-born and upwardly mobile Jews. The same process of adaptation was also occurring within what would come to be known as Conservative Judaism. Initially Conservative Judaism did not begin as a separate movement. Its central institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, was established at the turn of the century in order to train Americanized rabbis who would then return to immigrant neighborhoods and minister to congregants who disdained Reform Judaism as inauthentic and who looked askance at European-style Orthodoxy. The immigrants, it was feared, would be lost to Judaism if not presented with a more enlightened version of Orthodoxy. Within a decade or so, and certainly before 1920, it was clear that the JTS was shaping a new form of Judaism, one distinct from both Reform and Orthodoxy. Mordecai Kaplan was the most important figure within what would come to be known as Conservative Judaism. Kaplan’s 1934 book, Judaism as a Civilization, provided a blueprint for a new Jewish denomination called Reconstructionism. This volume, arguably the most important theological volume by an American Jewish theologian, claimed that a belief in a personal God was simply incompatible with modernity, and that a non-theistic form of Judaism was required. He proposed to ground American Judaism on a Jewishness that transcended traditional religion. Jews were Jewish because they were part of a civilization, and the synagogue should immerse its congregants in a host of educational, cultural, and artistic activities. While the gurus of the Conservative movement at the JTS rejected Kaplan’s theology, many synagogues welcomed his program. It became popular for Conservative synagogues to call themselves “centers” and to have gymnasiums, game rooms, and catering halls, to employ youth directors, and to sponsor a full range of activities for adults and children, including game nights, trips to resorts, and Boy Scout chapters.

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If Reconstructionism can be viewed as a heresy of Conservative Judaism, Reform Judaism had its own heresy. In 1963, Sherwin Wine, an atheist, founded the Society of Humanistic Judaism (SHJ), and by the early twenty-first century the society encompassed about thirty congregations. Non-believers had for centuries been a prominent part of Jewish history, but only in America did they feel compelled to manifest their ties to Jewishness within a quasi-religious setting of rabbis, congregations, statements of faith, canonical texts, and celebrations. This showed the centrality of religion in American life and the need even for non-believers to dress their activities in religious clothing. The context for the creation and growth of the SHJ was the vacuum created by the decline of secular components of Jewish identity such as Yiddish culture and socialist politics, the post-World War II religious revival, and the movement of Jews to suburbia where Jewishness was increasingly defined in religious terms. Scholars have frequently defined America’s Jews as an ethnic group. If so, they have comprised a most peculiar one. They did not have a common language. Jews from Central Europe spoke German, those from Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, those from North Africa spoke Arabic, and those from the Balkans often spoke Ladino, a language derived from medieval Spanish. Relations between these immigrant groups were hardly harmonious. Jews from Lithuania (Litvaks), for example, viewed the Jews from Galicia (Galitzianers) as country bumpkins. The Germans, in turn, looked down on all the East Europeans as uncouth and ill-mannered, and did not welcome them to their clubs and organizations. The unofficial motto of the Harmonie Club of New York City, a bastion of the city’s German Jewish elite, was “more polish and less Polish.” In order to differentiate themselves from their uncivilized co-religionists, German Jews frequently described themselves as “Hebrews” and not “Jews.” The organization of Reform congregations in America was the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, to emphasize that its members traced their lineage back not to the Jews of Europe but to the ancient Hebrews of the Bible. And yet no matter from where in Europe they originated, Jewish immigrants were notable for the speed by which they learned English and for their rapid upward social and economic mobility. It is not by chance that the classic picture of Americanization has been Leo Rosten’s The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, which was based on the author’s experience teaching English to Jews living in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, the center of the city’s Jewish population. One of the characters in his book believed that the sixteenth President must have been Jewish since his name was Lincohen. These

Chapter 1. The Mystery of American Jewish Identit

immigrants learned quickly, however, and soon they were advising their children to “think Yiddish but dress British.” The secular and socialist Jewish identity revolving around Yiddish language and culture, with its Yiddish theaters, newspapers, schools, and books, which Jewish intellectuals from East Europe hoped to recreate in America, was strictly a one-generation phenomenon and had little appeal to the second generation. Abraham Cahan, the author of The Rise of David Levinsky, arguably the most important novel about America’s Jews, and the long-time editor of the New York Forward, had no illusions about the future of Yiddish. He saw no intrinsic value in either the Yiddish language or culture, and believed they were destined to disappear with the passing of the immigrant generation. The central role of his newspaper was to facilitate the adaptation of Jews to their new land, and the most widely read part of the paper was the bintl brief, the “Dear Editor” advice daily handed out to the immigrants on how to behave and think in their adopted country. Yiddish has not disappeared in America, but it no longer serves as the basis of a secular Jewish identity. Ironically, the last redoubts of Yiddish as a vernacular language are neighborhoods in New York City and in towns in New York and New Jersey housing large numbers of Orthodox sectarians who disdain Yiddish literature and theater. The pioneers of Yiddish language hoped it would liberate Jews from religious obscurantism and enable them to join the world of literary modernism and high culture. They would be horrified to know that Yiddish was now being propagated in order to isolate Jews in the encapsulated pre-modern religious environment from which they had fled. Observers have classified Jews as one of America’s hundreds of religions. It is true that Judaism is the religion of Jews, but that does not mean that religion has been the most important element in Jewish identity. Most Jewish immigrants were already estranged from traditional Judaism when they left Europe, and this estrangement intensified once they arrived in America. Religious restrictions regarding diet, attire, sexual behavior, and employment on the Sabbath and religious holidays were viewed as obstacles to social and economic advancement and individual self-actualization. European-trained rabbis were dismayed by the ease with which America’s Jews gave up the trappings of traditional Judaism, and they viewed America as a trefa (impure) land where Jews did not observe the Sabbath, religious holidays, dietary restrictions, the laws of family purity, and other religious commandments. When Rabbi Jacob David Willowski of Slutsk visited New York City in 1900, he admonished his visitors for having migrated to America and advised them for the sake of their souls to immediately return

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to Eastern Europe. Ironically, he himself would settle in Chicago three years later, but this did not change his opinion regarding the dangers of living in America. “The Jews came to the United States, a land blessed with prosperity,” he said in 1904. “Here they prospered and are honored among peoples. But the ways and customs of this land militate against the observance of the laws of the Torah and the Jewish way of life.” He predicted that “those who have strayed from their faith, estranged themselves from truth, piety and Jewish observance, who enjoy with fullness of heart this country’s pleasures—such are most to descend to the Gehenna (hell).” The next year he left Chicago for Palestine, but few American Jews, however, followed in his path. If America was not the Promised Land, it was certainly their land of promise. Judaism’s rituals and beliefs have played a major role in the daily lives of only a minority of Jews, and at times a very small minority, and most Jews have been oblivious and indifferent to the most fundamental principles of the religion they ostensibly profess. Most of the immigrants, wrote the historian Michael A. Meyer, were drawn to the synagogue out of a “desire for ethnic identification, or in the language of social psychology, to sacralize their identity.” The attenuated hold of religion among the first generation was indicated by the small number of Jewish-owned businesses which closed for the Sabbath and by the scarcity of Jewish schools and ritual baths in Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, particularly in New York City. Even Yeshiva University, the bastion of traditional Judaism in America, when it came time to establish a medical school, named it after Albert Einstein, who did not hide his doubts regarding the existence of God. The strongest ties among Jews have been not religious practices but ethnic memories, social and political ties, fear of antisemitism, philanthropic giving, and membership in a myriad of institutions and organizations. In fact, Jews have been one of the most secular elements within the American population and have generally been suspicious of those professing strong religious feelings. An Irish-Catholic who became an atheist was still Irish but no was no longer a member of the church. But a non-believing Jew, by contrast, remained a Jew in good standing. Cahan’s Forward, the most popular by far Yiddish newspaper of its day, never made a secret of its opposition to traditional Judaism and had on its masthead a quotation from The Communist Manifesto, “workers of the world unite.” Religious Jews countered by not allowing it into their homes and by reading competing Yiddish newspapers which had a more affirmative view of Judaism. American Jews, in fact, were proud of Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, and other non-believers, and they were not ostracized from the Jewish community. The philosopher Sidney Hook wrote for Jewish magazines and consulted for Jewish

Chapter 1. The Mystery of American Jewish Identit

organizations, despite his well-known contempt for supernaturalism. Indeed, few of the American Jewish intellectuals and writers whom American Jews pointed to with pride were believers. The fact that Jews, by and large, are not religious does not mean they are not intensely Jewish. It only means that they have a different definition of what being Jewish involves. Zionism was another form of Jewish identity that attracted a following in America. Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, had emerged in the late nineteenth century in Europe in the midst of growing antisemitism as an answer to what was then called the “Jewish question.” The early Zionist leaders longed for a secular modern Jewish commonwealth free of the antisemitism, the constricted economic and social opportunities of Eastern Europe, and the power of traditional religious functionaries. Zionists viewed religious orthodoxy as part and parcel of the ghetto mentality of Eastern Europe, which hopefully would fade once the Jews had their own homeland. The Zionists also hoped to revolutionize the economic and social profile of East European Jews, to make farmers and craftsmen out of shopkeepers and students of the Talmud. The Zionists transformed the traditional messianic longings for a third Jewish commonwealth into the raison d’etre of a modern secular nationalist movement. But Zionism had little appeal to Jews living in America where there was no Jewish question, economic opportunities were plentiful, and they were rapidly moving up the social and economic ladder. Prior to the 1930s, America’s Jews also viewed Jewish nationalism with wariness since it raised doubts about their ultimate loyalty to America and their identity as American Jews. America was their promised land and Washington, D.C. their Jerusalem, and this was true as well for Europe’s Jews. For every European Jew who settled in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, over forty came to America. These immigrants to America had not come merely as sojourners. Jews immigrated as families at a higher rate than other immigrant groups, brought their children with them, had a lower repatriation rate than other immigrants, and became citizens more quickly. These were all indicators that the Jews were planning on being permanent residents and not “birds of passage.” America’s Jews were thus unsuitable prospects for a Zionism preaching the abnormality of Jewish life in the diaspora. Conditions would have to change, and Palestine would have to be recast if it wished to appeal to America’s Jews. This task fell to Louis D. Brandeis. There was nothing in the background of Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, which could have predicted his becoming the major spokesmen for Zionism, and why he did so remains

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an enigma. He was an assimilated Jew as well as a prominent Progressive Era reformer. Brandeis professed to see similarities between the efforts of progressive reformers to create a more just and democratic society in the United States and the attempts of Zionist pioneers to create a secular democratic homeland for Jews in Palestine. For him, the essence of Zionism was progressive reform, not Jewish nationalism, and he urged American Jews to support the struggling Zionist movement, not by settling in Zionism, but through political lobbying and charitable contributions. He told America’s Jews that being a good American required them to be Zionists, and that being a good Zionist was essential to their identity as Jews. American and Zionist identities were thus not contradictory but symbiotic. Brandeisian Zionism proved attractive to American Jews who did not want their patriotism to be questioned and had no intention of settling in Palestine. Brandeis told them that they could be good Zionists while remaining in America and did not need to learn any Hebrew. European Zionists, by contrast, accused Brandeis and his followers of lacking an emotional attachment to a Jewish homeland for all Jews, of divesting Zionism of its nationalistic raison d’etre and of transforming Zionism into just another Jewish charity for refugee relief. Brandeisian Zionism was the butt of the witticism that American Zionism was a movement in which one person raised money from another person to send a third person to Palestine. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, its leaders were puzzled by the failure of American Jews, and particularly the leaders of the American Zionist movement, to forsake the fleshpots of America since they believed the essence of Zionism was settling in the land. Brandeisian Zionism appeared to them to be an anachronism, and the Israeli statesman Abba Eban noted that, after 1948, the American Zionist movement had confirmed one of the basic tenets of religion—that there can be life after death. The Holocaust was the crucial event in the history of American Zionism. It convinced American Jews of the need for a Jewish homeland, even if they had no intention of living in it themselves. By the 1960s, what one scholar called “Israelism” had become the lowest common denominator of America’s Jews and the most important element in the Jewish identity of many, if not most, American Jews. Jonathan W. Woocher titled his examination of the ideology of the pro-Israel leadership of Jewish federation leaders Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews. This civil religion had its own educational system (leadership development training), annual rites (the fund-raising campaign), pilgrimages (missions to Israel), communal activities (fund-raising dinners and telethons), weekend retreats, and behavioral norms (expected financial

Chapter 1. The Mystery of American Jewish Identit

commitments). Jews were not ostracized from the Jewish community for rejecting Judaism, but they were denied communal honors and were fiercely criticized if they questioned the rationale for a Jewish state or Israel’s policies. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the generation that had lived through the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel was fading from the scene, and Israel was projecting a different image. No longer was it the plucky, outnumbered, and beleaguered nation threatened by its bloodthirsty and wealthy Arab neighbors as pictured, for example, in Leon Uris’s enormously popular 1958 novel Exodus. Israel had become the strongest military power in the Middle East and had by far the most dynamic and technologically advanced economy in the region. Public opinion polling revealed a direct correlation between support for Israelism and the age of the respondents, with younger Jews less committed to Israel than their elders. Younger Jews were also put off by policies of right-wing Israeli governments and by the stranglehold that the Orthodox in Israel had on religious matters. Observers increasingly questioned whether a vicarious identification with Israel was sufficient to bolster American Jewish identity. But if something else was required, it was not clear what that could be. Holocaust remembrance was another form of Jewish identity popular after World War II. The Holocaust should be central in the defining of Jewish identity, some argued, because all Jews bore its scars. Jews, and in particular survivors of the Holocaust and their children, funded dozens of Holocaust museums and memorials throughout the United States; subsidized scholarship on the Jewish catastrophe; encouraged the study of the Holocaust in public and private schools that so its lessons, however these might be interpreted, could be taught; made Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) part of the Jewish calendar; and made Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi murder camps, a place for quasi-religious pilgrimages. “Within the American Jewish community,” wrote Michael Berenbaum, the project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, “the Holocaust has entered the domain of shared sacrality.” Holocaust remembrance and Israelism had a symbiotic relationship. The Holocaust had made a Jewish state necessary, while a strong Jewish state made a second Holocaust unlikely. Holocaust remembrance, however, did not lack for critics who questioned whether what they cynically referred to as “Shoah business” could be a viable basis for a strong and healthy American Jewish identity. Martyrs command respect, Rabbi Daniel J. Silver of Cleveland said in 1986, but Jews required a sense of purpose consisting of something “more substantial than tears.” Few Jews, these detractors feared, would welcome an historical narrative featuring

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victimization, powerlessness, and mass murder, particularly when it encouraged inaccurate and dangerous analogies. Among these was equating the situation of modern Israel to that of European Jewry during the 1930s and 1940s. American Jewish philosophers and theologians noted that Holocaust remembrance, by emphasizing the silence of God, raised doubts about the covenantal relationship of Jews with God and even about God’s existence. It is not surprising that Jews were prominent in the “God is dead” outlook that emerged in the 1960s. Holocaust remembrance thus had the potential of moving Jews in a profoundly non-Jewish or even anti-Jewish direction. It was inappropriate for a people and a religion that had always highly valued life to now sanctify death, and it was equally troubling that, according to public opinion polls, the Holocaust was more important to the identity of America’s Jews than were the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. For some Jews, food was central to their Jewish identity. Eating became the easiest and most pleasant way of affirming one’s Jewishness, and restaurants and delicatessens became rivals to the synagogue and the Jewish community center. Jews eager to profess a Jewish identity but unwilling to give up religiously prohibited foods could instead eat “kosher style.” There was, of course, nothing kosher about this style of eating. Some Jews preferred to observe the kosher dietary restrictions at home but not outside, as if the purpose of these laws was to make houses and apartments, but not individuals, holy. Such eating preferences revealed how an essentially secular population could pay obeisance to Jewish tradition while preserving its freedom to choose. For them, a Jewishness revolving around food supplemented and even replaced the normative Judaism of the rabbis and the seminaries. For some Jews, fighting antisemitism was the central element in their Jewish identity. The problem was that antisemitism, which had peaked during the 1930s and World War II, experienced a rapid decline after 1945. Some Americans continued to harbor antisemitic sentiments, but they were increasingly marginalized. Within a decade or so after the end of World War II the majority of America’s Jews rarely, if ever, experienced serious antisemitism, and it had little, if any, impact on their economic and social situation. If anything, America had become philo-Semitic. The most popular Broadway show of the 1960s and 1970s concerned a shtetl in Eastern Europe (Fiddler on the Roof), and the most popular television show of the 1990s focused on the angst of a New York Jew and his friends (Seinfeld). This left Jews for whom the struggle against antisemitism was the be-all of their Jewish identity in a quandary.

Chapter 1. The Mystery of American Jewish Identit

Perhaps the most important form of modern American Jewish identity was philanthropy. Jews supported an impressive number of religious and secular institutions—schools, hospitals, shelters, summer camps, museums, social welfare agencies, community centers, historical societies, libraries, and synagogues—all competing for a limited number of dollars. At the dawn of the twentieth century, these organizations were raising several billion dollars annually to support causes and institutions here and abroad, and particularly in Israel. For many Jews, the most tangible manifestation of their Jewish identity was the checks they wrote, and status within the Jewish community was determined by their size. Skeptics questioned whether this “check-book Judaism” would be able to sustain Jewish identity, particularly when future generations will have different philanthropic priorities, and at a time when most charitable giving by American Jews was already going to non-Jewish institutions such as hospitals, medical schools, and universities. Certainly for those craving status, a contribution to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or to Harvard University had more cachet than one to Yeshiva University or to the Jewish Theological Seminary. Liberal politics involving what was termed “Jewish values” was another basis of Jewish identity. It was never clear what distinguished “Jewish values” from Christian values, but that was not the point. Jewish values validated a political approach which resonated deeply among America’s Jews. “Jews who maintain only the most pro forma links with the Jewish religious tradition, who know little or nothing of Jewish culture,” the political scientist Daniel Elazar declared, “increasingly express themselves Jewishly in connection with Jewish political causes or interest.” A survey among Los Angeles Jews in the 1980s was typical. It revealed that the most important element in their Jewish identity was seemingly not Judaism or support for the state of Israel but a commitment to equality and social justice, particularly when it concerned the African American community. The belief that liberal politics was the most essential aspect of American Jewish identity was the thesis of Leonard Fein’s Where Are We? The Inner Life of America’s Jews (1988). Only a concern for economic and social justice, he wrote, “can serve as our preeminent motive, the path through which our past is vindicated, our present warranted, and our future affirmed.” Left unexplained was the place of the minority of Jews who for a variety of reasons were politically conservative. And if liberalism, as Fein argued, flowed inexorably from Jewishness, how can one account for the fact that the most Jewish of Jews, those who eat only Jewish foods, wore only Jewish clothing, and married only other Jews, were the one less likely to support political liberalism?

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By the year 2000, “identity” had become the great buzzword of American Jewish discourse. This reflected a growing concern for Jewish continuity and even survival. In June 1952, Rabbi Morris Kertzer had published an article in Look magazine titled “What Is a Jew?” He explained that a Jew was like everyone else but only more so. Jews and Christians, he wrote, “share the same rich heritage of the Old Testament. They both believe in the fatherhood of one God, in the sanctity of the Ten Commandments, the wisdom of the prophets and the brotherhood of man.” Kertzer’s piece was published at a time when the image of the United States as a Judeo-Christian country was being widely broadcast, but left unstated was an obvious question. If Jews and Christians were similar and if Judaism did not place distinctive demands on Jews, then why should Jews continue to bear the burdens of being Jewish? And, most importantly, why should not Jews believe that there was nothing wrong with having a Gentile marriage partner? When Kertzer’s article appeared the threat intermarriage posed to the future of American Jewish identity had not yet become apparent. But by 1990 the National Jewish Population Survey revealed that fifty-two percent of Jews were marrying Gentiles, and the fastest growing segment of American Jewry was not Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox, but “none of the above.” By then assimilation had replaced antisemitism as the major concern of Jewish survivalists. The fear was not new. In the 1790s Rebecca Samuel of Petersburg, Virginia wrote to her parents in Hamburg, Germany of the marvels of her new country. “You cannot know what a wonderful country this is for the common man,” she said. “One can live here peacefully.” But she was skeptical that one could live as a Jew in Petersburg where there were only a dozen or so Jewish families. “I know quite well you will not want me to bring up my children like Gentiles,” she declared, but “here they cannot become anything else. . . . The way we live is no life at all. We do not know what the Sabbath and holidays are. On the Sabbath all the Jewish shops are open.” She told her parents she was thinking of moving to Charleston, South Carolina where there were perhaps sixty Jewish families, but this begged the question of why she ever settled in Petersburg in the first place. The most obvious explanation is that commercial opportunities trumped religious piety and Jewish identity. But what could be done about this? Intermarriage seemed the unavoidable result of the entry of Jews into all sectors of the American society and economy where they would meet and interact with Gentiles. Indeed, Conservative Rabbi Robert Gordis argued in his 1966 book Judaism in a Christian World that intermarriage was less a problem for which there was a solution than a condition

Chapter 1. The Mystery of American Jewish Identit

which Jews would have to accept. Intermarriage, he wrote, “is part of the price that modern Jewry must pay for freedom and equality in an open society.” Kertzer’s assumption that Jewish and American identities were compatible and mutually reinforcing was increasingly being reexamined and even rejected in the latter half of the twentieth century. For some, American and Jewish identities were simply irreconcilable. The political scientist Charles S. Liebman argued in his 1973 book, The Ambivalent American Jew, that America’s Jews were “torn between two sets of values—those of integration and acceptance into American society and those of Jewish group survival.” Liebman resolved this dilemma by settling in Israel. The prolific historian Jerold S. Auerbach, most notably in Rabbis and Lawyers: The Journey from Torah to Constitution (1990), also rejected the effort to reconcile Jewish and American identities and declared that the synthesis of Judaism and Americanness was “a historical fiction.” He followed Liebman’s example of moving to Israel. In his somber 1995 volume, Portrait of American Jews: The Last of the Twentieth Century, the sociologist Samuel Heilman speculated on whether Judaism or even Jewishness could survive in America. “If I am to be certain that my children and their children will continue to be actively Jewish,” he wondered, “then the boat that brought my family here to America in 1950 may still have another trip to make.” This hypothetical trip would be to Israel. The pessimism of Liebman, Auerbach, and Heilman was countered by more optimistic scenarios of other social scientists. Survey research indicated that America’s Jews still valued being Jewish, preferred to live among Jews and have Jewish friends, and belonged to Jewish organizations. But how important was it to the future of American Jewish identity that Jews preferred to watch the Super Bowl or play golf with other Jews? Was there anything of indelible value that they could pass on to their children and grandchildren? The major challenge to American Jews has always been to establish a balance that satisfied the demands of being both Jewish and American. At the end of the American Revolution, Mordecai Sheftall of Georgia wrote to his son about the opportunities awaiting him in America. “An entire new scene will open itself,’ he prophesized, “and we have the world to begin again.” Sheftall’s descendants did prosper but by the twenty-first century hardly any identified as Jews. And yet the experience of the Sheftall family is not the whole story. Jews, the philosopher Simon Rawidowicz pointed out, have been “an everdying people,” and this remains true in America where many question whether Jewish identity can survive the challenges of American freedom, prosperity, and individualism. “Over and over again,” the historian Jonathan Sarna wrote, the

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Jewish community “has confounded those who predicted gloom and doom, and has experienced surprising bursts of new life. There is no guarantee that this will happen again. . . . If history offers us no guarantee of success, it does at least provide us with a warrant for hope.” The historian Robert Seltzer remarked that the major question facing American Jewry is whether it will be capable of “generating its own self-perpetuation in yet another era of Jewish history.” There are reasons for both pessimism and optimism. Pessimists point to a low birth rate, high exogamy, religious apathy, and the lure of a secular culture idealizing individual autonomy and personal gratification, while optimists note an extensive Jewish parochial school system, annual fund-raising for Jewish causes which raises billions of dollars, and a Jewish intelligentsia staffing numerous rabbinical seminaries, university programs in Jewish studies, and Jewish welfare agencies. On May 5, 1964, Look published an article titled “The Vanishing American Jew.” Look soon vanished, but not the American Jew. Whether the magazine will have the last laugh remains to be seen. Prophecy, as the sages of the Talmud teach, is the province of fools.

Chapter 2

The Jewishness of the New York Intellectuals: Sidney Hook, a Test Case One of the more interesting aspects of recent American intellectual history has been the growing interest in the “New York intellectuals.” The autobiographies of Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, William Phillips, William Barrett, and Sidney Hook have been joined on the library shelves by monographic studies of Daniel Bell, Will Herberg, and Lionel Trilling, by several doctoral dissertations on the New York intellectuals, and by major studies of these intellectuals by Alexander Bloom, Terry A. Cooney, and Alan Wald. In these pages, many of the major intellectual developments of modern America—the growth of socialism during the 1930s, the struggle over literary modernism, the emergence of neoconservatism—appear to be little more than intramural debates within the New York intellectual community. The mostly Jewish New York intellectuals and their magazines—Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent, New York Review of Books, Public Interest— have assumed an almost mythic position among American intellectuals. Thus, Elizabeth Hardwick once noted that she had left Kentucky to become a New York Jewish intellectual (her conversion took place in the office of the New York Review of Books). Hardwick was not alone in assuming mistakenly that to be a New York intellectual (or any intellectual at all) one had to be Jewish. Victor Navasky, the editor of the Nation, jested in 1966 that “rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, you don’t have to be Jewish to be an intellectual.” During the past half-century or so, the only other group that has had a comparable impact on American intellectual life has been the Southern critics and writers. It would be difficult to conceive of two more different groups of intellectuals. Yet the Southern writers and the New York intellectuals were similar in at least one major respect: both were forced to come to terms with the conflict between the parochial and traditional cultures in which they had been raised,

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and the cosmopolitan intellectual communities of which they sought to become a part. As Allen Tate noted, the Southern writers had a “peculiarly historical consciousness” because they lived at a time when the traditional South of cotton, the Lost Cause, and rural ways was being obliterated by a new South of cities, factories, and progressive ideas.1 The histories of the New York intellectuals have also stressed this sense of marginality, alienation, and living at a crossroads. Bloom’s Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (1986), Cooney’s The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and its Circle (1986), and Wald’s The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (1987) argue that the creativity of the New York intellectuals resulted in part from the rejection of the religious and ethnic insularity of American Jewish life. They were, in Bloom’s words, “prodigal sons” living on the margins of American and Jewish culture. Fleeing from Jewish culture, they became part of a world of radical sectarian politics that had little relationship to or relevance for America. Cooney also noted the marginality of the New York intellectuals. They took their bearing “from the sense that they stood outside two cultures. It was Jewishness that made possible the assertion of a double exile that promised exceptional insight.”2 The argument that Jewish intellectuality stemmed from marginality and alienation was, of course, not new. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, both supporters and opponents of Jewish emancipation in Europe noted that one of its side effects had been the emergence of cosmopolitan, secular, and often revolutionary intellectuals. The nineteenth-century German Jewish socialist J. L. Bernays rejoiced in the fact that the modern Jew had “rescued men from the narrow idea of an exclusive fatherland, from patriotism, by liberating men . . . from everything that reminded him of race, place of origin, dogma and faith.” Three-quarters of a century later, in his important 1928 essay “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” the University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park argued that the modern Jew was the quintessential marginal man, existing

1

C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960), 31-32.

2

Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York, 1986), 142-55; Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison, 1986), 242; Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, 1987). See also David J. Hollinger, “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” American Quarterly 27 (May 1975): 133-51.

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

“on the margin of two cultures and two societies . . . the first cosmopolite and citizen of the world.” The Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher used the term “the non-Jewish Jew” to describe the phenomenon of Jewish intellectuals who have “dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures . . . [and] lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations.”3 Some of the New York intellectuals have also emphasized their marginality and estrangement from the world of their parents. Thus, in 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, Isaac Rosenfeld and Alfred Kazin stressed their indifference to their Jewish background. Being Jewish, Rosenfeld argued, “should occupy no more of a man’s attention than any ordinary fact of his history.” Kazin recounted that of all the forces shaping his outlook, he had been “most deeply influenced by my struggle against a merely imposed faith, and against a sentimental chauvinism.” What was Jewish about the American Jew, he asked. “What does he believe, especially in these terrible years, that separates him at all from our national habits of acquisitiveness, showiness and ignorant brag? . . . What a pity that he should ‘feel different’, when he believes so little; what a stupendous moral pity, historically, that the Fascist cutthroats should have their eyes on him, too, when he asks for so little—only to be safe, in all the Babbitt warrens.” For Kazin and the other Marxist Jewish intellectuals, Jewishness was a particularistic anachronism fated to disappear in the socialist cosmopolitan future.4 Marginality is a major theme in Irving Howe’s appropriately titled autobiography, A Margin of Hope. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Howe wrote that, Jewishness “was not regarded as a major component of the culture I wanted to make my own, and I felt no particular responsibility for its survival or renewal. It was simple there. While it would be shameful to deny its presence or seek to flee its stigma, my friends and I could hardly be said to have thought Jewishness could do much for us or we for it.” They were Deutscher’s non-Jewish Jews, living on the margins. “Our partial assimilation—roots loosed in Jewish soil but still not torn out, roots lowered into American soil but still not fixed—gave us a seemingly endless range of possibilities.” Above all, they were excited by 3

Stephen J. Whitfield, “After Strange Gods: Radical Jews in Modern America,” Forum 56 (Summer 1985): 34-35; Cooney, Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 14; Deutscher’s essay “The Non-Jewish Jew” is in Isaac Deutscher and Tamara Deutscher, ed., The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York, 1968), 25-41.

4

Cooney, Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 14, 240; Leonard Fein, Where Are We? The Inner Life of America’s Jews (New York, 1988), 189.

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“the idea of breaking away, of willing a new life.” One manifestation of Howe’s own breaking away from Jewishness was his opposition during the early 1940s to American entry into World War II. American involvement, this youthful Trotskyite argued, would bolster British imperialism and strengthen worldwide capitalism. This was too high a price to pay for stopping the Nazis.5 Those critics of the New York intellectuals for their indifference to Jewish concerns would seem to have a good case. Thus, Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature, argued that the price paid by the New York intellectuals for their intellectual independence and their flight from particularistic loyalties was political irresponsibility and moral insensitivity. “One of the greatest moral and intellectual failures of the New York intellectuals,” she concluded, “was their disregard of the Jewish fate, both before and during World War II and in the decades that followed.” She quoted the Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger’s cry of anguish during World War II. European Jewry suffered from “Jews who are too coarse, but also from Jews who are too sensitive.”6 The problem with this picture of the New York intellectuals is that it is too pat and neat, too dependent on that sociological abstraction of the deracinated Jewish intellectual. The New York intellectuals were unable to completely withstand the ties of tradition and peoplehood. Just as the Southern intellectuals sought to salvage something of value from the culture of the rural South, so the Jewish intellectuals sought to preserve something of value from the culture of their immigrant Jewish neighborhoods. Even the seemingly most emancipated and universal of the intellectuals were reluctant to reject their Jewish background completely. The Alfred Kazin who proclaimed his revolt from Jewish sentimental chauvinism was the same person who wrote in an autobiography titled New York Jew how the Holocaust became the consuming event of his life. “In my private history of the world I took down every morsel of fact and rumor relating to the murder of my people. . . . The line-up was always before my eyes. I could imagine my father and mother, my sister and myself . . . fuel for the flames, dying by a single flame that burned us all up at once.” Kazin’s book also contains a moving description of his trip to Israel after the Six-Day War.7 Irving Howe’s relationship with Jewishness was also more important than one would assume at first glance. The recounting in his autobiography of his 5 Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New York, 1982), 151-61. 6

Ruth R. Wisse, “The New York ( Jewish) Intellectuals,” Commentary, November 1987, 34-38.

7

Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York, 1978), 26-34.

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

alienation from Jewish commitments is in the chapter “Jewish Quandaries,” where he noted that what the New York intellectuals felt regarding Jewish matters “was rarely quite in accord with what we wrote or thought. . . . This was a kind of culture lag, recognition behind reality.” The Holocaust had the same impact on Howe as it had on Kazin and other Jewish intellectuals. As Norman Podhoretz has remarked, it demonstrated “the inescapability of Jewishness.” For Howe, the Holocaust was simply “the most terrible moment in human history.” It was primarily a Jewish tragedy, “the culminating ordeal in the sequence of ordeals which comprises the experience of the Jewish people. One’s first response—not the sole response, but the first—had to be a cry of Jewish grief.” As a result of the Holocaust, Howe had begun “timid reconsiderations of what it meant to be Jewish,” reconsiderations which would result in editing several volumes of Yiddish literature and writing World of Our Fathers (1976), a prizewinning elegy on the culture of the Jewish immigrant, working-class generation.8 The acrimonious debate over Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem also played a part in the growing Jewish consciousness of Howe and other New York intellectuals. Arendt’s volume forced them to come to terms with their own failure to do more to rescue European Jewry. The passions aroused in the intellectuals were, as Howe wrote, “overwhelming. I cannot think of anything since then that harassed me as much except perhaps the Vietnam War. You might say that it was a tacit recompense for our previous failure to respond.”9 This route to Jewishness “wasn’t, of course, a very forthright way of confronting my own troubled sense of Jewishness, but that was the way I took,” Howe wrote. “Sometimes you have to make roundabout journeys without quite knowing where they will lead to.” His final destination was to be “a partial Jew,” embodying the tradition of secular Jewishness. Unsympathetic toward either Judaism or Zionism, Howe’s Jewish identity had little to sustain it, existing in “a state of prolonged interregnum, between the denied authority of total faith and the sterile prospects of assimilation.”10 Howe’s friendly critic Sidney Hook was also a secular Jewish intellectual. Although Hook has not often been thought of as a Jewish intellectual, for over

8

Howe, Margin of Hope, 247-51; Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York, 1967), 118-22.

9

Howe, “The Range of the New York Intellectual,” in Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York. ed. Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein (New York, 1982), 285-86.

10 Howe, Margin of Hope, 260-80.

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half a century he wrestled with the question of American Jewish identity. Hook’s initial prominence came during the 1930s when, as a philosopher at New York University, he was one of the few admitted Marxists on the faculty of a major American university. He participated in virtually all of the major internecine controversies that convulsed the Left during the Depression. His Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933) and From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (1936) were among the first serious American studies of Marx and Marxism. For orthodox Marxists, Hook’s attempt to synthesize Marxism with the pluralism and instrumentalism of his teacher, John Dewey, were heretical. After World War II, Hook was a consistent and fervent opponent of communist totalitarianism, and an equally strong supporter of democracy and what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has termed “the vital center.” A grateful nation has accorded Hook its highest honors. In 1984 he gave the Jefferson lecture at the Library of Congress, and in 1985 he received the Medal of Freedom from President Reagan. Hook’s contribution to the debate over American Jewish identity was shaped by his commitment to democracy and Deweyite liberalism. The problem he confronted was the same one that has faced American Jewry from the late eighteenth century—reconciling the “pluribus” and “unum” of America. Could the particularism of Jewish identity, he pondered, be compatible with the universality of an American identity which transcended ethnic and religious distinctions? For intellectuals, the problem was complicated by the contrast between the parochialism of Jewish culture and the cosmopolitanism of Western culture of which they felt a part. Hook was too much a child of the heavily Jewish Williamsburg section in Brooklyn to reject his ancestry, and too much a product of the City College of New York and Columbia University to affirm a particularistic religious or nationalistic definition of American Jewish identity. Instead, he sought to reconcile Jewish and American identities through the liberal and democratic pluralism of Dewey and Horace Kallen. For Hook, the most important element in American Jewish life was not religion or Zionism, but democratic values. There was, he contended, a symbiotic relationship between American Jewry and American democracy. Jewish identity strengthened democracy and democracy strengthened Jewish identity. As is true of Kazin and Howe, Hook propagated an image of initial estrangement from Jewish concerns. In recalling the stance of the New York intellectuals toward Jewish concerns, he said, “We took ourselves for granted as Jews and were concerned with the Jewish question primarily as a political one.”

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

On another occasion, he denied any interest in Jewish affairs. “I suppose I have been in the thick of every controversy in the intellectual and political life of the nation during the last 60 years,” he wrote in 1984. “But there is one area I never got involved in except in a civil libertarian way. That is Jewish affairs. A number of reasons account for this—the suspicion that its affairs are so tangled that if I got involved I would have no time for any other struggle, the fact that although I believe that the Jews ought to have a homeland of some kind, I have never been a political Zionist, etc.”11 This stance of remoteness from Jewish affairs is difficult to reconcile with Hook’s deep involvement in Jewish concerns, particularly during the 1940s. (It is revealing that Hook did not dwell on these in his 1987 autobiography Out of Step.) He helped raise funds for the United Jewish Appeal among the New York University faculty; he was active in New York University’s Jewish Culture Foundation, and chaired the committee that planned the dedication of the Foundation’s library; he was a member of the Academic Council of the Hebrew University; he solicited funds in behalf of the Jewish magazine Menorah Journal; he prepared a lengthy self-study for the National Council of Jewish Women; he chaired the Advisory Committee of the Palestine Project of the National Council of Jewish Women; he was an advisor to several Jewish cultural agencies, including the Federation of Jewish Student Organizations of New York; he often spoke on Jewish themes before Jewish secular organizations and synagogues; and he was under contract to the Jewish Lecture Bureau of the Jewish Welfare Board and was a member of the Bureau’s Advisory Committee. While at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University during the 1970s and 1980s, he received (and read) the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin and contributed regularly to the annual campaign of the San Francisco area’s United Jewish Appeal. He also published two significant essays on American Jewishness: “Promise Without Dogma: A Social Philosophy for Jews” (1937) and “Reflections on the Jewish Question” (1949). In contrast to Howe and other New York Jewish intellectuals, Hook never made a fetish of alienation. He was perfectly comfortable as an American and as a Jew. In 1952, for example, he noted that he was perplexed by the intellectuals’ continual “laments about the ‘alienation’ of the creative artist in American culture.” He never regretted being an American, and he was contemptuous toward those he termed “amateur Gentiles,” self-hating Jews who denied their ances11 Wald, New York Intellectuals, 28; Sidney Hook to Joseph J. Jacobs, January 9, 1984; Hook Papers (Hoover Institution, Stanford University).

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try. His closest friends were Jews, particularly the philosopher Ernest Nagel, the political scientist Milton Konvitz, and the sociologists Lewis Feuer and Daniel Bell; both of his wives were Jewish; and, for a short period, he sent his son to a Hebrew school in a Brooklyn synagogue.12 Hook’s effort to carve out a Jewish identity was complicated by his opposition, which he shared with most of the other New York intellectuals, to the two most important modern manifestations of Jewish identity—Judaism and Zionism. Even before he was thirteen, Hook proclaimed he was an atheist and threatened not to take part in the hypocrisy of a bar mitzvah ceremony. He relented only after his parents pleaded with him not to shame them in the eyes of their neighbors and relatives. Hook’s rejection of Judaism was facilitated by his superficial Jewish education, and by the primitive state of the Judaism of the immigrant generation. “Judaism seemed mainly a mass of superstitions taught by tyrannical old men who brooked no contradiction or honest doubt,” he recounted. “There was little familiarity with enlightened, alternative versions of Judaism.”13 Hook’s initial rejection of theism stemmed from his inability to resolve what, since the time of Leibniz in the early eighteenth century, has been termed “theodicy”—reconciling the existence of evil with the goodness and sovereignty of God. Hook had first been drawn to the problem of theodicy when he learned that one of his siblings had died at an early age. What Richard Rubinstein and other “God is Dead” theologians had concluded during the 1960s as a result of meditating on the Holocaust, Hook had concluded a half-century before. The problem of theodicy would remain Hook’s major defense against the appeals of the religious. “I don’t expect the innocent man to be vindicated tomorrow,” he said in 1987, “But I do expect him to be vindicated before he goes to the scaffold. I don’t expect the tyrant to be struck by a thunderbolt. But I would expect, if there is a God, that he would not die comfortably in his bed.”14 Hook’s atheism was deepened when he became a student of John Dewey while working toward his doctorate during the 1920s at Columbia. Dewey’s naturalism and faith in the method of scientific experimentation bolstered Hook’s denial of a supernatural God, and his stress upon pluralism encouraged Hook 12 Hook, “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19 (May–June 1952): 570. 13 Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York, 1987), 33. 14 Ibid., 33-34; Tom Bethell, “A Stroll With Sidney Hook,” American Spectator, May 1987, 1213.

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

to begin thinking about America as a pluralistic and culturally diverse nation. Hook was also influenced by his friend Horace Kallen, America’s most prominent exponent of ethnic cultural pluralism. Dewey and Kallen convinced Hook that democracy required cultural diversity. The real issue for Kallen and Hook was the nature of the Jewish contribution to this cultural mix. Kallen was also skeptical of traditional Judaism, and sought to base American Jewish identity on something other than theism. The atheist son of an Orthodox rabbi, Kallen preferred to call himself a Hebraist rather than a Judaist. He argued that American Jews were essentially an ethnic group rooted in Hebrew culture. Hook agreed with Kallen that ethnicity, in general, and Jewish ethnicity, in particular, had enriched American life; that religion need not be the central component of Jewish identity; and that the most valuable elements of Jewish culture were ethnic, rather than religious. In contrast to Kallen, Howe, and many of the other New York intellectuals, Hook was unfamiliar with Yiddish and Hebrew culture and with the classic Jewish texts. Consequently, he emphasized that the essence of American Jewish ethnic identity lay not in language, custom, literature, religion, or nationhood, but in Jewish “values” which resembled those of Dewey. This was poles apart, for example, from Howe’s secular Judaism that was indebted to the culture of Yiddishkeit he so movingly described in World of Our Fathers. For Howe, but not for Hook, the world of his parents provided a standard of judgment against which a capitalistic and materialistic America could be judged. For Hook, the most important of these Jewish values was democracy. “As Jews we plead guilty to the charge that we are defenders of the democratic way of life,” he asserted in a lecture of the 1930s. “Our goal and our hope must be that without ceasing to be Jews, we can become its most zealous defenders.” He argued that there was a mutually reinforcing relationship between Jewishness and American democracy. “As I interpret Jewish culture,” he wrote in “Promise Without Dogma,” “its noblest feature is the characteristic way in which its traditions have fused passion for social justice with respect for scientific method and knowledge. When Jews forsake this method, they forsake a precious part of their tradition.” American Jews, he maintained, were united not only by a common history, but also by a commitment to American democracy and by traditions of science and justice. He omitted any mention of religious or national ties.15

15 The outline of this speech is in the Hook Papers; Hook, “Promise Without Dogma: A Social Philosophy for Jews,” Menorah Journal, October–December 1937, 273-88.

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According to Hook, the “‘democratic way” involved three things: (1) economic justice, particularly the elimination of economic insecurity; (2) the recognition of the desirability of group differences and cultural pluralism; and (3) the pragmatic, scientific method of John Dewey. As long as American democracy remained strong, he contended, antisemitism would have little appeal. Hook’s interpretation of the sources of antisemitism was a product of the 1930s as well as his own affinity then for an economic interpretation of history. Since Hitler had come to power during the Depression and promptly abolished German democracy, Hook naturally concluded that economic security and democracy were antithetical to antisemitism. Hook did not flinch in the 1930s from carrying his assumptions regarding Jewishness and democracy to their logical political conclusion. Besides the complete separation of church and state, cultural diversity, and the pragmatic method, democracy implied a socialist welfare state. Socialism, he declared, was the most acceptable social philosophy for Jews, since it alone wedded “the ideals of the good life in the good society to the methods of intelligent analysis and action.” Hook’s ideal Jew combined the best of Marx and Dewey. For Jewish survivalists, the problem with Hook’s approach was the absence of any positive and distinctive Jewish content since, as he readily admitted, the social philosophy he recommended to Jews was equally applicable to Gentiles, and its model practitioner was John Dewey. Furthermore, the twentieth-century’s experience with socialism hardly demonstrated that Jewish survival is most likely under conditions of socialism.16 This ahistorical view of the Jewish past tells us more about the values of Hook and those of the editors of the Menorah Journal than it does about Jewish tradition. This tradition is in fact more theocratic than democratic, and while Jewish texts are eloquent regarding the charitable and moral responsibilities of the individual Jew, they offer little in the way of a blueprint for social justice. Furthermore, Jewish tradition is largely concerned with following God’s laws and not with conforming to the dictates of the scientific method. While both Kallen and Hook agreed as to the ethnic character of American Jewry, they differed regarding Zionism. For Kallen, Zionism was important in the development of a vibrant American Jewish identity. Hook, in contrast, 16 Hook, “Promise Without Dogma”; Hook to Edward S. Shapiro, May 11, 1988. For two different responses to Hook’s essay, see Shlomo Gradzensky, “Sidney Hook Faces the Jewish Problem,” Labor Zionist News Letter, January 15, 1938, 5-9, and Alvin Johnson, “A Social Philosophy for Jews,” Menorah Journal, January–March 1938, 1-5. Hook’s response to Johnson is in ibid., 103-4.

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

became an anti-Zionist when he became a Marxist while a teenager. For Marxists, Zionism was a bourgeois nationalist ideology that distracted the Jewish proletariat from revolution. This view of Zionism was common among the New York Jewish intellectuals prior to the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel. Socialism, not Zionism, was their answer to the Jewish question. “Having transcended American nationalism by our allegiance to a universalist ideal, in which all men were brothers, we were not going to settle for a more parochial national ideal,” Hook recalled. “The Jewish problem— and we all knew what that was—would be solved when the economically classless society of the future was established.” Hook and Howe also feared that Zionism would lead to war between Jews and the indigenous Arab population in Palestine.17 In his autobiography, Hook asserted that one of the greatest errors of the New York intellectuals, himself included, was their failure prior to World War II to recognize the intensity of European antisemitism. Antisemitism supposedly was an anachronism, destined to disappear with the inevitable coming to power of socialism. While sensitive to the national aspiration of persecuted peoples, the New York intellectuals lapsed into a “proud universalism” when it came to the Jews.18 Hook’s opposition to Zionism, rooted as it was in radicalism, was strengthened when he encountered the liberal anti-Zionism of Morris Raphael Cohen, the legendary City College professor of philosophy. Hook was particularly impressed by Cohen’s 1919 article “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?” which appeared while the Versailles Conference was debating the nationalistic claims of various European ethnic groups, including those of the Jews. Cohen did not oppose Zionism as a philanthropy working to establish a refuge in Palestine for persecuted Jews. But he did oppose those European Zionists who argued that Zionism was the only answer to the Jewish question, that the possibility of Jewish assimilation was chimeric, that all Jews were united by indissoluble ties of ideology and blood, that Judaism and Jewishness could only prosper in a Jewish state, and that Palestine should be an exclusively Jewish state. Cohen described them as “zealous enthusiasts” propagating an anti-liberal program of group autonomy and “mystic and romantic nationalism” that was “profoundly inimical to liberal or humanistic civilization.” 17 Hook, Out of Step, 33. 18 Ibid., 5.

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According to Cohen, a Zionist Palestine would mean a state founded on a tribal religion, dominated by one ethnic group, and justified by a doctrine of racial supremacy. Contrary to Zionist ideology, the future for American Jews lay in the United States, not in the Middle East. “The supposition that the Jews in Palestine would be more fortunately situated to make contributions to civilization than the Jews of America is contrary to all human experience.” The amelioration of the Jewish condition depended not on a Zionist tribalistic fantasy, but on the spread of the enlightenment values of toleration, individual liberty, and reason. Zionism, Cohen further claimed, was profoundly opposed to Americanism. Whereas the essence of Zionism was immutable group loyalties and group autonomy, the essence of Americanism was freedom and individuality. In contrast to Zionism, America stood for the separation of church and state and the fluidity of ethnic and religious identities. Cohen warned American Jews that Zionism would distract them from the need to adjust to American conditions. “The glory of Palestine is as nothing to the possible glory of America. If history has any lesson at all it is that never have men accomplished anything great by trying to revive a dead past.”19 Hook’s definition of Zionism was the same as Cohen’s—Jewish nationalism—and he opposed it for the same reasons. Prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948, he rejected political Zionism and sympathized with Judah Magnes’s proposal for a binational state in Palestine, a plan he later admitted was “utopian” because it lacked Arab support. In a letter published in the New York Times on December 4, 1948 Hook, joined with Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and other leading Jewish intellectuals in protesting the racism, nationalism, chauvinism, terrorism, “religious mysticism,” and even fascism that supposedly permeated Menachem Begin’s right-wing Herut Party. (During the 1970s, Hook modified this harsh judgment of Begin, perhaps because he concluded that Begin’s pessimistic view of the Arabs had merit, and perhaps because of Hook’s antipathy toward Begin’s critics on the Left.)20 Hook could not accept the Zionist argument that a Jewish state was necessary because of the inevitability of antisemitism. In a long career, extending over six decades, Hook had been a prolific writer, and his bibliography runs to forty pages; but it does not contain even one item on American antisemitism. It was 19 Morris R. Cohen, ‘Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?’’ New Republic, March 8, 1919, 602-603. 20 New York Times, December 4, 1948; Hook, “Israel and American Jewry” (Unpublished manuscript, Hook Papers).

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

simply incomprehensible to him that America would ever experience anything similar to the Dreyfus Affair, much less the Holocaust, and that American Jews would ever have to flee to Palestine. In his 1947 analysis of the activities of the National Council of Jewish Women, written at the height of the political debate over the proposed Jewish state, Hook supported the Council’s neutrality regarding Zionism. He agreed with the Council that the major concern of America’s Jews must be the future of American Jewry, and that political Zionism caused legitimate questions to be raised regarding the loyalty of American Jews and their commitment to an American future. His only caveat was that the Council had been needlessly defensive because of an exaggerated fear of offending Zionist extremists. Opposition to political Zionism did not mean, however, that American Jewry should not assist the Yishuv or lobby for unrestricted immigration into Palestine. American Jews properly recognized the cultural importance of Palestine for all Jews, admired the economic accomplishments of Palestine Jewry, and welcomed the social and economic principles underlying the kibbutz. Hook’s position was not far from that of mainstream American Zionism prior to the World War II Biltmore Conference where American Zionist leaders, for the first time, united in support of a Jewish state. Prior to that, American Zionism had emphasized the succoring of persecuted Jews and charitable efforts on behalf of the Yishuv rather than Jewish nationalism.21 After 1948, Hook’s position toward Israel resembled that of most American Jews, including the New York intellectuals. He was interested in the country’s welfare, and sympathized with the outlook of the Israeli Labor Party and the Histadrut. But he had no intention of settling in the Jewish state or even visiting it, despite invitations from Israeli academic circles, and he rejected the notion that, as a Jew, he had any special relationship or obligation to Israel. In 1949, he cautioned American Jews about the danger of ethnic chauvinism resulting from Israel’s military victories in her war of independence. “A people that has, by and large, been rational and pacific,” he warned, now sought through militarism, ultranationalism, and “the mystique of action . . . to prove that they are like everyone else—inconsistent, fanatical, atavistic.” In the 1950s, Hook even praised the activities of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. Another indication of his attitude toward Israel was the fact that he did not discuss in print the

21 A copy of Hook, “The National Council of Jewish Women on the Present-Day Jewish Scene: A Program Survey of the Organization” is in the Hook Papers.

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founding of Israel, the development of the country, or the Middle East wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967.22 The Six-Day War of 1967 was a watershed in the attitude of the New York intellectuals and other American Jews toward Israel. It took the threat of an Israeli defeat to make them realize how much Israel meant to them. But while most New York intellectuals were driven primarily by fears of a second holocaust, Hook was motivated by admiration for an Israel that defeated the clients of the Soviet Union. Israel’s primary significance for Hook was its role as an ally of the West in the struggle against the Soviet bloc and its western dupes. His support for Israel was conditional on her remaining part of the western coalition. Hook dissented from the disenchantment with Israel among New York intellectuals after Begin’s election in 1977 as Prime Minister. He defended the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which most New York intellectuals firmly opposed, and argued that the media’s assault on Israel had generated “an atmosphere of pogrom-hatred against Jews.” Accusations by Arthur Hertzberg, Irving Howe, and other intellectuals that Israel had “lost its soul” because of the Lebanese invasion struck Hook as nonsense. “Norman Podhoretz is closer to the truth in his order of priority of blame—the PLO first, and Israel last.”23 Hook’s attitude toward Israel was a by-product of his staunch attempt, beginning in the 1930s, to shore up western defenses against the dangers of communism and Soviet power. In contrast to most of the other New York intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s, he was more concerned with the danger of communism than fascism, and his anticommunism was deeper and more consuming. While fascism was the greater military threat to the West, Hook perceived communism to be the greater threat to the “democratic way of life” within the world of the universities and intellectuals. The Holocaust did not have the same impact on Hook as it had, for example, on Kazin or Howe. His infrequent writings on Nazism tended to downplay its unique demonic character, and he was too much the universalist to argue, as did Howe, that the significance of the Holocaust lay largely in its Jewish dimension. He implicitly rejected the argument—most forcefully presented by the historian Lucy Dawidowicz—that World War II was, for Germany, “a war against the Jews.” According to Hook, Nazism was simply one manifestation of the totalitar22 Hook, “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” Partisan Review 16 (May 1949): 466; Hook to Leonard R. Sussman, March 7, 1957, Hook Papers. 23 Hook to Joseph P Bachman, undated; Hook to Jonathan Harlen, November 24, 1982, Hook Papers.

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

ian impulse whose purest and most malignant form was Stalinism. This interpretation of totalitarianism differed sharply from that of most other American Jewish intellectuals, and particularly from that of Jewish emigres from Germany. For them, the totalitarian paradigm was Nazism; for Hook it was Stalinism. Hook’s relative lack of interest in Nazism also accounts for his uncharacteristic silence during the controversy of the early 1960s over Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. In a guest column in the November 26, 1938 New Leader entitled “The Tragedy of German Jewry,” published two weeks after Kristallnacht, Hook claimed that Nazi Germany had learned how to deal with unpopular and vulnerable minorities from the Soviet Union. Stalin had taught Hitler “the art of uprooting and wiping out whole groups and classes of innocent citizens. . . . If, as it is rumored, Hitler intends to convert the Jews into serfs to work on canals, fortifications and roads, he will merely be tearing a leaf out of Stalin’s own book.” For Hook, the Nazis were evil, but their evil was hardly unique.24 Hook continually emphasized the importance of the communist theory of “social fascism” in facilitating Hitler’s accession to office in 1933 and in solidifying his power. This theory, which declared the major danger to the German working class to be social democracy and not Nazism, supposedly prevented cooperation between the German socialists and communists that could have prevented the Nazis from coming to power. Hook asserted that the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 and the cordial relations between the two dictatorships until the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 were not idiosyncratic, but stemmed from the fundamental similarities between the two regimes. One important aspect of Hook’s interpretation of Nazism was its downplaying of antisemitism. Since antisemitism had no place in official Soviet ideology, an emphasis on Nazi antisemitism would have undermined Hook’s argument that Nazism derived largely from Stalinism and was not sui generis. “The Tragedy of German Jewry” contended that, while the condition of German Jews was “one of the darkest shadows on our century” and could be resolved only by their mass exodus from Germany, it did not require a Western response different from that toward other minorities persecuted by the Nazis and Stalin. In protesting against German antisemitism, he told his readers, “we are also protesting against his hounding of all other religious and political minorities. We are protesting

24 Hook, “The Tragedy of German Jewry,” New Leader, November 26, 1938.

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against the murderous liquidation of all groups whose only fault has been that they have fallen foul of arbitrary, dictatorial decrees.”25 Hook’s most important analysis of National Socialism, “Hitlerism: A NonMetaphysical View,” appeared in the February 1944 issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record, published by the American Jewish Committee. Its readers must have been surprised by its downplaying of the popularity of antisemitism in accounting for the appeals of Nazism. According to Hook, antisemitism and other such “metaphysical” ideological factors were unimportant in the Nazi triumph in Germany. Nazi leaders had been attracted to Hitler solely by the promise of “material plunder and other prerequisites of office and prestige,” and his support from the masses stemmed from economic insecurity, rather than from any widespread sympathy for his racial fantasies. “It was not Hitler’s rhetoric and propaganda they believed but his promises.” Hook’s solution to the Nazi problem followed logically. “Immunization from another plague of Nazism is conditional upon profound social and economic changes to be carried out by a democratic revolution which will give the masses security of existence without terror.”26 This refutation of metaphysical explanations of Nazism was a continuation of Hook’s famous conflict during the early 1940s with Mortimer J. Adler, the Thomistic philosopher from the University of Chicago. Adler had claimed that democracy must be grounded in metaphysics and theology, that philosophical relativism and agnosticism were greater threats to American democracy than Hitler, and that the West needed to counter the ideologies of its enemies with an ideology of its own. Hook attributed Adler’s ideas to a “failure of nerve” and a hankering for “transcendental consolation,” which were incompatible with the nineteenth-century sources of liberal democracy and the methods of modern scientific inquiry. His failure of nerve was “a desperate quest for quick and all-inclusive faith that will save us from the trouble of thinking about difficult problems.” His philosophical monism was dangerous because, by repudiating secularism, pluralism, and respect for the “method of free, critical intelligence,” it rejected the foundations of modern democracy. It also undermined the security of American Jews, which depended on secularism, democracy, and the scientific spirit. Hook’s definition of American Jewish identity stemmed from this 25 Ibid. For a general discussion of the response of American intellectuals to totalitarianism, see Stephan J. Whitfield’s essay “American Jewish Intellectuals and Totalitarianism,” in his Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden, 1984), 9-29. 26 Hook, “Hitlerism: A Non-Metaphysical View,” Contemporary Jewish Record, February 1944, 146-55.

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defense of democracy against the totalitarianism of the left and the medievalism of the right.27 Hook’s view of American Jewish identity struck some new notes in the postHolocaust era. The first was the difficulty he had in determining whether Jewish identity was a matter of fate or choice. Hook now emphasized that the key to this identity was neither democracy, the scientific method, or leftist economic planning; rather, it was the common lot of Jews which, “whether they like it or not or whether they like each other or not, cancels all their other not inconsiderable differences.” The hold of this fate was so strong that even the most alienated of Jews were unable to separate themselves from it.28 Echoing Kallen, Hook argued that it was psychologically destructive for Jews to hide their Jewishness, capitulate to irrational prejudice, and “deny kinship with their own fathers and mothers who, often against heroic odds, had courageously kept their integrity and faith whatever it was.” Hook was wrong since many Jews did not feel any burden of a common fate with other Jews, nor were they afflicted with psychological traumas as a result of denying their ancestry. While rejecting the monistic definitions of Jewish identity of the Orthodox and the Zionists, Hook was close to accepting a monism of biological determinism and involuntary ethnic identity. He agreed with Kallen’s famous statement that a person could change anything except his grandparents. There was, Hook said, “no dignity in denying one’s origins or in living as if they were something to be apologetic about.” This was a strange conclusion for a disciple of Dewey.29 Dewey’s open and pluralistic social philosophy affirmed the right to reject as well as to affirm group loyalties. The belief that a person must remain in the same social and cultural situation in which he was born, Hook said, was “a piece of antidemocratic presumption.” Whether a person chose to identify as a Jew in a democracy was a matter of voluntary choice. But Hook’s commitment to Dewey’s philosophy of openness and diversity was limited by his contempt for “amateur Gentiles” and his ethnic interpretation of American Jewry.30

27 Hook, “The New Medievalism,” New Republic, October 28, 1940, 602-6; Hook, “The New Failure of Nerve,” Partisan Review 10 ( January–February 1943): 2-23. 28 Hook, “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” 475. 29 Ibid., 479; Hook, “The Plural Sources of Jewish Life in America” (Unpublished manuscript, Hook Papers). This is a twenty-one page paper Hook delivered at the 1947 conference of the American Jewish Committee. 30 Hook, “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” 482.

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Hook now sought something more substantive and distinctive than liberalism to define Jewish identity. While liberalism allowed for group identity, the nature of this identity had still to be defined in Jewish terms, and it had to involve more than opposition to antisemitism. “The psychology of mere defense,” he wrote, “is ultimately self-defeating unless there is some positive awareness of what we are defending, its significance and value.” The challenge to American Jewry was to provide an identity that would be attractive even to college-educated youth afflicted with self-hatred. Hook’s partial answer to the problem of Jewish identity among the young was the creation of a nonsectarian university, under Jewish auspices, to be run on democratic, secular, and progressive principles. Such an institution appeared in 1948, when Brandeis opened. But Brandeis would never be able to educate more than a tiny percentage of Jewish youth.31 Hook’s 1949 essay, “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” was prompted by the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew. Sartre had argued that Jewish identity was largely a response to antisemitism. For Sartre, the quintessential Jew was the martyr—eliminate antisemitism and Jews would no longer have any need to remain Jewish. Hook agreed that Jews were unified by a “negative togetherness.” This resulted from “a common historical condition which, whether they like it or not or whether they like each other or not, cancels out in the eyes of others their not inconsiderable differences.” But Hook went beyond Sartre in affirming the possibility of a positive Jewish identity, although his distaste for ideological straitjackets and “muddy metaphysics” prevented him from advancing beyond vague generalities.32 He argued that a secular and democratic American Jewish culture could be the basis of American Jewish identity. Such a culture would have to flow from indigenous American sources and be compatible with American social and political values. He proposed establishing a host of artistic, literary, and philosophic organizations, journals, schools, theaters, and museums to stimulate American Jewish culture “through music, through art, through literature and drama, through common celebrations, religious or secular, and especially through study.” Young Jews would not be attracted to Zionism and traditional religion, and a Judaism of Deweyite liberalism was too tepid in the post-World War II environment of heightened Jewish consciousness. A revived Jewish culture, in contrast, “interacting and integrated with whatever American life it can 31 Hook, “Plural Sources of Jewish Life”; Hook, “National Council of Jewish Women.” 32 Hook, “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” 476.

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

reach,” would enable American Jews to avoid the extremes of acculturation and parochialism.33 But Hook was silent regarding the critical issue—what precisely would be the nature of this American Jewish culture of significance and value. His pluralism and suspicion of ideologies prevented him from moving from process to content, from how to what. For Hook, the son of immigrants and the product of a Jewish neighborhood, defining Jewish culture was unnecessary. One does not have to define what is in your very bones. But definition would be necessary for later generations, whose ties to the Jewish past were more fragile and whose Jewishness could not be taken for granted. Hook, himself, had been unable to provide any reason why such Jews should wish to be the cultural heirs of Moses rather than of Jesus or Marx. Furthermore, as Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology pointed out, Hook’s view of Jewishness as “a distinctive expression or articulation of American civilization” had no place for those religious impulses which, transcending the particularities of time and place, sought to judge rather than to sanction society’s values. Without a sense of the transcendent, Judaism could be used to legitimize whatever social, economic, or political orthodoxy was in fashion, just as Hook, in the 1930s, had equated Jewishness with socialism. Ironically, during the 1960s and 1970s, Hook condemned precisely the same tendency within Christianity when he attacked “liberation” theology for attempting to synthesize Christianity and Marxism.34 Hook explored the nature of American Jewish identity in his examination of the National Council of Jewish Women. He began the study, he told the Council, with only one major assumption—“a firm belief in the desirability of Jewish group survival in the United States.” The report repeated familiar themes. It emphasized the right and duty of American Jews to create a separate collective existence since democracy involved an equality of diversity and not an equality of unanimity. The report rejected all efforts to establish a single definition of Jewishness since heterogeneity was the major characteristic of American Jews. A Jew was anyone who for any reason calls himself such or is called such in any community that acts on the distinction. Jewish unity was a product not of beliefs but of “a common lot and destiny.” Hook did not explain how a group which was 33 Hook, ‘National Council of Jewish Women”; Hook, “Plural Sources of Jewish Life.” 34 Hook, Out of Step, 350.

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so economically, socially, and geographically diverse could share a common lot and destiny.35 Instead of describing the specific contributions Jews could make to the American mosaic, Hook’s recommendations to the Council focused on the strengthening of cultural pluralism. These included opposing all efforts to breach the wall of separation between church and state, supporting educational programs showing the cultural and ethnic diversity of America, and attacking discrimination against any ethnic or racial group. The content of Jewish cultural activities seemed less important to Hook than the occasion they provided for Jews to interact. “Wherever Jews meet as Jews for a common purpose,” he said, “an opportunity is at hand for the development of characteristic Jewish experiences.” One of the beneficial results of Jewish education was that it led to “ongoing activities.”36 Certainly Hook was correct in seeing Jewish communal identity as important and not needing any justification. As Leonard Fein has noted, “the core method of Judaism is community. Ours is not a personal testament, but a collective and public commitment. . . . What defines the Jews as Jews is community; not values, not ideology.” But a method is only a means to an end. Hook did not discuss why heterogeneous Jews would want to be part of a community. It is doubtful whether sociability for sociability’s sake, what Hook called “continuing association and common activity,” could sustain a continuing Jewish commitment in a nation where the barriers to assimilation are so easy to navigate. This is particularly true among younger Jews for whom the campus provides a rival community.37 The surprising thing about Hook’s attempt to define an American Jewish identity along liberal and secular lines is not, as he later admitted, that it failed, but that it took place in the first place. That an intellectual of Hook’s stature should concern himself with the seemingly parochial question of American Jewish identity is symptomatic of the inability of the New York intellectuals to divest themselves of their Jewishness, whatever that might mean to them. If Hook failed to resolve the tension between universalism and particularism, he is in good company; no one else has, either. This tension, Fein has written, “is not, as is so generally believed, a dilemma to be resolved but an existential condi35 Hook, “National Council of Jewish Women.” 36 Ibid. 37 Fein, Where Are We? 168.

Chapter 2. The Jewishness of the New York Intellectual

tion to be lived and even savored. Alone, each is precarious; together. . . they are an arch, two weaknesses leaning into a strength.”38 Hook’s own effort reflected a confidence in the compatibility of American democracy and Jewish continuity. Only time will tell whether he was correct. You don’t have to be Jewish to like Levy’s Jewish rye, and you don’t have to be Jewish to like American democracy. But, according to Sidney Hook, it sure helps.

38 Ibid., 160-61.

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Chapter 3

Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955) was the most famous and influential book published in the 1950s on the sociology of American religion. Martin E. Marty called it “the most honored discussion of American religion in mid-twentieth-century times,” and he predicted that it would stand alongside Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and H. Richard Niebuhr’s Kingdom of God in America on the short list of classic interpretations of American religion. Reinhold Niebuhr declared Herberg’s volume to be “the most fascinating essay on the religious sociology of America that has appeared in decades . . . Students will be discussing this interesting study for a long while,” while Nathan Glazer described Protestant—Catholic— Jew as “the most satisfactory explanation we have yet been given as to just what is happening to religion in America.” Msgr. John S. Kennedy agreed. Protestant— Catholic—Jew, he said, was a book “that everyone seriously interested in the state of religion in America today will want to—indeed, will have to digest . . . original, brilliant, valuably constructive.” Fr. Gustave Weigel called the book “brilliant” and its author “a highly sensitive and resonant observer” of American religion. Marshall Sklare, arguably the leading sociologist of American Jewry, was also enthusiastic. Herberg’s sociology, he noted, was “both respectable and highly suggestive.”1 1

Marty’s comment is in his introduction to Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago, 1983), vii, x; Reinhold Niebuhr, “America’s Three Melting Pots,” New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1955, 6; Nathan Glazer, “Religion Without Faith,” New Republic, November 14, 1955, 18-20; Kennedy’s statement is on the cover of the 1960 Doubleday Anchor paperback edition of the book; Gustave Weigel review of Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew in America, November 5, 1955, 152; Marshall Sklare, “Third-Generation Religion,” Commentary, February 1956, 195-96. For other favorable

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

Decades after its publication, Protestant—Catholic—Jew was still being used as a standard for judging books in the sociology of American religion. In a brief 1977 essay on “Herberg as Sociologist,” Glazer described it as “the most substantial and stimulating large-canvas effort to deal with religion in America in the 1950s” and “the first book I would give to anyone interested in the sociology of American religion.” In discussing Robert Wuthnow’s The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (1988), William M. McClay claimed it was worthy of comparison with Protestant—Catholic— Jew.2 A 1999 survey by the conservative magazine Intercollegiate Review of the “fifty best books” of the twentieth century placed Protestant—Catholic—Jew alongside Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, Winston Churchill’s The Second World War, Shelby Foote’s The Civil War, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, and Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore. The compiler of this list said Herberg was “the first sociologist to take religion in America seriously.” This is a strange statement since Herberg (1901-1977) was not a professionally trained sociologist, and his book was hardly the first serious sociological examination of American religion. In fact, one of the key arguments of Protestant—Catholic—Jew was derived from Ruby Joe Kennedy’s article “Single or Triple Melting Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870-1940,” which appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 1944. The fulsome praise of Herberg by the Intercollegiate Review was undoubtedly due more to sympathy with his conservative politics than to any appreciation of his place in the study of American religion.3 Will Herberg was born in Russia in 1901. There was nothing in his early years that anticipated his post-World War II involvement in religion or his evaluations of Protestant—Catholic—Jew, see the reviews by J. Milton Yinger in American Sociological Review 21 (1956): 237-38 (“a stimulus to the development of the sociology of American religious life”); Rev. Joseph P. Fitzpatrick in Thought 30 (1955): 595-601 (“a fine example of the sociology of religion”); Samuel Sandmel in American Jewish Archives 9 (1957): 150-52 (“a welcome and admirable contribution to the understanding of the religious situation in the United States”); C. Joseph Nuesse in Catholic Historical Review 42 (1956): 214-15; and Gustave Weigel in Theological Studies 16 (1955), 651-53. 2 Nathan Glazer, “Herberg as Sociologist,” National Review, August 5, 1977, 881-82; William M. McClay, “Religion in Politics: Politics in Religion,” Commentary, October 1988, 46. 3

“The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century,” Intercollegiate Review 35 (1999), 11.

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conservative politics. On the contrary, his parents were perfunctory Jews and did not pass on any strong Jewish leanings to their children. Neither of their sons had a bar mitzvah celebration, and when the mother died her children cremated her. The vacuum in Herberg’s life was filled by politics. He joined the Communist movement while a teenager, and during the 1920s he wrote for the Daily Worker, Revolutionary Age, and other left-wing publications. He became among the party’s intellectuals luminaries, admittedly not a large group. The historian John P. Diggins described him as “the young Rabbi of the Revolution, the Talmudic scholar of the militant Left, the intellectual wanderer who could not find a home even in the Communist Party itself.” His mission, Diggins continued, was to “expedite the revolution by explicating the meaning of dialectical materialism and the theory and practice of Leninism.” In 1929 the party expelled Herberg along with Jay Lovestone because of their belief in what was called “American exceptionalism” and their skepticism regarding the imminence of an economic collapse in America. During the early 1930s, Herberg was an active member of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (Opposition), headed by Lovestone. This group opposed the Stalinization of the American Left and supported diverse national approaches to the ultimate goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Herberg’s disenchantment with revolutionary Marxism emerged during these years. In 1935 he was appointed the educational director of the fiercely anti-communist International Ladies Garment Workers Union and held this position until 1948. In 1955 he joined the faculty of Drew University, a Methodist institution in Madison, New Jersey, and six years later he became the religion editor of William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative journal, National Review.4 Herberg initially accepted the Marxist view that religion was the opiate of the masses, claimed that it was an instrument of class domination, and called for “the annihilation of religion through social consciousness.” By the 1940s, however, he had lost faith in the quasi-religion of Marxism. The crisis of socialism, he wrote in 1944, was not a passing phase, but “a profound moral bankruptcy . . . an inner collapse, from which there is no way out except by making a new beginning in a new direction.” For Herberg this beginning and direction pointed toward Judaism. The writings of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, 4

John P. Diggins, Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York, 1975), 9-l0; Harry J. Ausmus, Will Herberg: From Right to Right (Chapel Hill, 1987), 4. For the communist phase of Herberg’s life, see Robert J. Alexander, The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s (Westport, 1981), 34-39, 90-91.

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

particularly Moral Man and Immoral Society (1934), profoundly influenced his intellectual metamorphosis, and he came to be known as the “Reinhold Niebuhr of Judaism.” Niebuhr, Rabbi Neil Gillman wrote, gave Herberg “a new center for his faith, a combination of realism and radicalism without illusion, and a theology which grounded Herberg’s long-standing interest in political activity.” Herberg had been on the verge of becoming a Christian after World War II when Niebuhr told him that first he should learn something about Judaism and directed him to the Jewish Theological Seminary. Herberg also studied with Rabbi Milton Steinberg, rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. “In Judaism,” David D. Dalin said, Herberg found a faith “that encouraged social action without falling into the trap of utopianism—and . . . a religious edifice that satisfied his own hunger for orthodoxy.”5 The high-water mark in Herberg’s religious journey occurred in 1951 with the publication of his religious apologia, Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion. By then Herberg’s vocabulary was replete with words such as “absurdity,” “frustration,” “sin,” “despair,” “crisis,” “insecurity,” “anxiety,“ “tragedy,” and “dread,” popular buzzwords during the vogue of post-World War II religious existentialism and Protestant neo-Orthodoxy. Judaism and Modern Man, John Diggins said, conveyed “Herberg’s consuming quest for ethical salvation in a secularized world.” It also conveyed an interpretation of Judaism that owed more to Søren Kierkegaard, Jacques Maritain, Emil Brunner, Karl Barth, Nicolas Berdyaev, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, and particularly Reinhold Niebuhr, than to the Judaism of Maimonides and Rashi. (The book’s index contains seven references to Maimonides and none to Rashi, but twelve to Niebuhr and Kierkegaard, seventeen to Rosenzweig, and fifty-six to Buber.) Not surprisingly, Herberg was better known and more respected among Christians than Jews. The importance of Judaism and Modern Man resides in Herberg’s idiosyncratic confession of faith rather than in his contribution to contemporary Jewish theology. Published three years after the founding

5

Ausmus, Will Herberg, 53. Neil Gillman, “Introduction,” in Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (Woodstock, 1997), viii; David D. Dalin, ed., From Marxism to Judaism: Collected Essays of Will Herberg (New York, 1989), xvi, xix, 3; Dalin, “Will Herberg’s Path from Marxism to Judaism: A Case Study in the Transformation of Jewish Belief,” in The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 124. For the relationship between Herberg and Steinberg, see Simon Noveck, Milton Steinberg: Portrait of a Rabbi (New York, 1978), 217-18.

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of the state of Israel, Judaism and Modern Man barely mentions this, the most important theological event in Jewish history during the past two thousand years.6 Whether as a radical or a conservative, Herberg was a Lancelot in search of the philosophical absolutes and intellectual certitudes that reveal the patterns of history. Marxism, he confessed in his 1947 essay “From Marxism to Judaism,” had been for him “a vast, all embracing doctrine of man and the universe, a passionate faith endowing life with meaning, vindicating the aims of the movement, idealizing its activities, and guaranteeing its ultimate triumph. In the certainty of this faith, we felt we could stand against the world.” But in the crucible of the 1930s and 1940s, Marxism was a failure. “It proved itself incapable of explaining the facts or sustaining the values that gave meaning to life, the very values it had itself enshrined as its own ultimate goals.” The intellectual bankruptcy of Marxism left a void in Herberg that cried out to be filled. “I felt intensely the need for a faith that would better square with my ideal which in tenor, doctrine, and spirit could give impulse and direction to the radical reconstruction of society which I so desperately desired.” In a collection he edited of the writings of Maritain, Berdyaev, Buber, and Tillich, Herberg wrote about these four existentialist theologians in a manner that described his own search for meaning. Each of these men, he said, “has felt in his own existence the metaphysical hunger than cannot

6

Diggins, Up From Communism, 286. Reinhold Niebuhr predicted that Judaism and Modern Man “may well become a milestone in the religious thought of America” because of its analysis of religious existentialism. Niebuhr, review of Judaism and Modern Man, New York Herald Tribune Book Review, December 16, 1951, 8. For the influence of twentiethcentury Protestant theology on Herberg, see his essay “Has Judaism Still Power to Speak? A Religion for an Age of Crisis,” which originally appeared in the May 1949 issue of Commentary and is reprinted in Dalin, ed., From Marxism to Judaism, 49-71. For Herberg the theologian, see Robert G. Goldy, The Emergence of Jewish Theology in America (Bloomington, 1990), 55-65, Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 3, Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960 (Chicago, 1996), 344, and Arnold M. Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington, 1983), 155; June Sochen, “Jewish American Identity: The Views of Horace Kallen and Will Herberg,” Michael 15 (2000): 190-91. Rabbi Ely I. Pilchik called Judaism and Modern Man a “remarkable book,” but also noted that Herberg’s knowledge of Judaism was deficient. “Somehow one fails to catch in Herberg the feeling that he is flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone of historical living Israel.” “Flight into faith alone may be characteristic of other traditions,” Pilchik continued, “but in the Jewish complex it is just another link in the long chain of pseudo-messianism.” Pilchik’s review of Judaism and Modern Man appeared in Jewish Social Studies 14 (1952): 190-91.

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

be stilled with the dry husks of nineteenth-century platitudes.” The greatest of all these platitudes was, of course, Marxism.7 Herberg was a political dualist. If during the 1920s the key fact of life for him was the class conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, during the 1950s and 1960s it was the conflict between the atheism of Soviet communism and the theism of the West. And just as class conflict allowed for no compromise and anticipated the complete triumph of the proletariat, so the struggle between the West and communism was a fight to the finish over the soul of modern man, a fight in which there was no place for compromise and coexistence. “At its deepest level, the conflict between Soviet-Communism and the free world is a religious conflict,” Herberg wrote in 1955. “In their conception of man’s nature and position in the world, of his dignity and responsibility, of his relation to his fellow men, to society, and to the Power that is beyond man and society, Communism and the faith that underlies American democracy confront each other in a conflict that admits of no compromise because it is a conflict of ultimates.” This Manicheanism clouded Herberg’s understanding of the ambiguities, contradictions, and compromises of post-war American religion.8 There are two major elements in Protestant—Catholic—Jew, one philosophical-theological and the other historical-sociological. The first reflected the influence of contemporary Protestant existentialist theology and Herberg’s disdain for the superficiality and intellectual incoherence of much of the postwar “religious revival.” American society, he claimed, exhibited an increasing religiosity in the midst of a pervasive secularism that had little patience for the transcendent message of biblical faith. Americans, Herberg claimed, viewed religion instrumentally. They valued it not because it spoke the truth, but because it was good for America and for Americans. Not only was it a valuable ally in the struggle with the Soviet Union, but it also provided an organizational context within which the “lonely crowd” and “organization men” of post-war America could interact socially. For Herberg, American religion was shallow and meretricious, “a spiritual anodyne designed to allay the pains and vexations of existence.” It was bereft of that fear and trembling before God that was the essence of biblical faith. In the world of American religion, Kierkegaard, Jonathan Edwards, and Niebuhr could not compete with Norman Vincent Peale and the power of 7 Dalin, ed., From Marxism to Judaism, 22-25; Will Herberg, ed., Four Existentialist Theologians: A Reader from the Works of Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich (Garden City, 1958), 24. 8

Herberg, “The Biblical Basis of American Democracy,” Thought 30 (1955): 37.

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positive thinking. Americans, Herberg noted, placed a high value on their own virtue, and this offered “a better insight into the basic religion of the American people than any figures as to their formal beliefs can provide, however important in themselves these figures may be.” To put it into modern parlance, American religion was a “feel-good” religion, the religion of Peale and Joshua Loth Liebman, in which inconvenient notions regarding sin and divine judgment were disregarded.9 Although pessimistic about the American religious situation, Herberg did not believe it to be beyond redemption. “Even the more conventional forms of American religion, for all their dubiousness,” he said at the conclusion of Protestant—Catholic—Jew, “should not be simply written off by the man of faith. Even in this ambiguous structure there may be elements and aspects . . . which could in the longer view transform the inner character of American religion and bring it closer to the faith it professes.” It is doubtful, however, whether Herberg believed this would ever occur. “The religiousness characteristic of America today,” he said, “is very often a religiousness without religion, a religiousness with almost any kind of content or none, a way of sociability or ‘belonging’ rather than a way of reorienting life to God. It is thus frequently a religiousness without serious commitment, without real inner conviction, without genuine existential decision. What should reach down to the core of existence, shattering and renewing, merely skims the surface of life, and yet succeeds in generating the sincere feeling of being religious.” American Christianity and Judaism had been watered down to appeal to an “other-directed” population, which prized “adjustment, sociability, and comfort, designed to give one a sense of ‘belonging,’ of being at home in the society and universe.”10 In America, Herberg avowed, religion had been so conflated with American nationality that it had given up its prophetic and transcendent character. Americans worshiped not God but the American flag. In contrast to European countries where nationality was racial or cultural, American nationality was ideological and primarily involved a commitment to the fundamental political principles of the United States as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address, and to the social values of self-reliance, free enterprise, and social mobility. For most Ameri-

9

Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York, 1960), 75, 267.

10 Ibid., 260-61, 272.

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

cans, Herberg believed, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism were simply three different and legitimate ways of affirming the spiritual ideals and moral values underlying the American Way of Life. They were the three religions of democracy, individualism, and capitalism. This pseudo-religion of democracy and the American Way of Life was “a particularly insidious kind of idolatry” because its objective was to sanctify and not to judge American society. And insofar as Christianity and Judaism had become part of this American civic religion, these biblical faiths were incapable “of warning against inordinate national pride and self-righteousness,” or of “rising about the relativities and ambiguities of the national consciousness and bringing to bear the judgment of God upon the nation and its ways.” Rather, religion validated the goals and ideals of Americans, and reassured them of “the essential rightness of everything American, his nation, his culture and himself.” In American religion “there is no sense of transcendence, no sense of the nothingness of man and his works before a holy God; in this kind of religion, the values of life, and life itself, are not submitted to Almighty God to judge, to shatter and to reconstruct; on the contrary, life, and the values of life, are given an ultimate sanction by being identified with the divine.”11 The historical-sociological component of Protestant—Catholic—Jew sought to explain why the post-1945 growth in religious identification, membership in churches and synagogues, enrollment in Sunday schools, distribution of religious literature, and construction of religious edifices, in the heightened status of religious figures and in religion’s new respectability among American intellectuals had not reversed the long-term trend toward secularism. “Every aspect of contemporary religious life reflects this paradox,” Herberg said, of “pervasive secularism and mounting religiosity. . . . America seems to be at once the most religious and the most secular of nations. . . . It is this secularism of a religious people, this religiousness in a secularist framework, that constitutes the problem posed by the contemporary religious situation in America.”12 11 Ibid., 88, 264-69. 12 Ibid., 2-3. Seymour M. Lipset was skeptical that a religious revival was, in fact, even taking place after World War II. Lipset, “Religion in America: What Religious Revival?” Review of Religious Research 1 (Summer 1959): 17-24. The most striking aspect of American religion, Lipset concluded, “is not the changes which have occurred in it—but the basic continuities it retains” (24). Herberg’s rejoinder, “There Is a Religious Revival!” is in Review of Religious Research 1 (Fall 1959): 45-50. “In the perspective of the past six decades of this century,” Herberg wrote, “and for the purposes of understanding what is most perplexing in the contemporary religious situation, it is the change rather than the continuity that should be

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Herberg’s explanation of this incongruity was influenced by Marcus Lee Hansen, the first important professional historian of American immigration and author of The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860 (1940), which won the Pulitzer Prize in history. In his essay “The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant,” published in 1938 as a pamphlet by the Augustana Historical Society, Hansen posited a formula that came to be known as Hansen’s law. This stated that “what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” According to Hansen, the first-generation immigrants were secure in their ethnicity. Their children, however, were embarrassed by their parents’ foreign ways, including their religion, and wished to become part of the American mainstream. The second generation, Hansen said, “wanted to forget, and even when the ties of family affection were strong, wanted to lose as many of the evidences of foreign origin as they could shuffle off.” The third generation, by contrast, felt thoroughly American, but wished to hold on to something of value from their immigrant forebears. But what was there in the culture of the first generation that could be remembered? Hansen provided one clue. The church, he wrote, “was the first, the most important and the most significant institution that the immigrants established.”13 Hansen provided little evidence for his generational formula, and historians and sociologists have been skeptical regarding its accuracy. Hansen’s own life focused. And this ‘change’ may fairly be described as an upsurge in religiousness, even a ‘revival of religion,’ if both terms are properly qualified, and conflicting trends within the over-all movement carefully distinguished and defined” (50). The sociologist Herbert Gans agreed with Lipset. See his “Foreword” to Neil C. Sandberg, Ethnic Identity and Assimilation: The Polish-American Community: Case Study of Metropolitan Los Angeles (New York, 1974), vii-xiii. 13 For Hansen, see “Moses Rischin, “Marcus Lee Hansen: America’s First Transethnic Historian,” in Uprooted Americans: Essays to Honor Oscar Handlin, ed. Richard L. Bushman et al. (Boston, 1979), 319-47; Allan H. Spear, “Marcus Lee Hansen and the Historiography of Immigration,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 44 (Summer 1961): 58-68; Thomas J. Archdeacon, “Hansen’s Hypothesis as a Model of Immigrant Assimilation,” in American Immigrants and Their Generations, ed. Peter Kivisto and Dag Blanck (Urbana, 1990), 42-63; H. Arnold Barton, “Marcus Lee Hansen and the Swedish Americans,” in ibid., 113-25; and Philip Gleason, “Hansen, Herberg, and American Religion,” in ibid., 85-103. Vladimir C. Nahirny and Joshua A. Fishman reject the Hansen thesis in “American Immigrant Groups: Ethnic Identification and the Problems of Generations,” Sociological Review 13 (1965): 311-26. For Nathan Glazer’s acceptance of Hansen’s law, see his “Ethnic Groups in America: From National Culture to Ideology,” in Freedom and Control in Modern Society, ed. Morroe Berger et al. (New York, 1964), 170-71. A shortened version of Hansen’s essay was published in Commentary, November 1952, 493-500 under the title “The Third Generation in America: A Classic Essay in Immigration History.”

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

did not even conform to it. He was the child of Scandinavian immigrants, but he did not flee from their cultural heritage. As the leading historian of American immigration, Hansen hardly wished to “forget,” and his experience was typical. As Werner Sollors has noted, continuity and not conflict better explained the process of generational adaptation to America. Hansen’s law “wasn’t applicable to the masses of the second generation, it certainly doesn’t describe the secondgeneration intellectuals any better. It does not even apply to the historian who phrased it.”14 This did not prevent Herberg, who was neither a trained historian nor sociologist, from using it to explain the post-war religious revival. More than anyone else, Herberg was responsible for popularizing the Hansen thesis. He dedicated Protestant—Catholic—Jew to “the Third Generation upon whose ‘return’ so much of the future of religion in America depends,” a dedication that is ironic in view of the fact that Herberg had “returned” to religion even though he was a second-generation American. The third generation, Herberg claimed, felt secure as Americans, but were beset by another problem—finding a meaningful subcommunity to which they could belong. Their Americanization precluded the ethnic group from playing this role. Religion was the only aspect of immigrant life that had not been rendered irrelevant by Americanization, and it was to religion that the third generation, numbering then in the tens of millions, turned for what Herberg called “self-identification and social location.” Religion defined “their place in American society in a way that would sustain their Americanness and yet confirm the tie that bound them to their forebears. . . . Increasingly the great mass of Americans understand themselves and their place in society in terms of the religious community with which they are identified.” But these religious communities differed from the religions of their immigrant grandparents, which were deeply infused with ethnic elements. Rather they were Americanized versions of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, and thus it was as Protestants, Catholics, and Jews that the third generation located themselves within American society.15 Herberg’s tripartite division of American religion failed to do justice to the heterogeneity of American religion. Herberg cannot be faulted for failing to anticipate the increase in the number of American Muslims and Buddhists,

14 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986), 216-18. 15 Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew, 12-23, 27-37.

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but it should have been clear by 1955 that the Protestant—Catholic—Jewish division could no longer describe American religion. Where, for example, do the adherents of Eastern Orthodoxy belong? The theological, denominational and cultural boundaries Herberg considered decisive were becoming less important, while at the same time new religious groups were continually emerging to challenge the tripartite religious model. In America, Wade Clark Roof wrote recently, “fluidity within religious groups and institutions is extraordinarily high. Boundaries are porous, allowing people, ideas, beliefs, practices, symbols, and spiritual currents to cross.”16 Herberg believed the major evidence for the tripartite division of America along religious lines was religious endogamy. Relying on the conclusions of sociologists such as Ruby Jo Kennedy, Herberg claimed that America had become a triple melting pot: Protestants married Protestants, Catholics married Catholics, and Jews married Jews. The test of any sociological theory is whether it can predict the future, and Herberg’s claim for religious endogamy has not stood up. Even in the mid-1950s the religious taboos against marriages between Protestants and Catholics were breaking down. And while endogamy still characterized American Jewry, within a decade and a half Jewish survivalists would be lamenting an intermarriage rate that appeared to be increasing geometrically and protesting the television show “Bridget Loves Bernie,” which portrayed intermarriage in a sympathetic light.17 Not all American sociologists agreed at the time with Herberg’s historical and sociological schema. Gerhard Lenski’s important 1961 book, The Religious Factor, argued that, as least as far as Detroit’s Christians were concerned, the third generation phenomenon emphasized by Herberg was not evident. While third generation Detroiters, with the exception of Jews, were more religious than the second generation, the second generation was not less religious than the first. If anything, Lenski noted, the religious revival began not with the third generation but with the second. Herberg, Lenski claimed, was correct in positing a relationship between increasing religiosity and Americanization, but this relationship first appeared among the second generation. Only among Jews was the second generation less religious than the first. Furthermore, white Protestant 16 Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, 1999), 44. 17 For evidence that the model of a triple marital melting pot was incorrect, see John L. Thomas, “The Factor of Religion in the Selection of Marriage Mates,” American Sociological Review 16 (1951): 488.

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

migrants from the South to Detroit, even though their families had been in the country for several generations, were no more active in churches than the first or second-generation immigrants from Europe. This was to be expected if the crucial variables in religiosity were urbanization and embourgeoisement and not an Americanization process extending over three generations. Except among Jews, the attainment of middle-class status in Detroit led to an increase in religious activities. Middle-class respectability and education, Lenski concluded, rather than Americanization and the third-generation phenomenon explained the post-war religious revival.18 The sociologist Harold J. Abramson was also skeptical regarding Herberg’s attempt to apply Hansen’s thesis to American religion. Religious identity, Abramson argued, was due to the religio-ethnic culture itself and not to any generational changes, and it is the diversity of this culture that explains the diversity in religious behavior. While some elements within American religion experienced a revival after World War II, others did not. Had the three-generational thesis been correct, the religious revival would have been pervasive and consistent throughout the population. “The concept of the ‘third generation,’” Abramson concluded, “means different things to different groups, not only because they experience this time period under different conditions in the social order, but also because their cultures, as say their religious behavior, are traditionally so disparate.”19 Herberg’s statement that “to be an American today means to be either a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew, because all other forms of self-identification and social location are either (like regional background) peripheral and obsolescent, or else (like ethnic diversity) subsumed under the broader head of religious community” appeared the year after the Supreme Court in the Brown decision outlawed racial segregation in public schools. In two places in his book, Herberg noted that his three religious melting pots formula did not pertain to African Americans, whose “primary context of self-identification and social location remains their . . . ‘racial’ group.” The Black Church “stands outside the general system, just as the Negro still stands largely outside the general pattern of American life.” In fact, African Americans outnumbered Jews three to one 18 Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor: A Sociologist’s Inquiry (Garden City, 1961), 44-47. Lenski is generally supported in Bernard Lazerwitz and Louis Rowitz, “The Three-Generation Hypothesis,” American Journal of Sociology 69 (1964): 529-38. 19 Harold J. Abramson, “The Religioethnic Factor and the American Experience: Another Look at the Three-Generations Hypothesis,” Ethnicity 2 (1975): 163-77.

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when Herberg wrote these words. Many whites, particularly in the South, also believed that race, not religion, was the most important factor in defining their place in American society. Few southern whites, if asked the question “What are you?,” would have answered in religious rather than racial terms. Any historical or sociological interpretation of American identity during the 1950s that downplayed the racial dimension omitted a big part of the story.20 Protestant—Catholic—Jew appeared during the first stirrings of the feminist movement. An increasing number of women believed that gender was more important than religion in defining their location in American society. There were also tens of millions of Americans for whom self-identification and social location were defined by class and economic position rather than by religion. The reductionism of Herberg’s book not only failed to do justice to the role of race, gender, and class, it also distorted the nature of American religion after World War II. Protestant—Catholic—Jew equated American religion with the religious mainstream, particularly in its discussion of Protestantism. The book’s chapter on Protestantism focused on the mainline denominations, ignored Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, and slighted the fastest growing segment of Protestantism, the evangelical and Pentecostal sects. Herberg described these as “very minor denominations” and “fringe sects,” which existed on the “periphery” of American Protestantism and appealed primarily to the poor and disinherited. This, along with Herberg’s stress on cultural homogeneity and the myths and values underlying American culture (“the American Way of Life”), had its counterpart elsewhere in American academia, particularly in the development of the discipline of American Studies and in the emergence of the “consensus” interpretation of American history by Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Boorstin. Actually in the 1950s nearly ten million Americans identified with evangelical Christianity, while new evangelical sects were appearing constantly. Protestant—Catholic—Jew has only one reference to Billy Graham, the most prominent American religious figure of the 1950s, and it does not even mention the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California or the Dallas Theological 20 Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew, 36-42, 114. For a critique of Herberg which stresses the division between black and white melting pots, see Samuel A. Mueller, “The New Triple Melting Pot: Herberg Revisited,” Review of Religious Research 13 (Fall 1971): 18-31. “There are still three groups, but they are no longer Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. The new triple melting pot is comprised of white Christians, white non-Christians, and blacks” (Mueller, 31, italics in original).

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

Seminary, key institutions in the American evangelical world. It is ironic that Herberg, who evolved into a political conservative after World War II, should have been so dismissive of right-wing religion. By contrast, Robert Wuthnow’s discussion of post-war Protestantism in The Restructuring of American Religion, the most comprehensive history of American religion since 1945, emphasized the “great divide” which existed within American religion. Wuthnow meant by this not the division among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but the split between religious “conservatives” and religious “liberals” within Protestantism.21 Herberg’s discounting of right-wing religion was also evident in his analysis of American Judaism. He focused on Conservative and Reform Judaism and ignored Orthodoxy at a time when Orthodoxy had commenced a revival of its own. His discussion of American Jewry, particularly after the great immigration from Eastern Europe commenced in the late nineteenth century, reflected the common, but mistaken, belief in the religious declension of Jews in America from Orthodoxy. Actually, most of the immigrants from Eastern Europe were estranged in varying degrees from the traditional Judaism they had known in Europe, and they passed on this alienation to their children. That many second generation East European Jews were political and intellectual radicals did not stem from any generation gap but from the fact that they had been “red diaper babies.” “Both radicalism and Zionism were second-generation phenomena,” Herberg mistakenly wrote. This overlooked the fact that the clientele for the left-wing anti-religious Yiddish newspapers, labor organizations, schools, and cultural organizations were primarily immigrants.22 Herberg’s reliance on Hansen’s law failed to explain the post-war resurgence of Judaism, if in fact such a resurgence even occurred. The second generation was not more hostile to Judaism than their parents. It was simply more apathetic. Furthermore, important barometers of a religious revival such as Jewish ritual or synagogue attendance did not increase between the second and third generations, and there is no indication that the third generation was more religious than the second. If belonging to a synagogue became de rigueur after World War II, it was more likely due to suburbanization, family formation, and embourgeoisement than to generational changes. The sociologist Stephen Sharot said of America’s Jews that “the majority of the first generation were not traditionally 21 Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew, 122-23; Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, 1988), chs. 7-8. The word “Fundamentalism” is not in the index of Protestant—Catholic—Jew. 22 Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew, 179-85.

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religious, the second generation did not ‘revolt’ against religion, and the third generation did not ‘return’ to religion.”23 The belief that Orthodoxy was solely a first generation phenomenon supposedly bolstered Herberg’s argument regarding the religious gulf between first and second generation Jews. Obviously the second generation was not Orthodox. Hence the first generation must have been Orthodox. The supposed Orthodoxy of the first generation made it easier to portray Orthodoxy as incompatible with acculturation and economic and social mobility. Herberg agreed with the sociologist Marshall Sklare that the future of American Judaism rested with Conservative Judaism. The form of Judaism most compatible with America, Herberg said, was Conservative Judaism—“Conservatism . . . became the prime beneficiary of the Americanization of Judaism.” This explains why Protestant— Catholic—Jew, published during the hey-day of Conservative Judaism, barely mentions the Orthodox day school movement and ignores what would come to be known as “Modern” or “Centrist” Orthodoxy, the major traditionalist rival to Conservative Judaism. A convergence between the various denominations of American Judaism was taking place, Herberg said. “All were becoming American and therefore more and more like each other.” This convergence left no place for traditional Judaism.24 Jewish identity is idiosyncratic, and any sociological attempt, such as that of Protestant—Catholic—Jew, which brackets the religiosity of both Christians and Jews is thus doomed. In his discussion of America’s Jews, Herberg assumed that Jews resembled other ethnic and religious groups, and that when third generation Jews wished to remember what their parents had forgotten they necessarily turned to religion. The young Jew, Herberg said, “could still think of himself as a Jew, because to him being a Jew now meant identification with the Jewish religious community.” But it was not “incontrovertible” in 1955 and it is not incontrovertible today that “the Jewish community in the United States has become a religious community in its own understanding.” Herberg himself noted that public opinion polls had revealed that sixty-two percent of Jews had not attended any religious service during the three previous months (compared to eighteen percent for Catholics and thirty-two percent for Protestants), and only forty-seven percent of Jews claimed that religion was “very important” to 23 Stephen Sharot, “The Three-Generations Thesis and the American Jews,” British Journal of Sociology, 24 (1973): 162. See also Donald Weber, “Reconsidering the Hansen Thesis: Generational Metaphors and American Ethnic Studies,” American Quarterly 43 (1991): 323-25. 24 Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew, 193-94.

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

them (compared to eighty-three percent for Catholics and seventy-six percent for Protestants). Evidently Jews were something other than merely a religious community.25 Herberg’s religious existentialism impeded his appreciation of the communal and non-religious elements of Jewishness. He argued that uniqueness of the Jewish people could only be justified and explained by divine election and her vocation as a covenant-people. “By the testimony of its history,” he wrote, “Israel is the appointed bearer of the sacred tradition, the witness of God to the world.” All forms of Jewish life such as Zionism and left-wing politics were transitory and unimportant when compared to “the vision of Israel as the dedicated Servant of God appointed to serve mankind.” This religious definition of Jewishness also located Jews within the American mosaic. Being a Jew in America meant belonging to the Jewish religion, just as being a Protestant or Catholic meant belonging to the Protestant or Catholic religions. For native-born American Jews, he wrote, “once familiar secular definitions of Jewishness are quite unacceptable, in fact hardly intelligible. Their Jewishness, or Judaism, is to them their way of fitting into the American tripartite scheme, their way of taking their place in America as Americans.” The most important American Jewish institution has become the synagogue since “the problem confronting American Jewry today is perhaps more than ever a religious problem demanding a religious answer.” Herberg’s interpretation of religion in general and Judaism in particular reflected his own journey back to Judaism, which downplayed the ethnic, historical, and other non-religious elements of Jewish identity, such as Zionism and the Holocaust. A Jew accepted the truths of Judaism, as had occurred to him after he took Reinhold Niebuhr’s advice and crossed Broadway to study with the professors at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Herberg’s model Jew was the type of Jew Will Herberg had become.26 Herberg’s theism and his belief that American Jewry can survive only as a religious community put him in the forefront of opposition to Mordecai M. Kaplan’s Reconstructionist movement. As a naturalist and a disciple of John 25 Ibid., 187-88, 220. 26 Herberg, “Assimilation in Militant Dress: Should the Jews be ‘Like Unto the Nations?’” Commentary, July 1947, 20-21; Herberg, “What Is Jewishness?” Jewish Frontier, May 1952, 22; Herberg, “The Integration of the Jew in Contemporary America,” Conservative Judaism 15 (Spring 1961): 4-9; Herberg, “Jewish Existence and Survival: A Theological View,” Judaism 1 ( January 1952): 26. Herberg described Zionism in his essay “Socialism, Zionism, and the Messianic Passion” as “‘de-religionized’ messianism” and an example of the “radical secularization of the messianic idea in the modern world” (Dalin, ed., From Marxism to Judaism, 120).

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Dewey, Kaplan sought to purge Judaism of is religious mythology so that it would become relevant to the scientific and humanistic ethos of America. His great book Judaism as a Civilization emphasized that Judaism was a culture in which religion played a subsidiary role. This culture “includes the nexus of a history, literature, language, social organization, folk sanctions, standards of conduct, social and spiritual ideals, esthetic values, which in their totality form a civilization” (italics in original). It is not surprising then that Reconstructionist spokesmen disagreed with Herberg’s religious existentialism and his diagnosis of the challenges facing American Jewry.27 Critics of Herberg were correct that Judaism has been merely one aspect of American Jewish identity, and for many American Jews it has not been the most important. The very title of Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew assumed the similarity between Jews and Protestants and Catholics, yet what other supposedly religious group contained such a high percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously indifferent? To group Jews with Protestants and Catholics is erroneous because it implies that being Jewish is similar to being a Protestant or a Catholic. It is Herberg’s seeming obliviousness to the peculiar nature of American Jewish identity that makes his discussion of American Judaism so problematic. It is true that with the demise of the first generation non-religious and even anti-religious ideologies such as left-wing Zionism and socialism atrophied. But surrogate non-religious ideologies and practices emerged to take their place. These included modern Zionism, Jewish feminism, and federation work. Not surprisingly, many of the major accomplishments of post-war American Jewry—the growth of Jewish studies as a respected academic discipline, the development of fund-raising into an art form, lobbying on the state level and in Washington for Jewish causes—cannot be subsumed under the rubric of religion. Herberg’s return to Judaism came through the study of philosophy and theology, and it is understandable that he saw Judaism and Jewish identity as simply his experience writ large. “What Judaism needs today,” he said in 1947, “is a great theological reconstruction in the spirit of a neo-orthodoxy distant alike from sterile fundamentalism and secularized modernism.” By contrast, the things that tied Jews to Jewishness—Jewish neighborhoods, the Yiddish language, Jewish 27 Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American Jewish Life (Philadelphia, 1981), 178. For Reconstructionist criticisms of Herberg’s theology; see Eugene Kohn, “The Menace of Existentialist Religion,” Reconstructionist, January 11, 1952, 7-15, and Meir Ben-Horin, “Herberg vs. Dewey,” ibid., February 6, 1953, 14-20.

Chapter 3. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew: A Critique

cuisine, left-wing politics, philanthropy and federation involvement, Zionism and the State of Israel—were not discussed by Herberg in either Judaism and Modern Man or Protestant—Catholic—Jew. His Judaism had been purged of its most salient and important folk elements. Protestant—Catholic—Jew, rather, focused on those elements of American Jewish culture that defined America’s Jews as a religious group similar to Protestants and Catholics. If attendance at religious services is a barometer of the strength of Jewish communal ties, then Herberg was correct in being pessimistic about the future of American Jewry. But, as Lenski remarked, when talking about Jews “it is not safe to infer the strength of communal ties from the strength of associational ties.” Pace Herberg, there is more to Jewishness than Judaism, synagogues, and theology.28 The most important aspect of American Jewish history after 1945 was not any newfound respect among Jews for Judaism, but the fact that Jews and Judaism had become part of the American social, cultural, economic, and religious mainstream. This was the major theme of the 1954 yearlong tercentenary celebration of Jewish settlement in America, and was reflected in the then widespread assertion that American culture was imbued with “Judeo-Christian” values. Protestant—Catholic—Jew reflected this sanguine mood in claiming that Judaism, which comprised only three percent of the nation’s population, had achieved parity with Protestantism and Catholicism as a legitimate expression of the American Way of Life and as one of the three religions of democracy. American Jews, Herberg wrote elsewhere, have achieved “a status and a security quite without precedent in the millennia of diaspora history. It has meant that, on one level at least, his Americanness and his Jewishness have ceased to be in conflict, perhaps even, to be in tension. . . . American Jewry is now achieving a form of integration radically different from anything that is to be found in the thousands of years of Jewish experience.” For historians of American Jewry, the significance of Protestant—Catholic—Jew lies in the recognition of this new reality. As David D. Dalin said, Herberg’s book “served as a kind of ‘scientific’ legitimation of the arrival of American Jews as partners on the national religious scene, bolstering Jewish self-respect and altering for the better the perceptions of American Jews held by their non-Jewish neighbors.”29 28 Gerhard Lenski, “The Four Socio-Religious Groups,” in Religious Conflict in America: Studies in the Problems Beyond Bigotry, ed. Earl Raab (Garden City, 1964), 40. 29 Herberg, “The Jew in Mid-Twentieth Century: His Position and His Responsibilities,” Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook 77 (1968): 193; David D. Dalin, “Will Herberg in Retrospect,” Commentary, July 1988, 42. For the tercentenary celebration, see David

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For Herberg, the major developments within American religion were most clearly shown within Judaism. The symbiotic relationship between religion and ethnicity was stronger among Jews than for America’s other major religious groups. American Judaism is an “ethnic religion” to a far greater extent than any of the forms of American Protestantism or Catholicism. And so when ethnicity inevitably atrophied among Jews, Judaism naturally assumed a larger role in defining Jewish identity. Herberg believed this evolution of American Jewish identity had its counterparts within Protestantism and Catholicism. Instead of Jews conforming to Christian America, Christians were conforming to the pattern of ethnic and religious identity exhibited particularly by Jews. As the University of Notre Dame historian Philip Gleason has observed, Herberg’s sociological analysis more accurately described the history of America’s Jews than that of Protestants or Roman Catholics. Herberg, Gleason said, offered no real evidence that Hansen’s generational formula applied to Catholic immigrants. Rather, “the Jews were actually the paradigmatic case of its operation, which led him to assume its application to other groups as well.” Furthermore, “it was this complex relationship between religion and ethnicity among American Jews as the group entered its third generation stage” that led Jews such as Herberg, Nathan Glazer, and Oscar Handlin to Hansen’s essay to begin with.30 But Herberg’s view of the Jew and Judaism went beyond American religious sociology and history. For him, the Jew was Everyman, the personification of the existentialist dilemma of modern man. “In the Jew,” he said, “the archetype of the outsider standing forever at the brink of nothingness, the alienation of contemporary man, his malaise and homelessness in the world, find their most intense expression.” American Jews had indeed come a long way by the 1950s when such ideas were being voiced by arguably the most important analyst of American religion.31

Bernstein, “The American Jewish Tercentenary,” in American Jewish Year Book: 1956, vol. 57, ed. Morris Fine (New York, 1956), 101-18. 30 Gleason, “Hansen, Herberg, and American Religion,” 91-99. 31 Herberg quoted in Ausmus, Will Herberg, 84.

Chapter 4

The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War II Wartime simultaneously exacerbates and modulates religious, ethnic, and political tensions. This phenomenon was particularly prominent in America during World War II. On the one hand, Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned, and religious and political dissenters, including pacifists, were viewed with heightened suspicion. On the other hand, notions of American nationality were broadened to include hitherto marginalized groups because of their contributions to the war effort and because of the belief that victory required national unity. Among these marginalized groups were Jews, who vigorously supported the war effort. The war, wrote the historian Charles C. Alexander, was “the central” factor in American life in the twentieth century and affected virtually every corner of the country.1 Fifteen million Americans served in the military, and tens of millions of civilians bought war bonds, gave blood, participated in paper, rubber, and scrap metal drives, grew “victory gardens,” worked in shipyards and aircraft factories, and volunteered as air raid wardens, hospital workers, and USO hosts and hostesses. At the same time their children collected airplane and ship models and read comic books about the war. For many Americans the war was the greatest experience of their lives, and it left an indelible imprint. All sectors of the American population felt a sense of elation and accomplishment for contributing to the Allied victory. The federal government and the military realized that ethnic, religious, and racial bigotry threatened the unity essential for victory and sought to quash it. Franklin Roosevelt made this clear in his fireside chat of February 2, 1942. “We Americans,” he said, “will contribute unified production and unified acceptance of sacrifice and effort. That means a national unity that can know no limitations

1

Charles C. Alexander, Nationalism in American Thought, 1930-1945 (Chicago, 1969), 201.

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of race or creed or selfish politics.”2 His wife agreed. That same year Eleanor Roosevelt told the readers of her newspaper column that “The citizens of this country belong to many races and many creeds. They have come here and built a great Nation around the idea of democracy and freedom. . . . [T]his country was founded to be a land where people should have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of race or creed or color.”3 The government was not alone in emphasizing the need to expunge ethnic and religious prejudice and in seeing the war as a conflict between democracy and equality on the one hand and racism and intolerance on the other. Private organizations such as the Common Council for American Unity, the Council for Democracy, the Council Against Intolerance, the League for Fair Play, Friends of Democracy, the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and the Committee for National Morale reinforced this message.4 Jews made sure that their contributions to the war effort did not go unnoticed. They broadcast the fact that 550,000 Jews served in the military during the war, the equivalent of thirty-seven divisions, and that they comprised nearly half of American Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and forty-four. Of these, eleven thousand were killed in combat and forty thousand were wounded.5 The forward to Jews in World War II: The Story of 550,000 Fighters for Freedom, a twovolume work published in 1947 by the Bureau of War Records of the National Jewish Welfare Board, stressed that “In the ranks of our land armies, our sea forces, our air might, American Jews marched, American Jews fought, American Jews suffered, bled, died. . . . They made their sacrifices side by side with their

2

Robert L. Fleeger, “‘Forget All Differences until the Forces of Freedom Are Triumphant’: The World War II-Era Quest for Ethnic and Religious Tolerance,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27 (Winter 2008): 60-63.

3

Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1992), 196.

4

Richard W. Steele, “The War on Intolerance: The Reformulation of American Nationalism, 1939-1941,” Journal of American Ethnic History 9 (Fall 1989): 13ff.

5 Deborah Dash Moore, “When Jews Were GIs: How World War II Changed a Generation and Remade American Jewry,” in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor, 2008), 29; S. C. Kohns, “Jewish War Records of World War II,” American Jewish Yearbook 47 (1946): 153-72; Ours to Fight For: American Jewish Voices from the Second World War, ed. Jay M. Eidelman (New York, 2003). These figures mirrored the percentage of Jews in the American population.

Chapter 4. The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War I

fellows, on wreck-strewn beaches, in blood-stained waters, in stricken and plummeting aircraft.” Hollywood was particularly influential in refashioning American identity along more pluralistic lines. Various “platoon movies” during and after the conflict emphasized the contributions made by an ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse population to the American military. The names of servicemen in the films “Air Force” and “Bataan,” for example, included Callahan, Feingold, Matowski, Quincannon, Peterson, Ramirez, Weinberg, and Winocki. A 1942 government pamphlet titled “Manual for the Motion Picture Industry” encouraged the making of such films and emphasized that, in contrast to the fascist states, the United States was a great melting pot of many races and religions working together to free the world of fear, want, racism, and prejudice.6 In the 1945 short film “The House I Live In,” which won a special Academy Award in 1945 as well as a Golden Globe Award, Frank Sinatra sang a song of the same title attacking prejudice in general and antisemitism in particular. The next year Hollywood produced “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “Crossfire,” the first serious American cinematic examinations of American antisemitism, a topic that Hollywood’s Jewish filmmakers up to this point had studiously avoided. “Gentleman’s Agreement” won the Academy Award for Best Picture of the year. Arguably the most important, and certainly the most famous, postwar attack by the entertainment industry on prejudice was the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musical South Pacific, which opened on Broadway in April 1949. Rodgers’s parents were Jews, and Hammerstein’s father was a Jew, although he had been raised by his Christian mother as an Episcopalian.7 The musical was based on James Michener’s book Tales of the South Pacific, which had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the previous year. The musical was a boxoffice smash and ran on Broadway for five years where it was performed nearly two thousand times. It won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and received eight Tony awards, more than any other musical in history. Among the many reasons 6 Larry May, “Making the American Consensus: The Narrative of Conversion and Subversion in World War II Films,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago, 1996), 76-78; Benjamin L. Alpers, “This Is the Army: Imagining a Democratic Military in World War II,” Journal of American History 85 ( June 1998): 141-47. The wartime contributions of black servicemen, however, were generally glossed over. 7

Hammerstein’s maternal grandfather was the journalist Horace Greeley, and his full name was Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II. Hammerstein’s fraternity at Columbia University had a largely Jewish membership.

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for its popularity was its attack on racial prejudice, the same reason why attempts were made to prevent it from being performed in America’s Deep South. Central to the show was the romance between Joe Cable, a scion of a wealthy Main Line Philadelphia family, and Liat, a beautiful young Polynesian woman. Cable breaks off the relationship because he believes his family would never accept her. Heartbroken, he sings “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.” “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. . . . You’ve got to be taught to be afraid, of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade—you’ve got to be carefully taught.” Cable is conveniently killed in a military operation, thereby avoiding the problems that could have occurred had the romance persisted. This deus ex machina might actually have been unnecessary since a fundamental change in American racial attitudes and policies occurred as a result of the war. In 1947 Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, the national pastime, and the next year President Harry S. Truman ordered the racial integration of the nation’s military. Racial segregation, antisemitism, and other forms of prejudice appeared particularly un-American after Americans had just fought a bloody and successful war against Nazism and Japanese chauvinism. The hundreds of thousands of Black and Jewish servicemen (and women) were unwilling to acquiesce in second-class status on returning home, and they would be supported by those Americans who took seriously the wartime propaganda picturing the war as a fight against bigotry.8 Because of the Holocaust, no group of Americans had a greater reason to exult in America’s victory than her five million Jews, and never in their history were they so patriotic as during and after the war. The Conservative rabbi Arthur Hertzberg would write in his 2002 autobiography of his feelings in 1945 after Germany’s surrender. Jews, he recalled, “took pride not only in the tens of thousands of their young who had served with valor as ordinary soldiers, but especially in the strikingly large numbers of Jewish scientists and managers among those who had produced the munitions that made victory possible.” Jews wanted “to be thought of as part of the brave, undaunted, victorious America. . . . 8

For a more critical view of the wartime generation, see Kenneth D. Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II (New York, 2008). The myth of the greatest generation, Rose wrote, gives the false impression that “war draws all people closer together, that cohesion is maximized and conflict minimized” and that “war itself is an attractive option rather than an absolute last resort” (254). For a less cynical view, see Thomas Bruscino, A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along (Knoxville, 2010).

Chapter 4. The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War I

(W)e wanted our neighbors to think of us as wrapped, together with them, in an American flag, preferably with the slogan Don’t Tread on Me written over it. . . . I was carried along by the great wave that was lifting American Jews into passionate and proud activism and muffling their sense of shame.” Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, did not share Hertzberg’s liberal politics, but he agreed with him on the crucial role of World War II in defining his American Jewish identity. He remarked in his 2009 book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, that the war transformed him “into a fervent American patriot.”9 The same was true of Henry Kissinger who had fled from Germany with his family in 1938 when he was fifteen. He noted that it was serving in the Army that transformed him into an authentic American, and other Jewish servicemen and women shared the same experience.10 For Jews in the military, the historian Jonathan Sarna noted, fighting in the war against Nazi Germany was “the ultimate synthesis of patriotic allegiance and religious duty.”11

Insecurity and Insularity The war had a greater impact on American Jews than any other event of the twentieth century. Its most important effect was arguably not economic, political, or social, but psychological. American Jewry prior to the war was an insecure and insular community, and this insecurity and insularity were symbiotic. Insecurity encouraged insularity that, in turn, encouraged insecurity. Most Jews lived in Jewish neighborhoods, attended schools and universities with large Jewish enrollments, worked in traditionally Jewish occupations such as retailing and garment manufacturing, and married other Jews. Besides the economic fears engendered by the Great Depression, there was one other major concern which preoccupied America’s Jews during the 1930s. With the Nazi takeover of Germany in January 1933 and the spread of virulent antisemitism throughout Europe and the United States, America’s Jews wondered whether “it could happen here,” and no Jew had to be told what “it” was. They feared that they would never be accepted as true-blue Americans and questioned whether America was truly different. 9

Arthur Hertzberg, A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity (New York, 2002), 148-49; Norman Podhoretz, Why are Jews Liberals? (New York, 2009), 136.

10 Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 (New York, 2011), 391. 11 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, 2004), 265.

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Such concerns were understandable. The majority of American Jews during the 1930s were immigrants or the children of immigrants from Europe, and memories and tales of European antisemitism were lodged deeply within their psyche. One Jewish observer noted during the 1930s that America’s Jews were living in a “state of fear, anxiety and constant alarm,” and the historian Henry L. Feingold used the word “traumatized” to describe the emotional condition of American Jews at this time.12 This insecurity was particularly prevalent among second-generation Jews. They were conflicted, having absorbed the somber memories of their parents of antisemitism while imbibing at school a national ideology accentuating individualism, tolerance, equality, and freedom. A national officer of a Jewish college sorority pondered whether, in the face of increasing antisemitism, Jewish high school graduates would be forced to attend colleges in the South which seemed more welcoming to Jewish applicants than colleges elsewhere. Another person suggested to Jewish fraternities and sororities that, in the face of growing antisemitism, they be as inconspicuous as possible, to play down their Jewish identity, and to advise their members to be well-mannered and sedate.13 As if to compensate for such fears, American Jews emphasized the harmony between the democratic values of America and the principles of Judaism. The fact that Jews had to argue strenuously on behalf of their Americanness prior to and during World War II indicated the insecurity that lay behind such affirmations. It was perhaps never more important for America’s Jews to affirm this harmony or to celebrate their Americanness than prior to and during the war. One such effort was a 1944 Yiddish book of poems for children titled Mayn yidish bukh (My Yiddish Book). One of the poems is “My Country America,” which begins “America, America,/My beautiful and free country! You are my home, America,/And I love you.”14 A more serious effort along these lines was that of Louis Finkelstein, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary ( JTS) in New York City. During the war he established the Institute for Religious and Social Studies. The institute sponsored an annual conference on science, philosophy, and religion 12 Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920-1945 (Baltimore, 1992), 251. 13 Marianne R. Sanua, Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States, 1895-1945 (Detroit, 2003), 206, 241-62. 14 Beth S. Wenger, History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton, 2020), 176-77.

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at which scholars underscored the important role of religion in the defense of democracy. Finkelstein’s goal was not merely to solidify democracy against its enemies, but also to show the indispensable role that Jews and Judaism were playing in this effort. Finkelstein also supported the creation in 1944 of “The Eternal Light,” a weekly radio program emanating from the JTS. One of the program’s central messages was the contributions that Jews had made and would continue to make to American democracy.15 Finkelstein’s ultimate goal was reinforcing the notion that America was a “Judeo-Christian” country in which Judaism played a central role. This concept was also influential among some Christians. Beginning in 1934 the National Conference of Christians and Jews, founded in 1927 to fight religious and ethnic bias, had sponsored an annual National Brotherhood Day to promote harmony among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. These proved to be quite popular, and in 1936 the National Brotherhood Day expanded to a National Brotherhood Week with President Roosevelt as honorary chairman. This was a preview of the private and governmental efforts during the war to reduce prejudice and to reinforce the image of America as a combatant fighting on behalf of freedom, tolerance, and democracy. Much of the anxiety and insecurity of Jews dissipated as a result of the war. “Never before,” the historian Jeffrey S. Gurock wrote, had Jews “come out of a military experience feeling so much a part of this country.” Jewish servicemen “were unabashedly proud of their courage under fire.” They were conscious of the contributions they had made to the war effort and would not sit still and accept “the widespread prewar social antisemitism that had posed barriers to their integration and to that of their parents.”16 The historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz also noted the transfiguring impact that the war had “on the sense of identity of those tens of thousands of American Jews who went into the armed forces. Their induction launched their discovery or rediscovery of themselves as Jews.” But even more important was their discovery as Jewish Americans.17

15 Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Jewish Identity (Berkeley, 2009), 76-84. 16 Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Holocaust Averted: An Alternative History of American Jewry, 1938-1967 (New Brunswick, 2015), 276-77. 17 Neal Kozodoy, ed., What Is the Use of Jewish History? Essays by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (New York, 1992), 218.

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Writers and Composers The war accelerated the transformation of American Jews into Jewish Americans, with “American” as the more important noun. Leah Garrett remarked in Young Lions, her prize-winning analysis of American war novels by Jews, that they read like a tale of transformation in which a spiritually and physically weak Jew comes “into his own as a true blue American.” For the first time in their history, she noted, Jews were influential in interpreting a war for the general public, and “created the template through which Americans saw World War II.”18 Jewish war veterans wrote the most popular novel of each of the four services: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (Army), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (Air Force), Leon Uris’s Battle Cry (Marine Corps), and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (Navy). In The Caine Mutiny the Jewish lawyer Barney Greenwald defends the martial virtues, patriotism, and respect for authority, and condemns those officers on the Caine who conspired against their captain. The novel struck a chord with American readers. It was serialized in forty-five newspapers, was the selection of four national commercial book clubs, won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and sold three million copies, more copies than any American novel since Gone With the Wind (1936). The Broadway play ran for 415 performances, while the movie version starring Humphrey Bogart, Fred MacMurray, Jose Ferrer, and Van Johnson received several academy award nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Actor (Bogart).19 Uris’s Battle Cry (1953) featured two Jewish Marines, Jake Levin and Max Shapiro, and sold even more copies than The Caine Mutiny. Five years after the publication of Battle Cry, Uris would publish an even more popular novel. Exodus exhibited the same symbiosis between American and Jewish identities emphasized by Uris and the other Jewish novelists of World War II. It’s heroine is Kitty Freemont, an American nurse who falls in love with Ari Ben Canaan, a sabra Jewish soldier fighting to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Uris had worked on the screenplay for the movie The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and in Exodus he portrayed the struggle between Arab and Jew in terms similar to the popular image of America’s Indian wars of the nineteenth century. In both cases 18 Leah Garrett, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston, 2015), 28, 128-29; ibid., “Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948,” Jewish Social Studies 18 (Winter 2012): 70-99. 19 Laurence W. Mazzeno, Herman Wouk (New York, 1994), 29, 48-50; Edward S. Shapiro, “The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity,” American Jewish History 10 (December 1996): 333-51.

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virtuous and civilized farmers were confronted by primitive natives waging merciless war. Children’s Yiddish magazines published in America also emphasized the symbiosis of American and Jewish identities. Naomi Prawer Kadar, the historian of such magazines, wrote that beginning in the late 1930s and continuing through the war years they emphasized their readers’ “deep connection to life in the United States and respect for its institutions and heroes,” and that “a desire to participate in the democratic process” was a “thematic underpinning” in the fiction they published. According to Kadar, their Yiddish-speaking readers felt “a new sense of belonging in America,” and this was responsible for a “more acculturated images of Jewish life in America” appearing in the magazines.20 American classical music during the war mirrored some of the same developments. The three most popular pieces of classical music written about the war were by Jews: Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Morton Gould’s “American Salute,” and Marc Blitzstein’s “The Airborne Symphony.” Copland, the greatest figure in American classical music in the mid-century, especially revealed the impact that the war had on America’s Jews.21 His father was president of the family synagogue in Brooklyn, Yiddish was spoken at home, and, although a secular Jew, Copland had a lifetime interest in Jewish music. He skipped college and moved to Paris shortly after the end of World War I and his high school graduation in order to study piano and musical composition. While in Paris he visited the battlefield of Verdun where seven hundred thousand French and German soldiers were killed in 1916 in World War I’s longest battle. On September 21, 1921 he sent a postcard to his parents expressing his disgust at what he saw. “To think men can be such beasts. One thing is sure— I am absolutely inoculated against war fever, for all time to come, and not if everybody stood on their heads, would I fight in any army for any cause. I’d go to prison first. If everyone did the same there would be no war, and I’ll be the first to start.”22

20 Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-1950 (Waltham, 2017), 220-27. 21 The musicologist Arthur Berger wrote during the war that Copland was the preeminent American composer of “democratic idealism.” Arthur Berger, “Music in Wartime,” New Republic, February 7, 1944, 178. 22 Elizabeth B. Crist and Wayne Shirley, eds., The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland (New Haven, 2006), 19. Copland wrote the music for Miracle at Verdun, a 1931 play that

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Copland was a patriot, and he returned to America in 1924 determined to help create a distinctively American musical vernacular. It was imperative, he said in 1932, for America “to develop a school of composers who can speak directly to the American public in musical language which expresses fully the deeper reactions of the American consciousness to the American scene.”23 After the attack on Pearl Harbor, and despite his previous abhorrence to war and military service, he volunteered to serve in the Army’s specialist corps as a musical advisor. In April 1942 he told the Sub-Committee on Music of the Joint Army and Navy Committee on Welfare and Recreation that “I contemplate the giving up of my composing activities with the greatest reluctance, but if I must be used in the war effort, I wish to be as useful as possible.”24 Rejected by the army because of his age (he was then forty-one years old), he still wanted to do his part. It was imperative, he said, that American composers “reaffirm the democratic ideal that already fills our literature and our stage. It is the composer who must embody new communal ideals in a new communal music.”25 In April 1943 he complained that “damn little has been done to make use of the talent of serious composers in the war effort.” Copland ended up as a musical advisor to both the State Department and the Subcommittee on Music. He visited Latin America as a cultural ambassador, lectured at military camps, and wrote several patriotic works during the war.26 The best known traces a group of soldiers who rise from their graves at Verdun and return home. Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York, 1999), 329-30. 23 Gail Levin and Judith Tick, Aaron Copland’s America (New York, 2000), 147. 24 Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (New York, 2013), 15, 57, 234. The American Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin entertained the troops during the war and encouraged other performers to do likewise. “This is a spiritual war,” Menuhin declared, and he told his father-in-law that he had come to know America by performing overseas (Fauser, Sounds of War, 40, 43-45); Jonathan Rosenberg, Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War (New York, 2020), ch. 5. 25 Elizabeth B. Crist, Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War (New York, 2005), 47, 147-48. Richard Rodgers’s application to join the Air Force was also rejected. His biographer Meryle Secrest claimed that Rodgers felt guilty for not having participated in the war effort. His guilt should have been assuaged when he wrote the music (with the assistance of Robert Russell Bennett) for the popular post-war television documentary Victory at Sea. Meryle Secrest, Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers (New York, 2001), 263-64, 305. 26 Fauser, Sounds of War, 10, 57.

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of these was his 1942 composition Fanfare for the Common Man, the most played piece of classical music written by an American during the twentieth century. Eugene A. Goossens, director of the Cincinnati Symphony, had asked Copland and seventeen other composers to write a fanfare for his orchestra. “It is my idea to make these fanfares stirring and significant contributions to the war effort,” he wrote. “I ask you to do it for the cause we all have at heart.” Copland was happy to comply. His fanfare, however, was unique. Previous fanfares were written to extol the martial virtues, and Goossens suggested these fanfares be named after various allies and fighting organizations.27 Copland’s fanfare, by contrast, was a tribute to the common man, and he included it in his third symphony, which premiered in October 1946. Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack said Copland used the fanfare in the symphony’s final movement because “he wanted a noble finale that would reflect upon the war’s victorious struggle.”28 In 1942, Copland also composed the music for the ballet Rodeo, which celebrated the American West, and A Lincoln Portrait.29 Copland’s Lincoln was a prophet of democracy who had saved the country during the Civil War, just as he believed Franklin Roosevelt was attempting to do during World War II. Copland hoped A Lincoln Portrait would bolster American morale at a time early in the war when news from the battlefield was bleak. He would not be disappointed. Andre Kostelanetz, the musical director who had commissioned the work, called it “magnificent” and a “stirring work . . . of patriotic and national significance,” and it will “convey a great message to the American public.”30 Lincoln scholar Barry Schwartz said A Lincoln Portrait “aroused audiences because it made early 1942 battle losses comprehensible and manageable by placing them in the perspective of Lincoln’s war goal (preservation of the

27 Other fanfares submitted to Goossens included A Fanfare for Russia (Deems Taylor), Fanfare for the Signal Corps (Howard Hanson), Fanfare de la Liberte (Darius Milhaud), and A Fanfare for the Fighting French (Walter Piston). Goossens himself wrote Fanfare for the Merchant Marine. 28 Pollack, Aaron Copland, 410. 29 The dancer Ted Shawn abhorred Rodeo because of its patriotic fervor. He told Agnes de Mille, the ballet’s choreographer, that “It’s because of music like that that we are having war” (Fauser, Sounds of War, 157-60). 30 Ibid., 53-54, 249-51.

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Union) and Lincoln’s strategy (perseverance in the face of successive military calamities).”31 Morton Gould’s family, in contrast to Copland’s, was assimilated, and he inherited his father’s disdain for religion in general and Judaism in particular. Neither of his two wives were Jewish and he had no Jewish affiliations, although he did write the music for the television series “Holocaust.” Music was his entry into the American mainstream, as it was for Copland and Blitzstein, and like Copland, he was an American nationalist when it came to music. “I am an American,” he declared in 1943, “so I wrote American music. . . . I am influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by the musical currency of my place.”32 He championed American music, rejected the assumption that European music was the gold standard, and denied that the only worthwhile American music was being written by urban composers. “One has to go out of the big cities,” he wrote in the New York Times, “to discover the tremendous musical development taking place in this country.”33 Gould was also a political radical, as were Copland and Blitzstein, and his first wife was a communist. He turned hawkish regarding the European war after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and he attempted unsuccessfully to join the Army. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor six months later deepened his outrage. He tried for a second time to join the Army and then the Navy, and was again rejected, presumably because of physical reasons. Gould always regretted that he did not serve, and music became his means to strike back against America’s enemies.34 He composed many morale-boosting pieces during the war. The most famous of was American Salute (1942), which became a staple of wartime and post-wartime patriotic music. Others included the stirring Lincoln Legend (1942),35 a fanfare for Eugene Goossens titled “Fanfare for Freedom,” four

31 Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (Chicago, 2008), 74; ibid, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II,” American Sociological Review 62 (October 1996): 917-18. 32 Fauser, Sounds of War, 225, 247-48. 33 New York Times, August 17, 1941. 34 For Gould’s biography, see Peter W. Goodman’s appropriately titled Morton Gould: American Salute (Portland, 2000). 35 The Lincoln compositions of Copland and Gould were part of a multifaceted effort of the American Left to appropriate the memory of Lincoln. The most famous example was the

Chapter 4. The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War I

marches (“March for Yanks,” “Bombs Away,” “American Legion Forever,” and “March of the Leathernecks”), numerous popular songs (including “Buck Private,” “American Youth,” and “Paratrooper”), and his Symphony No. 1 (1943), which he dedicated to “my three brothers in the Armed Forces of the United States and their fellow-fighters.” The symphony is permeated with military themes. Gould’s second symphony, completed in 1952, was commissioned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of West Point, and is called the West Point Symphony. On the occasion of his death in February 1996 the West Point Band performed a memorial concert in his memory. Marc Blitzstein also came from an assimilated Jewish family. His parents were political radicals who abhorred capitalism, militarism, and religion, save for the religion of Marxism. Their son adopted their political passions and for a time was a card-carrying member of the Communist party. His 1937 musical play The Cradle Will Rock attacked compulsory military training as a capitalist ploy. His pacifism, however, vanished after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He became eager to be personally involved in the war, and in May 1942 said that “music, no less than machine guns, has a part to play and can be a weapon in the battle for the free world.”36 Three months later he enlisted in the Air Force as a private and was assigned as an entertainment specialist to the Eighth Army Air Force in England. He reveled in the military training which he had previously condemned in The Cradle Will Rock, and wrote to his family in October 1942 that he was having “a fine time.” He remained in England until 1945 where he composed for radio, short films, and canteen shows. He was ecstatic now that he was part of the war effort and had “the chance to do my own work, fused into the stream of the most terrifying events of our time, and right at the field of operations! Not ominous, my boy: thrilling.” Being in the Air Force, he said, was “the most thrilling assignment I can imagine.” His biographer Howard Pollack wrote that Blitzstein was pleased by his “engagement in a great moral struggle, a fight not only against fascism, but for the common man, part of a struggle, in his estimation that had predated the war and that would continue afterwards.”37 Lincoln Brigade, a military unit consisting of pro-communist Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War. 36 Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York, 1989), 217. Blitzstein left the Communist Party in 1949. 37 Howard Pollack, Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World (New York, 2012), 262, 270-71; Gordon, Mark the Music, 221-24.

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While in the military Blitzstein wrote several patriotic military compositions. The most important of these was The Airborne Symphony (1944), which he dedicated to the airmen of the Eighth Air Force and envisioned being used for propaganda purposes by the Air Force. Blitzstein’s biographer Eric A. Gordon called it “the single most powerful American composition to emerge from the Second World War.” Blitzstein compared his symphony to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (the Leningrad Symphony), written in 1941 as a tribute to the besieged residents of Leningrad. In an outline of the proposed symphony, Blitzstein said its theme would be the sacred struggle of airborne free men of the world, particularly of the US Air Force, “to crush the monstrous fascist obstructionist in their path; to crush completely the power of an enemy who abuses the very achievements of the air for purposes of persecution, murder, enslavement.” Once the war was over “free men can resume their historic task in this Age of the Air: the conquest of the skies, men over nature. This is the good conquest, the good enslavement.” When completed, The Airborne Symphony chronicled the history of flight from the time of the Wright Brothers, through the aerial bombing of Guernica, Leningrad, London, Malta, Manila, Rotterdam, and Warsaw, to the strategic bombing of Germany.38 American Jewish composers of popular music also did their part in the war effort. The musicologist Sheldon Winkler wrote that there has never been another time when Americans were “so eager to express their patriotism through popular music.”39 Jews wrote many of the most popular American wartime songs, including songs that bolstered morale and anticipated eventual victory. These included “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” (Frank Loesser), “When the Lights Go On Again (All Over the World)” (Bennie Benjamin, Sol Marcus, and Eddie Seiler), “Ac-Cen-Tchu-Ate the Positive” (Harold Arlen), and “Victory Polka” ( Julie Styne and Sammy Cahn). By far the most popular and important American musical during the war was Oklahoma!, which opened in New York City in March 1943.40 With music 38 Ibid., 232, 277. 39 Sheldon Winkler, The Music of World War II: War Songs and Their Stories (Bennington, 2013), 119. A group of Yiddish-speaking songwriters also wrote war songs. See John Bush Jones, The Songs That Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939-1945 (Waltham, 2006), 47-49. 40 Oklahoma! held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical until My Fair Lady appeared in 1956. A theater company performed the musical before American servicemen, and perhaps one and a half million soldiers, sailors, and airmen saw it. A road company toured for

Chapter 4. The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War I

by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! is arguably the most patriotic and celebratory of all major American musicals and the most popular of the Rodgers/Hammerstein musicals. The musicologist Raymond Knapp said it was “a vital component in building and maintaining America’s resolve during the height of its involvement in World War II, and in providing it afterword with the confidence and energy to help build a world ravaged by years of war.”41 It won a special Pulitzer Prize in the “Letters” category, and in 1953 the song “Oklahoma” became the state’s official song. Neither Rodgers nor Hammerstein had any first-hand contact with rural Oklahoma. This allowed them to portray it in idyllic terms, in contrast to John Steinbeck’s more somber novel The Grapes of Wrath, which four years earlier had described the devastation created by the Dust Bowl. Life magazine remarked that Oklahoma! was “wholesome and sweet in the unaffected way that a fairy tale is.” In the Oklahoma of Rodgers and Hammerstein “the sounds of the earth are like music,” the mornings are “beautiful,” “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” and there is “plen’y of room to swing a rope” as well as “plen’y of heart and plen’y of hope.” The Oklahomans know they “belong to the land” and the land they belong to “is grand.” There is a snake, however, in this pastoral paradise in the form of Jud Fry, a gloomy, menacing, primitive, and violent character who is redolent of the fascist threat. Ultimately he is killed by Curly McLain, the male lead. And just as Curly stood up to Jud Fry and cleansed the community of his darkness, so the American military must cleanse the world of America’s fascist foes. With Fry out of the way, Curly can marry Laurey and look to the future with optimism, as can the United States when its enemies have been disposed of.42

ten years and performed the musical before ten million people. The musical was a financial bonanza for its backers, returning thirty-three dollars for every dollar invested. Max Wilk, OK! The Story of “Oklahoma!” (New York, 1993), 244-45; John Steele Gordon, “Oklahoma!,” American Heritage 44 (March 1993): 60. 41 Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, 2005), 124. 42 Richard Hasbany, “Bromidic Parables: The American Musical Theatre during the Second World War,” Journal of Popular Culture 6 (Spring 1973): 661; Tim Carter, Oklahoma!: The Making of an American Musical (New Haven, 2007), 186-87; Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA, 2004), ch. 4.

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Chaplains Among the Jews serving in the military during World War II were 311 chaplains, for whom the war was an education in inter-religious cooperation. The shortage of military chaplains forced them to do things for which their seminary training had not prepared them. Jewish chaplains not only had to minister to Jewish servicemen ranging from the Orthodox to atheists, but they often had to counsel Christian servicemen, lead Christian religious services, and give Christian last rites to the wounded. Upon returning to their civilian pulpits after the war, these chaplains imparted to their congregants this ecumenism and broad-mindedness they had absorbed while in the military.43 Alexander D. Goode was the most famous of these chaplains. A Reform rabbi, he had been a pacifist prior to America’s entry into the war, but volunteered for military service in the army shortly before America’s entry into the war. He was rejected, and then volunteered again after the Pearl Harbor attack and this time was accepted. He wrote his wife in 1943 that the American cause was just and would bring forth a “new age of brotherhood . . . that will usher in at the same time the world democracy we all want, the age when men will admire the freedom and responsibility of the common man in American democracy. Our methods will be imitated and improved upon. Our spirit of tolerance will spread.” The post-war future, he avowed, was bright. “Toward the new world the cavalcade of democracy marches on, heralding the century of humanity.” He was at this time working on a manuscript he titled “Cavalcade of Democracy,” which forecast a new world of cooperation between Christians and Jews in which the spirit of democracy would prevail.44 On February 3, 1943 Goode was on the Dorchester, a troop transport carrying nine hundred sailors and soldiers bound for Greenland, when it was torpedoed by a German submarine. There were three other chaplains on the ship as

43 The letters of chaplain David Max Eichorn of Tallahassee, Florida recount a Rosh Hashanah service in which a Lutheran recited the opening prayer; a Chanukah celebration at which an all-Gentile choir sung; and Protestant services in Germany led by a rabbi. Greg Palmer and Mark S. Zaid, eds., The GI’s Rabbi: World War II Letters of David Max Eichorn (Lawrence, 2004), 105, 129-30, 153, 165. Ronit Y. Stahl, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Cambridge, MA, 2017) is a perceptive history of American military chaplains. World War II, she claims, saw the culmination of “tri-faith America” and “moved Catholics and Jews from the margins to the mainstream” (74-82). 44 Edward S. Shapiro, “A Call to Service: Rabbis Jacob M. Rothschild, Alexander D. Goode, Sidney M. Lefkowitz, and Roland B. Gittelsohn and World War II,” Southern Jewish History 22 (2019), 97-98.

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well, two Protestant and one Catholic. Several of the servicemen on board left their life jackets below deck while fleeing the sinking ship. The four chaplains handed their jackets over and went down with the vessel. News of the chaplains’ selfless act quickly spread throughout the United States. They became national heroes, and their story became the most celebrated event in the history of the American military chaplaincy. Brigadier General William R. Arnold, Chief of Chaplains, declared that “the extraordinary heroism and devotion of these men of God has been an unwavering beacon for the thousands of chaplains of the armed forces. . . . The churches [sic] of America can be proud that such men carried their banners into this war, and men of all faiths can be proud that these men of different faiths died together.”45 Numerous schools, hospitals, and chapels were named for them, and Congress designated February 3rd as Four Chaplains Day. A postage stamp was issued in 1948 in their honor, and its caption read, “THESE CHAPLAINS . . . interfaith in action.”46 Rabbi Goode was arguably the most important American Jewish serviceman of the war, and the saga of the four chaplains had an especially important symbolic meaning for Jews. It refuted the antisemitic slur that they were cowards, shirked military service, and thought only of themselves, and it lent credence to the image of America as a pluralistic and Judeo-Christian nation. This message would be reinforced two years later by another iconic event involving another Reform rabbi. The occasion was the dedication on March 26, 1945 of a cemetery on Iwo Jima containing the bodies of Marines from the 5th Marine Corps Division killed in the battle for the island. The most senior chaplain of the division asked Roland Gittelsohn, the first Jewish chaplain in Marine Corps history, to deliver the eulogy at the dedication. Eight other chaplains, however, objected to a non-Christian delivering the eulogy, and Gittelsohn, not wishing to create a controversy, decided instead to deliver his eulogy at the section of the cemetery reserved for Jewish Marines.47 45 New York Times, December 3, 1944. 46 For the sinking of the Dorchester and the story of the four chaplains, see Francis Beauchesne Thornton, Sea of Glory: The Magnificent Story of the Four Chaplains (New York, 1953); Dan Kurzman, No Greater Glory: The Four Immortal Chaplains and the Sinking of the “Dorchester” in World War II (New York, 2004). 47 For Gittelsohn’s biography and the eulogy, see Roland B. Gittelsohn, Here Am I—Harnessed to Hope (New York, 1988); Lee Mandel, Unlikely Warrior: A Pacifist Rabbi’s Journey from the Pulpit to Iwo Jima (Gretna, 2015).

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Gittelsohn titled the eulogy “The Purest Democracy.” It became part of Marine Corps lore and was the most famous American eulogy of the war. News of what Gittelsohn said spread almost immediately throughout the United States, and it was widely discussed in the press and on radio. The eight dissident Marine Corps chaplains were severely criticized, and Gittelsohn was highly praised for his depiction of the war as an ideological struggle between bigotry and totalitarianism on the one hand and equality and democracy on the other, and for broadening the notion of American nationality. He modeled his brief eulogy on the most famous of all American eulogies, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He began by stating the importance of consecrating the “sacred soil” of Iwo Jima to the memory of the Marines who fought and died there. These dead reflected the diversity of America herself. In this cemetery “no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. . . . Theirs is the highest and purest democracy.” Gittelsohn concluded by evoking Lincoln’s words of 1863. “Out of this, and from the suffering and sorrow of those we mourn . . . we promise the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere.”48

Into the Mainstream World War II diminished the insularity as well as the insecurity of America’s Jews. If social psychologists are correct that frequent and close contacts will overcome prejudice, then the mixing of Jews and Gentiles in the military was a major cause of the rapid post-war decline in America of antisemitism. The military service of Jews began with boot camp training in the South, the Midwest, and the West, and this accelerated their entry into the American mainstream, a process portrayed in Neil Simon’s play Biloxi Blues. This was the first time that many Jewish servicemen (and women) came into close contact with Gentiles, and the first time that many Gentiles came into close contact with Jews. “Serving in the war,” Jay M. Eidelman said, “integrated American Jews into white American society in ways that were unimaginable just five years earlier.”49 Thus when 48 Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching in Times of War, 1800-2001 (London, 2008), 481-507. Actually the Marine Corps did not accept African Americans until after World War II. 49 Jay M. Eidelman, “Jewish GIs and the War against the Nazis,” in Eidelman, ed., Ours to Fight For, 14-15. For the impact of the war on one prominent American Jewish intellectual, see Nancy Sinkoff, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Detroit, 2020), 104.

Chapter 4. The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War I

David de Sola Pool, the rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York City, America’s oldest Jewish congregation, offered a prayer for the success of the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, he referred to American soldiers as “our sons,” “our brothers,” and “our beloved warriors.”50 The tendency of Jews to view politics through ideological lenses also encouraged this integration into the American mainstream. The Forward, the most popular of America’s Jewish newspapers, declared on July 4, 1939, two months prior to the outbreak of the war in Europe and two and a half years prior to America’s entry into the war, that in one corner of the world in Europe, Hitler stands with a sword in hand. In the other corner, in America, we stand with our torch of freedom. . . . Whoever wishes to see the blessing of democracy and liberty need not go far: he needs only to take a look at America, at America from coast to coast. Everything that America possesses, everything that America is, it has acquired through democracy and freedom.51

For Jews the war was fought not merely to defend America’s national security. An equally important objective was securing the freedoms enunciated by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Atlantic Charter. Jews, more than another other American ethnic or religious group, looked forward to a postwar liberal order free of racial, religious, and ethnic prejudices. The war had a crucial influence on the postwar politics of America’s Jews. Their participation in the military and their contributions to the war effort on the home front, combined with the deep satisfaction they felt in the defeat of Nazi Germany, instilled in them a confidence they had not previously felt. This manifested itself politically in a number of ways. They vigorously defended specifically Jewish interests, particularly the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and ignored warnings that political lobbying on behalf of a Jewish state in the Middle East could lead to accusations of “dual loyalty.” The war also invigorated their liberalism, the most important elements of which were a more inclusionary view of American identity and a greater determination to eliminate all vestiges of discrimination and racism. 50 The de Sola Pool prayer can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V4hrxP04kg. 51 Deborah Dash Moore, Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (New York, 2017), 270-72; Wenger, History Lessons, 78. For the importance of this liberal understanding of the war, see Frank A. Warren, Noble Abstractions: American Liberal Intellectuals and World War II (Columbus, 1999), passim.

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For the post-war generation of Jews, no domestic issue was more important than civil rights for African Americans, and Jews played a major role as participants, financial backers, and lobbyists in the civil rights movement. The security of America’s Jews, Jewish defense organizations argued, depended on the elimination of bias directed at other groups. In September 1946, New York State Supreme Court Judge Meier Steinbrink told the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, an organization which he then headed, that “There must be no cleavage in the ranks of America’s millions; as we worked together—all races, religions, creeds, side by side toward victory, so we must continue to work to cement that victory, to make meaningful the enormous investment in life, limb and labor.”52 This particularly pertained to relations between African Americans and Jews. In a 1950 speech before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention in 1950, Rabbi Irving Miller, the president of the American Jewish Congress, declared, “Through the thousands of years of our tragic histories we should have learned one lesson and learned it well: that the persecution at any time of any minority portends the shape, quality and intensity of the persecution of all minorities.”53 The war also encouraged American Jews to recognize that they no longer lived on the margins of American life. A decade after the war the Jewish theologian Will Herberg published Protestant—Catholic—Jews: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, the most talked about book on American religion of the 1950s. The book’s central thesis was that Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism were the three great religions of America and equally valid religious expressions of the democratic way of life. Jews, who comprised barely three percent of the population, had, in Herberg’s telling, achieved religious parity with Protestants and Catholics. In fact, Herberg argued, Christians were conforming to the patterns of ethnic and religious identity pioneered by Jews. Jews were thus “paradoxically the most ‘American’ of all the ethnic groups that went into the making of modern America.”54 For Jews, this was indeed welcome news. For members of the American Jewish Committee, the bastion of the American Jewish establishment, the time had finally come for Jews qua Jews to make 52 Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Theme of Indivisibility in the Post-War Struggle against Prejudice in the United States,” Patterns of Prejudice 3 (2014), 223-47; Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York, 1999), 128-20; CCAR Yearbook 55 (1946), 123-27. 53 Fleeger, “Forget All Differences”: 77. 54 Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew, 10.

Chapter 4. The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War I

a serious contribution to American intellectual life now that the war was over. They decided in 1945 to establish Commentary, a non-parochial monthly magazine that would explore issues of importance to both America and its Jews. Elliot E. Cohen, its first editor, laid out the publication’s rationale in an editorial in its initial number in November. Titled “An Act of Affirmation,” it asserted that Commentary was a vote of confidence in the manifold possibilities of Jewish life in America as well as in the intellectual maturity of America’s Jews. “We have faith,” he declared, “that out of the opportunities of our experience here, there will evolve new patterns of living, new modes of thought, which will harmonize heritage and country into a true sense of at-home-ness in the modern world. Surely, we who have survived catastrophe, can survive freedom, too.”55 Within a few years Commentary would become one of America’s most important magazines and mandatory reading for the American intelligentsia. Cohen viewed with suspicion the vogue of alienation common within this intelligentsia. In November 1946, his magazine published an article by Israel Knox challenging the fundamental tenet of Zionism. Its title asked “Is America Exile or Home?,” and its subtitle, “We Must Begin to Build for Permanence,” answered the question. America, Knox argued, was neither galut (exile) nor hutz la-aretz (diaspora), but rather home to five million Jews, “the largest and most fortunate in the world.” “By committing ourselves intimately to the democratic destiny of America, by aligning ourselves with the forces for its preservation and its deepening,” he declared, “we not only build firm foundations for our own survival—we act out the spirit and the implications of the Jewish ethos.” Jews, Knox concluded, must recognize that “we—and our children and our children’s children—are here to stay, that this is our home!”56 Cohen agreed. “Jews,” he wrote in 1947, “will live very deeply immersed in the culture of our general American society. This is not only unavoidable—it is eminently desirable. For Western culture, as we know it in Western Europe and these United States is . . . the highest culture in its potential, that mankind has yet produced.”57 The founding of Commentary was followed three years later by the opening of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Abram L. Sachar, its first 55 Elliot E. Cohen, “An Act of Affirmation,” Commentary, November 1945, 1-3. 56 Israel Knox, “Is America Exile or Home?,” Commentary, November, 1946, 406-408; Benjamin Balint, Running “Commentary”: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (New York, 2010), 38-47. 57 Elliot E. Cohen, “Jewish Culture in America: Some Speculations by an Editor,” Commentary, May 1947, 416.

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president, had convinced a group of Jewish communal leaders and philanthropists of the need to establish a secular Jewish university. He wished not merely to provide a refuge for Jewish students and professors who might be excluded from elite universities because of antisemitic quotas. He also felt that it was now incumbent upon American Jewry to contribute to American higher education in the same way that other religions and ethnic groups had done. Brandeis would differ from Yeshiva University’s undergraduate college for men in New York City whose purpose was to educate only Orthodox students. Rather, Brandeis would be open to qualified students of all races, creeds, ethnicities, and genders. The title of Sachar’s history of Brandeis is revealing: A Host at Last. For Sachar, the era of the wandering Jew had ended, and Jews had found a permanent home In America. If universities such as Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, and Georgetown hosted Jewish students and professors, he asked, did not American Jews have a concurrent responsibility to establish a university that would host Gentile students and faculty? America had been good to the Jews, and it was time to pay this debt back. Brandeis, Sachar said, would be “a corporate gift of Jews to higher education.”58 Sachar also appealed to the self-interest of Jews since their social standing would rise as Americans come to realize the contribution that Brandeis was making to the country. But, and this was the real question, would Gentiles be willing to attend such a university? Sachar was confident they would since they had not been reluctant to use Jewish-sponsored hospitals. They would do the same as long as Brandeis maintained high academic standards. By 1960 even the most inveterate skeptics had to admit that Sachar’s dream had come to fruition. In a little over a decade Brandeis had leapfrogged into the upper ranks of American universities and was attracting academically oriented Gentiles as well as Jewish students. Nothing better illustrates the new status of America’s Jews than what occurred on September 8, 1945 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a week after Japan surrendered and the war officially ended. On that date, Bess Myerson, a Yiddish-speaking beauty raised in the Shalom Aleichem Cooperative Houses in the Bronx, was selected as the first, and to date the only, Jewish Miss America. This was at a time when the Miss America pageant was a significant national happening and was avidly monitored by American women, young and old. The contrast between the agonies of the Jews in Europe during the war and the selection of Myerson as the personification of American femininity could not have been 58 Abram L. Sachar, A Host at Last (Boston, 1976), 14.

Chapter 4. The Impact of War: America’s Jews and World War I

more striking or symbolic. Complete strangers came up to Myerson during the week of competition and told her how important it was for her to win, that it would be a collective victory for all Jews as well as a hopeful portent of America’s future. Myerson’s triumph did show that America, while not the promised land of the Bible, was certainly a land of promise for Jews.59 World War II, by diminishing any dissonance that America’s Jews felt between their Jewish and American identities, was a transformative event in the evolution of American Jewish identity. No longer did Jews assume they were outsiders living in America only by the sufferance of the real Americans. Perhaps the most notable indication that Jews had finally become part of the American mainstream was a soaring intermarriage rate between Jews and Gentiles. By the 1960s this had increased so dramatically that Jewish professionals were wondering whether the American Jewish community could survive this latest challenge, one perhaps more insidious than those it had faced prior to the war.

59 Susan Dworkin, Miss America, 1945: Bess Myerson’s Own Story (New York, 1987), 7-8, 10611, 132.

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Chapter 5

A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida Although South Florida has the third largest Jewish population in the Western Hemisphere, exceeded only by that of New York and southern California, it has been largely ignored by historians of American Jewry.1 This is particularly true for the area’s Orthodox Jews who have been doubly orphaned by historians, first because they live in South Florida and secondly because they are Orthodox. Less than ten percent of the Jews of Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties are Orthodox, but they exert a disproportionate influence. Orthodox institutions as well as businesses catering to the Orthodox have been established throughout the tri-county area during the past several decades, and few major centers of population in the three counties lack an Orthodox presence. Particularly during the winter months, dozens of lectures, classes, and fund-raising events are directed at the Orthodox population. In December, menorahs erected by the Orthodox are on display throughout South Florida, and Lubavitch Hasidim even light a menorah at halftime when the Miami Dolphins football team is playing at home during Chanukah. Despite their minority status, the

1

The surveys of Jewish population in the United States published annually by the American Jewish Year Book have the figures for South Florida and metropolitan Los Angeles running neck-in-neck if Orange County and Long Beach are included in the total for Los Angeles. The data for Orange County is a very rough estimate. The slighting of Florida Jewry by American Jewish historians is reflected in two important recent works on American Judaism: Wertheimer, A People Divided and Sarna, American Judaism. Florida is not listed in the index to Sarna’s book, and it is mentioned only once in the index to Wertheimer’s volume. This reference is to a sentence on page fifty-four where Wertheimer notes the strength of Conservative Judaism among the retired Jews of South Florida.

Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida

Orthodox are among the most dynamic elements within the religious life of South Florida Jewry.2 Approximately fifty thousand Orthodox Jews live full-time in South Florida. In addition, tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews spend part of the winter in South Florida either as snowbirds or tourists. These include over a thousand Haredi Jews who come to Miami Beach. The Haredi men, with their black coats, and the Haredi women, with their long dresses and wigs, add a colorful element to 41st Street in Miami Beach, where they frequent the kosher restaurants, kosher food stores, and a shop selling wigs. (Another wig store for Orthodox women is in North Miami Beach.) The Haredim have included some of the most prominent figures in American right-wing Orthodoxy, such as Rabbis Moshe Feinstein, Yaakov Kaminetsky, Yaakov Ruderman, Mordecai Gifter, and the spiritual leaders of the Satmar, Bobover, and other Hasidic groups. Indeed, South Florida has become, next to Jerusalem, the major tourist destination of America’s Orthodox. Even Orthodox Jews from Europe, including Moshe Rosen, the late chief rabbi of Romania, have wintered in South Florida. A high birth rate has also increased the area’s Orthodox population. This birth rate is one of the indications of demographic vitality within the tri-county area where there are many retirees and the average age of Jews is far higher than in the rest of the country. Since the 1960s, South Florida has been one of the major American destinations for Jewish immigrants, and today it has the most polyglot Jewish population in the nation. In no other area in the country has immigration played such an important role in the growth of the Jewish population. Beginning in the 1960s, South Florida became a popular destination for immigrants from Latin America, Israel and other parts of the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. These immigrants often had little experience with other variants of Judaism besides Orthodoxy before arriving in the United States. 2

For the percentage of Orthodox Jews in South Florida, see Ira M. Sheskin, “Ten Percent of American Jews,” in Jews of South Florida, ed. Andrea Greenbaum (Waltham, 2005), 14. The sociologist Samuel C. Heilman recently estimated the Orthodox population of South Florida to be about forty-five thousand. Heilman, Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy (Berkeley, 2006), 65, 327. The phenomenon of Orthodox influence disproportionate to their numbers is seen elsewhere. “The number and proportion of Orthodox Jews is quite small,” four sociologists recently wrote, however “the denomination may be significant not only for its members, but for the impact it has on the religious patterns and norms of the non-Orthodox community.” They also claimed that, based on Jewish population studies, the percentage of Orthodox Jews in the Miami area was smaller than in the metropolitan areas of Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, DC. This is difficult to believe. Bernard Lazerwitz, J. Alan Winter, Arnold Dashefsky, and Ephraim Tabory, Jewish Choices: America Jewish Denominationalism (Albany, 1998), 21, 39-40.

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Although generally not religiously observant, many tended to equate Judaism with Orthodoxy. This was encouraged by Orthodox outreach efforts, particularly that of the Lubavitch movement. As a result, some of the immigrants identified with Orthodoxy after settling in South Florida. Orthodox immigrants, along with other newcomers to South Florida, have been attracted by the region’s pleasant climate and an economic boom, which has transformed Miami into one of America’s major ports as well as an important banking and legal center. South Florida particularly appealed to Jews in the Northeast. This was especially true for veterans of World War II, beneficiaries of the G. I. Bill of Rights, and the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation. Many of these were professionals who found employment in law and accounting firms or opened up medical and dental practices. These migrations, both foreign and domestic, increased the area’s total Jewish population from nine thousand in 1940 to two hundred fifty thousand by 1975 and to over six hundred thousand by 2006. Among these newcomers were Orthodox Jews, attracted to South Florida for the same reasons that enticed others. By the 1980s, the Orthodox population of South Florida had itself become a magnet, attracting additional Orthodox Jews who wanted to live where there were was a sizable Orthodox presence and viable Orthodox institutions.3 The Jewish population of South Florida has also dispersed. In the 1940s it was concentrated in a couple of neighborhoods in Miami and Miami Beach in Miami-Dade County. The economic development of Broward and Palm Beach counties and the building of numerous retirement communities in these two counties have moved the geographic heartland of South Florida Jewry northward. By 2006 there were more than twice as many Jews in Broward County (234,000) and Palm Beach County (256,000) than in Miami-Dade County (113,000). By the 1990s Palm Beach County had by far a higher percentage of Jews in its population than any other American county.4 Although the center of Orthodoxy in South Florida has remained MiamiDade County, particularly Miami Beach, settlements have sprung up throughout the area. Many new synagogues were established in the more northerly Bro3

Sarna, American Judaism, 292; Sheskin, “Ten Percent of American Jewry,” 3-7.

4

Kimberly Miller, “Kosher Cafe to Open on FAU Campus,” Miami Herald, January 3, 2007. For the decline of the Jewish population in Miami Beach, see Abby Goodnough, “For Shtetl by the Sea, Only a Few Fading Signs Remain,” New York Times, April 3, 2007. For the increase of the Jewish population in Boynton Beach, Palm Beach County, see Erika Pesantes, “Boynton Area Top Draw for Jewish Residents,” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 1, 2007.

Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida

ward and Palm Beach counties, and the Orthodox synagogue with the fastest growing membership in the United States during the 1990s was the Boca Raton Synagogue in Palm Beach County. Orthodox Jews also moved south of Miami. Prior to the 1960s the region encompassing Kendall-Coral Gables-Homestead largely consisted of citrus, dairy, and horse farms. By 2007 it was densely populated and had five Orthodox synagogues.5 American Orthodoxy, both in South Florida and elsewhere, was transformed in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although prior to World War II there were Jews in America, primarily immigrants, who were Orthodox both in ideology and practice, they were conscious of being a beleaguered minority and were pessimistic that their children and grandchildren would remain Orthodox. These true believers were outnumbered by those for whom Orthodoxy simply involved institutional affiliation. The latter belonged to Orthodox synagogues, although their lifestyle and religious observance did not conform to traditional Orthodox standards. As the immigrant generation most familiar with East European Orthodoxy passed on, the ranks of what can be called the “fellow traveling” Orthodox diminished. They were replaced by the “card carrying” true believers, who had been educated in Orthodox schools and identified with Orthodoxy on the levels of both practice and ideology. Fellow-traveling Orthodox Jews remained, particularly among the elderly, but they were a diminishing minority. American Orthodoxy was also transformed by the settlement after World War II of tens of thousands of European Orthodox Jews. They came not as immigrants to the United States but as refugees from persecution, and they sought not to acculturate into American society but to re-create the Orthodox world they had known. As they prospered in the United States, they established European-type yeshivot, kollelim, and other Orthodox institutions, and disdained the compromises with modernity made by the Orthodoxy they encountered in America.6 They and their descendants, some of whom settled in South Florida, were partially responsible for the much-discussed movement of Orthodoxy to the right during the latter half of the twentieth century. This move was exhibited in the hardening of attitudes toward non-Orthodox religious 5

The Florida Jewish Directory (Boca Raton, FL, [2007]). This two-hundred-page annual contains advertisements for stores selling items of Jewish interest and lists the names and addresses of the synagogues, mikvehs, restaurants, Jewish schools, Jewish community centers, and other Jewish institutions servicing Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.

6

For the important role of the Holocaust generation in American Orthodoxy, see Heilman, Sliding to the Right, ch. 1.

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movements, an emphasis on the study of Talmud as the be-all of Jewish learning, the raising of kashrut standards, a pervasive religious one-upmanship, and an incessant divisiveness over what constitutes authentic traditional Judaism. This divisiveness was exhibited in the Kosher Map and Guide, which is distributed for free at Jewish gift stores, kosher restaurants, and other places where Orthodox Jews congregate in South Florida. The 2004-5 edition featured the names of the rabbinic organizations certifying the kashrut of the restaurants listed, as well as a disclaimer from the map’s publisher, a rabbi, that the map “cannot assume responsibility for the kashrus of any establishment or product or accuracy of any information contained therein.” For much of the twentieth century, the dominant paradigm of sociologists and historians regarding American Orthodoxy was that Orthodoxy was an anachronism destined to disappear with the passing of the immigrant generation and the maturation and acculturation of their children and grandchildren. “As a result of the pressures, the training, and the rewards offered by American society at large,” the sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in 1956, “traditional Judaism has ceased to be a living culture for the second-generation Jew. Parts of it, however, have remained active in the form of habits or emotions; they are now providing the impetus for a new ‘symbolic Judaism’ still in the process of development.”7 Scholars predicted that, because of the openness of American society and Orthodoxy’s own retrograde character, Orthodoxy would shrink to a small group of religious sectarians located on the lower rungs of the American social and economic ladder. For the rest of American Jews, it would have only “symbolic” value. This pessimistic view of Orthodoxy was a theme of two of the most important books on American Judaism written by sociologists in the 1950s, Nathan Glazer’s American Judaism and Marshall Sklare’s Conservative Judaism. Glazer described Orthodoxy as incompatible with middle-class respectability. Orthodoxy’s future lay with those whom he described as a “particularly backward and archaic group of Jews.” Sklare said in a much-quoted statement that “Orthodox adherents have succeeded in achieving the goal of institutional perpetuation to only a limited extent; the history of their movement in this country can be written in terms of a case study of institutional decay.” For American Jews, Sklare concluded, “Orthodoxy bears the stigma of the ‘ghetto.’ They feel that Orthodox procedures are out of keeping with the type of behavior expected of the middle class, that Orthodoxy will not raise their status among fellow-Jews of higher 7

Herbert Gans, “American Jewry: Present and Future,” Commentary, May 1956, 415.

Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida

social position, and also that Orthodoxy will not help to improve Jewish-Gentile relations.” The future of traditional Judaism in America, Sklare concluded, lay not with Orthodoxy but with the more dignified and higher status Conservative Judaism.8 Historians also assumed that Orthodoxy’s future was bleak. This is exhibited in the most famous historical analysis of South Florida Jewry, Deborah Dash Moore’s 1994 volume, To the Golden Cities. This book, as noted on its jacket, purported to tell the story of the creation and growth of fresh and dynamic Jewish communities in the golden cities of Miami and Los Angeles. Here, Moore argued, Jews had supposedly reinvented themselves and created “a new consensus on the boundaries of Jewish life and what it means to be Jewish. . . . Today these sun-soaked, entrepreneurial communities have become part of a truly American, self-confident style of Judaism.” This consensus, however, had no place for Jews less interested in “Pursuing the American Jewish Dream,” the subtitle of Moore’s book, than in perpetuating traditional Jewish values, practices, and institutions. According to Moore, Jews joined synagogues in the golden cities “not due to the weight of tradition or any collective compulsion,” but rather because “each one saw personal meaning in the act.” Although To the Golden Cities dis8 Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago, 1972), 144-47; Marshall Sklare, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement (Glencoe, 1972), 43, 73. Both Glazer and Sklare modified their pessimism regarding Orthodoxy in the new editions of their books. Sklare wrote, “Unaccountably, Orthodoxy has refused to assume the role of invalid. Rather, it has transformed itself into a growing force in American Jewish life. It has reasserted its claim of being the authentic interpretation of Judaism” (464-66). For a critique of Glazer’s analysis of Orthodoxy, see my “The Missing Element: Nathan Glazer and Modern Orthodoxy,” American Jewish History 77 (December 1987): 260-76, reprinted in my We Are Many: Reflections on American History and Identity (Syracuse, 2005), ch. 10. Other statements of Orthodoxy’s bleak future include Abraham J. Karp, “The Conservative Rabbi—‘Dissatisfied but Not Unhappy,’” American Jewish Archives 5 (November 1983): 255; Howard W. Polsky, “A Study of Orthodoxy in Milwaukee: Social Characteristics, Beliefs, and Observances,” in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York, 1958), 25-35; and Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins (New York, 1964), 262-67. For Orthodoxy’s refusal to roll over and die, see Chaim I. Waxman, “From Institutional Decay to Primary Day: American Orthodox Jewry Since World War II,” American Jewish History 91 (December 2003): 405-41; M. Herbert Danziger, Returning to Tradition: The Contemporary Revival of Orthodox Judaism (New Haven, 1989); Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America (Chicago, 1989); Sarna, American Judaism, 290-306, 326-27; and Wertheimer, A People Divided, 114-36. Waxman spoke of an Orthodox “renaissance” (414) and the “coming of age of Orthodoxy in American society” (419), while Wertheimer’s chapter on Orthodoxy is titled “Orthodoxy: Triumphalism on the Right.” Certainly there has been a revival of Orthodox morale, even though the percentage of American Jews identifying with Orthodoxy declined during the last half of the twentieth century.

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cusses at length politics, Zionism, efforts to combat antisemitism, and Jewish summer camps, it virtually ignores Orthodoxy and Orthodox Jews, even though by the 1990s there were flourishing Orthodox communities in both cities.9 The book’s chapter on Jewish religious life, “Seeking Religious Roots,” discusses three Miami synagogues—Temple Emanu-El, a Conservative synagogue also known as the Miami Beach Jewish Center on Washington Avenue at 17th Street, Temple Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation off 41st Street in Miami Beach, and Temple Israel of Greater Miami, a Reform congregation in Miami proper. All three of these “temples” had enterprising rabbis and innovative programs directed at filling the spiritual and social needs of “The New American Jew,” the title of the book’s last chapter. These three congregations, Moore said, cultivated “the search for personal meaning to be found through experience and an emphasis on an individual’s voluntary affirmation,” traits which she believed characterized the spiritual longings of Miami’s Jews. The three Miami rabbis discussed in To the Golden Cities, Irving Lehrman of Emanu-El, Leon Kronish of Beth Sholom, and Joseph Narot of Temple Israel, “saw the promise of a frontier society—its openness, venturesomeness, and willingness to tolerate innovation.” These rabbis “offered a personalized path to Jewish fulfillment to the engaged minority seeking religious roots.”10 Certainly the popularity of Lehrman, Kronish, and Narot indicated that they had correctly gauged the thinking of their congregants. But the “engaged minority” of Jews in South Florida “seeking religious roots” had other options besides these three congregations. Rabbis Phineas A. Weberman and Abraham Korf had settled in Miami Beach three and a half decades before the publication of To the Golden Cities, and had been busy building Orthodox institutions since then. For much of this time Weberman, the chaplain of the Miami Beach Police Department, was the leading non-Hasidic Orthodox rabbi in Miami Beach, while Korf directed a growing Lubavitch presence in the area. For Moore, Orthodoxy, which valued tradition, law and community, was incongruous in settings where Jews esteemed experimentation, entrepreneur-

9 Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York, 1994), 263-66. The book has only two sentences on the growth of Orthodoxy, both of which discuss Los Angeles (265). 10 Moore, To the Golden Cities, 122, 270. For another view of Kronish, see Henry A. Green, “Leon Kronish: Miami Beach’s Twentieth-Century Prophet,” in Jews of South Florida, ed. Greenbaum, 162-78; Green, Gesher Vakesher: Bridges and Bonds: The Life of Leon Kronish (Atlanta, 1995).

Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida

ship, and individualism. While To the Golden Cities mentions the movement of Temple Emanu-El and Temple Beth Sholom away from Orthodoxy, it does not discuss the pre-1994 growth of Orthodoxy in either Los Angeles or Miami, including the establishment of literally dozens of Orthodox synagogues and prayer rooms in both cities. The book discusses the founding of the Los Angeles branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary, but not the creation in Los Angeles and Miami of a network of Orthodox day schools. It relates the post-war migration of Jews from the Northeast to Miami and from the Middle West to Los Angeles, but not the immigration of traditional Jews from Israel and Latin America to Miami and from Iran to Los Angeles, or that Orthodox texts written in Spanish could be purchased in stores on 41st Street in Miami Beach and their counterparts written in Farsi were available in stores on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. The historian Stephen J. Whitfield, a leading authority on Florida Jewry, also questioned whether Orthodoxy or, for that matter, any other form of Judaism, could flourish in the Sunshine State. Judaism, he said, could not thrive in a culture where “the quest for self-satisfaction” and the “glorification of joy” had been elevated into art forms. Whitfield termed the Judaism of Florida as “post-Orthodox,” and he noted that the first Orthodox synagogue in the state was not established until the twentieth century. It was not until the 1920s that Miami had two Orthodox synagogues, and the first Orthodox synagogue in Miami Beach did not open until the ill-starred year of 1929. Miami’s Jews, Whitfield wrote, attended religious services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but rarely at other times, and they expected their rabbis to be adept at socializing, but not to be scholars or to put many demands on their congregants. These Jews, Whitfield concluded, “had uprooted themselves to live in south Florida well after the impact of Americanization had been registered, long after the acids of modernization had corroded the integral Yiddishkeit of their ancestors.”11 But if the Judaism of Florida was “post-Orthodox,” how can one explain the fourteen Orthodox synagogues in Miami Beach, nine in North Miami Beach, six in Aventura, and three in Hollywood; sixty kosher restaurants in Miami Beach, North Miami, North Miami Beach, Aventura, Broward County, and Boca 11 Whitfield, “Blood and Sand: The Jewish Community of South Florida,” in Greenbaum, ed., Jews of South Florida, 46-48. Had it existed when he wrote these words, Whitfield could have pointed to the World Erotic Art Museum on Washington Street in Miami Beach, founded by a woman who had grown up in an Orthodox home in Newark, New Jersey. She waited until her husband died before opening its doors in October 2005.

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Raton; and five mikvehs in Miami Beach, North Miami Beach, Hollywood, and Kendall listed on the Kosher Map and Guide? Admittedly some of these synagogues were simply glorified prayer rooms, and some of these restaurants were holes in the wall. But it is not their quality but their quantity that is significant. Indeed, the growth of Orthodox Judaism in South Florida has been so rapid that the map has had to be updated periodically, and within a year the statistics on the 2004-5 map were out-of-date. By 2006 there were not six Orthodox synagogues in Aventura but eight, and there were not five mikvehs in Miami-Dade County but nine, with another four mikvehs in Broward County.12 Forty-five years earlier there were only two operational mikvehs in the entire state, one in Jacksonville and the other in Miami Beach.13 Orthodox schools and eruvs experienced the same growth during this period.14 In 1960 there were only two Orthodox schools in Florida, both in Miami Beach. In 2006 there were six Orthodox elementary day schools and seven Orthodox high schools in Miami-Dade County, with another half a dozen Orthodox schools in Broward and Palm Beach counties. This growth is perhaps best illustrated by the Bais Yaakov school in North Miami Beach. This rightwing school for girls opened in 1988 with five students. Today it has four hundred, all of whom come from Orthodox families.15 In 1960 there was no eruv in Florida. There are now at least four eruvs in Miami-Dade County alone, and there are also eruvs in Broward and Palm Beach counties. In 1960 no store sold glatt kosher meat in the entire state, and only one sold non-glatt kosher meat. Today there are dozens of stores in South Florida providing glatt kosher meat.16 In 1960 there was no reliable kosher bakery in South Florida, nor was cholov Yisrael milk sold anywhere in Florida. Now there are at least seventeen bakeries in

12 The eight Orthodox synagogues in Aventura in 2006 are about the same number as were in the entire state of Florida in 1960. Aventura was swampland in 1960. 13 For a discussion of mikvehs in Broward County, see Phyllis Steinberg, “Ancient Jewish ‘Mikvahs’ Get New Technology,” Palm Beach Jewish Journal, November 28, 2006. 14 An eruv is a boundary line, usually a wire, enclosing an area within which carrying and the pushing of carriages is permissible on the Sabbath. Eruvs have become pervasive within Orthodox communities in the United States. 15 For day schools, see Susan Meimand, “Jewish Education in South Florida,” in Greenbaum, ed., Jews of South Florida, 192-94. 16 Glatt, which means “smooth,” is a more stringent version of kosher meat. Glatt meat comes from cows that do not have lesions in their lungs.

Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida

Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties under reliable kashrut supervision. Cholov Yisrael milk is also readily available throughout the three counties.17 “Pre-Orthodox,” not “post-Orthodox,” better describes the Judaism discussed by Whitfield. Part of this is explained by the newness of Miami and Miami Beach and of its Jewish communities. Miami had only 170,000 full-time residents in 1940, and Miami Beach, which was incorporated only in 1915, had 35,000. Of these 205,000, about 8000 were Jews. After World War II, however, the area’s general and Jewish population boomed. By 1960, it had 140,000 Jews, and this comprised the sixth largest concentration of Jews in the nation, just behind Boston.18 This “pre-Orthodox” condition helps explain the success of Lubavitch Hasidim in the region. In contrast to the major cities of the Northeast and Middle West, South Florida did not have an Orthodox community of synagogues, yeshivas, and other institutions dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Lubavitch movement was able to partially fill this religious vacuum, and in the process it has become more influential in Florida, particularly in South Florida, than anywhere else in the United States. The impact of Lubavitch has been particularly strong in Palm Beach County, where by 2007 there were ten Lubavitch synagogues. Six decades earlier the city of Palm Beach in Palm Beach County was once an exclusive watering hole for WASP vacationers, and some of its hotels, most notably Henry Flagler’s The Breakers, discouraged Jewish patronage. Since 1998, the Lubavitch have held a menorah-lighting ceremony in Palm Beach marking Chanukah, the holiday symbolizing Jewish resistance to pagan values. This ceremony takes place a short distance from The Breakers and only a few blocks from Worth Avenue, the city’s legendary and exclusive shopping mecca.19 Lubavitch’s emphasis on out-reach to the non-religious was well suited for its missionary work among Jews in what was essentially a religious tabula rasa. Since 1960, when Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the head of Lubavitch, sent Abraham Korf to South Florida, Lubavitch has become a pervasive 17 Phineas A. Weberman interview conducted by author, December 7, 2006; Abraham Korf interview conducted by author, December 7, 2006. 18 Moore, To the Golden Cities, 25-26. 19 Larry Luxner, “The Jewish Traveler: Palm Beach,” Hadassah Magazine 88, February, 2007, 48. The Orthodox Palm Beach Synagogue, which is not a Lubavitch institution, is located two blocks north of The Breakers. As Luxner notes, “Its prominent Star of David seems to mock those early developers who sought to exclude Jews from the city” ( 50).

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presence in the region. By 2007 it had over one hundred and seventeen schools, synagogues, mikvehs, and study centers in the state. These included five elementary day schools, two girls high schools, two boys high schools, one rabbinical college, one post-high school seminary for girls, and a kollel where for a couple of years young married men study the Talmud and hasidic texts. There are Lubavitch synagogues today in South Florida towns and cities, including Coral Gables, Lauderhill, Jupiter, and Wellington where thirty years ago there were few Jews, much less Orthodox Jews. The Lubavitch, however, comprised only a small minority of the Orthodox of South Florida. More important were the modern Orthodox communities in places such as Hollywood, Miami Beach, and Boca Raton.20 The development of Orthodoxy in Boca Raton has been particularly noteworthy. In 2005, Rabbi Kenneth Brander of the Boca Raton Synagogue, a centrist Orthodox congregation, recounted the recent history of his community. “Twelve years ago there were no kosher butchers or bakeries up to Orthodox standards. Now there are a plethora of restaurants and their number keeps growing. Twelve years ago, we had a small day school that didn’t go through all the elementary grades. Now there are 375 kids in the lower school, 150 teens in the high school, and a new elementary school being started. The growth has been unbelievable.”21 The correlation which mid-century sociologists posited between Orthodoxy on the one hand and poverty and lower social status on the other lost its plausibility with the rapid ascent of the Orthodox in South Florida and elsewhere up the social and economic ladders. This upward Jewish mobility was not, of course, restricted to the Orthodox. Jews in general experienced rapid economic and social ascent. Historians and sociologists differ as to the reasons for this, but they agree that Jewish upward mobility is one of the great success stories of American history. Orthodox mobility is particularly noteworthy because of the restrictions that an Orthodox life-style has on economic success, such as not working on the Sabbath and the cost of parochial education. While poor Orthodox remain in South Florida, they are not present in great numbers. No longer are the Orthodox Jews of South Florida first-generation and working-class. They are, particularly of the “modern” or “centrist” variety, largely college-educated and professionals. As a result, Orthodox Jews are 20 Abraham Korf to author, December 29, 2006. 21 Linda Brockman, “Jews of Boca Raton,” in Greenbaum, ed., The Jews of South Florida, 118.

Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida

playing an increasing role in the economic, social, and political life of South Florida. One prominent example is the Rand Eye Institute, one of the most important facilities of its kind in South Florida. It was founded by a member of the Boca Raton Synagogue, and his name adorns the synagogue’s main sanctuary. South Florida also has a number of wealthy Orthodox builders and entrepreneurs. This socio-economic transformation of South Florida Orthodoxy was reflected in the demise of the kosher hotel business of Miami Beach, which catered to tourists from New York and other northern cities. Prior to the 1970s dozens of hotels on the beach provided three kosher meals daily for their patrons. This business went into decline during the late twentieth century, and then disappeared entirely in this century with the closing of the last holdouts, the Crown and Saxony. The newly affluent Orthodox did not want to stay in second-rate kosher hotels. Many were able to purchase expensive houses and condominiums, often selling for well over a half million dollars, on the ocean in Miami Beach or inland in Hollywood, Boca Raton, and other Orthodox enclaves. With this new market in mind, upscale apartment houses installed Sabbath elevators to attract Orthodox residents. These elevators, which stop automatically on the Sabbath, enable Orthodox residents and their guests to use them without violating the prohibition of pushing electrical buttons. Sabbath elevators are now common in the high-rise apartment buildings of Miami Beach’s “millionaires’ row.” The elevators have a symbiotic relationship to the Orthodox. Orthodox residents insist on Sabbath elevators, and, once in place, the elevators attract more Orthodox residents. Once an apartment house has attracted a critical mass of Orthodox residents, the next step is to open a room for daily religious services. There are a least a dozen of such apartment house synagogues along the ocean from Miami Beach to Hallandale frequented almost exclusively by Orthodox worshipers. Paralleling the decline of the kosher hotel business has been the emergence of successful kosher take-out establishments in Miami Beach, North Miami Beach, Aventura, Boca Raton, and elsewhere in the tri-county area. The customers of these businesses are mainly Orthodox. The demise of the kosher hotels meant that Orthodox snowbirds were now responsible for their own meals. This provided a clientele for take-out kosher food, particularly for the Sabbath. And as is true elsewhere, kosher take-out food became increasingly popular in South Florida because of the increasing number of Orthodox women with full-time jobs. Take-out food helps Orthodox women balance their work and home responsibilities.

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Another result of the collapse of the kosher hotel business and the large numbers of Orthodox women working outside the home has been an explosion in the number of kosher restaurants in the tri-county area. Fifty years ago these restaurants could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Today there are at least seventy such establishments, ranging from pizza and falafel joints to luxury restaurants serving meals costing well over seventy dollars each and offering an abundant selection of fine kosher wines and liquors. Some of these eateries provide take-out food as well as offering the sacred South Florida custom of early bird specials. While not all of the customers of the kosher restaurants are Orthodox, it is their patronage that determines their success and failure. One upscale kosher restaurant in South Florida is Prime Eighteen, one of four kosher restaurants in Aventura within a radius of one hundred and twenty feet. Prime Eighteen seeks to appeal to a sophisticated, well-traveled, and affluent clientele, who presumably will appreciate its cosmopolitan menu as well as the fact that it is strictly glatt kosher. It’s menu includes grilled asparagus, teriyaki steak skewers, spaghetti pomodora, sushimi sushi, hamachi scallion sushi roll, and roasted sea bass. A relative of mine who had recently flown to South Florida noted that his airplane ticket on JetBlue had cost less than one of the restaurant’s entrees.22 The menu of Grill Time in North Miami Beach is equally varied. It offers Thai beef salad, beer battered onion bread, sweet and spicy chili chicken, salmon Provencal, grilled Chilean sea bass, Korean steak, Gaza strip steak, Hawaiian tropical rib eye, Malaysian beef steak, Hungarian goulash, and roasted Asian lamb. Other kosher restaurants in South Florida specialize in Thai, Chinese, French, Italian, Yemenite, and Moroccan cuisine.23 22 Prime Eighteen, which opened in 2006, was preceded by another elegant eatery, Prime Grill. The menu of Prime Grill included duck salad appetizer and short ribs empanadas. 23 Rabbi Menasheh Klein in the tenth volume of his responsa collection Mishneh Halakhot (Brooklyn, 1987), 145-46, warned Jews not to eat at such restaurants because it was forbidden to walk in the ways of the Gentiles. This included eating non-Jewish foods and at nonJewish-type restaurants, even if they were kosher, because this could lead to assimilation. “In my opinion it is forbidden to enter restaurants that have non-Jewish names and non-Jewish styles of cooking and food which is given non-Jewish names. It is also forbidden to participate in weddings and other affairs where this style of food and drink are served.” Judging by the popularity of such restaurants and the popularity of sushi at weddings and other Jewish celebrations, Klein’s advice has been ignored. The China Bistro, an upscale restaurant in Aventura, not only features such specialty drinks as watermelon martinis, lime cosmos, and mai tais, it also offers to its kosher patrons imitation crab wontons, imitation calamari, Asian paella (“A combination of three fish, imitation ‘crab’ and ‘shrimp’ stir-fried with vegetables and a splash of white wine serve with a saffron rice”), and imitation shrimp and crab tempura sushi rolls.

Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida

Such restaurants are indicative of an Orthodox population now prosperous enough to afford such food and urbane enough to appreciate it. American-born Orthodox are more attracted to the new kosher cuisines than their immigrant ancestors. These restaurants reflects the extent to which the Orthodox of South Florida have assimilated the mores of American society in which patronizing expensive restaurants has been an important part of urban upper class behavior for over a century. Eating out is also a religiously acceptable nighttime activity for Orthodox Jews, who do not belong to country clubs or frequent nightclubs at which non-kosher food is served and immodest behavior is condoned. Going to restaurants thus fills a social void. The phenomenon of upscale kosher restaurants is, of course, not unique to South Florida. In September 1989, the New York Times discussed several such restaurants in an article titled “Kosher Cooking: Goodbye Derma, Hello Sushi.” The article quoted Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald of New York City’s Lincoln Square Synagogue. “The Orthodox consumer has become a lot more affluent. While they are giving more to charity, they have also acquired a taste and curiosity for the finer things in life.” One restaurant mentioned by the Times was Levana in New York City. Here customers could dine on venison, chicken rolled in pecans with black trumpet mushrooms, and mahi-mahi. Another was the Madras Palace, also in Manhattan. This kosher Indian restaurant served dishes such as rava masal dosai (wheat crepes filled with potatoes, onions, and nuts) and gobhi masala curry (cauliflower curry). The Times also mentioned Guiseppe Goldberg’s, a restaurant in Miami Beach’s Sans Souci Hotel. It offered Italian dishes such as linguini puttanesca.24 The February, 1997 issue of Hadassah Magazine discussed several upscale kosher restaurants in New York City offering a variety of cuisines besides high cholesterol chopped liver, derma, beef flanken, pastrami sandwiches, and brisket. One woman quoted by the magazine said, “For the first time in my life I can feel like anyone else. I can eat kosher Persian, Indian, Middle Eastern, French, Japanese. Now if we only had a good kosher Mexican restaurant.”

24 Dena Kleinman, “Kosher Cooking: Goodbye Derma, Hello Sushi,” New York Times, September 7, 1987. It is suggestive that Lou G. Siegel’s, which was founded in 1917 and was the only traditional kosher restaurant mentioned by Kleinman, folded in the 1990s. “It’s a delicate balance,” an executive at Lou G. Siegel said. It’s the ‘boiled beef flanken’ customer that made Siegel’s the tradition it is, and we’re not willing to let that go. Yet at the same time, we want to open our doors to the younger, more food-conscious consumer.” Evidently the restaurant was unsuccessful. For a discussion of Le Marais, a kosher steak house, and Hasikara, a kosher Japanese restaurant, both in Manhattan, see J. Walman, “Sushi and Cigars: Kosher Dining Goes Mainstream,” Forward, July 5, 1996.

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She could have satisfied this craving in several restaurants in South Florida.25 A decade later the same magazine noted, “kosher French restaurants established by recent émigrés from France serve everything from cassoulet to feather-light crepes in the shopping centers that line South Florida’s boulevards.”26 The Orthodox synagogues of South Florida are as diverse as its kosher restaurants. There is a synagogue for virtually every major ethnic group and for every version of contemporary Orthodoxy. There are four Sephardic synagogues in Aventura attended by immigrants from North Africa and their offspring, a Bukharan synagogue off 41st Street in Miami Beach, and a Russian Lubavitch synagogue in Sunny Isles. There are large modern Orthodox congregations in Miami Beach and Boca Raton as well as small Haredi congregations in Miami Beach and North Miami Beach. And there are synagogues of several other Hasidic groups besides the Lubavitch. Orthodoxy also now has a presence in higher education in South Florida. In the early twenty-first century, a group of Orthodox benefactors established the Collegiate Learning Experience, which funded the salary and living expenses of an Orthodox rabbi at the University of Miami. It was modeled on a program instituted by a group of Jewish philanthropists for students at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The responsibilities of the Orthodox rabbi at the University of Miami include providing Sabbath hospitality, religious services, and religious classes. It was hoped that these would make Orthodox students feel more at home in Coral Gables. (The Hillel Center at the University of Miami also provides activities for Orthodox students.) The CLE later established a similar program at the Biscayne Bay branch of Florida International University in North Miami Beach, which has a significant number of Latin American Jewish students. Representatives of Lubavitch also engaged in outreach directed at local college students, often in competition with that of the CLE.27 Sixty miles north of the University of Miami, the Hillel Center at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, home to almost two thousand Jewish students, sponsors a kosher cafe. “We have some students who actually only eat 25 Joan Nathan, “Kosher and Classy,” Hadassah Magazine 78, February 1997, 28-32. 26 Sara Liss, “The Jewish State of Florida,” Hadassah Magazine 88, February 2007, 26. A photo accompanying this article shows a traditional Cuban Jewish family eating Cuban-style foods in the family succah. 27 Professor Jeffrey Shoulson, University of Miami, interview conducted by author, December 26, 2006.

Chapter 5. A Shtetl in the Sun: Orthodoxy in Southern Florida

kosher and they can’t eat on campus right now,” said a Hillel representative shortly before the cafe opened its doors. Stacy Volnick, the director of the university’s business services, noted that the kosher cafe was part of an attempt to diversify the food choices on campus. “What we’re trying to do is have our food service operation reflect the diversity of our students and this is just the start of that goal.”28 In 2006 Touro College, an Orthodox educational conglomerate headquartered in New York City, opened a branch in Miami Beach. For readers of To the Golden Cities, it is ironic that the college rents space in the building housing Temple Emanu-El. Seventy students from South Florida enrolled for that year’s fall semester, taking undergraduate courses in business management and administration, psychology, and Judaic studies, and graduate courses in education. Literature for the college did not advertise the fact that it is an Orthodox institution. A college brochure simply stated that with the founding of Touro College South, Touro College “continues to realize its vision of intellectual growth under Jewish sponsorship.” This was in keeping with Touro College’s mission statement that describes it as “an independent institution of higher and professional education under Jewish sponsorship,” that aspires “to strengthen Jewish life and perpetuate the Judaic tradition on the college campus, and to contribute to the building of a better society for all through educational opportunities.”29 This growing Orthodox profile did not go unnoticed by the state’s politicians, particularly by Republicans who shared the conservative social agenda of the Orthodox. Politicians courted them, and a symbolic Orthodox presence became common at local and state political gatherings, such as inaugurations and dedications. Orthodox political efforts met with mixed success. They were unable to halt the advance of the gay rights movement in South Florida, unsurprising considering the many homosexuals living in the Miami area, particularly in the South Beach area of Miami Beach. Orthodox leaders were more successful regarding gender issues. In the early 1980s they joined with other groups in defeating a renewed attempt in the state legislature to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.30 The recent experience of Orthodoxy in South Florida, as well as that of Orthodoxy nationally, confirms the unpredictability of history, the difficulty of 28 Miller, “Kosher Cafe to Open on FAU Campus.” 29 http:www.touro.edu/general/mission.asp. 30 Phineas A. Weberman interview conducted by author, December 26, 2006.

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accurately predicting social trends, and the need for skepticism when confronted with seemingly plausible sociological and historical paradigms. Few would have predicted in 1960 that a vibrant Orthodox community would emerge in this land of sun and fun. By 1994, however, it was already clear that Orthodoxy was not a fringe and dying phenomenon in South Florida. While Moore stated that the born-again Jews of Miami were presented with “new possibilities for the American Jewish future,” one of these possibilities was not new at all. Rather, it was the opportunity to create a traditional Jewish life in the midst of the “leisure, freedom and security” of this new garden of yidn.31 At first glance there appears to be nothing distinctive in the sociology and history of South Florida to account for this Orthodox revival. Orthodoxy has been sufficiently flexible to adapt to diverse geographical settings such as Vilna, Jerusalem, Casablanca, London, Paris, and Brooklyn. Today there are vibrant Orthodox communities in snowbelt Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago, as well as in Sunbelt Atlanta, Phoenix, and Houston. One could have assumed that Orthodoxy would flourish in South Florida simply because of the critical mass of the area’s Jewish population. On the other hand, one could also have presumed that those inclined to Orthodoxy would have avoided South Florida because of its hedonistic lifestyle. If the story of Orthodoxy in South Florida proves anything, it is that geography is not destiny.

31 Moore, To the Golden Cities, 275.

Chapter 6

The Crisis of Conservative Judaism Conservative Judaism has been experiencing several serious difficulties that have led even sympathetic observers to doubt its long-term viability. When speaking of a crisis within Conservative Judaism one has to distinguish between Conservative Judaism as an institution and Conservative Judaism as a movement. The institutions of Conservative Judaism—its synagogues, summer camps, youth organizations, sisterhoods and men’s organizations, seminaries, rabbinate—will undoubtedly live on. The crisis, rather, revolves around Conservative Judaism as a movement, defined as a significant number of people whose daily lives reflect the acceptance of a distinctive way of life as articulated by an intelligentsia. Recent histories of American Judaism have failed to explore in depth this crisis, perhaps because this would involve drawing into question several sacred cows. Two of these sacred cows involve issues of gender and homosexuality. Traditional Judaism has from the beginning drawn a sharp line between the role of men and women both within and outside the synagogue. A woman’s primary responsibility was viewed as the raising of children, and she was thus exempt from many religious obligations because of the demands this put on her time. Women were also forbidden to be rabbis because the Talmud seems to preclude them from serving as judges, and acting as a judge is an important element in a rabbi’s job description. A small number of Orthodox synagogues have hired women to be de facto rabbis with the understanding that they cannot serve as judges. Conservative Judaism, in contrast, opted to remove all religious distinctions between the genders, including the elimination of the barrier separating men’s and women’s sections in the synagogue and the ordination of women as rabbis. The other sacred cow involves homosexuality, particularly religiously sanctioned gay marriages and ordaining openly gay rabbis, both male and female. These have been abhorrent to traditional Jews who point to the biblical strictures against homosexuality. Recently some progressive Orthodox thinkers have taken a more welcoming stance toward homosexuals, but this is a minority position.

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By contrast, the various Conservative seminaries now ordain homosexuals, and some Conservative rabbis perform same-sex weddings. The first of the problems confronting Conservative Judaism is one of numbers. “We are in deep trouble,” declared Edward Feinstein, rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom Synagogue in Encino, California, a large Conservative congregation. “There isn’t a single demographic that is encouraging for the future of Conservative Judaism. Not one.” The National Jewish Population Survey of 2001-2 reported that the percentage of congregationally affiliated American Jews who identified with Conservative Judaism had declined from forty-three percent to thirty-three percent during the 1990s, and this decline, as the 2011 survey of Jews in the New York area indicated, has continued during the past decade. Two decades ago the Conservative movement was the largest denomination within American Judaism. By the year 2000 it had been overtaken by the Reform movement, which had increased its percentage from thirty-five percent to thirty-nine percent, and the gap between the two has continued to widen. In 1985 there were 850 Conservative synagogues in North America. Since then, around two hundred have either folded or merged with Reform congregations. There is little prospect in the near term that this declension can be reversed. Reform congregations have many more children enrolled in their educational programs than do Conservative synagogues, and the Conservative movement has had more difficulty in retaining the loyalty of its youth. This demographic hemorrhaging is reflected in the fact that the number of schools affiliated with the Conservative movement and the number of children attending these schools has declined by a third during the past two decades. Not surprisingly, the Conservative movement has been experiencing financial pressures and has had to curtail its programming. Conservative Judaism has become “leaner,” but it certainly has not become “meaner” if this implies a more committed, albeit smaller, constituency. The second problem, closely related to the first as a cause and as an effect, is one of declining morale. Judging from pronouncements from its leaders and from private conversations with several Conservative rabbis, the mood within the movement is bleak, and many of its leaders fear it has lost its raison d’être and is ideologically adrift. A narrative of decline now dominates discussion of the movement’s future. Its leaders have called for reassessment and renewal, but such bromides will be ineffective as long as the sources of its problems are not understood. Nor will vacuous calls for outreach to the unaffiliated and disaffected, or for the establishment of new spiritual communities, be successful as long as the religious message of Conservative Judaism remains so cloudy. The central

Chapter 6. The Crisis of Conservative Judais

issue for Conservative Judaism is whether it can remain faithful to Jewish tradition and intellectual honesty while rejecting fundamentalism, and whether it can reconcile the individualism and personal autonomy so valued by Americans with the respect for community and rabbinic precedent central to Jewish tradition. A centrist movement that seeks to be all things to all people will certainly not flourish. For some this crisis has had a personal dimension. In one notable example the son of a prominent Conservative rabbi in New Jersey, who had been president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the rabbinic arm of Conservative Judaism, was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi and was employed by an Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan. In another the son of a Conservative rabbi in Philadelphia has become a leading Orthodox authority on the Talmud. As more than one Conservative leader has somberly noted, our failures become Reform Jews and our successes become Orthodox. It had been the hope of the founders of the Conservative movement in the early twentieth century that it would embody a modern and an Americanized version of traditional Judaism. As late as the 1920s it was often difficult to distinguish between Orthodox and Conservative synagogues, and there was even talk of merging Yeshiva College (an Orthodox institution) with the Jewish Theological Seminary (a Conservative one). It was common then for graduates of Yeshiva College to be ordained at the Seminary and then to assume pulpits at Conservative congregations. Conservative Judaism emphasized its loyalty to “the Torah and its historical exposition,” the observance of Sabbath and the dietary laws, and maintenance of the traditional liturgy. When in 1902 Solomon Schechter became the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, his philosophy of “Catholic Israel” shaped the thinking of the early Conservative movement. By “Catholic Israel” he meant a big tent Judaism that would be open to innovation and yet respectful of Jewish tradition. His “vision of a traditional service infused with English, decorum, and modern education,” writes Michael R. Cohen in his recent book, The Birth of Conservative Judaism (2012), was perfectly compatible with what later became known as “Modern Orthodoxy.” Schechter believed that Jewish law could and must change, but this could occur only when the various segments of the Jewish people were willing to go along. Schechter died in 1915, and later generations of JTS graduates were less committed to “Catholic Israel.” This was particularly after World War II when graduates of the seminary wanted Conservative Judaism to become a distinctive Jewish movement with a unique approach to Jewish law and tradition.

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Symptomatic of this was the change in 1991 in the name of the United Synagogue of America, the congregational organization of Conservative Jewish synagogues, to the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. The Conservative assumption was that as the immigrant population died out, European-style Orthodoxy would slowly disappear, a victim of upward social and economic mobility, acculturation, and Americanization, and that Conservative Judaism would fill the resulting vacuum. This was one of the themes of Nathan Glazer’s 1957 book, American Judaism. Orthodoxy might not totally disappear, but, Glazer argued, it would be restricted to those outside the American Jewish mainstream, such as recent immigrants, Hasidic sects, and residents of poor inner-city neighborhoods. The decades immediately after World War II were the golden age of Conservative Judaism, and it was infused by a sense of triumphalism. From 1945 to 1965, 450 new congregations joined the United Synagogue of America, the congregational organization of Conservative Judaism—more than the combined total of new Reform and Orthodox congregations. In 1956 and 1957 alone, 130 congregations joined the United Synagogue. Some of these were newly founded congregations, while others were former Orthodox congregations. By the 1960s Conservative Judaism was the largest denomination within American Judaism, and its leaders expected that the movement would continue expanding. This sense of triumph permeated Marshall Sklare’s pioneering 1955 sociological study, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement. The volume’s concluding chapter claimed that the movement had made “a notable contribution to survivalism and . . . provides a significant institutional framework for a possible revivified Judaism.” There was no reason, Sklare concluded, why “the vitality of Conservatism should not continue for quite some time.” Five years later, Conservative Rabbi Max Routtenberg told his rabbinic colleagues that “the future belongs to us. The tide of Conservative Judaism is still running strongly and will yet increase in the next generation or two. It meets the needs of American Jews better than Reform or Orthodoxy. It holds within it promise of an abundant and meaningful life, and there are many who believe that this promise will be fulfilled.” Although I was too young to understand the social and intellectual forces at work, I experienced this flowering of Conservative Judaism as a boy. In January 1951 my bar mitzvah ceremony occurred at B’nai Israel Congregation in Washington, DC, an Orthodox congregation located in a small building, formerly a church. That same year the congregation moved four blocks away to a much

Chapter 6. The Crisis of Conservative Judais

larger building in a prestigious neighborhood one block from the home of Clark Griffith, the owner of the Washington Senators, the city’s major league baseball team. When the congregation moved it changed its affiliation from Orthodox to Conservative and provided family pews so that men and women could sit together in keeping with modern social norms rather than separately as in Orthodox synagogues. This change was sanctioned, or at least not strenuously opposed, by the congregation’s ostensibly Orthodox rabbi. It was not coincidental that the synagogue moved to the new and prestigious address and simultaneously changed its religious affiliation since both were responses to the same status aspirations. B’nai Israel would eventually become the largest Conservative synagogue in metropolitan Washington. By 1951 the ties of the mostly American-born and increasingly affluent Jews of B’nai Israel to Orthodoxy had become attenuated, and they were attracted to Conservative Judaism’s more up-scale image and its flexibility regarding Jewish observance. Three years earlier the Rabbinical Assembly, the rabbinical arm of the Conservative movement, had rejected a resolution that its Committee on Jewish Law and Standards should be instructed “to hold itself bound by the authority of Jewish law and within the frame of Jewish law.” In 1950 the committee sanctioned traveling in an automobile on the Sabbath as long as this was necessary to attend Sabbath services. The post-war spread of the Jewish population had made it difficult, if not impossible, for many Jews to walk to synagogue. By then the membership of B’nai Israel had spread to the furthest reaches of northwest Washington and even into the adjacent suburbs. In 1950 the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards also approved the use of electricity on the Sabbath in order to enhance enjoyment of the day. Conservative Judaism was also far more open than Orthodoxy to the demands of women for gender equality. In 1954 the Rabbinical Assembly voted in principle to equalize the status of women in Jewish law. In 1973 it allowed women to be counted toward the quorum of ten adults needed for communal prayer, and in 1983 the faculty of JTS voted to admit women into its rabbinic program. Two years later the Seminary ordained Amy Eilberg, the daughter of a former Pennsylvania congressman. This was done over the protests of members of the Talmud faculty of JTS, presumably the authority on such matters. The drive for gender equality did not go unchallenged. David Halivni Weiss, one of JTS’s most distinguished Talmudists, left JTS for a position at Columbia University and became the guru of an organization of dissident rabbis called the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism, which later became the Union for

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Traditional Judaism (note the dropping of the word “Conservative”). The group even founded its own seminary in competition to JTS. The gender question and other issues have led to debate within the movement over the nature of Conservative Judaism. What is it? What does it mean to be a centrist traditional Jewish movement? What distinguishes Conservative Judaism from Reform, and are the differences large enough to justify institutional independence? Can Conservative Judaism continue to claim that it is faithful to Jewish tradition and law? Where does tradition end and innovation begin? How large can the Conservative Judaism tent be before it ceases to be Conservative? For the majority of the Conservative laity, who, by and large, are indifferent to matters of religious ideology and Jewish observance, the distinctions between Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism have become increasingly irrelevant. Both movements are supportive of Zionism, have come to terms with modern American culture, and demand little in the way of observance. Just as Protestants move easily from a Methodist to an Episcopal church, so Conservative Jews move with little difficulty from a Conservative to a Reform synagogue at the drop of a hat, or, in this case, at the drop of a skullcap. Conservative Judaism has also faced a challenge from the right. Orthodox Judaism in America has, to the surprise of many, unexpectedly prospered during the past half-century. In the mid-twentieth century, sociologists of religion believed the inexorable march of secularism would force the decline of conservative religion in general and Orthodox Judaism in particular. Any resuscitation of Orthodoxy would only temporarily exhume a religious ideology incompatible with the regnant social and intellectual trends. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, however, observers began noticing that Orthodox Judaism was experiencing a renaissance. Not only did this baffle the sociologists, but it also confounded leaders of Conservative Judaism which now faced an unexpected and serious challenge from an Orthodoxy which refused to acknowledge it as a legitimate form of traditional Judaism. The “revival of Orthodox Judaism,” writes the historian Jonathan D. Sarna, “is one of the great stories of postwar Judaism.” The 2001-2002 national Jewish population survey estimated that the share of Orthodox Jews among Jews affiliated with a synagogue had increased from sixteen percent to twenty-one percent during the 1990s. This number has grown even more in the past decade, and it would not surprise demographers if the Orthodox percentage, because of the prolific Orthodox birth rate, is now higher than that of Conservative Judaism. When Marshall Sklare brought out a second edition of Conservative Judaism in 1972, he included a new chapter on “Recent Developments in Conservative

Chapter 6. The Crisis of Conservative Judais

Judaism.” Here he claimed that Conservative Judaism was in the midst of a “crisis” stemming from, among other things, the revitalization of Orthodoxy. “The belief among Conservative leaders that the movement’s approach to halachah [ Jewish law] had the power to maintain observance, as well as to inspire its renewal,” he said, “has proved illusory.” The resurgence of Orthodoxy refuted the Conservative assumption that Orthodoxy could not attract the affluent, well educated, and upwardly socially mobile, and that the traditionally minded among them would inevitably gravitate to Conservative Judaism. During the past half a century the exact opposite has occurred. Jews who identify with Modern or Centrist Orthodoxy are by and large college graduates, some with degrees from America’s most prestigious universities, have successful careers in business and the professions, and worship in elegant buildings. (This in contrast to the Hasidic groups of Brooklyn or to Jews living within the encapsulated yeshiva world of Monsey, New York, the Boro Park neighborhood in Brooklyn, and Lakewood, New Jersey.) The flourishing of Modern Orthodoxy has deprived Conservative Judaism of what it once perceived to be its natural constituency, and its contemporary discontents are due in part to its need to discover a new clientele and to define a new mission. This has been difficult. In a 2007 article in Commentary, Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at JTS, described what he termed “The Perplexities of Conservative Judaism.” His article was prompted by the attempt that year of Conservative Judaism’s leaders to reconcile the opposition of Jewish texts and tradition to homosexuality with the growing agitation among the Conservative laity and rabbinate in support of single-sex marriage and the ordination of gays and lesbians. This attempt to square the circle has proven to be impossible, and the pronouncements on homosexuality emanating from the movement were, as one would expect, contradictory. This did not stop the two American Conservative seminaries from announcing that they would immediately accept homosexuals as rabbinic students or the Rabbinical Assembly from recognizing their graduates as legitimate Conservative rabbis. The most dramatic public expression of the discontents of contemporary Conservative Judaism had occurred the previous May when Ismar Schorsch, the outgoing chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, gave the commencement address. Instead of offering the optimistic clichés typical on such occasions, Schorsch, the titular head of Conservative Judaism, bitterly attacked the movement and the institution over which he had presided for two decades.

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He claimed that Conservative Judaism’s recent attempts to amalgamate truth and faith were “inane,” that “impoverishment” and “malaise” characterized the seminary’s rabbinical students who craved a “quick spiritual fix” rather than immersion in Judaism’s basic texts, and that Conservative Judaism lacked spiritual passion and suffered from “a grievous failure of nerve.” At one point he attacked “pampered and promiscuous individuals who scorn all contemporary norms.” It was unclear whether he was referring to that year’s graduates, to Conservative Jews in general, or to American Jewry at large, but the members of the audience believed he was talking about them and that his words were in exceedingly bad taste, to say the least. Schorsch’s address was not merely the rant of a disappointed academic toward his students for failing to live up to his lofty expectations. It was also a pessimistic prognosis by an insider of a movement that he believed had seen its better days and of its flagship institution that he thought was sinking. While Conservative Jews were dumbfounded by Schorsch’s words, Orthodox Jews welcomed them. “As another Jewish heretic movement nears its end,” one Orthodox Jew wrote on the Internet, “its more perceptive members take notice and wring their hands. When will they take the next logical step and return to their real roots—traditional Torah Judaism?” Another Orthodox Jew claimed that Schorsch’s speech was further confirmation of the fact that Conservative Judaism lacked “a distinctive outlook that can win support. What was built to be relevant is now the picture of irrelevance.” Schorsch’s words were indiscreet but hardly surprising. He had voiced similar sentiments to his fellow Conservative rabbis two months before at the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly. He criticized them for pushing for the ordination of gay clergy and same-sex marriages. “What ails the Conservative movement is that it has lost faith in itself,” he told his unsympathetic audience. Should homosexuality be accepted, he said, it would remove one of the major remaining distinctions between Reform and Conservative Judaism, would raise legitimate questions regarding Conservative Judaism’s traditionalist credentials, and prompt rabbis and lay people to leave the movement. Neal Gilman, a professor at JTS, speaking for many within the Conservative world, thought the developments Schorsch lamented to be advances. At the 2005 convention of the United Synagogue in Boston, he had urged Conservative Judaism to “abandon its claim that we are a halakhic movement.” He offered a new definition of Conservative Judaism: “living with ambiguity.” But no change in nomenclature could conceal the major challenge to Conservative Judaism of reconciling distinctiveness with diversity. If halakhah is no longer

Chapter 6. The Crisis of Conservative Judais

determinative, what differentiates Conservative Judaism from Reform? And why should anyone want to live with ambiguity when there are rival movements offering more clarity and certainty? “Which way will the movement go?” Michael R. Cohen asked. “Will it return to Schechter’s Catholic Israel, seeking to unite the American Jewish world behind a message of a traditional Judaism that is relevant in the lives of modern Americans? . . . Struggling between a commitment to tradition and a desire for change, between those who advocate for a broadly encompassing ‘big tent’ movement and those who seek a more narrowly defined, ideologically coherent one, the Conservative movement faces difficult choices.” These choices are made even more difficult because of the movement’s dwindling numbers and the challenges emanating from Reform and Orthodoxy. Before they even attempt to make any choices the leaders of Conservative Judaism should decide whether they currently face a problem for which there are answers or whether they are confronting a condition for which there are no solutions.

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Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case It is no secret that contemporary American Modern Orthodoxy is in crisis. This would have surprised observers of American Judaism a half century ago who were predicting that Orthodoxy of any variety would soon be such a marginal phenomenon that there would be nothing to have a crisis about. Orthodoxy, it was believed, was fated to disappear, or at least be restricted to the cultural backwaters of American Jewry such as the Lower East Side of New York and the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. The dominant sociological model of religion posited that acculturation and social and economic mobility were incompatible with religious fundamentalism. From this perspective, it was simply inconceivable that Orthodoxy could transplant itself to affluent suburbia and retain the loyalties of the American-born and college-educated children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation. The only thing left for Orthodoxy was to die gracefully. Marshall Sklare’s Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement, a classic in American Jewish sociology, claimed in 1955 that the history of Orthodoxy in the United States “can be written in terms of a case study of institutional decay.” For Jews eager to join the American mainstream, Sklare wrote, “Orthodoxy bears the stigma of the ‘ghetto.’ They feel that Orthodox procedures are out of keeping with the type of behavior expected of the middle class, that Orthodoxy will not raise their status among fellow-Jews of higher social position, and also that Orthodoxy will not help to improve Jewish-Gentile relations.” Orthodoxy, Sklare concluded, had a bleak future, dependent as it was on elderly immigrants and those left behind in the mobility process. The future of traditional Judaism in America, he declared, was in the hands of the Conservative movement.1 1

Marshall Sklare, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement (New York, 1955, 1972), 43, 73.

Chapter 7. Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case

Other scholars agreed with Sklare. The sociologist-historian Nathan Glazer wrote in his American Judaism, published two years after Conservative Judaism, that American Jews saw Orthodoxy as an anthropological survival incompatible with middle-class respectability. It was thus not surprising that Orthodoxy did not appeal to the more prosperous and Americanized sections of the Jewish community. In the final chapter of American Judaism, Glazer asked where could American Jews turn to if they rejected the bland Judaism of middle-class suburbia and opted for a “more alive and meaningful” religion. The best answer he could supply was the “exotic” Hasidic courts of Williamsburg and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. It was symptomatic of the widespread belief in the incompatibility of Orthodoxy and mainstream American culture that Glazer believed the future of Orthodoxy rested with those whom he described as a “particularly backward and archaic group of Jews.”2 Orthodox leaders also believed that Orthodoxy could not flourish in the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, Eastern European rabbis argued that the individualism, materialism, and fluidity of American life were incompatible with Orthodoxy, and they urged their followers not to migrate to this “trefa land,” where, to quote the Ridbaz (Rabbi Jacob David Willowski), “even the stones are impure.”3 The Hafetz Hayyim, the greatest figure in early twentieth-century East European Orthodoxy, agreed. “Whoever wishes to live properly before God,” he said, “must not settle in that country.”4 In America, it was noted, the Sabbath was widely desecrated, kashrut supervision was a joke, the laws of family purity were disregarded, only a handful of Orthodox Jewish schools existed, and only a few distinguished rabbis and scholars had taken up residence. While the Jews might prosper economically in America, it would be at the sacrifice of their souls. This was the theme of what is arguably the most important fictional treatment of the East European Jewish migration to America, Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David Levinsky, published in 1917.5 2 Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago, 1957), 144-47. 3

Aaron Rothkoff, “The American Sojourns of Ridbaz: Religious Problems Within the Immigrant Community,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 57 ( June 1968): 260.

4

Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Resisters and Accommodators: Varieties of Orthodox Rabbis in America, 1886-1983,” American Jewish Archives 35 (November 1983): 150.

5

For the low level of religious observance in the immigrant generation, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Twentieth-Century American Orthodoxy’s Era of Non-Observance 1900-1960,” Torah uMadda Journal 9 (2000): 87-107, and Gurock, From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth Century America (Ann Arbor: 1998), 5-14.

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The overwhelming majority of East European immigrants to America, contrary to popular mythology, were not Orthodox. In fact, despite the idealized recollections of Fiddler on the Roof and other sentimental recollections of East European Jewry, most had not even been Orthodox back in Europe, and their decision to immigrate was simply another step in their estrangement from the religious world of their fathers. “Is it not clear,” Conservative Rabbi Herbert Parzen wrote a half century ago, “that those who cry out today against the secularization of Jewish life in America must seek its origins not in the fleshpots of New York, but back across the sea in the supposedly piety-bound ghettos of the Pale?”6 The small Orthodox synagogues the immigrants established in America were not indicative of their religious practices. Rather, as the sociologist Charles S. Liebman has written, they “were social forums and benevolent societies adapted to the requirements of poor, unacculturated people.” Orthodoxy was the Judaism they knew, not the Judaism they practiced.7 Even the Orthodox in America were pessimistic about Orthodoxy’s future, and for good reason. Orthodoxy seemed to have little appeal to their children and grandchildren, who were flocking to Conservative and Reform congregations, seemingly at the drop of a hat. When Immanuel Jakobovits resigned the pulpit of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York in 1966 to become the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, he recalled that the major challenge he faced when he arrived in New York in 1958 had been “to make Orthodoxy elegant and fashionable and to show that you don’t have to live on the Lower East Side in squalor to be a strictly traditional Jew.”8 By the 1960s, however, it was clear that the sociological model identifying right-wing religion with low social and economic standing was no longer credible.9 Much to the surprise of sociologists, various forms of right-wing religion found among both Christians and Jews were perfectly compatible with higher education, economic and social mobility, and cosmopolitanism. And by the 1960s, Orthodox Judaism had transplanted itself to suburbia and had

6

Herbert Parzen, “When Secularism Came to Russian Jewry,” Commentary, April 1952, 362.

7

Charles S. Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,” in American Jewish Year Book 1965, ed. Morris Fine and Milton Himmelfarb (New York, 1965), 28.

8

James Yaffe, The American Jews: Portrait of a Split Personality (New York, 1968), 89.

9

Charles S. Liebman, “A Sociological Analysis of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Judaism 13 (Winter 1966): 285-304.

Chapter 7. Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case

become the religion of choice of a surprising number of physicians, lawyers, engineers, academicians, and other professionals. When Marshall Sklare brought out a second edition of Conservative Judaism in 1972, he declared that the laws of religious sociology had seemingly been repealed. “Unaccountably,” he wrote, “Orthodoxy has refused to assume the role of invalid. Rather, it has transformed itself into a growing force in American Jewish life. It has reasserted its claim of being the authentic interpretation of Judaism.”10 To the surprise of the non-Orthodox who viewed Orthodoxy as an anachronism, the Orthodox now exhibited a spirit of triumphalism born of the conviction that they, and they alone, were the future of American Judaism, and that other forms of Judaism were illegitimate and doomed. This élan resulted in Orthodox “outreach” activity among Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews, particularly among the young. Now it was the non-Orthodox who felt under siege.11 At the same time that Orthodoxy was coming of age, Modern Orthodoxy, the branch of Orthodoxy identified with Yeshiva University and with this institution’s underlying philosophy of “Torah u-Madda” (the synthesis of traditional Judaism and Western culture), was itself being challenged by a sectarian Orthodoxy centered in the yeshiva world. Modern Orthodoxy is differentiated from right-wing Orthodoxy by its approval of secular higher education, its acceptance of middle-class norms of enjoyment, social relations, and dress (“think Yiddish but dress British”), and by its willingness to grant non-Orthodox forms of Judaism a modicum of legitimacy. For the sectarian Orthodox, Modern Orthodoxy reflected an assimilationist outlook unable to withstand the pressures of acculturation and secularization. The sectarian Orthodox were not entirely wrong. Modern Orthodox Jews have sought, often unsuccessfully, to reconcile the demands of halakhah with the attractions of American materialism, to live a lifestyle that Liebman has described as “half-pagan, half-halakhic.”12The sociologist Samuel C. Heilman, himself a Modern Orthodox Jew, agreed. The Modern Orthodox Jew, he wrote in 1979, “has learned to live with the sociological ambivalence inherent in his

10 Sklare, Conservative Judaism, 264-66. 11 Wertheimer, A People Divided, ch. 6. This chapter is titled “Orthodoxy: Triumphalism on the Right.” 12 Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,” 91.

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dualistic identity. A genuine homo duplex, burnished with a cosmopolitan parochialism, he waits for the Messiah to solve his problem.”13 The right-wing Orthodox of the yeshiva world feel no such ambivalence. They disdain the compromises of Modern Orthodoxy, are convinced that the be-all and end-all of Jewish life is the intensive study of the Talmud, and believe that the study of literature, philosophy, and history are, at best, a waste of time, and, at worst, a threat to Torah-true Judaism. Stung by such criticisms regarding their modernity, many of the Modern Orthodox now prefer to call themselves “Centrist” Orthodox. The influence of the sectarian Orthodox on Modern Orthodoxy has involved more than semantics. Because of the relatively low salaries in Jewish education, the Modern Orthodox’ day schools have had difficulty in filling their teaching positions with their own kind. They have been forced to hire devotees of sectarian Orthodoxy, who inevitably influence the religious orientation of their students. And during a period when American culture, as evidenced by the mass media, has coarsened, the sectarian Orthodox’s rejection of the synthesis of Orthodox Judaism with Western culture resonates more strongly. Another cause of the growth of right-wing Orthodoxy was the settling in America of Orthodox Holocaust survivors (and their descendants). The Orthodox survivors were forced to flee Europe, and they came to America not as immigrants but as émigrés. Had the Holocaust never occurred, they would have remained in Europe, close to their rabbis, their yeshivas, and their synagogues, and they sought to reconstruct the Jewish life they knew in Europe. Reconciling traditional Judaism with the best of Western culture is for them of little importance. Some observers of American Orthodoxy have argued that the sectarian Orthodox’s criticisms of Modern Orthodoxy, along with the attractions of some Modern Orthodox children to right-wing Orthodoxy, have demoralized the Modern Orthodox. Even at Yeshiva University, the leading institution of Modern Orthodoxy, the philosophy of Torah u-Madda has been repudiated by most of the faculty of its rabbinic seminary. For the Modern Orthodox, this is bizarre. Just as Conservative Judaism was surprised by the refusal of the Modern Orthodox to roll over and die, so has Modern Orthodoxy been shocked by the resurgence of an Orthodoxy which disdains higher education and western culture. “Shaken and troubled by its encounter with the postwar Orthodox,” the 13 Samuel C. Heilman, “Inner and Outer Identities: Sociological Ambivalence Among Orthodox Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 39 (Summer 1979): 238.

Chapter 7. Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case

historian Jenna W. Joselit argued, Modern Orthodoxy has been “unable to hold its own in the face of withering criticism.” “Modern Orthodoxy’s stock,” David Singer wrote in 2001, was “currently at an all-time low. Indeed, the movement is in deep crisis—its leaders demoralized, its institutions weakened, its mass base shrinking rapidly.” The spokesmen for Modern Orthodoxy have been “simply unable to stand up to the challenge presented by Orthodox traditionalism.”14 In the mid-1990s, several prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis responded to the challenge of the sectarian Orthodox by founding EDAH (Hebrew for congregation), an organization dedicated to disseminating the classic Modern Orthodox message. The most important item on EDAH’s agenda was elevating the status of women within Orthodoxy, particularly within the synagogue. Although EDAH has been successful in attracting thousands of people to its conventions, including important rabbis and lay figures, its slogan, “the courage to be modern and Orthodox,” reflects the pessimism within Modern Orthodoxy. Courage is appropriate for those facing difficult challenges, not for those imbued with the prospect of imminent victory. The tensions within Modern Orthodoxy were exhibited on a local level in the 1990s in Congregation Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob and David of West Orange (AABJ&D), New Jersey, the leading Orthodox congregation in Essex and Morris counties. I have been affiliated with the congregation since 1969, and as an academically trained historian and an observer of the sociology of American religion, I have closely watched and thought about its growth. Indeed, much of my writing on American Judaism has come from viewing developments on the ground, so to speak, in West Orange. The evolution of the West Orange Orthodox community has, I believe, been a microcosm of important trends in the history of American Orthodoxy in general and of suburban Orthodoxy in particular.15 AABJ&D had been moving slowly to the right during the past three decades. The square dances and concerts with female singers of the 1970s had disappeared from the congregation’s social calendar. Mixed dancing at the synagogue’s annual dinner ended in the early 1980s. The prayer books and Bibles 14 Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (Bloomington, 1990), 149; David Singer, “Rabbi Weinberg’s Agony,” First Things, June–July 2001, 40. For another somber view of contemporary American Orthodoxy, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Future of American Orthodoxy,” Sh’ma 31 (February 2001): 1-3. 15 I have discussed the early years of the Orthodox community of West Orange in “Orthodoxy in Pleasantdale,” Judaism 34 (Spring 1985): 163-70, reprinted in my We Are Many, ch. 9.

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used by the synagogue reflected this rightward move. In the 1970s the synagogue used the Birnbaum siddur and the Hertz chumash. These were replaced in the 1980s by the siddur and chumash produced by ArtScroll. ArtScroll specializes in printing prayer books, biblical commentaries, hagiographic biographies, children’s books, and other works that reflect the anti-modernist mentality of sectarian Orthodoxy. These books are written in an execrable manner and edited by persons who disdain or are unaware of modern Jewish scholarship. Few of AABJ&D’s members seem to recognize the incongruity of a congregation of college graduates and professionals using such fundamentalist religious literature. The Rabbinical Council of America, the major rabbinic spokesmen of Modern Orthodoxy, even commissioned ArtScroll to produce a prayer book suitable for their congregations. “There is no small irony,” wrote the historian Jack Wertheimer, “in the fact that the RCA thus commissioned its opponents in the Orthodox world—traditionalists who do not accept the legitimacy of centrist Orthodox rabbis—to provide its official prayer book.”16 In their 1989 book Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America, the sociologists Samuel Heilman and Steven M. Cohen spoke of the strains facing the Modern Orthodox in “combining a commitment to the parochialism of Orthodoxy with a life in the contemporary cosmopolitan world.”17 These pressures can remain latent unless a catalytic event brings them to the surface. In the case of AABJ&D, this event was the selection of a new rabbi in 1998. The selection of a rabbi is never pleasant, and this is particularly so when the congregation is Modern Orthodox. Modern Orthodoxy does not have a sharply defined ideology, distinct norms of religious praxis, and, after the death of Joseph B. Soloveitchik in 1993, clearly recognized leaders. As a result, there is no clear agreement within the congregation regarding the traits most desired in a rabbi.18 Depending on who is talking, the rabbi will be judged too religious or not religious enough, too inflexible or not inflexible enough, too immersed in Torah study or not immersed enough, too involved in communal affairs or not involved enough. He is admired if he stands up for what he believes, but he is also

16 Wertheimer, A People Divided, 128. 17 Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America (Chicago, 1989), 34. 18 Charles S. Liebman, “Left and Right in American Orthodoxy,” Judaism 15 (Winter 1966): 104.

Chapter 7. Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case

criticized if he challenges the community’s religious standards, particularly the specific ways that it has synthesized Orthodoxy with societal norms. The rabbi is caught between a rock and a hard place. In the words of the title of Heilman and Cohen’s book, he can be cosmopolitan and open to the secular and general Jewish world, or he can be parochial and reflect the ethos of the yeshiva world. No Orthodox rabbi can be all things to all people. The debate concerning AABJ&D’s selection of a new rabbi forced the community to think seriously about the nature of their religious identity. The previous rabbi had been in the community for three decades, and during his tenure the congregation had grown from a handful of Sabbath-observing families worshiping in a former animal hospital to five hundred observant families praying in a multi-million dollar building. Several factors were responsible for this growth, including the riots in Newark in 1967 which emptied the city of most of its remaining Jewish population, the movement of young Orthodox families from New York City to the suburbs, and the completion in 1973 of Route 280, which provided rapid transportation from West Orange to Newark, New York City, and the more western suburbs. Added to these were the leadership and the interpersonal skills of the incumbent rabbi, who was much respected, both within and outside the congregation. The rabbi was a “people person.” He made the non-Orthodox feel comfortable, and he was able to bridge the religious differences within the congregation’s increasingly diverse membership. His sermons avoided potentially divisive topics and emphasized the need for community and unity. The rabbi’s highest values were ahavat Israel (love of fellow Jews) and support for the State of Israel. He also exhibited another important trait of Modern Orthodoxy: involvement in the wider Jewish community. He was active in the local Jewish Federation and respected by the non-Orthodox as a person with whom they could relate. The nature of his replacement would indicate whether the synagogue would remain a quintessentially Modern Orthodox synagogue or move to the right. Moving to the left was never an option. By 1998, AABJ&D was a different congregation than what it had been thirty years earlier. Most of its members in the 1960s were only nominally Orthodox, and until the early 1980s the synagogue ran a Hebrew school for the children of member families who did not attend Orthodox day schools. The latitudinarianism of the incumbent rabbi was attuned to the religious outlook of the congregation’s membership, for whom Orthodoxy was a matter of preference, not of practice. By the early 1980s, however, most of the nominally Orthodox had either left the congregation or their children had grown up, and the congregation

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closed its Hebrew school. In addition, many observant Orthodox families had moved to West Orange. This winnowing process had changed the nature of AABJ&D’s membership from “fellow-traveling” to “card-carrying” Orthodox. Rabbinic tolerance of religious transgressions was no longer considered so virtuous. And, as the historian Jeffrey S. Gurock noted in 1998, congregational Orthodox rabbis “no longer feel the pressure to accommodate, or turn a blind eye towards the activities of the minority of graying non-observant members.”19 It was anticipated that once word go out that AABJ&D was looking for a new rabbi, the congregation would receive literally dozens of applications from persons representing various segments of American Orthodoxy. It was important, therefore, that the selection process be handled as methodically and carefully as possible. To achieve this, the congregation’s president appointed a committee of eight to screen candidates. The most important guideline adopted by the committee was that applicants who made the short list would have to embody the centrist Orthodox philosophy of Yeshiva University and not be a right-wing yeshiva-type. Other requirements included being able to speak well, willingness to follow the current rabbi’s example of involvement in the local Jewish Federation and day school, and the ability to attract new families to West Orange. It was also expected that the successful candidate would be in his forties so that he would remain in the community for several decades. The committee of eight narrowed down the search to six applicants. These names were then forwarded to a larger synagogue search committee of approximately thirty people. This latter committee included several major donors to the synagogue, and women comprised one-third of its membership. Of the six applicants who made the short list, one withdrew his application and two others were dropped from consideration. The names of the remaining three candidates were then presented to the general synagogue membership for consideration. Throughout the search process, the members of the two committees and the synagogue membership took their responsibilities very seriously. The three candidates, along with their spouses, each spent a separate weekend in West Orange, where they spoke several times to the congregation. They also took part in a question-and-answer session so that the congregants could determine where the candidates stood on such issues as the role of women in the synagogue and the relationship of the Orthodox community to the broader Jewish world. With only the candidates’ weekend visit to go by, the synagogue membership could not conclusively evaluate their intelligence, scholarship, 19 Gurock, From Fluidity to Rigidity, 38.

Chapter 7. Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case

administrative competence, and interpersonal skills, although they could evaluate their speaking abilities and where they stood on the Orthodox spectrum. As a result, much of the discussion of the relative merits of the three candidates involved symbolic issues, which to outsiders would appear frivolous but which were important to the membership. These included whether the candidates wore dark suits and hats while praying and whether their wives covered their hair (all did). The final candidates personified three distinct rabbinic “ideal types.” Candidate one headed a small declining congregation in a neighborhood experiencing ethnic and racial change. He was in the mold of the incumbent rabbi. During his visit to West Orange, he emphasized his involvement in the general Jewish community and his interest and expertise in pastoral counseling. He had a doctorate in pastoral counseling, and he appealed to those in the synagogue who were looking for, above all else, a pastor. He projected the same spirit of balance, equilibrium, and compromise of the incumbent. He posed no threat to the religious consensus of the synagogue’s members or to the diverse ways they had reconciled the allure of modernity with the demands of Orthodoxy. He failed, however, to project the charisma and religiosity that many congregants sought. Candidate two embodied another rabbinic model: the rabbi as Torah scholar who could synthesize halakhah and modernity. Of the three candidates, he exhibited the qualities most identified with Modern Orthodoxy. Candidate two was a member of the faculty at a Jewish teacher’s college and the rabbi of a small Orthodox congregation in which women played a more active role than they did in the West Orange congregation. He favored women’s minyans (prayer meetings) and women carrying the Torah scrolls on the holiday of Simchat Torah. Candidate two came strongly recommended by former teachers and rabbinic mentors, who predicted that he was destined to become one of American Orthodoxy’s intellectual luminaries. Although considerably younger than the other two candidates, candidate two was enthusiastically endorsed by those members of the search community who were seeking intellectual distinction. This, they believed, more than compensated for his youth and congregational inexperience. The day after he met with the synagogue membership, however, candidate two withdrew his name from consideration. Some people attributed this to the bitter opposition to his candidacy by a small group of disaffected synagogue members. Candidate two was also intimidated by the myriad of tasks required of a rabbi of a congregation of this size, and he feared that these would leave him little time for study, reflection, and writing. Members of the search committee

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who favored candidate two were disappointed by his withdrawal, and they felt it indicated an indifference, if not antagonism, to his intellectuality. The third and successful candidate presented a third rabbinic image: that of the communal rav, halakhic decisor, and defender of religious truth and dogma. Although a graduate of the rabbinical school at Yeshiva University, candidate three had gone on for further study at a right-wing yeshiva and had married the daughter of the head of the yeshiva. His dress and demeanor projected a more right-wing outlook. In contrast to the incumbent who was clean-shaven and wore a skullcap during prayer, candidate three had a short beard, wore a black hat during prayer, was always dressed in the dark suit and white shirt common to the yeshiva world, and sent his oldest son to study at a right-wing yeshiva. The interview of candidate three with the synagogue’s members revolved around whether he threatened the prevailing religious ethos of West Orange and how he would relate to non-Orthodox Jews. While in West Orange, he was asked specifically whether he would be willing to become involved in the local federation, and whether he would send his children to the local day school, a centrist institution, or whether he would opt to send them to more right-wing institutions. He stated from the beginning that he would not enroll his children in the local Modern Orthodox day school. It soon became clear after he assumed office that he was far less tolerant of non-Orthodox varieties of Judaism than his predecessor and less interested in being involved in the larger Jewish community. His view of his role as rabbi was indicated when he affixed to his office door a sign stating that he was “mora d’asra” (leader of the community), implying that he viewed himself as West Orange’s ultimate authority on matters of Jewish law. Another set of questions that confronted candidate three concerned the role of women, the most contentious issue facing contemporary Orthodoxy. Modern Orthodox women have demanded, either individually or through the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, a greater role in liturgical matters and synagogue governance, a revision in the traditional attitude toward agunot (women whose husbands had deserted them or were missing), and changes in halakhah regarding birth control and other matters of particular relevance to women. More important than these specific issues was the more fundamental effort of Modern Orthodox women to modify the Orthodox view of women’s role as one revolving around home and family. As is true of Orthodox men, the Orthodox women of West Orange are situated between two worlds. They strongly identify with a fundamentally androcentric religion, but they also have been influenced by a modernist social ethos which strongly opposes gender differentiation in employment, education, and social life and which espouses the spiritual

Chapter 7. Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case

equality of women. The Modern Orthodox mothers (as well as fathers) of West Orange have high aspirations for their daughters, and were particularly sensitive to indications that any of the rabbinic candidates were less than sympathetic to the idea that young women should be allowed to realize their full social, economic, and intellectual potential. Candidate 3, who was redolent of the yeshiva world, presented a special problem in this respect. During the interview process, he was asked his opinion of women’s prayer meetings at which they would read from Torah scrolls (he opposed them), and of women wearing slacks within the synagogue building (he hoped they would wear appropriate clothing when meeting with him). The feminist disquietude was not alleviated by the new rabbi’s first pre-Yom Kippur sermon. Here he emphasized the duty of husbands to buy their wives pretty clothes for the High Holy days. This offended some women in the congregation who felt they had more important roles than being the recipients of their husbands’ largesse, and it reinforced the sense that he did not understand why so many Orthodox women believed they were not being taken seriously as Jews. In his book Synagogue Life, Samuel Heilman noted that the American Orthodox rabbi was not merely a teacher and scholar, but he was also a “preacher, halachic arbitrator, and sometimes even symbolic model Jew.” (The subtitle of his book is “A Study in Symbolic Interaction.”)20 The symbolic character of candidate three loomed large during the selection process. Ironically, some of his support came from less observant members of the congregation. Prior to the congregational vote to select the new rabbi, a mass meeting was held at which congregants discussed the merits of the remaining two candidates and indicated their preferences. Many people indicated that they favored candidate three because he would encourage them to become more devout and knowledgeable about Judaism. It is unlikely that all of these intended to change their own level of religious observance. Rather, they saw themselves benefitting vicariously from having a rabbi who was more to the right. It was here that the issue of where the rabbi would send his children to school became important. For some, it was gratifying that he opted to enroll them in institutions that were to the right of the local Orthodox day school to which they sent their own children. For others, however, the school issue indicated that the rabbi and the congregation were hopelessly mismatched, and that what they saw as a rigid right-wing mind-set was unsuited for West Orange. Thus for some in West Orange, candidate three was welcomed because he would 20 Samuel C. Heilman, Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction (Chicago, 1976), 103.

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challenge the religious ethos of the community, while for others he was suspect for the very same reason. Perhaps conscious of the fact that he projected a rabbinic image different from that of his predecessor that might be troubling to some of the congregation’s members, candidate three sought to reassure those uncomfortable with his selection. Thus he chose to speak on Torah u-Madda at the Saturday night selichot services shortly after assuming office. This is not to say, however, that the issues involved in AABJ&D’s choice of a new rabbi were merely symbolic. The community had moved to the right during the past three decades, and the new rabbi reflected this fact. Social activities within the synagogue acceptable a quarter of a century ago were no longer so. There is more study of Jewish sacred texts, and there is a group of men who participate in daf yomi, the daily study of the Talmud lasting for about an hour. This drift to the right has been a cause and a result of the move into the community of more right-wing families. Movement out of West Orange no longer occurs because right-wing families feel uncomfortable. Those who do leave for religious reasons usually resettle in Israel.21 One potential problem facing the West Orange Orthodox involves the children. The often dissonant relationship between Orthodoxy and modernity which characterizes Modern Orthodox communities only becomes obvious to the young when they are in high school. Most of the children of West Orange do not go immediately to college. Rather, they spend at least a year at a yeshiva or a girls’ seminary in Israel, where they are drawn into a religious environment considerably to the right of that which they are familiar with in West Orange. Perhaps for the first time they intellectually confront the religious compromises made by their parents and begin thinking seriously about the nature of their own commitment to Orthodoxy. This Israel experience is one of the major sources of what the sociologist Charles Selengut has called the “yeshivization” of Modern Orthodoxy. In the yeshivas, he wrote, “theological and halakhic pluralism, once the hallmark of the modernist camp, now gives way to increasingly fundamentalist and rigid interpretations of religious law and practice code.” Selengut was pessimistic about the future of Modern Orthodoxy. “In the final analysis,” he claimed, “it is the yeshiva rabbinical leaders who are the arbiters for Orthodoxy. Accordingly, we 21 For the conflict between sectarian and Modern Orthodoxy, see Liebman, “Left and Right in American Orthodoxy”: 104ff., and Samuel C. Heilman, “Orthodox Jews: An Open or Closed Group,” in Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn (New York, 1987), 119-21.

Chapter 7. Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: A Test Case

can expect modern Orthodoxy to take on many of the sectarian qualities of yeshiva life.” This yeshivization process has not occurred without protest from the Modern Orthodox. Haym Soloveitchik, a professor at Yeshiva University, in a lengthy and much-discussed article published in Tradition, the journal of the Rabbinical Council of America, criticized the triumph of the elite religion of the yeshiva world over the folk religion of American Orthodoxy.22 There are other factors besides yeshivization that have pushed Orthodoxy to the right during the past thirty years. The more that traditional moral standards appeared to be unraveling in America, the more attractive became right-wing religion, which disdained the modernist values of individualism and self-expression and sought to isolate its members from the cultural and social mainstream. The virtues of Modern Orthodoxy—its accommodation to modernity, its greater doctrinal flexibility, and its openness to social trends such as feminism—appeared as weaknesses to the more traditionalist elements. Right-wing Orthodoxy also appeared to have the formula for resisting the demographic problems plaguing American Jewry, such as divorce, intermarriage, and a low birth rate, and it benefitted from the contemporary popularity of multiculturalism, which was protective of religious and ethnic movements outside the American mainstream. What does the selection of AABJ&D’s rabbi in 1998 tell us about the state of Orthodoxy? It certainly confirms the widespread assumption regarding Orthodoxy’s move to the right. Here the Orthodox of West Orange are mirroring developments within American religion at large. But, not surprisingly, the coming of a new rabbi has not fundamentally changed the prevailing religious ethos of West Orange. Despite grumbling by those fearful that the community was moving too far to the right and in danger of going “black hat,” life in West Orange goes on much as before. While there has been a heightened emphasis on Jewish education, only a handful of synagogue members have been so moved to avail themselves of these opportunities. This was to be expected. It was unrealistic to believe that any one person could change the behavior and values of five hundred families. Perhaps the new rabbi recognized this when he told the local Jew22 Charles Selengut, “By Torah Alone: Yeshiva Fundamentalism in Jewish Life,” in Accounting for Fundamentalism: The Dynamic Character of Movements, ed. Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago, 1994), 259; Haym Soloveitchik “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994): 64-130. See also Menachem Friedman, “Life Tradition and Book Tradition in the Development of Ultraorthodox Judaism,” in Judaism From Within and Without: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Harvey Goldberg (Albany, 1987), 235-55.

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ish newspaper shortly after assuming the pulpit that one of his objectives was to see “serious growth” in the number of kosher restaurants in the area. Who could disagree regarding the value of corn beef on rye with Russian dressing?23 The compromises and compartmentalization that are the hallmarks of the Modern Orthodox of West Orange remain in place and seem to be as strong as ever. One can assume that, absent a large movement of sectarian Jews into the neighborhood, change within the Orthodox community of West Orange will be quite gradual. The mini-crisis of 1998 and the coming of a new rabbi did not impede the growth of AABJ&D. On the contrary, it has continued attracting new families at an accelerating rate. The congregation is prospering, and there are an increasing number of children of congregation members who have bought homes in West Orange. A full-time office manager had to be hired, and there is now talk of expanding the building, even though the last renovation was less than a decade earlier. Ironically, this growth has undermined the personal influence of the rabbi by limiting the personal contact he can possibly have with individual families. His relationship with his congregants necessarily has become more remote, formal, and abstract. And since the primary Jewish focus of the average AABJ&D family is on the education of their children, the synagogue and its rabbi is in a losing battle for the attention (and dollars) of the synagogue’s families. They also must compete with the myriad of charities which the congregation’s families’ support. If the events of 1998 did not change fundamentally the religious behavior of the Orthodox of West Orange, he did force them to define their religious identity. The selection of a new rabbi brought to the fore such questions as the meaning of Modern Orthodoxy, the nature of the symbiosis between modernity and Jewish tradition, and the future of the congregation and the movement of which it is a part. These are the same questions that are being asked by other suburban Orthodox congregations as well. Thus the recent history of AABJ&D is a microcosm of that of suburban Modern Orthodoxy.

23 New Jersey Jewish News, October 15, 1998, 12.

Chapter 8

The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism in America The nature of American Jewish identity is the central theme of American Jewish historiography. This is not surprising since the nature of American identity is one of the great themes of American history. The question, “what does it mean to be an American?” has been around since the founding of the country when the Founding Fathers declared the new nation to be a “novus ordo seculorum” (new order of the ages). In his 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur asked the most famous and important question in American history. “What then is the American, this new man?” He replied that the authentic American leaves behind him “all the ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” The American “entertains new ideas, and forms new opinions.” Crevecoeur was enthusiastic about this new man whose “labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed these sentiments five decades later in his famous “The American Scholar” address when he said that Americans must reject “the sere remains of foreign harvests” and “the courtly muses of Europe.” Future Americans “will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.” Americans have prided themselves on the conceit that they had turned their backs on Europe and carved out a new identity. Jefferson recommended a revolution every two decades to preserve the purity of the revolution, and twentieth-century politicians emphasized their break with tradition by naming their programs the New Nationalism, the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the New Frontier. This rejection of the past has also been a central theme of American literature and folklore. Our greatest writers, including

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Mark Twain and Henry James, have contrasted American innocence, newness, and freedom with European sophistication, corruption, and fatigue. Our most famous folk hero, the cowboy, embodies this freedom and newness when he continually strikes out for the west, rejecting that which lies to the east, including Europe. Our language values change over tradition. To be a go-getter is better than to be a stick-in-the-mud, and while British politicians stand for office, American politicians run for office. In such a country it is not surprising that Jews, along with other groups, should reject much of their past and develop new forms of identity. But the question of identity is more problematic for American Jews than for other groups since there is no agreement among Jews as to what is authentically Jewish and who even can be considered Jews. Do Jews comprise a religion, a race, an ethnic group, a cultural community with its own values, languages, and customs, or a nationality? Should Jews with a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother be considered Jews as the Reform movement has declared? Or is being Jewish dependent on matrilineal descent as Conservative and Orthodox Jews believe? And what does Jewishness involve? Arthur Liebman, in his book Jews on the Left (1979), notes that “the Jewish label can be applied to those who are secular, cultural, assimilated, or even-self-denying.” America, the land of the self-made man, is also the land of the self-made Jew. While American Jews have not generally thought of themselves as a chosen people, as this would hardly be the way to make friends and influence people, they certainly have been a choosing people when it came to defining their ethnic and religious identity. A United States Senator named Cohen could choose not to identify as a Jew, while a Black Jew named Greenberg could become the police chief of Charleston, South Carolina. In America, Judaism was transmuted into a religious persuasion that could be accepted or rejected, as one punster put it, at the drop of a hat. Jews became adept at selecting those aspects of Judaism and Jewishness that harmonized with their identity as modern Americans. The most popular of these did not interfere with their acculturation, did not make them conspicuous, and were attuned to democratic values. Thus the key element in the ethnic and religious identity of some Jews during the 1950s and 1960s was their support for the civil rights movement. They pointed to the murdered civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner as models, even though Goodman denied that he was motivated by anything Jewish and Schwerner disowned even being Jewish, preferring to call himself simply a human being. For still other Jews, Jewish identity has revolved around

Chapter 8. The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism in Americ

such secular causes as lobbying in behalf of Israel, fund-raising for Jewish communal institutions, fighting antisemitism, and venerating the victims of the Holocaust. It is the various choices that Jews have made which most interest historians, sociologists, demographers, and other onlookers. The historian Jenna Weissman Joselit, for example, in her fascinating 1994 book, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950, emphasized the penchant of American Jews to invent and then reinvent Jewish identity. In America, she wrote, Jewishness became “a malleable and protean social construct,” stemming “as much from American notions of consumerism, gender, privacy, and personal happiness as from Jewish notions of tradition, ritual, memory and continuity.” This combining of “the immediate and transcendent, the quirky and the hallowed” was “virtually without parallel in modern Jewish history.” This process extended to Judaism. New forms of Judaism emerged in America, including Reconstructionism, Conservative Judaism, Modern Orthodoxy, and humanistic Judaism. Hanukkah, a previously minor holiday, became a major event on the American Jewish calendar in part because, coming in December, it competed with Christmas and its orgy of gift giving. (Hanukkah had an advantage in this respect since it lasted not one day but eight.) The defining of Jewish identity did not become important until the nineteenth century. Before then virtually everyone, Jews as well as Gentiles, agreed that what distinguished Jews was their religion. But the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, the rise of socialism, the growth of nationalism, the emergence of the modern secular state, and the impact of social and economic modernization challenged traditional religion and gave rise to a host of competing ideologies of Jewish identity, many of which were secular and even anti-religious. This will strike many Christian readers as strange. Isn’t the term “secular Judaism” an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms? If a Christian is secularized and becomes an atheist or an agnostic, he or she ceases being a Christian. Shouldn’t the same be true of Jews? But a Jew who rejects Judaism, and many of the fiercest critics of Judaism have been Jews, remains a Jew in good-standing in the eyes of fellow Jews. Elaine Marks, a professor of literature at the University of Wisconsin, indicated just how far notions of Jewishness could be stretched. She asserted that central to her sense of Jewishness was her apostasy. ”I am Jewish precisely because I am not a believer,” she said paradoxically, “because I associate . . . the courage not to believe with being Jewish.” The non-Jewish Jew, to use Isaac Deutscher’s terminology, becomes in Marks’s telling the most committed of Jews.

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Throughout the twentieth century, peoplehood has generally trumped religion when it comes to defining Jewish identity, and Jews took pride in their religious dissenters. Albert Einstein, a religious skeptic, was arguably the Jew most widely admired by other Jews during his lifetime. He was offered the presidency of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the medical college of Yeshiva University, the leading American Orthodox institution, bears his name. There are limits, however, as to how far definitions of Jewish identity may be stretched. Converting to another religion will remove a Jew from the Jewish people, at least in the eyes of other Jews, while becoming an atheist, an agnostic, or professing an anti-religious ideology such as Marxism will not. Jews in the messianic Jews for Jesus movement might argue that their Jewish background logically leads to their becoming Christians, but such claims are rejected by Jews who perhaps remember Heinrich Heine’s witticism that no Jew could become a good Christian because no Jew would believe another Jew could be God. The contemporary tendency to conflate Jewishness with Judaism and Jews with religious believers is a particularly American phenomenon. This is true today even though the majority of American Jews reject both the beliefs and practices of normative Judaism. In Israel, by contrast, everyone recognizes that there are two types of Jews, the religious and the secular. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, approximately two million Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to America. Legend has remembered these immigrants as pious souls, but this was hardly the case. Many, perhaps a majority, of Jews living in East Europe by 1900 were well along the path of modernization, acculturation, and secularization. They might continue to identify as Orthodox Jews, but this was more often out of inertia than conviction, and because Orthodoxy was an integral aspect of Eastern European Jewish culture that they looked back to with a certain degree of nostalgia. Religious laxity increased exponentially in Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the atrophying of Orthodoxy created a vacuum in Jewish identity that was partially filled by a host of competing secular ideologies. Of Tevye’s three married daughters in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, for example, only one lived as a traditional Jew. One married a Gentile in a Russian Orthodox church and became estranged from her family, and another married a revolutionary committed to the overthrow of the Czarist regime. Remaining in East Europe was still, in the eyes of the rabbis of the time, preferable to settling in America, a trefa (impure) land where Jews work on the Sabbath and eat non-Kosher food. Such warnings, as one might have anticipated, were ineffective. The conditions in Europe were too bleak and the

Chapter 8. The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism in Americ

opportunities in America too bright for such advice to be taken seriously, and, in any case, it was precisely those Jews most unshackled from religious orthodoxy and least likely to listen to rabbinic admonitions who were most likely to immigrate. A significant minority of these Jewish immigrants thus came to the United States imbued with various non-religious and even anti-religious ideologies, including secular Zionism, diaspora Jewish nationalism, socialism, and communism. None of these had much relevance to American social, economic, and political conditions, and were, in their pristine versions, generally one- or twogeneration phenomena. The history of Zionism is particularly revealing in this respect. The modern secular Zionist movement emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century in response to growing antisemitism and worsening economic conditions. Zionists argued that the only solution for the Jewish “problem” in Europe was transplanting Jews to Palestine, the ancestral Jewish homeland. In America, however, the ideology of secular Zionism had little appeal since American Jews had no intention of leaving the United States for the forbidding clime of Palestine. If America was not the Promised Land, it was certainly a land of promise. Here antisemitism was far weaker than in Europe, and, in any case, it did not seriously impede their economic and social advancement. Instead of themselves settling in Palestine, American “Zionists” raised funds to underwrite the settlement of other Jews in Palestine. American Zionism became not a movement of national revival but a philanthropy. For Israelis such as David Ben-Gurion, American Zionism was not truly Zionistic since it rejected the fundamental Zionist principles of the negation of the diaspora and the ingathering of the exiles into a Jewish state. The Israeli statesman Abba Eban quipped that, after the establishment of the State of Israel, American Zionism had demonstrated the truth of a fundamental religious belief--that there could be life after death. The story was even bleaker for left-wing, Yiddish-speaking Jews who hoped to transplant their institutions and ideas to the friendly soil of America. The history of socialism in America, in contrast to its history elsewhere, is a story of failure. One of the great historiographical questions for American historians has been why this was so since, as the world’s largest industrial power, the United States should have been open to socialist panaceas. If socialism failed in America, Jewish socialism was doubly doomed since it was embedded in an immigrant secular culture that would inevitably disappear. But for a few decades during the early twentieth century it was possible for an immigrant secular Jewish leftist to live in an encapsulated world of like-minded persons, a world one could believe

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to be part of the wave of the future. Each of the various leftist Jewish movements had its own schools, summer camps, publications, and even neighborhoods. Between the two world wars there were four separate apartment complexes in the borough of the Bronx in New York City inhabited by Jewish families professing different versions of socialism ranging from worker’s Zionism to communism. One of these families was headed by a house painter named Myerson, whose daughter Bess was named Miss America in September 1945. This radical secular Jewish identity began dissolving almost immediately on the arrival of the immigrants to America. The best indicators of Jewish acculturation were to be found in the pages of the Forward, the most widely read American Yiddish newspaper and the most popular American foreign-language newspaper in American history. From February through April 1905 the Forward published some fifty letters to the editor on the momentous question whether free thinkers should assist a religious coworker with his work on Friday afternoon so that he could arrive at home in time for the Sabbath. That a socialist and nominally anti-religious paper such as the Forward would open up its pages to such a debate is surprising, and so were the sentiments of some of its readers. While some said that giving any assistance would encourage religious fanaticism and intellectual darkness, others said that in America freethinkers should be tolerant toward the misguided and try to wean them away from their religious foolishness. Another issue debated in the pages of the Forward concerned how socialist organizations should respond to members who attend religious services since they were betraying their organizations’ principles. Here again, tolerance toward the misguided was recommended. A more interesting question was why these individuals would attend such services in the first place? One answer was provided by a joke of the time that recounted how Abraham, a member of the Arbeiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle, a socialist Jewish mutual-benefit organization), was berated by another member after he was seen leaving a synagogue. In defense, he pointed to his synagogue-going friend Jacob. “Jacob,” he said, “goes to synagogue to talk to God; I go to synagogue to talk to Jacob.” But after World War II there were fewer and fewer Jews like Abraham who craved speaking Yiddish with fellow immigrants. The world of secular left-wing Jewish culture was destroyed by acculturation and social and economic mobility, and the Holocaust murdered those potential immigrants who might have temporarily rejuvenated it. American secular Judaism lived on only in a host of novels, memoirs, and histories, most notably Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers (1976). The Yiddish newspapers, the summer camps, the schools, and the

Chapter 8. The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism in Americ

mutual-benefit societies are now gone or are hanging on by their fingertips. By the 1950s and 1960s, Abraham’s prosperous and English-speaking descendants were safely ensconced in suburbia where attending religious services was a norm of middle-class behavior. More than anything else, they wanted to be considered good Americans, and to be a good American required that at a minimum one had to go through at least the motions of being religious. Americans were, as the Pledge of Allegiance stated, “one nation under God.” The immigrants’ faith in socialism was transmuted into their children’s faith in liberalism. This commitment to liberalism had been portended in 1936 when the Forward endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt during the presidential election. Socialist true believers were horrified by the endorsement of a candidate of a capitalist political party by an ostensibly socialist newspaper. Rather than being a betrayal of socialist principles, the endorsement was further evidence of the Forward’s acculturation and its recognition that socialism was neither relevant nor important to its increasingly Americanized readership. With the collapse of left-wing secular Judaism in America, Judaism came to the fore as the most popular way of defining Jewish identity. This does not mean that American Jews had suddenly become more religiously observant, only that increasingly they saw religion as the key element of their Jewishness. Will Herberg’s influential 1955 book, Protestant—Catholic—Jew; An Essay in American Religious Sociology, reflected this new mood. Herberg described Judaism as one of America’s three great religions. Conflating Jewishness with Judaism, he ignored the manifold non-religious ways by which Jews had defined and lived out their Jewish identity. Herberg wrote at a time when Judaism seemed to be flourishing, and when each of the major Jewish denominations—Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox—exhibited or would soon exhibit a sense of triumphalism. This equating of Jewishness with Judaism was indicated by the practice of academia of placing courses in Jewish studies in departments of religion even if these courses focused on sociology or history. Reflective of Judaism’s now elevated status among Jews was Stephen J. Whitfield’s perceptive 1999 volume, In Search of American Jewish Culture. Only religion, he asserted, provided the core of a viable and meaningful Jewish culture. “There is simply no longer a serious way of being Jewish—and of living within Jewish culture—without Judaism,” he claimed. “As the various secular bases of Jewish life have been discredited, religion alone remains standing.” Any attempt to resurrect an ideology of secularist Jewish identity “looks like the future of an illusion.” “What makes Jews different,” Whitfield concluded, is “finally and

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fundamentally, only Judaism. . . . A Jew is someone who subscribes to Judaism. Period.” Recent demographic studies indicate that Judaism is hardly “irrepressible” (Whitfield’s term). The latest of these, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, published by the Pew Research Center on October 1, 2013, emphasizes that a growing percentage of American Jews were alienated from Judaism. Of the nearly thirty-five hundred Jews surveyed, over one-fifth claimed to have “no religion,” and these religious dropouts were disproportionately to be found among younger Jews. While ninety-three percent of those born before 1927 identified themselves as Jewish based on religion, only sixty-eight percent of those born after 1980 did so. Increasingly, it would appear, American Jews believe Jewishness revolves around culture and ancestry rather than religion. A majority of the respondents said it was not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish. Only nineteen percent felt that observing Jewish law was important, while forty-two percent stated that having a good sense of humor was essential to their Jewish identity. Evidently Jerry Seinfeld, Joan Rivers, and Sarah Silverman have trumped the Almighty and Maimonides. Nevertheless, while the “nones” are estranged from Judaism, they remain strongly connected to the Jewish people and the state of Israel and claim to be proud to be Jews. They form a large potential constituency for various versions of contemporary secular Judaism. The title of the Pew survey is itself revealing: not “American Jews” but “Jewish Americans.” “American” is the noun, not the adjective. This increase in the “no religion” category is not unique to America’s Jews. An October 2012 Pew survey reported a rapid recent increase in the number of unchurched Americans, with one out of every five Americans claiming to have no formal religious affiliation. This dropout is particularly evident within the mainline Protestant denominations. For the first time in history there are no Protestants on the Supreme Court, and Protestants are a minority of the American population. The same story is true as well for Roman Catholics. If not for the immigration of Hispanics, the number of Roman Catholics likely would also have declined. “Former Catholics” comprise one of the major categories in recent surveys of American religion. Symptomatic of the growing percentage of Americans unaffiliated with any formal religious structure is the growing number who describe themselves as “spiritual” but not religious, whatever that might mean to them. The status of contemporary secular Judaism is the subject of a fifty-two page article in the 2012 American Jewish Yearbook titled “American Jewish Secularism: Jewish Life Beyond the Synagogue.” The authors—Barry A. Kosmin, director

Chapter 8. The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism in Americ

of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and Ariela Keysar, the institute’s associate director—are clearly secular partisans, although the institute self-identifies as “nonpartisan.” In their article, Kosmin and Keysar claim that contemporary secular Judaism, through the use of “pluralistic market forces and the new information technology,” is invigorating American Jewishness and “creating “new ties and forms of community” distinct from those involving religion. No longer can secular Jewishness be considered a vestige of the immigrant experience or a step on the road to assimilation and acculturation. Rather, it is an organic and vibrant cultural phenomenon that provides a way for Jews to express their Jewish identity in a non-religious manner. These Jews are the audience for Jewish museums, Jewish community centers, concerts featuring Klezmer and Sephardic music, Jewish film and book festivals, Jewish book clubs, Jewish internet web sites, all-day Jewish television programming, and Jewish Studies courses in academia. Contemporary Jewish secularism, Kosmin and Keysar note, comprises “disparate communities” and “takes multiple forms and varies across different contexts and social environments.” It is “malleable and flexible” and “rich and diverse.” This flexibility and openness is undoubtedly one of its greatest strengths. But it is also one of its greatest potential weaknesses since a movement without clearly defined boundaries runs the risk of becoming vacuous. What, after all, is distinctively Jewish about watching Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm? Don’t Gentiles do the same? In preparing their essay, Kosmin and Keysar received assistance from the Posen Foundation, as did David Biale in writing his 2011 volume, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought. In the introduction to his book, Biale describes Felix Posen, a wealthy British Jewish philanthropist who endowed the foundation, as “that rarest of philanthropists who takes deep intellectual interest in the causes he supports.” His financial support of scholarly efforts to uncover the sources of Jewish secularization “have had an enormously stimulating effect on a generation of Jewish Studies scholars.” The Posen foundation was established in 2004, and one of its activities has been underwriting seminars and courses on secular Jewish culture at Brandeis, Harvard, Brown, and a couple of dozen other American universities. Today’s secular Judaism is different from that of the first-generation. It is less ideological, less political, and less hostile to religion. Secular American Jews have worked out a modus vivendi with religion and often incorporate religious

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ideas and customs, suitably secularized, into their programming. They acknowledge that religion is a major element in Jewish culture while rejecting the claim that the essence of Jewishness lies in religion. Posen denies that his foundation is anti-religious. It is instead pro-Jewish culture, which is heavily secular. “I feel completely comfortable studying Judaism,” Posen said, “I just don’t believe in it. It’s part of our culture. . . . I have to stress that I will have nothing to do with anyone who is anti-religious. I’m only interested in the positive aspects of our culture.” Nor is contemporary Jewish secularism in America deeply ideological. Secularism, Biale notes, is a response to the peculiarly American emphasis on “selffashioning and self-invention” and not to philosophical constructs. America is, after all, the land of William James and John Dewey and the birthplace of philosophical pragmatism. “The hallmarks of secularism in America,” he says, “are lack of dogma and resistance to uniformity. . . . No hegemonic authority, either religious or nationalist, can dictate its agenda. No trajectory toward the future can be charted with confidence. Secularism can make no promise of continuity or survival, but it does guarantee the freedom to experiment, without which neither continuity nor survival is possible.” According to Laurence J. Silberstein, a professor of Jewish Studies at Lehigh University, contemporary Jewish secularism prizes “process over product, multiplicity over unity, and becoming rather than being.” The key question regarding Jewish secularism in America is whether it has any future. Can its devotees pass on their interest in the artifacts of secular Jewish culture to their children and their children’s children? Israel’s secular Jews have a state to protect, a language to speak, a culture to preserve, and a strong sense of nationality. American secular Jews have none of these. Is it likely that a love of Jewish-themed movies, an interest in Yiddish literature or the history of the Holocaust, or fond memories of Jewish museums can provide a lasting Jewish identity? With Jewish identity increasingly a matter of prescription rather than ascription, what guarantee is there that, outside of the traditionally religious, there ever will be enough Jews choosing the same things to constitute a community? What will be the cement of community when Jews come to believe that Jewishness sanctions whatever is the cultural rage of the day? Secular Judaism appears to be a Jewishness without boundaries. So far it has not been acceptable to be a Jewish Christian, but, in light of a skyrocketing intermarriage rate, is there any certainty that this will continue? Already there are Gentiles on the board of directors of some Reform congregations.

Chapter 8. The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism in Americ

Judaism might not be the entirety of Jewish identity, but it is difficult to imagine a vibrant Jewish identity completely severed from Judaism. Certainly this is what the social science literature would seem to indicate. The fastest growing segments of American Jews are the nones and the Orthodox, and the potential audience for secular Judaism appears to be limited. “Outside of Israel, where secularism flourishes in the hothouse of nation-building,” writes the journalist Andrew Silow-Carroll, “the Jewish future belongs to religion.” If this is so, then future estimates of the American Jewish population will have to be revised dramatically downward. As the Talmud warns, with the passing of the prophetic age prophecy became the province of fools and children, but one can safely make one prediction: the issue of Jewish identity will continue to be salient.

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Chapter 9

John Higham and American Antisemitism American historians, in contrast to their European counterparts, have not expended much effort in examining antisemitism. Since the end of World War II the major examinations of American antisemitism have been done by sociologists and social psychologists, not historians, and it is unlikely that even this would have occurred without funding by the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. No important American historian has made antisemitism the primary focus of his work, and even Jewish historians have been more concerned with studying the prejudice directed at African Americans than antisemitism. Undoubtedly the major reason for this lacuna is the relative lack of prominence of antisemitism in America when compared with, say, Europe. There has not been anything in the United States remotely resembling the pogroms, expulsions, and atrocities that European Jews experienced. American historians have concluded that antisemitism has been an exotic and unimportant aspect of American life. For them, antisemitism has not been intrinsic to America, but rather a European import incompatible with the dominant liberal Jeffersonian thrust of American history. From this perspective, antisemitism has been a product of unusual and transitory social and economic conditions and marginal and disaffected groups.1 Every generalization has its exception, and in this case it is John Higham, the most distinguished historian of antisemitism in America. Leonard Dinnerstein, himself a student of American antisemitism, has described Higham’s writings 1

Michael N. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, 1979), 3-4; David A. Gerber, “Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana, 1986), 7-8; Jonathan D. Sarna, “Anti-Semitism and American History,” Commentary, March 1981, 42; Leonard Dinnerstein, ed., Antisemitism in the United States (New York, 1971), 2.

Chapter 9. John Higham and American Antisemitism

on antisemitism as “consistently thoughtful, detailed, and complex.” No other American historian, Dinnerstein concluded, has written “as deeply or as extensively” about American antisemitism. David A. Gerber, the editor of Anti-Semitism in American History (1986), agreed, noting that Higham is “doubtless the leading theorist in the history of American anti-Semitism.”2 Higham came to prominence in 1955 with the appearance of his first book, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, a revised version of his University of Wisconsin doctoral dissertation, directed by Merle Curti, the dean of American intellectual historians. The book was well received by Higham’s peers and has remained in print for the past three decades. Upon publication, it immediately became the definitive history of American nativism, and its author took his place among the most perceptive students of American ethnic relationships. Largely because of Strangers in the Land, Higham became Moses Coit Tyler University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and later Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Higham’s investigation of American nativism led to a lifelong interest in American Jewish history and particularly in antisemitism. (A 1975 collection of his essays was titled Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America.) As a Gentile who came to American Jewish history through his interest in American nativism, Higham believes antisemitism is not sui generis but part of the “patterns of American nativism.” Thus antisemitism has been important not for its own sake but for what it can teach us about American immigration, ethnicity, and social and economic mobility. The research and writing of Strangers in the Land occurred during a dramatic decline in American antisemitic opinion and behavior from its highwater mark during the 1930s and World War II. Due in part to the impact of the European Holocaust on America, the years after World War II witnessed a sharp reduction in antisemitism among employers, realtors, and admissions officers at the nation’s elite universities. Higham realized that he was living in a period of diminishing Judaeophobia, a time for stressing “harmony and unity in American society.” Not surprisingly, Strangers in the Land emphasized the transitory and tangential character of American antisemitism.3 2 Leonard Dinnerstein, “The Historiography of American Antisemitism,” Immigration History Newsletter, November 1984, 3-4; Gerber, “Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations,” 39; Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 5. 3

John Higham, “Ideological Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” in Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America, ed. John Higham (New York, 1975), 117-18; Higham,

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Antisemitism is not a major theme in Strangers in the Land, and the reader seeking a fuller view of Higham’s interpretation of antisemitism must turn to his post-1955 writings. The fact that only twenty of the 330 pages in Strangers in the Land are devoted to nativist attitudes toward Jews is not fortuitous. Higham argued that nativism was a constellation of ideas consisting of anti-radicalism, racism, and anti-Catholicism. Antisemitism, he contended, was not one of the important patterns of nativism, and nativists did not focus on Jews, generally lumping them together with other undesirable immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. Furthermore, prejudice against Italians and Asians was far greater than antisemitism. For Higham, the antisemitism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was caused by the social and economic tensions produced by urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the transformation of rural life. The extent of antisemitism oscillated with the intensity of these tensions. Thus it peaked during the depression of 1893-1897 and the flapper years of the 1920s. In the 1890s, agrarian radicals saw Jews manipulating the currency and exploiting farmers. “Since greedy destructive forces seemed somehow at work in the government and economy,” Higham wrote, “suspicion dawned that a Jewish bid for supremacy was wreaking the havoc America could not control.” In addition, Jews were disliked because of their rapid upward social and economic mobility. They were the classic upstarts, the Snopeses of urban America. At a time of pervasive social climbing, the Jew symbolized “the parvenu spirit.” Jews were “acquisitive barbarians,” personifying the mercenary spirit that was replacing manners and tradition with vulgarity and ostentatiousness. Despite the Shylock image, Higham believed that antisemitism “probably did not exceed in degree the general level of feeling against other European nationalities.”4 The situation changed after World War I. “Of all the European groups that lay outside of the charmed Nordic circle,” Higham claimed, “none was subjected to quite so much hatred as the Jews.” Jews now faced “a sustained agitation that singled them out from the other new immigrants blanketed by racial nativism— an agitation that reckoned them the most dangerous force undermining the nation.” The Jew became a satanic revolutionary beholden to an international cabal of capitalists and Bolsheviks bent on subverting American morality. Higham “Anti-Semitism and American Culture,” in ibid., 191; Leonard Dinnerstein, “Anti-Semitism Exposed and Attacked, 1945-1950,” American Jewish History 71 (September 1981): 134-49. 4

John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, 1955), 26-27, 66-67, 93-94, 160-61.

Chapter 9. John Higham and American Antisemitism

contended that this upsurge of antisemitism was due to the “decline of progressivism,” and that the antisemitic Henry Ford embodied a progressive spirit gone sour.5 Higham’s interpretation of antisemitism left many unanswered questions. The first concerns his argument that the roots of American antisemitism of the late nineteenth century resulted from rapid Jewish social mobility and the tensions of a dynamic society. This said nothing about the nature and origin of the antisemitic stereotypes themselves. Why, for examplę, did populists and patricians alike stress the image of the Jew as Shylock? It would appear that American antisemitism was part of a transnational mindset, not merely a response to indigenous American conditions, since the same antisemitic imagery was found in America and Europe. Furthermorę, the discovery by Naomi W. Cohen, Michael Dobkowski, and other historians of a significant amount of antisemitism prior to the Gilded Age challenges Higham’s argument that antisemitism originated in the social and economic competition of the 1870s and 1880s.6 Another problem with Higham’s interpretation of American antisemitism, stemming from his downplaying of its intellectual origins, is the complete absence in Strangers in the Land of any discussion of Christian antisemitism. The relationship between Christianity and antisemitism is, of coursę, controversial. There has been a strong philo-Semitic strain within American Protestantism, and yet Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark’s Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (1966) argued that the roots of contemporary American antisemitism were religious and theological. Certainly some evaluation in Strangers in the Land of the religious component of antisemitism would have been desirable, particularly in view of the strength of evangelical Protestantism at the time. One of Higham’s “patterns”of nativism was anti-Catholicism, indicating that people at that time did take religion seriously. And yet in Strangers in the Land and elsewhere, Higham scarcely mentions the relationship between American Christianity and antisemitism. This is puzzling, particularly since the focus of Strangers in the Land is supposedly on nativist ideas. A third difficulty regarding Higham’s analysis is the connection it makes between antisemitism and the stresses of a pulsating society and the social mobility of Jews. Strangers in the Land is unconvincing in its effort to correlate the

5

Higham, Strangers in the Land, 277-86.

6 Naomi W. Cohen, “Antisemitism in the Gilded Age: The Jewish View,” Jewish Social Studies 61 (Summer–Fall, 1979), 187 ff.; Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, passim.

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sudden and sharp increase of antisemitism after World War I with fundamental domestic social and economic changes and an upsurge in isolationism and nationalism. The problem remains why the Jew was viewed as the outsider, the preeminent threat to the purity of American nationality. Furthermore, the dramatic social and economic changes since the end of World War II have not been accompanied by increasing antisemitism—quite the contrary. During these four decades the American people have moved to suburbia, absorbed radical changes in the relationships between the sexes and the races, and assimilated countless economic changes, including revolutions brought on by television, the jet plane, and the computer. This period has also seen the most dramatic status and economic gains among Jews in the nation’s history and also a sharp decline in antisemitism to its lowest point since the Civil War. Certainly other factors besides Jewish social mobility and social and economic change are responsible for American antisemitism. One can also question Higham’s assumption that antisemitism is simply an aspect of nativism. The fact that Americans of diverse social and economic backgrounds espoused anti-Semitic stereotypes popular in Europe would seem to indicate otherwise. David Gerber’s criticism is apt. He complained of Higham’s tendency “to collapse antisemitism into a species of nativism; thus it becomes not unlike other prejudices against American white ethnic groups.” Higham for his part has argued that ethnic history written by insiders has a “special empathic flavor” and tends toward parochialism, while that written by more cosmopolitan historians reveals “unwelcome truths.”7 Finally, Higham’s conclusion that the antisemitism of the 1920s resulted from the “failure of democratic morale” and repressive nationalism is open to question. His dichotomy between democracy, reform, and tolerance on the one hand and conservatism, reaction, and antisemitism on the other is incompatible with the fact that some of the leading progressives were also antisemites who blamed Jews for the social conditions of urban America. Immigration restriction was one of the great progressive reforms, and it became operative during the greatest of all manifestations of the progressive mind, American involvement in World War I. Nor does there appear to be any simple correlation between nationalism and the fear of radicalism and antisemitism. While the Great Red Scare of 1919 occurred in a period of increasing antisemitism, the Second Great 7

Gerber, “Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations,” 39; John Higham, “Paleface and Redskin in American Historiography: A Comment,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (Summer 1985): 113.

Chapter 9. John Higham and American Antisemitism

Red Scare of the 1950s took place at a time of diminishing antisemitism. In fact, several of the chief red-baiters of the McCarthyite era were Jews. Furthermore, the backlash during the 1960s and 1970s against the New Left and anti-Vietnam protests was not accompanied by antisemitism. While the identification of antisemitism with reaction is unconvincing, it does provide a key to understanding Higham the historian. He is a left-of-center historian, a critic and yet an apostle of liberal and progressive historiography. Strangers in the Land appeared at a difficult time for liberals. Eisenhower was president, the conservative intellectual movement was just beginning, and leftwing intellectuals were experiencing a crisis of faith. Some historians, most notably Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., continued to identify with the progressive historiographical legacy of Charles A. Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington which emphasized social conflict, regional rivalries, and economic divisions. Other historians, however, had a conservative orientation more in keeping with the spirit of the decade. They were skeptical of mass movements, including supposedly democratic ones such as populism, stressed the continuity of the American experience, and emphasized the accomplishments, as well as the warts, of American history. A “consensus” school emerged which drew attention to an underlying political and ideological uniformity among Americans regarding the beneficence of private property, political decentralization, and private enterprise. During the 1940s and 1950s devotees of the “American Studies” movement were busy studying the myths and values that united Americans, while a mini-industry explored the relevance of Alexis de Tocqueville and his famous book, Democracy in America. Coming of age during the 1940s and 1950s, John Higham could not help but be influenced by the debate among American historians regarding the relevance of progressive historiography. In addition to his work in immigration and ethnic history, Higham has written extensively on American historiography, and it is not surprising that his interpretation of American antisemitism reflects his underlying historiographical orientation. Writing as an historian of the Left, Higham was skeptical of this new emphasis on cohesion, tradition, and stability. His famous essay “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’: Homogenizing our History,” published in Commentary, then a journal of the Left, attacked the new conservative direction of Americanists, particularly Daniel J. Boorstin. The conservative frame of reference, he claimed, “creates a paralyzing incapacity to deal with the elements of spontaneity, effervescence and violence in American history.” Ironically, in view of the emphasis his interpretation of American antisemitism placed on social rather than intellectual factors, Higham claimed that

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“contemporary conservatism has a deadening effect on the historian’s ability to take a conflict of ideas seriously.” While recognizing that the simple dualisms of progressive historiography (farm versus town, agrarian versus industrialist, West versus East, Jefferson versus Hamilton) were inadequatę, Higham worried that historians were rejecting as well the moral values which had animated the progressive historians: “an appreciation of the crusading spirit, a responsiveness to indignation, a sense of injustice.” Boorstin’s books were bereft of “any connection with a larger universe of values,” while his stress on the practicality of Americans was simply a “celebration of the mindlessness of American life,” an acceptance of “any circumstances that can be labeled as distinctively American.”8 In his appropriately entitled 1962 essay “Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic,” Higham elaborated on the place of moral judgment in historical writing. Consensus history, he feared, threatened scholarship with “moral complacency, parading often in the guise of neutrality.” The profession needed an infusion of the moral energy that had motivated progressive historiography, and he encouraged his colleagues to embark upon “a more widely ranging and subtler moral criticism than American professional historians have yet undertaken.” The historian, conscious of his moral responsibility, should be sensitive not only to what took place in the past but also to what could have taken place. His work should reflect a “knowledge of the elements of good and evil discoverable in a particular historical setting.”9 Higham’s History (1965) noted that while conservative and consensus historians had been glorifying the American past, historians of the Left, including himself, had “discovered a vein of prejudice in liberal thought,” an insensitivity and disinterest regarding race. Strangers in the Land’s emphasis on social and ethnic divisions, its illumination of a darker aspect of American history, and its applauding of the democratic heritage of open immigration was Higham’s major answer to consensus historiography as well as an example of the moral history he recommended to his peers. The question remained, however, whether his moralistic approach, his deemphasizing of the uniqueness of antisemitism, and his slighting of the depths of antisemitism significantly advanced the 8

John Higham, “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’: Homogenizing Our History,” Commentary, January 1959, 93-l00; John Higham with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, History (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), 213, 221.

9

John Higham, “Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic,” in Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship, ed. John Higham (Bloomington, 1970), 138-56.

Chapter 9. John Higham and American Antisemitism

understanding of American antisemitism. The answer to that would have to wait until the publication of Higham’s essays on American antisemitism.10 “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: A Reinterpretation” and “Social Discrimination Against Jews in America, 1830-1930” appeared in 1957, “Another Look at Nativism” in 1958, and “American Anti-Semitism Historically Reconsidered” in 1966. These were revised and reprinted in Send These to Me. When “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age” was reprinted, its title had been changed to “Ideological Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” perhaps to mollify those who had claimed Strangers in the Land had downplayed the ideological dimension of American antisemitism. Here he noted that antisemitism had been a minor factor in American history, criticized the left-wing interpretation of Carey McWilliams and others which blamed American antisemitism on conservatives and spokesmen for privilege, and denied that rural radicalism had been an influential determinant in the increase in antisemitism during the Gilded Age. “The whole agrarian crusade of the late nineteenth century,” he wrote, “drew vitality from the best traditions of American democracy and Christianity.”11 Instead, Higham looked to urban social and economic factors—particularly conflicts between a growing Jewish population and other ethnic groups, an economy which oscillated between flush and hard times, and the rapid Jewish advancement up the social and economic ladder—for the explanation of antisemitism, all the while recognizing that antisemitism was a minor theme in the late nineteenth century. Higham also repeated the contention of Strangers in the Land that antisemitism was part of a broader anti-immigrant movement. Antisemitism, he argued, “formed an integral part of a larger, more complex upswing of anti-foreign feeling.”12 Higham’s argument that antisemitism resulted from the interaction between Jewish social and economic mobility on the one hand and domestic tensions on the other necessarily led him to emphasize the urban context of antisemitism. Here he remained true to the progressive historiographical legacy that had been far more sympathetic toward the problems of rural than those of urban America. In the 1950s there had been an often bitter debate among historians regarding the relationship between the rural radicalism of the 1890s and antisemitism. Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and Peter Viereck, among 10 Higham, History, 213. 11 Higham, “Ideological Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” 123. 12 Ibid., 128.

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others, claimed that populism’s stress on the money question, its distrust of urban America, its search for scapegoats, and its desire to return to a golden age prior to urbanization, industrialization, and mass immigration had, in Hofstadter’s words, “activated most of what we have of modern popular antisemitism in the United States.” Higham, while admitting that antisemitism was not unknown among the populists, nevertheless claimed that it was at most a trivial aspect of populism. Much more important was the animus toward Jews felt by other urban ethnic groups and by members of the urban middle-class fearful of being engulfed by a Jewish wave.13 There was no place for Christian antisemitism in Higham’s analysis since, from his perspective, antisemitism was part of nativism, and American Christian leaders were not of one mind regarding immigration. With the exception of the Jews, virtually all the immigrants were Christians, and it would have been incongruous for native American Christians to oppose immigration on religious grounds. It is true that some Protestants opposed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe because most of these immigrants were Roman Catholic, but even they generally preferred to argue against large-scale immigration on social, economic, and political grounds. With Christianity on the sidelines regarding immigration, Higham had to downplay the religious roots of American antisemitism, particularly when he believed that antisemitism was of minor importance. Since Christianity was a fundamental element of American history and antisemitism was unimportant, it logically followed that American Christianity could not have been permeated with antisemitism. He preferred to attribute antisemitism to hard times, particularly during periods of intense nationalism, and especially among those who resented Jewish economic and social advancement. The economic interpretation, he concluded, “offers a still valid insight.”14 13 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), 77-91; Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York, 1955); Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era (Princeton, 1964); William F. Holmes, “Whitecapping: Anti-Semitism in the Populist Era,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 63 (March 1974): 244-61, esp. 261; C. Vann Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” American Scholar 59 (Winter 1959-60): 55-72; Norman Pollack, “The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism,” American Historical Review 58 (October 1962): 76-80; Walter T. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago, 1963), chs. 1-2; Arthur Liebman, “Anti-Semitism on the Left?” in Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History, 336. 14 Higham, “Ideological Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” 128-29. Ideological antisemitism, Higham wrote, “concentrated on economic rather than religious themes, on Shylock rather than Judas.” Higham, “Anti-Semitism and American Culture,” in Higham, ed., Send These to Me, 181.

Chapter 9. John Higham and American Antisemitism

The argument that antisemitism was a backlash to Jewish success was more fully developed in Higham’s “Social Discrimination Against Jews, 1830-1930.” For Americans unable to comprehend the dizzying pace of change of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and upset by the “general struggle for place and privilege,” the Jew was a handy target—the vulgar parvenu who had “upset the equilibrium of urban life.” Higham noted that, in contrast to other groups, “the Jews reaped more and more dislike as they bettered themselves. The more avidly they reached out for acceptance and participation in American life, the more their reputation seemed to suffer.” Higham attributed this to the more rapid progress of Jews, but it could just as easily have been argued that this progress triggered latent and distinctly anti-Jewish hostility. Higham refused to take this tack, however, because it would have weakened his underlying thesis that antisemitic behavior was simply a variant of nativism.15 While willing to admit that ideology has played “a major role in Jewish-Gentile relationships,” Higham refused to believe that it was responsible for social discrimination against Jews, and he denigrated the importance of Christianity or racism in fomenting antisemitism in America. Instead, he argued that the most significant ideological attack on the American Jew revolved around the mythical international Jewish conspiracy of communists and bankers, but he rejected any correlation between the popularity of this myth and social discrimination against Jews. “Discrimination, a product of status rivalries in an urban middle class, rested on foundations much more tangible than the specters that sometimes haunted the rural imagination.” Higham is thus forced to fall back upon “status rivalries,” a popular chestnut of the 1950s and one frequently used by critics of liberal historiography, to explain antisemitic behavior.16 In “Another Look at Nativism” Higham elaborated on his understanding of nativism. He continued to argue that nativism was, in essence, an ideological opposition to Catholics, radicals, and the supposedly racially inferior. He was quick to point out that nativism, as he understood it, did not encompass all of America’s ethnic tensions. Antisemitism, he asserted, resulted not from irrational myths “but rather from the structure of society.” The struggles for status, he wrote, “underlie much that we attribute too easily to irrational prejudice,” while

15 Higham, “Social Discrimination Against Jews, 1830-1930,” in ibid., Send These to Me, 147, 166-67. 16 Ibid., 168-72.

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“the question of status has touched the daily life of most Americans more intimately than any ideological warfare.”17 If American antisemitism has resulted from “a general middle-class scramble for prestige” which Jews participated in, then how can one explain the postWorld War II decline in antisemitism? This occurred at the same time that Jews became the chief executive officer of the Dupont Corporation, the Secretary of State, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College and the University of Chicago, the chairman of the Wall Street Journal, and the football coach at Brown University. A backlash against Jewish success should have resulted among the “guardians of distinction,” who presumably would have feared a Jewish invasion. But nothing of the sort took place, primarily because the climate of ideas of postwar America was hostile to antisemitism and other forms of racism.18 One possible key to Higham’s emphasis on status anxieties as a source of antisemitism is found in his statement that “we must assume . . . that in a competitive society everything which differentiates one group from another involves a potential conflict of interest.” Thus, for Higham, differences are most likely to result in conflicts of interest. This can be contrasted with Adam Smith’s argument that competition results in harmony among individuals and nations as all strive to secure their own self-interest. Competition, Smith believed, produces the maximum amount of goods at the lowest prices, focuses energies on productive enterprise, and deemphasizes the ethnic, religious, and dynastic rivalries conducive to warfare.19 Higham’s interpretation of antisemitism reflects a distaste for the competitive ethos and a longing for harmony prevalent within much of twentieth-century western intelligentsia. His 1966 essay “American Anti-Semitism Historically Reconsidered” (published in a revised version as “Anti-Semitism and American Culture” in Send These to Me) made this explicit. Here he attributed the decline of post-war antisemitism to assimilationist tendencies within the Jewish community. The more Jews became Americanized, the more receptive was the dominant culture to Jewish aspirations. This Americanization, he claimed, resulted from the ending of mass immigration and the dying out of the immigrant Jewish generation, the dispersal of Jews from the urban ghettos into suburbia and from 17 Higham, “Another Look at Nativism,” 107-10. 18 Ibid., 110. 19 Ibid., 111.

Chapter 9. John Higham and American Antisemitism

the Northeast to the Sun Belt, and the normalization of the Jewish economic profile and a corresponding disappearance of the “overbearing manners of the aggressive, insecure huckster.” With the diminishing of American heterogeneity, the image of the Jew “as the quintessential alien was virtually obliterated.”20 This explanation overlooks the fact that, as Charles Silberman has cogently pointed out in his recent A Certain People, the Jewish community is more assertive today than at any time in history, and Jews are no longer governed by the principle of “shah.” Antisemitism has gone out of vogue not because Jews qua Jews are inconspicuous but because antisemitism has been discredited. Today’s American Jews engage in the most blatant ethnic diplomatic lobbying in the nation’s history, Jewish comedians sprinkle their dialogues with Yiddish, Hollywood produces films such as Yentl and The Frisco Kid, and American Jewish novelists writing about Jews have won numerous Pulitzer Prizes and even a Nobel Prize. And yet there has not been any Gentile backlash even though this Jewish assertiveness has occurred at a time when much of America has been confronted by bizarre social and cultural changes. Higham’s assumption that the solution for antisemitism is a social harmony in which ethnic and religious differences are muted strikes a discordant note in this the year of the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. Taken to its logical conclusion, it would lead to the ultimate homogenization of American history.21 Higham has clearly stated his opposition to any serious commitment to cultural pluralism. “Since the most intense ethnic feelings are highly virulent,” he wrote in 1974, “it is fortunate that ethnic identification is frequently mild.” He praised those who lacked any strong ethnic feeling since they prevented social polarization “either by muffling divisive issues or by shifting the issues to a more universal plane.”22 For the intellectually curious, he claimed, the ethnic community was likely to be “suspicious, narrow-minded, riddled with prejudices.” America’s greatest problem in formulating a rational position regarding the competing claims of ethnic identity and cultural assimilation was “rediscovering what values can bind together a more and more kaleidoscopic culture.”23

20 Higham, “Anti-Semitism and American Culture,” in ibid., 194-95. 21 Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (New York, 1985). 22 Higham, “Introduction,” in Higham, ed., Send These to Me, ix. 23 Higham, “Another American Dilemma,” in Higham, ed., Send These to Me, 236-46.

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Higham’s skeptical approach to ethnic diversity helps explain his interpretation of American antisemitism. For him, American Jews make up an ethnic group which, along with other ethnic groups, will probably be swallowed up by the general culture as more and more of its most talented young reject parochial identities. With the dissipating of Jewish loyalties and distinctive Jewish social and personality characteristics, antisemitism will gradually disappear. Since antisemitism is a species of nativism, it will become attenuated by Jewish assimilation. And since Judaism as a religion and the Jewish people as a religioethnic community have no place in Higham’s schema, there is no need for him to discuss that type of antisemitism produced by Christianity. While Higham was developing his interpretation of American antisemitism, a competing diagnosis had appeared in 1950. Written by T. W. Adorno and several other refugees from Nazi Germany, The Authoritarian Personality provided an analysis of American antisemitism radically different from Higham’s. Not only did it argue that antisemitism was the most basic and distinctive of prejudices, but it also posited an “authoritarian personality” prone to antisemitism. This personality was rigid, religious, distrustful of ambiguity, and suspicious of change. It is not surprising that Higham believed The Authoritarian Personality to be a “ponderous, pretentious, often confusing” volume. He found objectionable not only its emphasis on antisemitism as the primordial hatred, but he also doubted the existence of any authoritarian personality irrespective of the historical peculiarities of different societies. He contended that the authors of The Authoritarian Personality had mistakenly applied a paradigm derived from Europe to the completely dissimilar conditions of America. Finally, Higham objected to The Authoritarian Personality’s reification of the concept of prejudice. This left no room for the social and economic conditions that had been emphasized in Strangers in the Land and the essays in Send These to Me. For Higham, American antisemitism was an unimportant and temporary phenomenon resulting from the dislocations of urbanization and industrialization.24 Higham has been the most perceptive historian of American antisemitism. Influenced by progressive historiography, conscious of the uniqueness of American history, and sensitive to the nuances of Jewish history, his analysis bore the marks of the intellectual milieu of the postwar years. It is the task of his successors to supplement his interpretation, to provide both a greater role for ideas in the origins of American antisemitism and a greater appreciation of the uniqueness of American Jewish history. 24 Higham, “Anti-Semitism and American Culture,” in Higham, ed., 174-76

C hapter 10

The World Labor Athletic Carnival of 1936: An American Anti-Nazi Protest The Soviet bloc’s boycott of the 1984 Olympics was merely the latest phase in the long and dismal relationship between politics and the modern Olympic movement. The absence of the Soviet Union and its satellites from Los Angeles had been preceded by the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow games, the Black African boycott of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the Canadian refusal to allow athletes from Taiwan to enter Canada and compete in Montreal, the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich games, the “Black Power” salute by Black athletes in Mexico City in 1968, the banning of South African athletes from all Olympics after 1968, and the exclusion of Israel, Japan, and Germany from the 1948 London Olympics. In fact, politics has been an integral part of the modern Olympics since its founding in the late nineteenth century by Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Coubertin, an ardent French patriot, was dismayed by the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and believed international athletic competition could strengthen French nationalism and invigorate the physical prowess of French youth. Not surprisingly, Coubertin lobbied, although unsuccessfully, to exclude Germany from the first of the modern Olympics in 1896.1 Ironically, the apex of political manipulation of the Olympics occurred forty years later when the Nazis attempted to use the Olympics to demonstrate Aryan athletic supremacy and Germany’s renaissance under National Socialism. There 1

Richard Espy, The Politics of the Olympic Games (Berkeley, 1979); John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (Chicago, 1981); Richard D. Mandell, The First Modern Olympics (Berkeley, 1976); Eugen Weber, “Gymnastics and Sport in Fin-de-Siecle France: Opium of the Classes?” American Historical Review 76 (February 1971): 70-98.

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was widespread opposition throughout Europe and the United States to participating in the 1936 Olympics since it was obvious that the Nazis planned to use the games as a political showcase. To protest the Berlin Olympics, a rival athletic festival was organized in Barcelona to begin on the first day of the Berlin games, while in America the Jewish Labor Committee ( JLC) and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) hosted the World Labor Athletic Carnival on New York City’s Randall’s Island on August 15-16, coinciding with the last two days of the Berlin competition. Germany had been awarded both the winter and summer 1936 games prior to the accession to power of the Nazis in 1933. Initially skeptical of their value, Hitler soon became the games’ most enthusiastic supporter when he realized their propaganda value. No expense was to be spared in constructing the most modern facilities, providing for the athletes’ comfort, and photographing the events. At the same time, German athletic officials made it clear that only Aryans would represent Germany at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin, and that Jewish athletes from other countries would not be particularly welcome. The International Olympic Committee told Germany that the games would be moved if German Olympic officials did not allow Jewish athletes to tryout for the German team, if antisemitic posters were not removed from Garmisch and Berlin, and if all visiting athletes would not be treated equally. Faced with the loss of the games, German authorities backed down and added a half-Jew to its hockey team and a half-Jew to its women’s fencing team. The Germans also guaranteed that all competitors would be treated fairly and antisemitic propaganda in the host cities would be removed. Germany hoped these minimum concessions would satisfy the International Olympic Committee, even though the antisemitism permeating German sports still remained. While Jewish athletes were supposedly allowed to compete for positions on the German team, they were denied the opportunity to train and to join Aryan athletic clubs, and Jewish athletic organizations were deprived of facilities and not allowed to compete with non-Jewish clubs.2 By 1935 it was obvious to impartial observers that Germany was engaged in a charade. Although the International Olympic Committee was willing to take the German Olympic Committee at its word, many Americans strongly opposed sending athletes to Germany. The American Jewish Congress and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League opposed American participation in the winter and summer games. Even more significant was the opposition to participation 2

Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (New York, 1971).

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within the American Olympic Committee (AOC) and the Amateur Athletic Union. In 1935, the president of the AAU was Jeremiah T. Mahoney, a New York lawyer and Roman Catholic layman who had close ties to the labor movement, Tammany Hall, and the Roosevelt administration. Mahoney was a passionate foe of Nazi paganism, antisemitism, and anti-Christianity. Ironically, he was also a member of the New York Athletic Club, which barred Jews and African Americans from membership. In 1935, he established the Committee on Fair Play in Sports which lobbied against American participation in the German Olympics. The committee’s pamphlet, Preserve the Olympic Ideal, claimed that the issue of participation was the most momentous question in the history of American sports, involving “the future and the integrity of American athletes throughout the world.” The matter was of interest, it claimed, to all Americans opposed to Nazi discrimination against Christians and Jews. The pamphlet accused the American Olympic Committee, which favored American participation in the Olympics, of appealing to antisemitism and every other passion “which in their low opinion of the American athlete he might conceivably possess.”3 The fact that the Olympic controversy occurred at the same time as the promulgation of the Nuremberg laws increased the number of prominent Americans favoring a boycott. They included Henry Sloane Coffin, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Al Smith, Charles E. Coughlin, Heywood Broun, James M. Curley, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, Oswald Garrison Villard, Francis Biddle, John Haynes Holmes, Westbrook Pegler, Paul Gallico, Dan Parker, Franz Boas, James W. Gerard (former ambassador to Germany), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Federation of Labor, the National Council of the Methodist Church, the Catholic War Veterans, the New York Times, the Nation, Christian Century, Commonweal, and the Amsterdam News. All told, seven governors, six United States Senators, forty-one university presidents, and twenty former Olympic champions publicly supported a boycott. Giant rallies in New York’s Madison Square Garden in late 1935 protested both the holding of the Olympics in Germany and American participation in them.4

3

New York Times, October 21, 1935, 1, 3; The Committee on Fair Play in Sports, Preserve the Olympic Ideal (New York, n.d.), 3-4. a copy of this pamphlet is in the Baruch Charney Vladeck Papers, Tamiment Collection, Bobst Library, New York University.

4

Richard E. Lapchick, “A Political History of the Modern Olympic Games,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 2 (Spring/Summer 1978): 1-12; Moshe Gottlieb, “The American Controversy over the Olympic Games,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 61 (March 1972): 200-209.

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The protestors’ hopes rested partially with the AAU which would decide in December 1935 whether to sanction American participation. Avery Brundage led the faction favoring American involvement. A former Olympic participant, a wealthy Chicago businessman, and head of the American Olympic Committee, Brundage was a fervent apostle of the Olympic ideal, believing that athletic competition encouraged international understanding and peace. If he was not an antisemite before the bitter controversy over the German Olympics, he certainly became one as a result of it.5 Brundage initially downplayed the existence of German antisemitism, denied that German Jewish athletes were discriminated against, claimed that German racial policies should not be the concern of the Olympic movement, and argued that politics should have no role in Olympic decisions. “Regardless of in what country the Olympic Games are held,” he stated in November 1933, “there will be some groups, some religion or some race that can register a protest because of the government of that country, past or present.”6 As the controversy heated up, Brundage became convinced that the opposition was largely an un-American Communist and Jewish conspiracy, a sentiment shared by other American Olympic officials. In December 1935, Brundage described the boycott advocates as “alien agitators and their American stooges,” and a few months later he warned a German Nazi that Jews and Communists would use “bribery, corruption and political trickery, and other contemptible tactics” in their campaign. On another occasion, he noted the effort at “intimidation by fair means and foul” by those “who have never learned the lessons of amateur sport and thus do not hesitate to use methods contrary to all levels of sportsmanship.” Brundage believed Mahoney’s position stemmed from selfish political ambition.7 To counter the Committee on Fair Play in Sports, Brundage organized the Fair Play for American Athletes committee and wrote Fair Play for American Athletes, a sixteen-page pamphlet that was distributed by the American Olympic 5

For Brundage’s life, see Allen Guttmann, The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement (New York, 1984).

6 D. A. Kass, “The Issue of Racism at the 1936 Olympics,” Journal of Sport History 3 (Winter 1976): 223-27; William C. Johnson Jr., All That Glitters Is Not Gold: The Olympic Games (New York, 1972), 175-77. 7

Kass, “The Issue of Racism at the 1936 Olympics,”: 228; Arnd Kruger, “The 1936 Olympics—Berlin,” in The Modem Olympics, ed. Peter J. Graham and Horst Ueberhorst (Cornwall, 1976), 171; Guttmann, The Games Must Go On, 72-73.

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Committee. The pamphlet accused “organized minorities” of fomenting “organized coercion and public rioting” to deny American athletes their right to compete in Germany, a right which “every loyal, red-blooded citizen” supported. It warned America’s Jews of the possibility of antisemitism stemming from “the radicalism and the self-seeking of a few in its ranks who put personal advantage before the welfare of the race.”8 After the Olympics, Brundage unequivocally defended the decision to participate, even at times praising the Nazi movement. Speaking at a celebration of German Day sponsored by the German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden in October 1936, he claimed Germany could serve as an example to Americans in stopping the spread of Communism and reviving patriotism. “Germany has progressed as a nation out of her discouragement of five years ago into a new spirit of confidence in herself,” he told his enthusiastic audience. “Everywhere I found Germans friendly, courteous, and obliging.” Since the times of ancient Greece, no nation “has displayed a more truly national and public interest in the Olympic spirit than you find in Germany.” The question whether the United States should send an Olympic team to Germany, he concluded, had involved the power of a “vociferous minority, highly organized and highly financed” attempting to impose its will on one hundred and twenty million Americans.9 Brundage never changed his mind about the 1936 Olympics, nor did he ever question his assumption that “the games must go on” at all costs. In 1944, he declared he favored the participation of Germany and Japan in the next Olympics. And in 1959, a decade and a half after the Holocaust, he was still referring to a “well-financed attack” on the 1936 Olympics, while claiming that American participation was “a great victory for Olympic principles.” In 1971, he described the Berlin games as “the finest in modern history. I will accept no disputes over that fact.” Brundage’s support for the German Olympics helps explain his callous response to the murder of the Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972.10 The question facing the AAU’s executive committee in December 1935 was whether to overturn its 1933 decision not to sanction American athletic participation in the German Olympics unless Germany modified its antisemitic sports

8

Arnd Kruger, “‘Fair Play for American Athletes’: A Study in Anti-Semitism,” Canadian Journal of the History of Sport and Physical Education 9 (May 1978): 43-46.

9

New York Times, October 5, 1936, 9.

10 John Lucas, The Modern Olympic Games (New York, 1980), 125; Lapchick, “A Political History of the Modern Olympic Games”: 4; Johnson, All That Glitters Is Not Gold, 177.

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policy. After a heated debate, the committee voted fifty-eight and one-quarter to fifty-five and three-quarters to approve American participation. Voting in the affirmative was an individual who would be arrested later as a German spy, a representative of the American professional cycling association whose members were banned from taking part in the Olympics, and a representative of the German Athletic Union. The AAU’s geographical districts voted fifteen and one-half to forty-one and one-half not to participate, while the associated sports groups, which Brundage had encouraged to join the AAU, voted fifteen to one to participate. The remaining votes were cast by past and current presidents of the union. After this crucial vote, Mahoney resigned as the AAU’s president and Brundage replaced him.11 During the first half of 1936, the American Olympic Committee purged itself of the more vocal advocates of an Olympic boycott. In April, it dropped Charles Ornstein, an ally of Mahoney and the Jewish Welfare Board’s representative on the AOC. The technical charge against Ornstein was his absence at the last two meetings of the AOC, even though he had attended every previous meeting for fourteen years. Ornstein claimed he had never been notified of one of the meetings he missed. The proposal to expel Ornstein was offered by Dietrich Wortmann, who had been born in Germany and was sympathetic towards Hitler’s regime. Ornstein charged his expulsion occurred because the AOC was “devoid of Americanism and sportsmanship” and had “adopted the color and tactics of Nazi Germany.” He predicted that in the near future American athletes “will rise to defend sportsmanship and to rescue it from the disgrace which the AOC has reduced it.” This would soon come to pass.12 Ornstein and Mahoney wished to avenge their humiliation at the hands of Brundage’s clique and to vindicate their belief that American athletes should not lend tacit support to the Nazi government. One possible way would be to sponsor a competing athletic event. There was precedent for such an action. The Norwegian workers’ sport association had sponsored a protest winter sports festival at the same time the winter Olympics was taking place in Garmisch in February. Also, a so-called People’s Olympics was scheduled to take place in Barcelona, in July and August to coincide with the Berlin games. Opponents of Brundage could have merely subsidized the participation of American athletes in Barcelona

11 Kruger, “The 1936 Olympics,” 172. 12 Gottlieb, “The American Controversy over the Olympic Games,” 193; New York Times, April 6, 1936, 25; Young Worker, April 14, 1936, 8.

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if opposing the Nazi Olympics had been their sole motivation. Other factors, however, were involved. They included the power struggle occurring within the AAU, the hatred of Ornstein and Mahoney for Brundage, and the desire to encourage an American workers’ sports movement. The problem for Ornstein and Mahoney was finding a cosponsor with the manpower, political influence, and following who could secure the facilities and sell a sufficient number of tickets to make such an anti-Nazi competition both financially and athletically successful. For several months, there had been talk in New York City about the possibility of such an athletic meet. Samuel K. Maccabee, an attorney and chairman of the Move-the-Olympic Committee, had formed the Good-Will Athletic Union to Preserve the Olympic Ideal to promote an athletic competition to rival the summer Olympics. At the same time, the Jewish Labor Committee ( JLC) had been in contact with Ornstein and Mahoney regarding the possibility of sponsoring an anti-Nazi track meet. In May, the JLC decided to go ahead, and Mahoney and Ornstein had their necessary co-sponsor.13 The JLC had been founded in February 1934 by Jewish labor leaders in the needle trades as a socialist, anti-Communist counterpart to the American Communist Party’s People’s Council for Democracy and Against Fascism which had been established the previous year. Baruch Charney Vladeck, the general manager of the Jewish Daily Forward, was the JLC’s first chairman, and David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), the city’s largest union, was its treasurer. Not surprisingly, Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and Dubinsky’s great rival, refused to join the JLC. The committee hoped to combat fascist propaganda in America, to aid European anti-fascist labor organizations, to help Jewish labor institutions in Poland and Germany, and to encourage the boycott of German goods. The staging of an anti-Nazi sports festival would be a coup for the JLC. Not only would it indicate American opposition to the Berlin games, but it would also perhaps provide funds for the committee’s activities and encourage the participation of workers in sports, an involvement which had become a more important activity for unions and left-wing political movements since World War I.14 13 New York Times, January 4, 1936, 18; Benjamin Gebiner to S. M. Oshry, January 27, 1936, Reel R1864, Vladeck Papers. 14 Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in U.S.A, 1914-1952: An Industrial, Political and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement (New York, 1953), 258-59.

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Initially, European socialists and Communists had opposed organized and professional sports. Sports, they believed, emphasized individual excellence at the expense of working class solidarity, made heroes out of the workers’ class enemies, stressed a win-at-any-cost philosophy, and exploited its participants to the economic advantage of the owners (in the movie Daniel a communist tells his son that Joe DiMaggio was an exploited member of the proletariat). The European Left was particularly opposed to the Olympics, which they claimed encouraged chauvinism and militarism and was the playground of the rich, the wellborn, and the college educated. (The left-wing view of the Olympics is similar to that portrayed in Chariots of Fire, in which proper English gentlemen from Oxbridge compete for glory according to an upper-class code). According to the Left, sports were a manifestation of the commercialism and exploitation of modern capitalism. In time, however, the European Left realized that the working class was in love with athletics and that it would have to provide workers with an ideologically proper context for sports participation. The European workers’ sports movement grew up in the early twentieth century to provide recreational opportunities for workers so that they would not be attracted to “bourgeois” sports organizations. Working class solidarity would be strengthened, it was hoped, if the laboring class would take part in wholesome physical education such as calisthenics, gymnastics, cycling, and running on a mass, non-competitive basis. Socialist leaders soon realized that workers were interested in competitive and professional sports, and that it was better for them to compete among themselves than to play alongside their class enemies and on teams sponsored by middle-class and religious organizations. From their perspective, workers’ sports were another means to intensify class consciousness and advance the revolutionary movement. While politics could reshape sports, sports could also reshape politics.15 The bitter rivalry between European socialists and Communists led to the establishment of rival sports organizations, the Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SWSI) and the Red Sport International (RSI), of rival sports clubs, and of rival athletic competitions. They even sponsored competing workers’ Olympics. The RSI held its “Spartakiad” in 1928 and 1931, while the SWSI held Workers’ Olympiads in 1921 (Prague), 1925 (Frankfurt), and 1931 (Vienna), 15 David Alexander Steinberg, “Sports Under Red Flags: The Relation Between the Red Sport International and the Socialist Workers’ Sport International, 1920-1929,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1979); Robert F. Wheeler, “Organized Sport and Organized Labour: The Workers’ Sports Movement,” Journal of Contemporary History 13 (April 1978): 191-210.

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and had scheduled one for 1937 (Antwerp). The European Left was particularly opposed to the German Olympics of 1936. The Comité Internationale pour le Respect de l’Espirit Olympique was formed in 1935 to organize a People’s Olympic to compete with the Berlin games. Many worker athletes of Europe refused to compete in Berlin, and Spain and the Soviet Union did not send their sportsmen to Nazi Germany.16 While the European workers’ sports movements published many magazines, sponsored major athletic events attracting thousands of athletes and tens of thousands of spectators, and were important elements in European left-wing culture, workers’ sports in America were in their embryonic stage. In part this was due to the lesser role of Communism and socialism in American life, and in part to the implausibility of arguing that organized American amateur and professional sports contaminated the working class. Sports were more popular among American workers than probably any other group. Collegiate and professional athletics was an avenue of social and economic advancement for talented individuals from the working class and from ethnic and racial minorities. Even the sectarian American Communist Party realized the fatuousness of applying European ideas of sports and recreation to American conditions. Beginning in the early 1930s, the Communist Daily Worker provided a sports page for its readers, knowing that it would be better for them to read about the Bronx Bombers and the Bums in the Daily Worker than in the capitalist press. The Communist Party wanted, of course, to encapsulate the entire life of the Communist—intellectual, social and recreational—within the Communist movement. Its youth must not be forced, for lack of alternative opportunities, to take part in athletic programs sponsored by the American Legion, the YMCA, the Catholic Youth Organization, and Jewish community centers. In New York, the party held annual picnics featuring athletic competitions. The one in 1936 in Brooklyn’s Ulmer Park was billed as the “Picnic of the Age” and “the gigantic Anti-Nazi Sports Festival.”17 The American Left was especially critical of the Olympic movement in general and the 1936 Olympics in particular. To protest the 1932 Los Angeles 16 Andrew Strenk, “Back to the Very First Day: Eighty Years of Politics in the Olympic Games,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 2 (Spring/Summer 1978): 30; Steinberg, “Sports Under Red Flags,” passim. 17 Mark Naison, “Lefties and Righties: The Communist Party and Sports During the Great Depression,” Radical America 13 ( July–August 1979): 47-59; Daily Worker, August 7, 1936, 3.

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Olympics, the Left sponsored a four-day festival in Chicago called the International Workers’ Athletic Meet, which attracted four hundred athletes and five thousand spectators. The Left worked assiduously to have the United States boycott the German Olympics. Sport Call, the organ of the Workers Sports League of America, argued that the Berlin Olympics would mirror the economic exploitation and nationalism inherent in fascism and capitalist sports. “The only true brotherly relations between nations and peoples of the world are brought about by organized labor and labor sports organizations.” The Communist instruments in the struggle against the Berlin games were the American Youth Congress and the American League Against War and Fascism which launched a campaign to collect one million signatures opposing American participation in Berlin. Communists were eager to cooperate with the non-Communist Left on the Olympic issue. The boycott campaign provided Communists, then going through their popular front stage, an opportunity to cooperate with others on the left in opposing fascism. As one wrote, an Olympic boycott would demonstrate to the German working class “the solidarity of the American people in their struggle against fascism.”18 The members of the Jewish Labor Committee opposed any cooperation with Communists, having earlier repulsed Communist efforts to take over their unions. But as men of the Left they believed in the workers’ sports movement and were familiar with the various workers’ athletic festivals and anti-Olympic events. Many of their unions sponsored basketball, baseball, and soccer leagues, gymnastic exhibitions, track meets, and other athletic programs for their members. Of all the garment unions, Dubinsky’s ILGWU was the most active in the recreational (and educational) field. Its biweekly newspaper, Justice, extensively covered the athletic activities of the union and its members, and every year the ILGWU sponsored a mammoth picnic on May Day featuring music, lectures, and athletic events. The one in 1936 was held in the Polo Grounds and attracted over seventy thousand people. Athletics, Justice noted, was not “the heritage of the privileged few but can and should be made eligible to the youth of the

18 John R. Betts, America’s Sporting Heritage: 1850-1950 (Reading, 1974), 317; Naison, “Lefties and Righties”: 52-55; Leo Thompson, “The Movement Against the Olympic Games,” International Press Correspondence 15 (December 21, 1935): 1727. For the situation in Canada, see Bruce Kidd, “Canadian Opposition to the 1936 Olympics in Germany,” Canadian Journal of the History of Sport and Physical Education 9 (December 1978): 20-40.

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laboring masses, to those who constitute the backbone of our people in city and nation.”19 After the JLC agreed to cooperate in holding an anti-Nazi sports festival, its first problem was finding a suitable facility. Dubinsky’s initial choice was the Polo Grounds or Yankee Stadium. These, however, were too expensive to rent even if they had been available, because they were used during the summer by the New York Giants and the New York Yankees. An alternative site was the new city Stadium on Randall’s Island, which was to host the men’s track and field tryouts for the American Olympic team on July 10th and 11th. Dubinsky had Vladeck approach Robert Moses, the Commissioner of Parks, on behalf of the powerful ILGWU and the city’s labor movement regarding use of the stadium. Both Moses and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia immediately agreed to use of the stadium, and the track meet was scheduled for August 15th and 16th, the last two days of the Berlin games. LaGuardia praised the JLC for its involvement in this project. “I am not unmindful of the need for developing greater opportunities for physical culture and body building among the adults of our congested population,” the Mayor noted, “and any movement designed to implant in the heart and minds of the workers a desire for more general participation in athletic endeavors is worthy of hearty cooperation and support. You will have that support from me in the splendid enterprise which you now have under way.”20 The shidduch between Ornstein and Mahoney and the JLC was consummated in late May with a press release announcing the World Labor Athletic Carnival. Mayor LaGuardia, Mahoney, Governor Herbert Lehman of New York, and William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, agreed to be honorary chairmen for the event. Since both Dubinsky and Vladeck were in Europe during much of the summer, the responsibility for organizing the athletic carnival fell on the shoulders of Isadore Nagler, one of the ILGWU’s vice presidents and general manager of the Joint Board of the Cloakmakers Union, and Abraham Tuvim, one of Dubinsky’s trusted lieutenants and the games’ executive director. The JLC handled publicity, ticket sales, and businessrelated matters of the meet, while Ornstein was in charge of the event’s athletic aspects, such as securing the athletes, preparing the field, and hiring officials. 19 Max D. Danish, The World of David Dubinsky (Cleveland, 1957), 101-2; Justice 18 (August 1, 1936: 16. 20 David Dubinsky to Baruch C. Vladeck, May 14, 1936, Box 39, Dubinsky Papers (ILGWU Archives, New York); Vladeck to Dubinsky, May 18, 1936, ibid; Justice 18 ( July 1, 1936): 3.

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The games’ committee contained both labor union officers and AAU officials from throughout the country, including Daniel T. Ferris, the AAU’s secretarytreasurer. Over the opposition of Brundage, the carnival received the sanction of the AAU.21 Before leaving the country, Dubinsky sent invitations to the meet to garment manufacturers, civic figures, and bankers involved in New York’s garment industry, the city’s largest business. Many of the manufacturers and bankers bought blocs of tickets at a cost of half a dollar to two dollars apiece. Both Mayor LaGuardia and Governor Lehman promised Dubinsky they would try to attend the meet. Lehman, a track enthusiast and manager of the Williams track team while in college, donated a cup to be awarded the athletic club scoring the most points.22 The major responsibility for ensuring the success of the meet rested with the garment unions and organizations with large Jewish memberships. Among the unions that bought many tickets were clothing workers, cloak makers, hat makers, furriers, belt makers, corset workers, dressmakers, knit goods workers, and millinery workers. The Grand Street Boys Association, the Workmen’s Circle, and the Jewish National Workers Alliance encouraged their members to support the meet, and tickets could be purchased at the offices of the city’s unions, the Forward, the Workmen’s Circle, and the Rand School of Social Science.23 The Jewish and left-wing press devoted much space to publicizing the athletic carnival. The workers’ sports movement, Justice claimed, would have its “national baptism” at Randall’s Island and then begin “a career of limitless development.” Local Jewish papers throughout the country printed articles about the track meet provided by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and many published editorials extolling Mahoney, Ornstein, and the JLC. The B’nai Brith Messenger of Los Angeles wrote that the athletic carnival was of “great importance” since “it is of the utmost importance that sentiment against Nazism should be kept alive.” For the Jewish Times of Baltimore, the track meet demonstrated the sentiments of millions of Americans that “Nazi Germany is not a fit place” for the Olympics. The Jewish press naturally emphasized the Jewish dimension of the Randall’s

21 Press release, May 22, 1936, Box 51, Dubinsky Papers; Harry Haskel, A Leader of the Garment Workers: The Biography of Isidore Nagler (New York, 1950), 266-68. 22 New York Times, June 4, 1936, 29; Guttmann, The Games Must Go On, 76. 23 Forward (in Yiddish), June 21, 1936.

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Island games, stressing the role of Jews in planning the event, the large number of Jewish athletes participating, and the duty of the Jewish American Olympic athletes to withdraw and compete at Randall’s Island.24 Interestingly enough, the Jewish Daily Forward downplayed the Jewish aspect of the games in its many articles about Randall’s Island. The Forward argued that the games were primarily a worker protest against Hitlerism, an interpretation congenial to the paper’s Bundist ideology. An exponent of secularism and socialism, the Forward (as well as the JLC) never questioned the wisdom of holding the games on the Jewish Sabbath. For the Forward, the games were part of the workers’ sports movement, and it stressed the many athletes participating under union banners, attacked Hitler as a “merciless enemy of the working class,” and argued that a large attendance would be “a mighty demonstration of working class solidarity” against fascism.25 In contrast to the Forward, the Communist Yiddish paper Freiheit was less timid in emphasizing the Jewish stake at Randall’s Island. At its Seventh World Congress in 1935, the Communist lnternational had called for a popular front against war and fascism. This, of course, stemmed from the growing Soviet fear of Nazi Germany. In the United States, this resulted in a friendlier attitude by Communists toward Jewish culture and a toning down of their fanatical antiZionist and atheist propaganda. Although the Freiheit questioned the wisdom of inviting “bourgeois” athletes to participate and of excluding Communists from helping plan the games, the Freiheit praised the athletic carnival as a manifestation of solidarity among Jews and workers, and hoped it would be the forerunner of other track meets.26 The Freiheit’s stance toward Randall’s Island echoed the international Communist line calling for a united front of all anti-fascist sportsmen. One way to broaden the appeal of Communism, Communist spokesmen stressed, was to make overtures toward democratic and peace-loving bourgeois sports organizations such as the AAU. Communists were encouraged “to completely rid themselves of all that remains of their sectarian traditions in relation to sport,” and

24 Justice 18 (August 1, 1936): 16; B’nai Brith Messenger (Los Angeles), August 14, 1936, 4; Jewish Times (Baltimore), June 5, 1936, 8. 25 Forward, June 12, 1936, June 21, 1936, and esp. August 13, 1936. 26 Freiheit (in Yiddish), August 15, 1936 and August 16, 1936; Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York, 1984), 382-84

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to work within all sports organizations. It was more important for the sports movement to be anti-fascist than communist.27 The Daily and Sunday Worker, the Communist Party of the United States’ major organs, took an orthodox ideological posture toward Randall’s Island. The paper praised the labor movement for providing workers “an opportunity to spend their spare time in constructive and health-giving sports,” predicted the meet would be “one of the major events of the year with international records jeopardized in a number of events,” described the carnival as the nation’s “greatest demonstration against Hitlerism in sports,” claimed attendance would surpass that of the American men’s Olympic trials, and complimented the meet’s organizers for providing the opportunity for labor athletes to compete against “carefully trained school boys.”28 The non-Communist Left was also enthusiastic regarding Randall’s Island, particularly elements close to the Jewish Labor Committee. The ILGWU’s Justice, for example, provided extensive coverage for the meet, whereas Advance, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America’s paper, discussed it only in a perfunctory manner. The publicity for the athletic carnival was also affected by a split which had just occurred within the American Socialist Party between the social democratic Old Guard, including David Dubinsky and other Jewish socialist union leaders from New York, and the more leftist progressives, headed by Norman Thomas. The differences between the two factions involved attitudes toward democracy, the New Deal, and Communists and Communist dominated unions. The struggle came to a head at the party’s annual convention in 1936 in Cleveland when the Old Guard left the party, took the magazine The New Leader with them, and created the Social Democratic Federation.29 The New Leader viewed Randall’s Island as virtually a New York Social Democratic Federation event, copiously discussing its progress from its inception in May through the games themselves in August. It noted the “formidable” group of athletes who would compete at Randall’s Island, the great public interest in the meet, the capacity crowd anticipated, and the “mighty demonstration” of labor opposition to the “travesty on sportsmanship” of the Berlin Olympics. The

27 “The Sports Movement and the United Front,” Communist International 14 (August 1937): 579-87. 28 Sunday Worker, July 26, 1936, 13, August 2, 1936, 13, and August 23, 1936, 13; Daily Worker, August 15, 1936, 4. 29 David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (Chicago, 1955), 211-46.

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pro-Norman Thomas Socialist Call, in contrast, merely printed a pro forma announcement of the games. More to its liking was a track and gymnastic demonstration on July 4, 1936 in Taborville, Ohio near Cleveland. Sponsored by the Czechoslovak Socialist Federation of America, the Czechoslovak Labor Gymnastic Union, the American Workingmen’s Sokol of New York, the Workingmen’s Gymnastic Association, and the Workers Sports League of America, the Taborville event was advertised as the “First Workers’ Olympiad of America.” The Socialist Call was the only left-wing journal that paid it more than cursory attention, perhaps because a representative of the Socialist Party greeted the participants on behalf of American labor. The Socialist Call extended its own “warmest, fraternal greetings of international working-class solidarity. Through independent labor action, we will march forward to our emancipation.”30 The Randall’s Island meet assumed greater importance when the Barcelona People’s Olympics collapsed. Sponsored by the Catalonia Committee for People’s Sports and a mélange of European socialist and labor organizations, the Barcelona games were in defense of “the true Olympic spirit of peace and equality among races” in contrast to the Berlin Olympics of “national socialism, slavery, war and racial hatred.” The Committee on Fair Play in Sports had sent a group of American athletes to Barcelona. This delegation left the country on July 4th, arrived in Spain just before the games’ opening on July 19th, and found itself in the midst of the Spanish Civil War that broke out on the morning of the scheduled opening ceremonies. The meet was immediately cancelled, and most of the athletes scurried to safety while some joined in the fighting on the Loyalist side.31 The Forward spoke for the organizers of Randall’s Island when it predicted shortly before the meet that it would be one of the “most stunning sports shows in America” in which the “greatest champions in the world will participate”. Unfortunately, and despite generally favorable weather, advance ticket sales of thirty-six thousand dollars, and a fairly strong contingent of athletes, the athletic carnival was both an athletic and attendance disappointment. Total attendance was not more than eighteen thousand for the two days, whereas it was hoped that fifteen thousand spectators would witness each day’s events (the stadium held forty thousand). The unsatisfactory turnout could be attributed to several 30 New Leader 19 ( June 13, 1936): 2; (August 1, 1936): 3; (August 22, 1936): 3; Sport Call 1 ( January 1936): 7-8; Socialist Call, July 4, 1936, 5. 31 Kidd, “Canadian Opposition to the 1936 Olympics in Germany”: 12; New York Times, July 2, 1936, 18.

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factors: the reluctance of left-wing socialists and Communists to attend an event sponsored by their ideological foes and which they had had no part in planning; the presence in Berlin of America’s leading track stars; the unfamiliarity of New York’s population, particularly Jews, with track and field when compared with baseball and basketball; the lack of interest among the middle-class for a labor event; and the opposition of the Brundage faction to the AAU’s sanctioning of the meet. The games’ organizers were particularly displeased by their inability to attract athletes from outside the United States and Canada. They had originally expected the European left-wing sports organizations of at least fifteen countries to send hundreds of athletes to Randall’s Island as a demonstration of worker solidarity.32 The competition at Randall’s Island was divided between eight events reserved exclusively for male and female union members and twenty-three events open to all men. This division reflected the dual motivation behind the games— encouraging the workers’ sports movement and opposing the American presence in Berlin. The workers participated in running, walking, and throwing a basketball. The involvement of workers justified the word “Labor” in the games title, while hopefully assuring a large turnout of union members to the festival. Nevertheless the workers’ competitions were mere window dressing. Public attention focused instead on the fairly strong group of athletes Ornstein had managed to secure for the meet. A total of 450 athletes took part in the open events (250 workers participated in the closed worker events). They included four national AAU champions, ten junior national AAU champions, and two Canadian champions. Present were Henry Cieman, the Jewish world class walker from Canada who boycotted the Nazi Olympics; George Varoff, the “Jumping Janitor” and world record holder in the pole vault; Charles Beetham, the Big Ten and AAU 800 meter champion; Walter Marty, former world-record holder in the high jump; Eulace Peacock, the Temple University sprinter and high jumper who had defeated Jesse Owens shortly before the Olympic trials; Eddie Gordon, the gold medal winner in the 1932 Olympic broad jump; and Ham Hucker, the current AAU champion in the 200 meter hurdles. All the athletes had competed for a spot on the Olympic squad and were anxious to demonstrate they should have been in Berlin. Varoff, for instance, was the greatest vaulter in history and had been considered

32 Forward, August 13, 1936.

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a certainty to make the American Olympic team and bring home either the gold or silver medal.33 Varoff vaulted an inch and a half higher than American Earle Meadows’s gold medal leap at Berlin and the fourth highest vault in history. He was selected as the meet’s outstanding performer. However, no other athlete gave a noteworthy performance. The New York Herald Tribune described the athletic performances as “mediocre” and noted that the spectators were unenthusiastic. “The idea behind the meet is excellent,” the paper wrote, “but the class of the competition was not near the standard recently on view for New Yorkers,” a reference to the American Olympic trials held a month earlier.34 The meet’s major upsets occurred in the 100 and 220 yard sprints by the unheralded Perrin Walker of Georgia. Newspaper attention focused on the fact that Walker was white and had defeated several prominent Black sprinters. The New York American wrote that white runners had “monopolized a sprint for a change,” an obvious contrast with the victories of Jesse Owens, Ralph Metcalf, and other Black sprinters in Berlin. The newspapers also continually referred to the fact that the vaulter Howard Jones was the first Negro to clear thirteen feet.35 The games’ organizers professed satisfaction at the way things had gone. The ILGWU noted that they had drawn “some of the finest performers in track and field . . . and created wide interest in labor and athletic circles in New York.” For Governor Lehman, who had attended the athletic carnival, its major significance was providing “the answer to the Nazi Olympics” and an opportunity for workers to become involved in sports. “It was a pleasure,” Lehman wrote Dubinsky, “to have the opportunity to participate in the splendid games and observe the boys and girls of your Union engaged in constructive and healthful outdoor sports.” The ILGWU was to be praised for its pioneering work in recreation. “I know of no more worthwhile enterprise for workers,” the governor concluded, and there was “no reason why young people from the shops and factories should not make their marks in athletics in common with other American boys and girls from colleges and clubs.” The New Leader was especially carried away by the athletic carnival. Headlining an article on the games “Crowd Sees Records Smashed at Anti-Nazi Labor Sports Meet,” the magazine described Randall’s Island as a “mighty demonstration of opposition to the Nazi-controlled 33 New York American, August 14, 1936, 23, and August 15, 1936, 19. 34 New York Herald Tribune, August 16, 1936, 1 and August 17, 1936, 34. 35 New York American, August 16, 1936, S-3.

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Olympics” in which “twenty-five thousand” spectators witnessed “spectacular exhibitions of athletic prowess.”36 The organizers of Randall’s Island hoped the athletic carnival would encourage the workers’ sports movement and be a prelude for other labor track meets. Even before August 1936, Mahoney had announced plans for a winter indoor and an annual outdoor meet. No winter competition was held, but another summer track meet at Randall’s Island was highly likely in view of the events of December 1936. In that month, Mahoney, still smarting from his ouster as AAU president and convinced that he had been correct in predicting that the Berlin Olympics would glorify the Nazi state, publicly announced his candidacy for the AAU’s presidency. His campaign manager was Ornstein. Brundage was finishing his seventh term as AAU national president, had decided not to seek reelection, and was supporting Patrick J. Walsh of New York.37 The crucial vote occurred on December 6th. After preventing a Brundage ploy to hold the election at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, the Mahoney forces overwhelmingly elected him by vote of 199-128. Mahoney interpreted his election as a clear mandate to cleanse the AAU of any remaining association with the Berlin games. Within a few weeks, he selected Ernest L. Jahncke, an intense opponent of American participation in Berlin, as a delegate-at-large to the AAU, replaced Dietrich Wortmann as head of the AAU’s weightlifting committee, and saw to it that the AAU’s executive committee refused to permit an American track and field team to compete in Germany during the summer of 1937. Brundage believed Mahoney’s election had been engineered by Jews and radicals. Convinced now that he was being victimized by a Jewish conspiracy, Brundage became an outspoken antisemite—collecting antisemitic literature, writing letters referring to Jewish materialism and bad sportsmanship, and blaming Jews for American involvement in World War I.38 With Mahoney as president, there was no doubt that the AAU would enthusiastically support a second labor athletic festival. This one-day event took place at Randall’s Island on July 11, 1937. Although cosponsored by the Jewish Labor Committee, the Jewish presence at this track meet was much less promi36 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union General Executive Board, Report to the Twenty-Third Convention (1937), 183; New York Herald Tribune, August 17. 1936, 34; Lehman to Dubinsky, August 27, 1936, Box 6, Dubinsky Papers; New Leader 19 (August 22, 1936): 3. 37 New York Times, December 1, 1936, 32; December 3, 1936, 33. 38 New York Times, December 7, 1936, 29; December 8, 1936, 35; December 26, 1936, 16; Guttman, The Games Must Go On, 83, 91-95.

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nent, and it received little publicity in the Jewish and radical press. There was, after all, no Nazi Olympics to compete with. Mahoney described the meet’s anti-elitist rationale. “The trend of the times was to furnish greater opportunity for those who have more leisure and those who do not have the advantage of the school, college or club athletic facilities.” Mahoney hoped this would take place under the sponsorship of the AAU. Just as in 1936, the meet’s events were divided between those open to anyone (twenty competitions) and those reserved exclusively for union members (twelve competitions). There were also three events reserved for the handicapped. Honorary chairmen were Governor Lehman, Mayor LaGuardia, and Mahoney. Ornstein was again chairman of the meet’s athletic aspects. He had attracted another strong group of athletes, including Glenn Cunningham and John Woodruff in the mile, Dimitri Zaitz in the shot put, Sam Stoller in the sprints, Forrest Towns in the hurdles, and Cornelius Johnson in the high jump, all members of the American Olympic team at Berlin. All told there were three Olympic and twelve American champions at the meet. Pre-meet speculation focused on the possibility of a fifteen-foot pole vault, since George Varoff and Cornelius Warmerdam had entered, and on the chance of a world record in the mile. The New York Times predicted this meet would “take rank with the nationals as an all-star attraction.” Once again, however, attendance and performances were disappointing. Elroy Robinson of San Francisco provided the only excitement when he broke the world’s record in the half-mile.39 The 1937 workers’ sports festival was the last major event in the history of workers’ sports in America. The movement had always been something of an exotic European import, bearing little relationship to American social conditions. The factors encouraging the athletic segregation of workers in Europe did not exist in the United States. Rather, sports was one area (with the exception of racial segregation in professional baseball, football, and basketball) where performance rather than pedigree and class was the major determinant of success. Each immigrant and ethnic group flocked to American sports as an avenue of social mobility and public recognition. The pervasive acceptance of capitalism and individualism among all sectors of American society made the ideology of the European workers’ sports movement irrelevant in the United States. The materialism, competitiveness, and glorification by the media characteristic of modern sports, traits which European socialists found so offensive, were precisely the features that the American working class found so attractive. Sports were a way for the laboring class to become part of capitalist American society, not, as the 39 New York Times, June 30, 1937, 30; July 11, 1937, V, 3; July 12, 1937, 23.

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workers’ sports movement sought, a way to solidify working-class consciousness. The workers’ sports movement was not the first time, nor would it be the last, when American radicals misinterpreted the nature of America. The limited success of the workers’ sports carnival of 1936, and to a lesser extent that of 1937, owed little to the ideology of the workers’ sports movement and more to the work of the Jewish Labor Committee in advertising them as anti-Nazi alternative to the Berlin Olympics. After 1936, the need for such athletic events disappeared. For Jews, the significance of the sports festivals lay in their being part of the campaign against Hitler’s Germany rather than their role in the development of worker consciousness. While the Forward might have seen the games as primarily a workers’ and secondarily as a Jewish protest, its readers knew better. And one suspects that the Forward’s editors knew better also.

C h apter 11

The Approach of War: Congressional Isolationism and Antisemitism, 1939-1941 Although the social and economic aspects of American antisemitism have been thoroughly examined, its role in national politics has not been so carefully studied. Particularly is this true for the period just prior to World War II. During these years approximately a dozen or so congressmen and senators voiced clearly antisemitic sentiments, sentiments that had rarely been heard before in Congress. The basis of this antisemitism was the fear, a fear shared by a significant number of Americans, that the activities of American and European Jews could involve America in the European conflict. The entry of the United States into the war in December 1941 eliminated the supposed conflict between the national interest and Jewish diplomatic objectives. Of course American antisemitism did not disappear after Pearl Harbor, but it could no longer depend on the support of extreme nationalists and isolationists.1 Most students of American antisemitism have slighted the relationship between antisemitism and America’s position in the world, instead emphasizing its roots in social and economic tensions. John Higham claimed that antisemitism increased during the 1870s and 1880s because Jews experienced rapid economic mobility and wished to live in the same neighborhoods, frequent the same resorts, and belong to the same organizations as their Gentile counterparts. Richard Hofstadter, in contrast, traced the antisemitism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries back to populism. Populist spokesmen, he claimed, 1 David W. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Amherst, 1981), 3ff.; Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York, 1967), ch. 14; Saul S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945 (Detroit, 1973), 25-44. For the impact of the European war on Congress, see David L. Porter, The Seventy-Sixth Congress and World War II, 1939-1940 (Columbia, 1979).

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attributed agrarian economic woes to the financial machinations of Jewish international financiers, particularly the Rothschilds, and Jews became the scapegoats for the failure of the populist movement and the continuing financial difficulties of farmers. The sociologist Arnold Rose’s famous article “Anti-Semitism’s Root in City Hatred” attributed the emergence of modern American antisemitism to urbanization and the identification of the Jew with the city. “A nostalgia for country life and the rural virtues” saw in the Jew and “Jew York” the personification of those hostile and foreign influences that were undermining the sanctity of an older, simpler, more virtuous, and less urban America. Similarly, Leonard Dinnerstein’s history of the Leo Frank incident of 1913 claimed the lynching of Frank was due to the inability of rural and fundamentalist southerners to adjust to the rapid transformation of the South brought on by urbanization, industrialization, and the decline of that old time religion.2 The rapid increase in antisemitism in Europe and the United States during the 1930s seemed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that social crises and antisemitism went hand-in-hand. The nexus between antisemitism and social dislocations was especially emphasized by the social scientists who fled Europe during the Thirties and settled in the United States, in particular those such as Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno who had been associated with the Marxist oriented Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. In 1950 Adorno and his colleagues published their significant volume The Authoritarian Personality which, Adorno later wrote, arose out of an attempt to place “racial prejudice in the context of an objectively oriented, critical theory of society.3 Certainly no one can doubt that antisemitism and social and economic developments are intimately related. Social and economic factors, however, do not exist within a vacuum. Historians of American antisemitism of the 1930s must take into account America’s role in the world. Concern with events overseas has been “the most prominent characteristic of the American Jewish political persona.” The focus of that concern differed radically from that of other Americans

2

John Higham, “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: A Reinterpretation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (March 1957): 559-78; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform; Oscar Handlin, “American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth Century,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 40 ( June 1951): 323-44; Arnold Rose, “Anti-Semitism’s Root in City Hatred,” Commentary, October 1948, 374-78; Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York, 1968).

3

T. W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” Perspectives in American History 2 (1968): 352-65.

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during the 1930s when a far larger percentage of Jews than non-Jews supported an interventionist foreign policy for Europe.4 Until the outbreak of the European war, antisemitism was rarely voiced by members of Congress in the 1930s. The major exception was Congressman Louis T. McFadden. McFadden, a Republican, represented an agricultural district in northeast Pennsylvania from 1915 to 1935. Born in rural Bradford County (Pa.) in 1876, McFadden had worked on a farm while a youth and later became president of a country bank in Canton, Pennsylvania. McFadden’s rural and small-town banking background help explain his phobia regarding Jews. He believed Jews comprised an urban international banking conspiracy that was financing the New Deal, debauching the nation, and destroying the world’s financial system. For McFadden, the financial and political history of the United States had been laid out in the pages of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was his major source for the role of European Jewish bankers. He was the first congressman to insert excerpts from the Protocols into the Congressional Record. In May 1934, during debate on the Silver Purchase Act, McFadden informed his surprised colleagues that the major silver speculators included Bernard Baruch and James P. Warburg, and that “the Montagus, the Sassoons, and other Jewish bankers have juggled silver markets in India, China, and elsewhere to their own great profit, and always to the benefit of the British Empire.” On another occasion, McFadden accused Jewish bankers of swindling the American people, entering into secret agreements and illegal transactions with the Bank of England, defrauding the federal government, destroying independent banks and debasing the currency, and “having treasonably conspired and acted against the peace and security of the United States, and . . . having treasonably conspired to destroy constitutional government in the United States.”5 McFadden, a staunch foe of the New Deal, described it as “Jewish-controlled,” beholden to international bankers, hostile to small business and entrepreneurship, and eager to see hundreds of thousands of Jewish communists immigrate to America. Boring from within, Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, and Samuel T. Untermeyer sought to take over the government in order to socialize the means of production and distribution. While Jews were conspiring to 4

Henry L. Feingold, “‘Courage First and Intelligence Second’: The American Jewish Secular Elite, Roosevelt and the Failure to Rescue,” American Jewish History 72 ( June 1983): 427.

5

United States Congressional Record (hereafter cited as CR), 73rd Cong., 2nd Session, May 30, 1934, 10008, 10023; CR, 73rd Cong., 1st Session, May 23, 1933. 4055-4058.

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effect a radical revolution, they also controlled Wall Street and the Federal Reserve System. “Is it not true,” McFadden asked rhetorically, “that in the United States today, the ‘Gentiles’ have the slips of paper while the Jews have the gold and lawful money?” The prophecies of the Protocols were coming to pass. Soon Americans would have to choose between God and the “money changers who have unlawfully taken all our gold and lawful money into their own possession.”6 Not surprisingly, McFadden sympathized with Hitler’s efforts to destroy the supposed Jewish domination of German politics, commerce, finance, the mass media, the universities, and the professions. McFadden opposed boycotting German-made goods and denied that Jews were persecuted in Germany. The alternative in Germany to Hitler was a Jewish-Communist regime such as existed in the Soviet Union. McFadden warned his countrymen that Communist Jewish bankers, hoping to duplicate their success in Russia, meant “to paralyze industry, to destroy patriotism, and, finally, to secure the overthrow of government itself in the United States.”7 McFadden’s views astounded his colleagues. A letter from Cyrus Adler, president of the American Jewish Committee, which was read in the House of Representatives, pointed out that the Protocols was a famous forgery. Congressman Samuel Dickstein, representing New York’s Lower East Side, defended the patriotism of American Jews, denied they controlled the nation’s banks, and claimed that, in all his years in Congress, “I have never yet either in public or private contact with the members, been aware of such stupid ignorance.” No congressman sprang to McFadden’s defense, and he was defeated in the Democratic landslide of 1934. Few Americans believed at this time that, after the experience of the United States in World War I, there was any likelihood that Jews or any other groups wished or were able to involve the nation in another European bloodbath.8 Despite his unpopularity, McFadden was prophetic in emphasizing one theme which would dominate the antisemitic rhetoric in Congress in later years: the threat posed by Jewish influences to America’s hallowed policy of isolation from the afflictions of Europe. The Pennsylvanian cautioned that Jewish bankers

6

CR, 73rd Cong., 1st Session, June 15, 1933, 6225-27, May 29, 1933, 4539-40; CR, 73rd Cong., 2nd Session, June 8, 1934, 10899-900.

7

CR, 73rd Cong., 2nd Session, June 15, 1934, 11841-43; CR, 73rd Cong., 1st Session, June 15, 1933, 6225-27.

8

CR, 73rd Cong., 1st Session, May 31, 1933, 4711-12.

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were seeking to drive the United States into another war with Germany “so that they and their Gentile fronts . . . may reap rich profits on everything an army needs.” As war drew closer, the temptation increased to use antisemitism to discredit Roosevelt’s anti-fascist military and diplomatic policies.9 Congressional antisemitism encompassed the far right and the far left, the Deep South and the northern Plains states, and rural and urban congressmen. They were united by an abhorrence of the very thought of American involvement in another European conflict. They were part of that vast majority of Americans who, during the 1920s and most of the 1930s, firmly believed America had been tricked into entering World War I and that nothing beneficial had come from American participation in the fighting. The “never again” outlook was especially strong among congressmen who were part of the populist-progressive tradition. The populists of the late nineteenth century believed they were being victimized by an unholy conspiracy of New York and London bankers who manipulated credit, commodity prices, and railroad rates. Leading antiwar advocates in 1917, such as George W. Norris and Robert M. LaFollette, Sr., had charged that agitation for involvement in the European war was instigated by the same financial forces that had long oppressed rural America. In turn, many of the leaders of isolationism during the 1930s were heirs to what remained of western (and southern) progressive politics. They admired LaFollette’s opposition to American entry into World War I, attacked the economic power of Wall Street and big business, and blamed Jewish influences for pushing America toward war. Had war not loomed on the horizon, congressional antisemitism would have been restricted to an occasional exotic such as McFadden. Instead, it included such prominent western and southern progressives as Senators Burton K. Wheeler of Idaho, Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, and Congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi.10 9

CR, 73rd Cong., 1st Session, June 15, 1933, 6225-27.

10 For agrarian radicalism, see Russell B. Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics: A Historical Study of Its Origins and Development (New York, 1959); for the waning influence of agrarian radicalism in Congress in the 1930s and its disaffection from the New Deal, see Ronald A. Mulder, The Insurgent Progressives in the United States Senate and the New Deal, 1933-1939 (New York, 1979) and Ronald L. Feinman, Twilight of Progressivism: The Western Republican Senators and the New Deal (Baltimore, 1981), esp. ch. 9. In a letter to his son in February 1939, seven months before the outbreak of World War II, Senator Hiram Johnson of California, a Progressive isolationist and opponent of American entry into World War I, noted the support of Jews for Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-German stance. While opposed to German antisemitism, Johnson did not believe it should cause serious enmity between the two countries. American Jews, in contrast, cheered Roosevelt “vociferously for aiding their people, who neither live

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Wheeler’s early political career featured a monumental struggle with the Anaconda Copper Company and opposition to American entry into the First World War. Elected to the Senate in 1922, he became a burr in the side of the Harding administration and an enemy of entrenched economic greed. In 1924, he ran for vice president on LaFollette’s progressive ticket, proudly describing himself as a radical. A radical, he said in 1926, “is a progressive who knows what he wants, and believes in the things that he advocates. . . . Has the movement become a class struggle? It has always been a class struggle. Every economic struggle is a class struggle.”11 Wheeler continually opposed racial and religious bigotry. He never attacked Jews directly, repeatedly condemned antisemitism and Hitler, and supported the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine. Nevertheless, his response to the events in Europe illustrated how the nativism of rural America, particularly its fear of eastern bankers, immigrants, and war, could lead to a reflexive antisemitism. During debate in February 1941, on the lend-lease proposal, for instance, Wheeler denounced several Gentile and Jewish banking families, including the Rothschilds, Sassoons, Warburgs, and Kuhn-Loebs, for attempting to impose a financial oligarchy on the world, a theme basic to populist demonology. By drawing attention to the Jewish banking interests, Wheeler inadvertently lent support to Nazi war propaganda that stressed the malevolence of Jewish financiers. Furthermore, Wheeler blamed America’s drift toward war on unassimilated immigrants. “I am an American, My people have lived in America for 300 years,” he remarked. “When they came to this country, they came not from Germany, Russia, Holland, Italy or France but from England only. I have neither relatives nor financial interests in any European or foreign countries.” In contrast, immigrant “chauvinistic junkers” were in control of the radio networks and the movie industry, saturating the nation with pro-English and pro-war propaganda.12 Wheeler was particularly discomfited by those he termed pro-war “Hollywood Hitlers.” “Gifted in the arts of corruption and bribery,” the Hollywood moguls have “debauched legislatures; they have elected and controlled gov-

here, nor have anything in common with our country” (quoted in Feinman, Twilight of Progresssivism, 177). 11 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston, 1960), 136-38. 12 New York Times, February 14, 1938; CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, February 28, 1941, 1513-14.

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ernors. The tentacles of this octopus reach not only into the state legislatures but at times into the Congress of the United States.” In January 1941, Wheeler complained to Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, that the American cinema was disseminating war propaganda. Legislation, he warned, would have to be enacted regulating Hollywood “unless the industry itself displays a more impartial attitude.” Seven months later, Wheeler established a subcommittee of his Senate Interstate Commerce Committee to investigate Hollywood’s propaganda. At that time, he claimed the motion picture industry had been conducting the “most gigantic campaign” of war hysteria the country had ever experienced. “I wonder,” he asked regarding Hollywood’s writers and directors, “how many of them were refugees, and how many of them were American citizens.” Although never referring specifically to the many Jews in Hollywood, Wheeler must have known that any investigation of the movie industry could be explosive since there were frequent complaints about Jewish control of American films. The industry itself immediately protested that the investigation was “the most barefaced attempt at censorship and racial persecution which has ever been tried in this country.”13 Senators Nye and Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri cosponsored the original motion in August 1941 to investigate Hollywood. The resolution had been drafted by John T. Flynn who also directed most of the probe’s research that was funded largely by supporters of the America First Committee. Nye, a fervent agrarian radical and isolationist, had chaired the famous 1934 investigation into the influence of the munitions industry in bringing America into World War I. Nye’s isolationism stemmed from his agrarian radicalism. Urban financial and industrial power, he contended, were responsible both for the plight of the farmer and the drift toward war. Nye was not personally antisemitic. He had Jewish friends, and a Jewish banker from Fargo was the best man at his wedding in 1940. And, as Wheeler had, he publicly condemned German antisemitism and supported Zionism. For Nye, accusations that he was antisemitic were a “red herring” to divert attention from the real issue—the role of the cinema in encouraging American involvement in war. On August 1, 1941, Nye spoke at an America First meeting in St. Louis and lambasted Hollywood. Entitled “Our Madness Increases as Our Emergency Shrinks,” the speech warned that 13 New York Herald Tribune, October 8, 1941; CR 77th Cong., 1st Session, July 31, 1941, 649899; Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945 (Lincoln, 1983), 474-76; Mark Lincoln Chadwin, The Warhawks: American 1nterventionists Before Pearl Harbor (New York, 1968), 215-19.

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the movies “have become the most gigantic engines of propaganda in existence to rouse the war fever in America and plunge this Nation to her destruction.” Nye specifically mentioned Harry and Jack Cohn of Columbia Pictures, Louis B. Mayer of M-G-M, George J. Schaefer of R.K.O., Barney Balaban and Adolph Zukor of Paramount, Joseph Schenck of Twentieth Century Fox, Murray Silverstone of United Artists, Samuel Goldwyn, the three Warner brothers, and Arthur Loew, Nicholas Schenck, Sam Katz, and David Bernstein of Loew’s. Except for Darryl Zanuck, no non-Jewish movie executive was mentioned. Nye argued that, because of its many unassimilated immigrants and refugees, Hollywood “is a raging volcano of war fever.” It “breathes hates, fans fears, and glorifies destruction.” American entry into the war would only make “the world safe for British imperialism and Russian Communism.”14 Nye, the leadoff witness in the investigation of Hollywood, warned America’s Jews that support for an interventionist foreign policy could increase antisemitism. Americans would naturally blame Jews for imposing “burdens of terrible weight upon all Americans.” Jews should “sense the possibilities and afford a conduct that would not lend itself to fanning” of race prejudice. Nye hoped Jews would think of America first and foremost. “Unfortunately, certain of them are not doing that.” This was particularly so within the motion picture industry. The foreign-born of Hollywood comprise “the most potent and dangerous” fifth column in the country. Jewish movie moguls have interests “which are quite foreign to America and her best interests.” Currently, they are spewing forth “the most vicious propaganda that has ever been unloosed upon civilized people.” Nye vigorously denied he was antisemitic, claiming that this charge had been raised “by those of the Jewish faith and those who would prejudice the issues.” For Nye, the test of American loyalty was support of strict neutrality. And yet he never attacked the South which was a center of interventionist support and where few Jews resided. Also, he never charged German-Americans or Italian-Americans with dual loyalty because some supported Hitler and Mussolini. Jews were a convenient target because their immigrant background and intense concern with European developments stamped them as incompletely American, while rural Americans were accustomed to identifying Jews with those urban economic and social forces afflicting the countryside. Thus Nye 14 Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945 (Lincoln, 1983), 474-76; Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (Minneapolis, 1962), 3-9, 188192; CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, August 4, 1941, A3736-38; New York Times, September 23, 1941.

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could simultaneously have close Jewish friends and yet believe in the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to drag America into war.15 Ernest Lundeen belonged to Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, had close ties with communists in the Twin Cities, and was to the left of the New Deal. His radicalism included opposition to what he termed “world saving.” Lundeen would have rightfully protested his innocence had he been accused of blatant antisemitism, and yet he attacked Jewish “international bankers” such as Bernard Baruch and Henry Morgenthau Jr., and opposed the Wagner-Rogers bill providing for the admission of twenty thousand refugee children from Nazi Germany. His antisemitism resembled that of Wheeler and Nye. Unfortunately, this did not erase the inherited stereotypes of midwestern radicalism, particularly the image of the Jew as the international banker profiting from American distress.16 Another agrarian isolationist, Republican Representative William P. Lambertson of Fairview, Kansas, also drew attention to the unfortunate effect of the supposed Jewish control of the mass media. A supporter of the America First Committee, Lambertson became infuriated in 1941 by efforts to prevent Charles Lindbergh from speaking in Philadelphia. He blamed Philadelphia’s Jews when the city’s Academy of Music and two of its radio stations allegedly refused the aviator use of their facilities. He named Samuel Rosenbaum, Leon Levy, David Stern, and Moe Annenberg as members of a “war crowd.” In fact, both of the radio stations, which were Jewish owned, had offered Lindbergh free time, and the owners of the Academy of Music were not Jewish. Moreover, Lindbergh gave his speech in a hall owned in part by Jews. Congressmen Leon Sacks of Philadelphia called on Lambertson to apologize for his false accusations and “vicious”

15 U.S., Congress, Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate Commerce, Hearings, Propaganda in Motion Pictures, 77th Cong., 1st Session, 1942, 6-48. The investigation of Hollywood was brief. Ridiculed by Arthur Krock, Dorothy Thompson, and others, it soon “collapsed of its own emptiness.” Larry Ceplair and Stephen Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Garden City, 1980), 159-61. The subcommittee adjourned early and never submitted any report, in part because of charges of antisemitism. Cole, Roosevelt and Isolationists, 476. 16 Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 150; CR, 76th Cong., 1st Session, February 21, 1939, 1683-84, February 23, 1939, 1826, March 2, 1939, 2151-52, March 14, 1939, 271718; CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, April 21, 1940, 8791. For Lundeen’s association with George Sylvester Viereck, Nazi Germany’s chief American propagandist, see Niel M. Johnson, George Sylvester Viereck, German-American Propagandist (Urbana, 1972), 197-98, 216-18.

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appeals to racial and religious bigotry. Such “scurrility and defamation” were part of the “Communist-Nazi” plot to spread “disunity, distrust and division.”17 For Senators Rufus Holman of Oregon and Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina, antipathy toward Jews was part of a broader antagonism toward all non-English immigrants. The Republican Holman had won election in 1938 as a supporter of the Townsend Plan and public power, and as a critic of the New Deal’s fiscal and labor policies. He had a large following among Oregon’s farmers. He favored higher restrictions on immigration and stricter neutrality legislation, and his interpretation of the European war emphasized its economic roots. “Out of these fundamental strifes for material profit,” he stated in March 1941, “evolve conflicting commercial rivalries for world markets, disputed national boundaries, the control of money, and the limitless ambitions of selfish men.” Motivated by these sordid influences, American internationalists seek to “keep the peoples of the world in continuous strife, and sometimes finance the resultant wars for both sides at the same time.”18 Holman was disappointed by Roosevelt’s reluctance or inability to drive “the money changers from the temple.” Although he favored an English victory in the European war and was not a friend of Hitler, Holman claimed that at least the German dictator “has broken the control of the international bankers and traders over the rewards for the labor of the common people of Germany.” As his contribution to the campaign against the international financiers, the Oregonian placed into the Congressional Record a fascist monetary tract Money, Politics, and the Future by H. T. Mills. The pamphlet examined the role of Jewish financiers and “the international money power” in maintaining the oppressive gold standard and in opposing Germany that, under Hitler, had gone off the gold standard.19 Holman’s views proved embarrassing when America entered the war, and in 1944 he lost a Republican primary contest to Wayne Morse. Three years later he established the American Foundation, Inc., dedicated to exposing the “Roosevelt conspiracy” and its beneficiaries, “war profiteers, the strike masters and labor racketeers, and those international people who have insinuated themselves into strategic places of authority in government.” Holman appointed himself 17 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, May 21, 1941, 4306, May 27, 1941, 4449, June 26, 1941, 5560-61, July 3, 1941, 5822-24. 18 New York Times, November 13, 1938; CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, March 4, 1941, 1733-34. 19 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, March 4, 1941, 1733-34.

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president and his wife treasurer of the foundation. Undoubtedly she had strongly encouraged Holman in this enterprise since she was the widow of Lundeen and had married the Oregonian in 1944, four years after Lundeen died in a plane crash.20 Robert Reynolds was something of a political exotic. The Senate had no more rabid isolationist than the North Carolinian, and yet nowhere was isolationism and the America First Committee more unpopular than in the South. Reynold’s isolationism stemmed from his fanatical opposition to immigration. In the late 1930s, he introduced a bill to ban all immigration for ten years, and he opposed the Wagner-Rogers bill, claiming that the young refugee children would turn out to be spies. Reynolds wished the European Jews well, as long as they did not settle in the United States. His solution to the Jewish question was large-scale migration to Palestine, and in 1939 he called upon England to honor the Balfour Declaration. At the same time, he inserted into the Congressional Record an article from a New York Italian newspaper attacking the immigration of Jewish refugee “trouble-makers” and drawing attention to the “Jewish empire” in America. Why, this paper asked, would Jews be forced out of Europe if “they were good citizens or if they had respected the laws, if they had not impoverished those lands, or if they had not conspired against their governments?”21 Not all congressional antisemitism resulted from agrarian radicalism and xenophobia. John C. Schafer, an ardent Coughlinite and isolationist, represented a heavily German-American district in Milwaukee. His outlook on foreign affairs supports the thesis of Samuel Lubell’s The Future of American Politics (1952) that the major source of American isolationism was ethnic rather than geographic or economic. He was one of Lubell’s “merchants of revenge,” seeking vengeance on the Democratic party for bringing America into war against Germany in 1917 and for allying closely with England during the late 1930s. His overt antisemitism emphasized the image of the Jew as a deracinated international radical. Jews, he claimed, were responsible for the New Deal and its implementation of “the socialistic, communistic ideas of a regimented Soviet bureaucracy, imported directly from Moscow.” He accused Henry Morgenthau Jr., Mordecai Ezekiel, and 20 Portland Oregonian, July 5, 1944; ibid., April 20, 1947. 21 CR, 76th Cong., 1st Session, March 17, 1939, 2915, April 20, 1939, 4546; Wayne S. Cole, “America First and the South, 1940-1941,” Journal of Southern History 22 (February 1956): 36-47; Alexander DeConde, “The South and Isolation,” Journal of Southern History 24 (August 1948): 332-46; Alfred O. Hero Jr., The Southerner and World Affairs (Baton Rouge, 1965), 91-103.

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Jerome Frank of seeking to collectivize American agriculture along the lines of the Soviet Union. The Jews were also to blame for the country’s diplomatic entanglements. Fearful that the same “international tribe” was leading the United States into war just as it had done in 1917, Schafer opposed all modifications of the neutrality legislation. He described the “cash-and-carry” bill of 1939 as the “Baruch-Bloom” bill, and declared it would benefit only “international bankers, international warmongers, and war profiteers.” According to John Roy Carlson, Schafer in 1941 predicted a bloody revolution: “There will be purges and Roosevelt will be cleaned right off the earth along with the Jews. We’ll have a military dictatorship to save the country. “22 Schafer frequently referred to Roosevelt as “an international banker” who had driven the moneychangers “into the temple, with the help of his secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Morgenthau, the son of Morgenthau, the international banker, who married the favorite niece of Lehman Brothers, who are among the most powerful international bankers in America.” The congressman also lost no opportunity to stress the Jewish role in Communism. He claimed Leon Blum, the French prime minister, was sympathetic toward Communism. On several occasions, Schafer spelled Blum’s name in order to emphasize his Jewish background. Schafer also claimed that the Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov’s original name was “Finkelstein.” (He also said that Walter Winchell’s real name was “Moses Weinstein.”)23 Even more vociferous in denouncing the crimes of the Jews was Jacob Thorkelson, a one-term congressman from Butte, Montana, the hometown of Wheeler. Thorkelson, a Norwegian immigrant and graduate of the University of Maryland medical school, was undoubtedly the most extreme antisemite ever to sit in Congress. For two years he subjected Congress to an unremitting outpouring of antisemitic speeches. These were later reprinted by William Dudley Pelley, with such suggestive titles as Rescue the Republic, Is This Nation Ruled by an Invisible Government?, and Who Are the Communists? Thorkelson frequently appeared in the pages of Pelley’s magazine Liberation and Gerald Winrod’s

22 CR, 76th Cong., 1st Session, March 14, 1939, 2729, June 12, 1939, 7639; CR, 76th Cong., 2nd Session, October 10, 1939, 260-64; CR, 76th Cong., 1st Session, June 29, 1939, 8318; John Roy Carlson, Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America (New York, 1943), 235-36. 23 CR, 76th Congress, 1st Session, June 30, 1939, 8463-64; CR, 76th Cong., 2nd Session, October 10, 1939, 263; November 1, 1939, 1277; CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, June 10, 1940, 7903-5.

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The Defender, spoke at meetings of Pelley’s Silver Shirts and Joe McWilliams’s Christian Mobilizers, and placed into the Congressional Record antisemitic literature of the English Imperial Fascist Union. American fascists and antisemites frequented his Washington office and considered him to be one of the nation’s most promising politicians. Thorkelson reciprocated by defending the patriotism of Pelley, Winrod, George E. Deatherage, Robert E. Edmondson, and Fritz Kuhn (“they hate Communism and subscribe to the fundamental principles of this Republic”), and by praising the court-martialed General George Van Horn Moseley.24 Since Thorkelson’s constituency was in the heart of Montana’s silver mining industry, he was obsessed with the ability of Jewish international bankers to impoverish farmers, laborers, and small businessmen through their control of the world’s gold. “Gold has always been a source of strife, intrigue, and double dealing,” he claimed, “due to the fact that its manipulators have used this valuable metal as a weapon of destruction.” His rhetoric harked back to the silver crusaders of the late nineteenth century. “There is only one way to destroy this hold upon the world, and it is to place an embargo on all gold, repudiate gold certificates, and place the international Shylocks on the same platform as that of those who have earned this wealth and who alone are rightfully entitled to the security of it.” The European war, Thorkelson argued, was being fought in order to perpetuate Jewish control of gold.25 Wherever Thorkelson looked, he saw malignant Jewish power. They “own and control our newspapers, our radio broadcasting stations, our cinema, and nearly all avenues of publicity. They are the people who dominate our political parties and who even reach into the States and districts, in order to dictate their wishes to the people in the smallest community.” Their control extended to “all governments with the exception of Germany, Italy, and possibly Japan.” According to Thorkelson, the Jews’ ultimate objective was a world government run by Jewish Communist-bankers along the lines of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Jewish conspiracy was well on the way to success, having financed the Soviet revolution of 1917, organized the New Deal, and equipped a Zionist army 24 Carlson, Under Cover, 87; CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, August 20, 1940, A5158-64; CR, 76th Cong., 2nd Session, June 2, 1939, 6537; CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, March 25, 1940, AI618-19. Thorkelson put into the Congressional Record material provided by George Sylvester Viereck. Johnson, Viereck, 220. 25 CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, June 19, 1940, A4050; February 7, 1940, A62lff.; April 2, 1940, A2190.

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in America to invade Alaska and eventually overthrow the federal government. Jews dominated the Justice Department and were persecuting the true patriots. Most Americans had been kept in the dark about these ominous developments because of Jewish control of the radio and the press, and because Jews had organized such prominent Gentiles as Edward M. House and Franklin Roosevelt into a “fifth column.” “Let me warn you American patriots,” Thorkelson cried out, “that you are aiding in your own defeat. Has not the Gentile lost nearly all of his business to these organized destroyers?”26 Thorkelson became particularly frantic when he contemplated the possibility that the “money-changers” might cause war between Germany and the United States. He called for the jailing of members of the Non-Sectarian AntiNazi League, defended the German invasion of Poland, implied that Jews were too influential in Congress, and denied that Germany was persecuting Jews. Was it reasonable, he asked, for Christian nations to “engage in internecine conflict or war of extermination, so that this group of haters may get even with one man?” He cautioned American Christians “not to be led astray nor allow themselves to be influenced by such malignant propaganda that originates in minds black with hate.” Thorkelson looked forward to a German victory in Europe with equanimity. Communism would be destroyed, the threat of international finance would be lifted, and “peace will be restored throughout the world.” Ironically, in view of Thorkelson’s opposition to war with the Axis powers, he was defeated in a 1940 Republican primary by Jeanette Rankin, the only member of Congress who would vote against the declaration of war on Japan.27 Schafer and Lambertson also failed to win reelection to Congress in 1940. The mantle of Congress’s leading antisemite was then assumed by John E. Rankin of Mississippi. Rankin represented his northeast Mississippi district from 1921 to 1953. Although he has a reputation as an extreme right-wing southern Democrat, in the 1930s he was considered an agrarian radical who voiced the fears, frustrations, and interests of the hill country poor whites. Rankin was a strong supporter of public power, aid to farmers, progressive taxation, and tight control of big business and Wall Street. In 1933 he ran unsuccessfully for Speaker 26 CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, August 5, 1940, A4695; June 13, 1940, A3839-3841; June 30, 1940, A4678-79; August 5, 1940, A4910-13. 27 CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, January 16, 1940, A224-29; February 8, 1940, A653-54; CR, 76th Cong., 1st Session, May 1, 1939, 4938-39; CR, 76th Cong., 1st Session, June 22, 1939, A2802-5; CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, A224; CR, 76th Cong., 2nd Session, October 30, 1939, 1067-68; CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, June 19, 1940, 4050.

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of the House as a “progressive Democrat,” attacking “the forces of reaction” and “the old reactionary crowd” ruling Congress.28 Rankin’s agrarian radicalism also shaped his isolationist outlook on world affairs. Seven months before the outbreak of World War II, he drew attention to “the international money changers” who were “squeezing the currency, driving commodity prices down and attempting to throw us into a foreign war.” In November 1939, he was more specific regarding the identity of the moneychangers. This “international element . . . is singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ That element wants us to go into the war, but not to protect Christianity. It is about 2,000 years too late for them to wrap the cloak of Christianity about themselves.” Rankin also blamed un-American Jews for racial agitation in the South. If America were to protect itself against mongrelization, it would have to have “an American radio, as well as an American press, and American movies.” The internationalists were also responsible for the prolonging of the European war in order that Communism might triumph after the devastation of Great Britain, the United States, and Germany, “the three great white nations of the earth.” The internationalists were also to blame for the sit-down strikes in the Midwest, inflation and then depression in Germany, the starvation of millions of Christian farmers in the Ukraine, and race-mixing in South America.29 In April 1941, Rankin characterized Walter Lippmann as an “international Jew” for encouraging Roosevelt to declare war on Germany. Lippmann, Rankin charged, was the mouthpiece of international Jewish financiers who controlled the world’s gold. “They have controlled the world through the gold standard ever since Rothchilds (sic!) got financial control of England during the Napoleonic war. They are now crucifying civilization on a cross of gold.” His constituents were “old-line Americans, Anglo-Saxons, people whose folks have been here for 200 years,” and they were not going to pull the financial chestnuts of international Jewry out of the fire.30 Rankin (along with Schafer, Nye, Thorkelson, and Wheeler) was unalterably opposed to the admission of a significant number of Jewish refugees into the country. Instead of liberalizing the restrictive immigration laws, he favored

28 New York Times, January I, 1933; ibid., November 13, 1934; ibid., November 20, 1936; ibid., January 3, 1937; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Boston, 1956), 299. 29 CR, 76th Cong., 1st Session, January 31. 1939, 974; CR. 76th Cong., 2nd Session, November 1, 1939, 1171; November 3, 1939, 1393-96. 30 CR. 77th Cong., 1st Session, April 24, 1941, 3279-81.

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making them even harsher. “We cannot afford to throw down the bars of immigration, or open wide our gates to every disgruntled element throughout the world.” More immigrants would increase America’s criminal “riffraff ” population and “add to the trouble we already have, pad our relief rolls, and stir dissension and discontent here as they have done abroad.” Jews here illegally, Rankin proposed, should be sent back to Europe, including Germany.31 Rankin’s next antisemitic diatribe against international Jewry had tragic consequences. On June 4, 1941, prompted by a news report of a pro-interventionist meeting in New York’s financial district the previous day, Rankin denounced “a little group of our international Jewish brethren” for harassing Congress and the President to declare war against Germany. According to Rankin, international Jewish bankers feared that an English peace movement might succeed in ending the war prior to American involvement. In fact, Jews neither planned nor spoke at this rally. Fight for Freedom, Inc. organized it, Lloyd Paul Stryker chaired it, and there was no mention in the news reports of any Jewish (or banker) participation. Rankin’s calumny particularly infuriated Congressman M. Michael Edelstein.32 Edelstein represented a district in Manhattan and his biography was an immigrant success story. His working class family had immigrated from Poland in 1891 when he was only three, and his father died ten years later. Although unable to attend high school for financial reasons, Edelstein did manage to graduate from Brooklyn Law School in 1909 and establish a successful legal practice. This was combined with work on behalf of Tammany Hall for which he was rewarded in 1940 when, following the unexpected death of William I. Sirovich, Edelstein received the Democratic nomination for Congress. In a special election in February, Edelstein defeated Louis Lefkowitz, the Republican candidate, and Earl Browder, the Communist candidate. In November he won the regular election.33 Edelstein represented one of the most polyglot districts in Congress. The center of the original Eastern European Jewish ghetto in New York, it also contained large numbers of Italians, Poles, Irish and Hungarians. There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the districts represented by Rankin 31 CR, 75th Cong., 3rd Session, May 20, 1938, 7186-87; CR, 75th Cong., 1st Session, May 18, 1937, 4740-41. 32 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, June 4, 1941, 4726-27; New York Times, June 4, 1941. 33 New York Times, February 11, 1940, June 5, 1941.

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and Edelstein. One was completely Protestant, the other primarily Jewish and Catholic. One consisted of “Anglo-Saxons,” the other of recent immigrants and their children. One was made up of farms and country hamlets, the other of congested tenements. Much of Edelstein’s time in Congress was taken up with attending to refugee problems and defending his constituents. “It is with regret,” he said, that nativists in Congress fail to recognize that “the great majority of aliens in this country are law-abiding, substantial people, most of whom have become citizens. To accuse aliens of faults or weaknesses which they do not have, as a group, is not consistent with the facts and ignores the rights which those aliens and their children have under our form of government.” On May 28, 1941, Edelstein answered Lambertson’s charge that Jews were part of the “war crowd.” He claimed there was no such thing as a Jewish vote and that many Jews opposed intervention and belonged to the America First Committee. Lambertson was simply spreading Nazi propaganda. “Jews,” he concluded, “have a constitutional right to think freely both pro and con on any subject. I hope their right to do so is not made the basis of intolerance.” Unfortunately, this was not to be the case.34 Edelstein immediately challenged Rankin’s attack on his “Jewish brethren.” The New York representative accused Rankin of demagoguery, and pointed out that very few American bankers were Jewish and that Jews had nothing to do with the June 3rd meeting in Manhattan. “I deplore the idea that any time anything happens . . . men in this House and outside this House attempt to use the Jews as their scapegoat,” he cried out. “I say it is unfair and I say it is unAmerican. . . . All men are created equal, regardless of race, creed, or color; and whatever a man be, Jew or Gentile, he may think what he deems fit.”35 The agitated Edelstein then walked up the aisle of the House chamber and began to sway. He was helped outside and collapsed in the lobby of the Capitol. Within seconds he died from a massive heart attack. Members of the House were shocked, and Rankin, for once, sat silent. Edelstein’s New York colleagues were especially angry. Samuel Dickstein said, “The thing is so horrible that I cannot believe what has happened.” The martyred Edelstein resembled an ancient prophet of Israel denouncing “those forces of evil which ever threaten to engulf American democracy.” Martin J. Kennedy eulogized Edelstein as a “loyal

34 CR, 76th Cong., 3rd Session, April II, 1940, 4380-81; April 8, 1940; CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, May 28, 1941, A2542-43. 35 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, June 4, 1941, 4727.

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adherent to the ancient faith of Israel” who died “defending the honor of his race and his creed.” William T. Pheiffer noted that the deceased’s last words concerned “those immutable and sacred principles of our Republic, for which many other great Americans have fought and died.” James A. O’Leary echoed Pheiffer’s words. Edelstein had died “while the House Chamber still resounded with the noblest American principles expressed by him in his final words.”36 Edelstein’s death greatly moved Representative Adolph Sabath of Chicago, a fellow Jew. Sabath described the New Yorker’s final words as “one of the most dramatic as well as most significant utterances” ever made by a Jew in Congress. His was “a clarion call for reason, fair play, and tolerance,” a brave defense of the Jewish people. Sabath asked Rankin whether he realized the extent to which his anti-Jewish remarks wounded America’s Jews. “Let us fondly hope,” Sabath optimistically concluded, “that the unwarranted, unsupported, erroneous charge which was the immediate cause of his death may not be made again in this Hall.”37 Newspaper comments harshly condemned Rankin. The Hartford Courant described the Mississippian as consumed by racial prejudice and determined to create dissension. The Detroit Free Press censured Rankin’s unprovoked, unwarranted, and “hot-mouthed” attack on American Jewry. The Omaha Evening World-Herald compared Rankin to Joseph Goebbels, and claimed that Edelstein’s martyrdom had rendered a great service to religious and racial liberty. The New York Times found the events of June 4th horrifying and of benefit only to Hitler since they weakened national unity. The New York Herald Tribune correctly noted that one did not have to be Jewish to oppose Hitler’s military ambitions.38 Not surprisingly, in view of the strength of southern interventionist sentiment, the press in the South was especially critical of Rankin. Southern newspapers, which had rarely questioned prejudice and discrimination when it involved African Americans, now argued that Rankin’s bigotry was foreign to Americans in general and southerners in particular. The Chattanooga News-Free Press 36 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, June 4, 1941, 4727-28; June 18, 1941, A2910-11, A3337-38; Memorial Services Held in the House of Representatives of the United States, Together With Remarks Presented in Eulogy of Morris Michael Edelstein, Late a Representative of New York (Washington, 1943), passim. 37 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, June 18, 1941, A2927. 38 Hartford Courant, June 7, 1941; Detroit Free Press, June 6, 1941; Omaha Evening WorldHerald, June 6, 1941; New York Times, June 6, 1941; New York Herald Tribune, June 6, 1941.

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declared there was no place in a democracy for religious prejudice, particularly at a time when the nation was girding for a conflict with totalitarianism. The Shreveport Journal described Rankin’s attack on Jews and bankers as “bunk,” while the Memphis Press-Scimitar asserted that Edelstein’s last words expressed the opposition of Americans to “the browbeating and persecution of minorities.”39 Mississippians had the most reason to be embarrassed by Rankin. Hodding Carter wrote in the Greenville Delta Democrat Times that the congressman, by slandering American Jews, was “a common scoundrel.” “There is unity among Jews,” Carter declared, but it is “a unity of beautiful and enduring religion, a unity of common sorrow that has bound a persecuted people together for centuries, a unity of custom and of hope; and in America, there is unity in Jewish devotion to a country whose historic tolerance is still unshakeable despite the mouthing of a venomous group . . . inspired by agents of totalitarianism.” If there was anything wrong with Jews hating Hitler, then “God grant that all of us be stricken.” The Meridian Star suggested that all Mississipians should “hang our heads in shame” at the antics of this “mangy, illbred, unfair, hateful and intolerant” man. The Jackson Daily News noted that this was not the time for “petty patter and childish rage” regarding the imaginary power of Jewish bankers. It suggested that Rankin stop talking so much in Congress since his speeches were “only the garrulous gabble of a man infatuated with the music of his own voice.” The strongest condemnation of Rankin appeared in his hometown newspaper, The Tupelo Journal. “We Are Ashamed of This” the paper editorialized. “As a citizen of John Rankin’s home town we (sic!) are heartily ashamed” of Rankin’s “Jewbaiting.”40 Edelstein’s funeral took place on June 6th at the Gramercy Park Memorial Chapel on Second Avenue in the Lower East Side near the congressman’s home. More than sixty policemen were required to control a crowd of approximately fifteen thousand mourners attempting to get into the funeral chapel. The eulogy of Rabbi Bernard Bergman of the Home of the Sons and Daughters of Israel on the Lower East Side emphasized the political and social significance of Edelstein’s death during “these critical hours, when our dear country is being assailed from within and without by enemies of our American way of living.”

39 Chattanooga News-Free Press, June 7, 1941; Shreveport Journal, June 13, 1941; Memphis PressScimitar, June 6, 1941. 40 Greenville Delta Democrat Times, June 9, 1941; Meridian Star; June 15, 1941; Jackson Daily News, June 11, 1941; Tupelo Journal, June 7, 1941.

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Having lived and died for the Jewish people, Edelstein had become “a martyr to democracy.”41 Rankin was stunned by the news of Edelstein’s death. The “great American earache” sat uncharacteristically silent in the House chamber, shielding his face with a hand, during the eulogies for Edelstein. Later on June 4th he told reporters that his remarks about “Jewish brethren” did not have Edelstein in mind, that he deeply regretted his death, and that the New Yorker had been “a good man, a good citizen, and a worthy representative of his district.” Nevertheless, shortly after the events of June 4th, John Roy Carlson met with Rankin. According to Carlson, the congressman said, “There is only one way to win this fight and that is to expose the international Jewish bankers as the war mongers. Tell the people that it is the Jews who want war. Do that and you’ve got half the battle won.”42 The years just prior to World War II were the highwater period for American antisemitism in Congress and in the country at large. Most of the members of Congress who expressed antisemitic statements were not intrinsically antisemitic. Rather, they were motivated by a genuine fear that Jews were pushing the United States into war with Germany. Others, particularly Schafer, Thorkelson, and Rankin, used the perilous diplomatic position of the nation to voice an antisemitism that antedated the international crisis, a crisis that, to a certain extent, legitimized antisemitism, allowing it to venture out of the closet. The isolationist focus on the Jews was singularly misplaced. Jewish influence on American foreign policy during this period was virtually nonexistent and, as far as the Jews were concerned, the Roosevelt administration engaged in what Henry Feingold has aptly termed a “politics of gesture.” Roosevelt realized that Jews, numbering less than four percent of the population, would continue to strongly support the administration. In contrast, the president feared, and probably exaggerated, 41 New York Times, June 7, 1941; CR, 77th Cong., 1st Session, June 18, 1941, 3056. 42 Chicago Daily Tribune, June 5, 1941; Carlson, Under Cover, 233-34. Rankin did not refer publicly to the events of June 4 until April 1943. This occurred during an angry exchange with Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn over another antisemitic tirade by Rankin occasioned by the Soviet government’s execution of Henryk Alter and Victor Erlich, two leaders of the Jewish Bund. Rankin defended the executions of these “flannel-mouthed agitators,” “a couple of Communist traitor Jews.” Rankin then exclaimed that Edelstein had misinterpreted his remarks of June 4, 1941. He actually had been on very friendly terms with the New Yorker, Rankin claimed, and the congressmen who had accused him of Edelstein’s death had perpetrated “the most ghoulish performance I have ever witnessed in my life.” The spreading of such “slime,” Rankin avowed, would not prevent him from speaking out against the infiltration of the federal government by Communist Jews. CR, 76th Cong., 1st Session, April 7, 1943, 3064.

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the political influence of the isolationists. Jewish leaders were reluctant to put pressure on the government for solely Jewish purposes because of the possibility this might create an antisemitic backlash. Jews thus could do little to move the administration regarding the refugee crisis, antisemitism within Central and Eastern Europe, and Germany’s aggressive territorial ambitions. Certainly America’s Jews were a minor factor in the repeal of the neutrality legislation and the deterioration of American-German relations after Munich. The most influential element within the interventionist camp was the South which contained relatively few Jews.43 Blatant antisemitism on Capitol Hill almost disappeared after Pearl Harbor. Rankin stood virtually alone in his ranting against the Jews. Few American politicans wished to be bracketed with Nazi Germany or to be associated with the type of thinking that had led to the Holocaust. World War II also destroyed the agrarian isolationism that had been a vital element in the opposition to internationalism and eastern financiers. After the war there existed a basic congruency between American national interests and the diplomatic agenda of American Jews because of America’s role in the Cold War and Israel’s position as a bastion of anti-Soviet influence in the Middle East. Acculturation of the second and third generation of Jews, along with the nationalization of American culture and the blurring of ethnic and regional peculiarities, diminished the suspicions of many Americans that Jews are somehow different. Jews have become, along with dairy farmers, steel manufacturers, and historians, simply another non-sinister pressure group. This is reflected in the willingness of Americans to vote for Jewish candidates and the willingness of Jews to run for national office. Whereas there were no Jews in the Senate and only six in the House of Representatives in the 76th Congress elected in 1938, there were eight in the Senate and over thirty-five in the House in the 98th Congress elected in 1982. Judging from the polls, a large majority of the American electorate would vote for a qualified Jew for president. Jews naturally view this situation with great satisfaction. It is difficult to imagine any social and economic crisis that could lead to a major resurgence of antisemitism within the United States. And yet the history of congressional antisemitism just prior to World War II indicates that the occasion, if not necessarily the source, for antisemitism need have only a tangential relationship to domestic developments. A fundamental shift in American priorities in the Middle East

43 Feingold, “‘Courage First and Intelligence Second’“: 428.

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could revive the charge of “dual loyalties.” Americans familiar with both the relationship between antisemitism and American foreign relations and the volatility of public opinion should be concerned as the nation is being dragged into the maelstrom of violence in the Middle East only a decade after the conclusion of the Vietnam War.

Chapter 12

Antisemitism Mississippi Style Students of the South have differed regarding the importance of antisemitism in Dixie. The journalist Harry Golden, for example, wrote of the philo-Semitism of southerners, and the prominent social psychologist Thomas F. Pettigrew has argued that the South has been one of the least antisemitic regions of the country. W. J. Cash’s classic The Mind of the South, in contrast, contended that Judeophobia was central to the southern experience, resulting from the hold which the “savage ideal,” “the patriotic will to hold rigidly to the ancient pattern, to repudiate innovation and novelty in thought and behavior, whatever came from outside and was felt as belonging to Yankeedom or alien parts,” had over the southern mind. For Americans, the Jew was the alien “and in the South, where any difference had always stood out with great vividness, he was especially so. Hence it was perfectly natural that, in the general withdrawal upon the old heritage, the rising insistence on conformity to it, he should come in for renewed denunciations; should, as he passed in the street, stand in the eyes of the people as a sort of evil harbinger and incarnation of all the menaces they feared and hated—external and internal, real and imaginary.”1 Leonard Dinnerstein, a leading authority on southern antisemitism, agreed with Cash. Dinnerstein attributed the famous Leo Frank case of 1913-14 to the insecurity and anxiety of southerners experiencing the social instability resulting from rapid industrialization, urbanization, and the decline of agriculture and rural life. The Jew symbolized the external forces transforming the cherished South, while antisemitism provided southerners with both an outlet for relieving their frustrations and an explanation for their social and economic afflictions.2 1

Thomas F. Pettigrew, “‘Parallel and Distinctive Changes in Anti-Semitic and Anti-Negro Attitudes,” in Jews in the Mind of America, ed. Charles H. Stember (New York, 1966), 390-91; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), 327, 342.

2 Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York, 1968), 70; Dinnerstein, “A Note on Southern Attitudes Toward Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 32 ( January 1970): 43-49; Dinnerstein, “A Neglected Aspect of Southern Jewish History,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly

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One clue to the relative importance and nature of antisemitism in the South is the careers of the two most vitriolic antisemitic national politicians in recent American history: Senator Theodore G. Bilbo and Congressman John E. Rankin. Residents of Mississippi, they gained notoriety as antisemites during and immediately after World War II. Bilbo and Rankin had first won national attention as political insurgents representing what passed for left-of-center politics in Mississippi. This involved appeals to extreme racism and demands for public electric power, control of corporations, close supervision of Wall Street, and economic leveling. Rankin and Bilbo capitalized on the same popular frustrations responsible for the emergence of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, and the other messiahs of the 1930s. Unlike these demagogues, however, Rankin and Bilbo never had any grandiose national ambitions nor, as good Democrats, did they contemplate establishing competing political parties or movements. Their racism limited their influence, and even in the South they were viewed as bizarre. Despite the fears of their northern protagonists, neither Rankin nor Bilbo was able to attract a national following. They remained provincial politicians concerned with their own political survival and the interests of those constituents with white skins. Bilbo had begun his political career as a staunch follower of James K. Vardaman, the leader of Mississippi populism at the turn of the century. During the 1940s Bilbo was known chiefly for his ferocious racism, sexual peccadilloes, membership in the Ku Klux Klan, and attraction to the fast buck. Yet while governor of Mississippi for eight years, the “Bilbonic Plague” had recognized, as his biographer noted, that “‘state government must accept its social responsibility; indeed, his impulses in this regard were much in advance of his time.”’ Bilbo was not a mossback during the 1930s. “Folks are restless,” he declared at the depths of the Depression. ‘“Communism is gaining a foothold. . . . In fact, I’m getting a little pink myself.”3 As a senator from 1935 until his death in 1947, Bilbo was a loyal New Dealer, supporting the Democratic national agenda except where race relations were involved.4 Many observers considered Bilbo to be the Senate’s worst member, with Senator Robert A. Taft describing him as a disgrace 61 (Sept. 1971): 52-68; Allan Peskin, “The Origins of Southern Anti-Semitism,” Chicago Jewish Forum 14 (Winter 1955-56): 83-88; Stanley Meisler, “The Southern Segregationist and His Anti-Semitism,” ibid. 16 (Spring 1958): 171-73. 3

A. Wigfall Green, The Man Bilbo (Baton Rouge, 1963), 123-25.

4

Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 204-205; Reinhard H. Luthin, American Demagogues: Twentieth Century (Gloucester, 1954, 1959), 63-65; New York Times, February 10,

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to the upper house. Non-Mississippians, particularly northerners, characterized him as a foul-mouthed, lecherous demagogue embodying the most retrograde aspects of southern politics. In contrast, Reinhard H. Luthin’s study of twentieth-century American political demagoguery claimed that had it not been for Bilbo’s racism, northern liberals “would have hailed him as a great humanitarian” in the mold of Claude Pepper, Hugo Black, and Lister Hill.5 John E. Rankin had first been elected to Congress in 1920 from the area encompassing Tupelo in the northeast corner of Mississippi. He continued to be reelected until 1952 when reapportionment forced him to run against a younger and more popular incumbent. Rankin’s thirty-two-year congressional career can be conveniently divided into two parts. During the 1920s and 1930s he was one of Congress’s more prominent progressives. During the 1940s and early 1950s he was Congress’s foremost racist and antisemite.6 Influenced while young by the populist movement, Rankin went to Washington as an opponent of big business and as a spokesman for agrarian interests. His major claim to legislative fame was sponsoring, along with Senator George Norris of Nebraska, the law establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority. “Cheap Juice John,” as Rankin came to be known, was a New Dealer during the 1930s, and the journalist Stanley High bracketed him with the likes of Maury Maverick, Jerry Voorhis, Tom Amlie, Vito Marcantonio, and Herman Kopplemann.7 In 1937, 15, July 9, 1939, 6; Raymond G. Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (New York, 1935), ch. 4. 5 Luthin, American Demagogues, 75; Raymond J. Zorn, “Theodore G. Bilbo,” in Public Men In and Out of Office, ed. J. T. Salter (Chapel Hill, 1946), 293-96; Allan A. Michie and Frank Ryhlick, Dixie Demagogues (New York, 1939), esp. ch. 5. Jews found it highly ironic that Bilbo, in the last year of his life, went to the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans for treatment for cancer of the jaw. The hospital had been named for Judah Touro, a nineteenth-century Jew from New Orleans. 6

Rankin’s district was extremely poor. Only one percent of his constituents had attended college, less than one-third had completed high school, and less than two-thirds had finished grammar school. The district had few Catholics, immigrants, or Jews. Approximately fifteen percent of its population was Black. Rankin was not popular statewide. He finished last among the five Democrats running to fill Bilbo’s seat in 1947 and even failed to carry his own district. Easton King, “Why Rankin Got Licked,” ADL Bulletin, September 1952, 3-4, 8; New York World-Telegram, Nov. 5, 1947; Russell Whelan, “Rankin of Mississippi,” American Mercury, July 1944, 31-37.

7

Stanley High, “The Neo-New Dealers,” Saturday Evening Post, May 22, 1937, 105; Walter Davenport, “Big Wind From the South,” Collier’s, Dec. 1, 1945, 81-83; New York Times, Apr. 23, 1933, 25, July 11, 1935, 4, Sept. 1, 1935, 3, Jan. 16, 1938, 2, June 6, 1938, 2. The relationship between populism and antisemitism has been debated by historians since the

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1933 Rankin unsuccessfully sought election as Speaker of the House. Running as ‘‘a progressive Democrat,” he attacked “the forces of reaction” and “the old reactionary crowd” controlling Congress. Three years later he was a candidate for floor leader of the House Democrats. When he withdrew from this race, he announced he would throw his support to “some other liberal” candidate.8 By the 1940s both Rankin and Bilbo saw themselves, and were seen by others, as “conservatives.” Opposing the labor union movement, an intrusive federal bureaucracy, and internal subversion, Rankin and Bilbo’s metamorphosis was characteristic of that of many southerners who had originally welcomed the New Deal as a means to alleviate some of the South’s economic problems and to rectify the economic imbalance between the South and the North. The belief that the South was at the mercy of external forces remained in the 1940s, but the large northern corporation was no longer the favorite whipping boy. Because of the growing assertiveness of southern African Americans, southerners now focused their ire on northern philanthropists, labor unions, and civil rights organizations for undermining southern social patterns. Southerners also attacked the labor union movement and wage-and-hours legislation for weakening the incentives for industry to relocate to the South. Southern public opinion was accustomed to thinking it was being exploited by foreign banks, insurance

publication of Oscar Handlin’s “American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth Century,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 40 ( June 1951), 323-44, and Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955). Handlin and Hofstadter argued that the populists attributed the source of many of rural America’s ills to an internal Jewish financial conspiracy. Irwin Unger’s The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879 (Princeton, 1964) supported this line of thought, while strong dissents were voiced by C. Vann Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” American Scholar 29 (Winter 1959-60): 55-72; Walter T. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago, 1963); Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1962); Pollack, “Handlin on Anti-Semitism: A Critique of ‘American Views of the Jew,’” Journal of American History 51 (December 1964): 391-403; Pollack, “Hofstadter on Populism: A Critique of ‘The Age of Reform,’” Journal of Southern History 26 (November 1960): 478500; and Pollack, “The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism,” American Historical Review 68 (October 1962): 76-80. As of November 1982, Rankin’s papers were still closed and Bilbo’s papers had not yet been catalogued. The precise influence which the populist mentality might have had on shaping the nature and intensity of their antisemitism is thus rendered more difficult, if not impossible, to determine. 8

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston, 1958), 11 and Crisis of the Old Order, 299; New York Times, Jan. 1, 1933, 8, Nov. 13, 1934, 20, Nov. 13, 1936, 4, Nov. 20, 1936, 22, Jan. 3, 1938, 38.

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companies, railroads, and Wall Street. For Bilbo and Rankin the external enemy took on another form: the New York Jew.9 Rankin’s antisemitism also had a more personal source. All his political ambitions of the 1930s had been unsuccessful. In addition to his campaigns for Speaker of the House and House Democratic floor leader, he had tried and failed to interest Democratic leaders in his availability for the vice-presidential nomination in 1936 and 1940. By the 1940s Rankin was frustrated and embittered. The New York Jew symbolized for him those social and economic forces responsible for the defeat of his political goals and for the weakening of racial segregation.10 The public first became aware of this new emphasis in Rankin’s thinking in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He, along with other prominent politicians who had been influenced by southern and midwestern populism, was an isolationist. Some, including Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and Rankin, were unable to resist the temptation to blame American Jews for the growing national opposition to the Axis powers. In 1939, two months after the outbreak of World War II, Rankin claimed that “99 percent of the Christian people of America” wanted to stay out of the European conflict. He pleaded for retention of the arms embargo and warned his House colleagues that ‘‘a certain international element that has no sympathy for Christianity was spending money by the barrel” in order to get America committed to the aid of England.”11

9

Walter Goodman’s description of Martin Dies fits Rankin as well. Dies, Goodman wrote, “stood for the small town populated by a few hundred neighborly descendants of early settlers and against the big cities with their polyglot masses. He stood for a style of life that was being shaken by industrial unions, by the Negro awakening, by revolutionary currents of every sort. He stood for fundamentalist enthusiasm against the radical enlightenment. He stood for Western insularity and against Eastern cosmopolitanism, for a strong legislature and against a strong executive, for the old verities and old slogans and against the new slogans and new demands. He stood, practically alone, he rapidly persuaded himself, for capitalism and the Constitution and God, and these were under attack from Pennsylvania Avenue and from New York City as much as from Moscow” (Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Baltimore, 1969), 163.

10 Rankin’s racism eclipsed his earlier image as a liberal and advocate of public power. Harold Ickes noted that Rankin had undermined the cause of public power in Congress because other congressmen didn’t want to be associated with him. “Rankin has almost gone crazy in his hatred of Jews and Negroes,” the secretary of the interior commented. Ickes Diary, July 4, 1943, 7947, 9756; Ickes Papers, Reel 6, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 11 U.S. Congressional Record (hereafter cited as CR), 76th Cong., 2nd Sess., Nov. 1, 1939, 1939-940.

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Rankin’s attacks on international Jews escalated in April 1941. At that time he singled out Walter Lippmann as a prototype of the international Jew who was more concerned with international Jewry than with American welfare. Rankin differentiated between Lippmann and his ilk and the majority of American Jews who were patriotic “and who must now suffer for the misconduct of these international Jews who are always stirring up trouble for them. In my opinion they are making the greatest blunder since the Crucifixion.” According to the Mississippian, Lippmann spoke for a clique of international Jewish financiers “who own or control the gold supply of the world” and, under the leadership of the Rothschilds, “are now crucifying civilization on a cross of gold.” They had “crucified the German Republic” prior to the emergence of Hitler and had now turned their hired pens on Franklin Roosevelt because he refused to declare war on Germany.12 Two months later Rankin’s accusations regarding international Jewry had tragic consequences. On June 4 he gave a one-minute speech in the House in which he charged “‘Wall Street and a little group of our international Jewish brethren” with harassing Roosevelt and Congress into declaring war on Germany. M. Michael Edelstein, who represented New York City’s Lower East Side, immediately challenged Rankin. He compared Rankin’s rhetoric with Hitler’s, noted that very few American bankers were Jewish, and charged Rankin was using Jews as scapegoats. “I say it is unfair and I say it is un-American. . . . All men are created equal, regardless of race, creed, or color; and whether a man be Jew or Gentile he may think what he deems fit.” Deeply agitated, Edelstein promptly left the House chamber, suffered a massive heart attack in the Capitol lobby, and died almost instantaneously.13 Edelstein’s death shocked most House members, and for once Rankin, whose verbosity in the House had earned him the sobriquet “the great American earache,” was nonplussed. It wasn’t until nearly two years later that he discussed Edelstein’s death. This occurred during an antisemitic tirade occasioned by his defense of the murder of two Polish Jewish socialists by the Soviet Union. “Let me say this here and now,” he ranted, “I have never at any time attacked an American Jew. I have known them all my life. The old line American Jews are just as patriotic as you or I. Many of them are worried to death about this communistic group in this country and all over the world that is stirring up this trouble 12 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., Apr. 24, 1941, 3280-81. 13 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., June 4, 1941, 4726-27.

Chapter 12. Antisemitism Mississippi Style

for them.” “I have refrained from mentioning the question here on the floor,” Rankin concluded, “even in the face of the slime that was smeared throughout the country two years ago. . . . These Communists are what I am complaining of and not the patriotic Americans.”14 Rankin, Bilbo, and other antisemites of the period were convinced that Jews exercised an inordinate influence within the Roosevelt administration. Jews, Bilbo claimed, had received “more consideration” under the New Deal than any other nationality. For Rankin, Felix Frankfurter was the prime example of the insidious and excessive influence of Jewry in Washington. Frankfurter was a perfect foil for Rankin. He was foreign-born, a former resident of New York, a professor at the Harvard Law School, and a defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, everything which the self-professed spokesman for “the white Anglo-Saxons of the South” detested. When Rankin wished to attack the “communist crackpots” who had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration, he focused attention on what he termed “this Frankfurter bureaucracy.”15 By World War II Rankin was equating communists with Jews. The support of American Jews for the civil rights movement, which Rankin believed to be a communist plot, strengthened this equation. The basis of atheistic Jewish communism, according to the Rankin gospel, was hatred of Christianity. This required him to sharply differentiate Jews from Christians and to deemphasize the Jewish roots of Christianity. Rankin traced modern Jewry partially back to the Khazars, a central Asian tribe that had adopted Judaism in the eighth century. “Atheistic communism,” Rankin told the House of Representatives, “is largely composed of a racial minority that has swarmed into Europe through the Urals in the last 100 or 300 years. . . . They seem to be more akin to Pharoah than they are to Moses.”16 Strangely enough, Rankin’s surrealistic interpretation of Jewish history led him to defend Stalin during the early 1940s. According to the Mississippian, the Russian Revolution had been conceived and carried out by Jews, while Stalin was leading a counterrevolution against the Jewish disciples of Leon Trotsky. The Russian dictator’s wartime repudiation of the Soviet Union’s antireligious 14 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., June 4, 1941, 2727-28, June 5, 1941, 4761, June 11, 1941, A2789, June 18, 1941, A2910-11, A2913, A2915, A2927, A3056; 78th Cong., 1st Sess., April 7, 1943, 3064. 15 CR, 78th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 20, 1944, 6253; 77th Cong., 2nd Sess., Nov. 5, 1942, 871718; 79th Cong., 1st Sess., Feb. 19, 1945, A693-94. 16 CR, 81st Cong., 1st Sess., Feb. 9, 1949, 1044.

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campaign revealed the antirevolutionary intentions of the former Russian Orthodox seminary student. “The Bible,” Rankin claimed, “says teach a child the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart therefrom. It was but natural therefore that when Stalin got into power he should open the churches.” After the war’s end there will be “a real democracy in Russia, in which these White Russians and Ukrainians will dominate, and . . . they will see to it that the Russian people will never again be subjected to such persecution as they have endured in the past.”17 During the postwar years Rankin dropped his admiration for Stalin, but he still continued to claim that communism was an instrument of world Jewry to extirpate Christianity. In his most vicious calumny, he informed doubting congressmen that the murder of thirty million European Christians had been carried out by “the same gang that composed the fifth column of the crucifixion. They hounded the Saviour during the days of His ministry; persecuted Him to His ignominious death; derided him during the moments of His dying agony; and then gambled for His garments at the foot of the cross.” For nearly two millennia Jews have attempted “to destroy Christianity and everything that is based on Christian principles. They have overrun and virtually destroyed Europe. They are now trying to undermine and destroy America. God save our country from such a fate.”18 The issue, simply put, was “Yiddish Communism versus Christian civilization.” “Remember,” he told his colleagues in 1950, “communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself.” Congressman Jacob Javits answered Rankin’s canard. He noted that only one of the twelve members of the Soviet Politburo was Jewish, and that it was virtually impossible to secure information about the ethnic and religious background of the wives of Politburo members or their influence on their husbands. Rankin’s speech, Javits stated, resembled “the dangerous propaganda technique, popularized by Hitler, Goebbels, and Stalin, of the sweeping lie constantly reiterated.” Rankin’s sentiments threatened “our essential freedom and domestic peace.” Congressman Clifford Case of New Jersey seconded Javits’s views. “I think it terribly important that

17 CR, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., June 8, 1942, A2337; Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919-1957) (Boston, 1957), 433. 18 CR, 81st Cong., 1st Sess., Feb. 9, 1949, 1044.

Chapter 12. Antisemitism Mississippi Style

the country as a whole and the world should know that in this sad and sordid departure the gentleman from Mississippi stands alone.”19 Rankin returned to the fray two years later when he accused “a little gang of yids” of dominating the communist governments of the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Iron Curtain nations. Jews, he contended, had not only been responsible for the starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants during the 1930s and the murder of Polish Christians during the Katyn massacre, but they had also been behind the infamous Nuremberg trials. Rankin described the court which tried the Nazi war criminals as having “‘perpetrated more outrages than any other organization of its kind that ever sat.” It was horrible that Soviet communist Jews, who had been responsible for the killing of tens of millions of Christians, should sit in judgment of “German soldiers, civilians and doctors, five or six years after the war closed.”20 The founding of the state of Israel provided Rankin with another opportunity for equating communists with Jews. His opposition to Zionism had been longstanding. During the war he argued that a strong British empire was vital if the “Anglo-Saxon peoples” were to retain their political and economic dominance and check the nationalistic and racial aspirations of the colored peoples. He berated Wendell Willkie, Drew Pearson, and other critics of British imperialism, but most of his venom was reserved for Zionism which he contended was a racial movement opposed to the interests of Anglo-Saxons. In 1944, for example, Rankin warned that American support for a Jewish homeland would disrupt relations with four hundred million Muslim and Christian Arabs, would weaken England’s control over India, would undermine the British military effort, and would strengthen communism in Palestine. Aid to Zionism resembled “waving a red flag in the face of the British Empire.” Instead of going to Palestine, Jews should instead take up Stalin’s offer and move to the Soviet Union, “possibly east of the Urals.” Such an arrangement for the Zionists could be “easily worked out, and since practically every Communist among them came from Russia, I am sure they would not protest—especially after they got over there.”21 Rankin’s knowledge of Zionism was minimal. He claimed that the Irgun, a nationalistic Jewish underground organization in Palestine, was pro-commu19 CR, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess., Feb. 13, 1950, A1010, March 1, 1950, 2594. 20 CR, 82nd Cong., 2nd Sess., March 11, 1952, 2106, 2110. 21 New York Times, Oct. 8, 1942, 3; CR, 78th Cong., 2nd Sess., March 8, 1944, 2374; 79th Cong., 1st Sess., Oct. 16, 1945, 9675.

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nist, that the only Americans who sympathized with Zionism were radical Jews who did not represent “the better element of American Jews,” and that American politicians supported Zionism only because they were seeking Jewish votes in the 1948 election. On one occasion he contended that the United Nations had supported the partition of Palestine solely because Jews had bribed some of the ambassadors, while other ambassadors had been warned that a negative vote would result in the cutting off of Marshall Plan aid to their nations. (Rankin referred to the Marshall Plan as the “Baruch-Marshall’’ plan, implying that it was of Jewish origin.) Rankin predicted the ejection of England from Palestine would result in “the collapse not only of Britain but probably of all western Europe; then communism, the greatest menace civilization has ever known, would overrun the whole European continent.” The decision of “this international Sanhedrin up here in New York” to divide Palestine, he warned, would touch off “a race war in Palestine” in which anywhere from one million to five million American soldiers would be sacrificed defending the Zionist state, “a branch of the Communist movement.” Rankin furthermore claimed that European Jews had no right to settle in Palestine since they were descended from the Khazars and not from the Jews of the Bible. Rankin’s source for this was Benjamin H. Freedman, whom Rankin termed “a great American Jew.” In truth, Freedman was a wealthy renegade Jew who on one occasion had praised Adolf Hitler. Two weeks after the birth of Israel in May 1948, Rankin claimed that ‘Russian Communists” were pouring into the new state in order to establish “a Russian bridgehead” in the Middle East. He proposed that the United States provide Great Britain with atomic bombs in order to stop the spread of communism in the Middle East and other areas vital to the British Empire.22 International factors were not, however, the basis for the antisemitism of Rankin or Bilbo. Bilbo, in fact, admired Zionism, and proposed it as a model to African Americans whom he was eager to see migrate to Africa. All of Bilbo’s antisemitism and most of Rankin’s could be traced to their image of the northern, and particularly the New York Jew, as the ally of the American Negro. Mississippi politics during the era of Rankin and Bilbo largely concerned the social and economic place of the Negro, and no Mississippi politicians were

22 CR, 80th Cong., 1st Sess., March 3, 1947, 1622, 1631; 80th Cong., 2nd Sess., Jan. 15, 1948, 204-5, May 24, 1948, 6350; U.S. Congress, House, Subcommittee on Legislation of the Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings on Proposed Legislation to Curb or Control the Communist Party of the United States, February 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 19 and 20, 1948, 80th Cong., 2nd Session, 1948, 154, 206.

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more extreme on the race issue than they. Bilbo, for example, predicted the passage of an anti-lynching bill by Congress in 1938 would “open the flood-gates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race-riots, and crime will be increased a thousand fold; and upon your garments . . . will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white southern men will not tolerate.” In 1947 Bilbo published Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, a lengthy exposition of his racial views. He modestly claimed the book was the result of having studied “practically all the records and everything written throughout the entire world on the subject of race relations, covering a period of close on to thirty thousand years.” Here he defended his 1939 proposal to provide a homeland in Liberia for African Americans willing to leave the United States, examined the threat to America from white amalgamation with a race several thousand years behind in physical, mental, and cultural development, surveyed the racial theories of Madison Grant, Arthur de Gobineau, Lothrop Stoddard, and Robert B. Bean, and warned against the “mongrel poison” being spread by communists and communist sympathizers. The United States, he concluded, “is now standing at the crossroad, and we must choose between a white or mongrel America of the future.” On other occasions Bilbo was more graphic in analyzing the race question. The “nigger is only 150 years from the jungles of Africa” where he ate “‘some fried nigger steak for breakfast.” The undermining of white supremacy would transform the United States into a replica of South America inhabited by “mestizos, mulattoes, zambos, terceroones, quadroons, cholos, musties, fusties,and dusties.”23 Rankin, if anything, was more extreme in his racial attitudes. While Bilbo was a politician working the redneck precincts, Rankin was a true believer. He predicted that Congressman Herman Kopplemann’s bill to eliminate segregation in the District of Columbia would encourage ‘‘the brutal Negroes to assault white women in every section of the city,” force whites to move into the suburbs, and terrify law-abiding African Americans. Kopplemann’s proposal was part of the Jewish communist plan to “force Negro equality or mongrelization upon the white people of the South” and to destroy American civilization. “Every time that someone high up socially or politically comes out and advocates social equality or racial amalgamation,” Rankin cried out, “some innocent

23 Zorn, “Bilbo,” 289; Theodore G. Bilbo, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (Poplarville, 1947), v, 283; Greene, Bilbo, 103-5.

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white girl in Washington pays with her life, or suffers humiliation that is worse than death.”24 Rankin’s racism extended to Asians. He interpreted the war with Japan as a racial and religious struggle in which “Christianity has come in conflict with Shintoism, atheism, and infidelity.” The United States was defending Caucasian civilization against “those yellow reprobates” and the “yellow peril.” In order to guarantee the security of Hawaii and California and ensure racial purity, Rankin favored the internment of all Japanese-Americans and their deportation to Japan after the conclusion of the fighting, even if they were fourth-generation citizens. “Once a Jap always a Jap,” is how the Mississippian described it. “You cannot change him. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” You could no more change a Japanese into a white man than you could “reverse the laws of nature.” Rankin was so incensed by the Japanese that he introduced a congressional resolution in April 1943 to change the name of the cherry trees located around the District of Columbia’s Tidal Basin to “Korean cherry trees.”25 At times Rankin’s racism was bizarre. In 1942, for example, he attributed unrest among African Americans to “Japanese fifth columnists.” He accused “the crackpots, the communists, and parlor pinks” of seeking to “‘mongrelize” the American blood stream by removing racial labels from Red Cross blood plasma. Behind this scheme were “alien doctors” and “a radical communistic element” which had flooded into America from Eastern Europe. Mongrelization would destroy America because, as Rankin told the House of Representatives, “mongrels, as a rule, do not propagate.”26 Rankin, Bilbo, and many other southerners of the 1940s believed that racial discontent among African Americans was caused by outsiders. Southerners claimed that they understood African Americans, that they had always provided for their basic needs, and that African Americans were essentially content in the South. Rankin, for instance, proclaimed himself to be “one of the best friends the Negro ever had.” Furthermore, Negroes supposedly lacked the political skills, education, and intelligence to mount an effective campaign in their own behalf. Thus white southerners looked elsewhere for the sources of racial unrest. 24 CR, 77th Cong., 2nd Sess., May 28, 1942, A1985; 77th Cong., 1st Sess., Aug. 15, 1941, 7184-85. 25 CR, 77th Cong., 2nd Sess., Feb. 18, 1942, 1419-20, Jan. 23, 1942, 605, Feb. 23, 1942, A76869, May 5, 1942, A1868-69; 78th Cong., 1st Sess., Apr. 17, 1943, 3536. 26 CR, 77th Cong., 2nd Sess., Feb. 23, 1942, A768-69, May 23, 1942, A2985, June 5, 1942, A2146, Oct. 14, 1942, 8192.

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At various times they blamed misguided northerners, crackpot reformers and philanthropists, labor union agitators, demagogic northern politicians, communists, and, in the case of Rankin and Bilbo, Jews for disrupting harmonious southern race relations.27 Of all the various guises that the Jews assumed in the minds of Rankin and Bilbo, none was more prominent or more nefarious than the ally of the Negro. Both men were careful to distinguish between the “good” Jews, many of whom lived in the South and backed white supremacy, and New York Jews who supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Bilbo’s reply to a Jew critical of his opposition to a fair employment practices commission was typical. Most American Jews were “fine American citizens,” the Mississippi senator declared, but there were “a few of you New York Jew ‘Kikes’ that are fraternizing and socializing with Negroes for selfish and political reasons.” He warned American Jews that their continuing involvement in the civil rights movement would result in their removal from America to Palestine where they could agitate all they wanted.28 Bilbo’s differentiation between “good” Jews and “Kikes” was based on his belief that the Jewish people were part of the white race. His antisemitism never extended as far as Rankin’s, and it lacked Rankin’s evangelical fervor and ideological underpinnings. Antisemitism for Bilbo was merely a by-product of his racism and was mainly a political ploy. On other occasions he attacked Catholic priests, Polish-Americans, and Italian-Americans for harboring doubts about white supremacy.29 Bilbo uttered his most famous racist statement in July 1945. It was directed at Josephine Piccolo of Brooklyn who had written him to protest his opposition to equal employment opportunities for African Americans. She stated that she was neither a Jew nor a Negro, “but that does not make you less my enemy.” “I find it hard to believe,” she declared, “that you are an American citizen, and much, much harder to believe that you are allowed to enter the doors of the United States Senate. Every man and woman who cast a vote for you should hang his head in shame.” Bilbo’s response to Miss Piccolo began with “Dear Dago.” Italian-Americans were infuriated by Bilbo’s slur, and Congressman Vito Marcantonio of New York demanded an immediate apology to Miss Piccolo. 27 CR, 78th Cong., 1st Sess., Dec. 15, 1943, 10732. 28 New York Post, July 26, 1945. 29 Ibid., July 27, 1945.

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Bilbo then took out after Marcantonio. “When and by whom were you appointed as the judge and arbiter . . . of any letter that I might write . . . to a nasty, insulting letter?” Bilbo avowed that he would be the last person to question the loyalty and patriotism of the “splendid citizens of Italian descent of this republic, but of course there are some exceptions.” Bilbo concluded by claiming that “Dago” was a longstanding and non-disparaging southern term used to describe swarthy southern Europeans.30 For Bilbo it was no coincidence that Miss Piccolo was from New York City. New York harbored all that was evil in American life. It was the center of American liberalism and Harlem, as well as the home of large numbers of supposedly unassimilated immigrants, of the offices of the major civil rights organizations, and of the major opponents of politics Mississippi-style. Bilbo described New York’s population as “a mongrel, motley bunch of Negroes and aliens” who think “they are sitting on top of the world.” In responding to a Jewish soldier who wrote Bilbo to criticize his “Dear Dago” letter, Bilbo characterized him as “a ‘Bowery inmate’ from the slum sections of New York City and . . . a very common ‘kike.’” Actually his correspondent was from Toledo, Ohio, but Bilbo assumed any Jewish critic had to be from the deracinated, unassimilated, polyglot population of New York. “To a citizen like myself, who has been born and reared in a State where there are more genuine white Caucasians than possibly in any State in the Union,” Bilbo wrote, “I am sure I would feel very much at a loss” in New York. He portrayed Congressman Marcantonio as a “political mongrel” representing a “sin-soaked communistic” area. By focusing their animus on New York City, Bilbo and Rankin continued a long history of New York-baiting. Southern and western agrarian spokesmen had for decades described cities in general, and New York in particular, as unnatural, parasitical, materialistic, pagan, alien, and corrupt. In 1896 William Jennings Bryan had accused the American metropolis of exploiting the farmer. In the 1940s Rankin and Bilbo accused New Yorkers, particularly radical Jews, of seeking to mongrelize the South.31 There was no doubt in Rankin’s mind that communist “long-nosed reprobates” were behind the civil rights movement. At times Rankin admitted there

30 Green, Bilbo, 102-3; New York World Telegram, July 21, 1945. 31 New York Times, July 25, 1945, 23; New York Post, July 27, 1945: PM, Aug. 15, 1945; Arnold M. Rose, “The Study of Man: Anti-Semitism’s Root in City-Hatred,” Commentary, October 1948, 374-78.

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were many anti-communist Jews in the South and elsewhere, loyal members of the white race, who opposed the schemes of their New York co-religionists. “The better element of the Jews, and especially the old line American Jews throughout the South and West,” he said in 1943, “are not only ashamed of, but they are alarmed at the activities” of Jewish communists responsible for the rapes and murders of white girls by “vicious Negroes.” On other occasions Rankin implied that “Jew” and “communist” were virtually synonymous. Thus he described the Fair Employment Practices Committee as “the most dangerous and brazen attempt to fasten upon the white people of America the worst system of control by alien or minority racial groups that has been known since the Crucifixion.” The FEPC was a product of “alien influences directed by a foreign comintern . . . that is based upon hatred for Christianity.”32 In 1950, Rankin read off a list of communist sympathizers that included the Rosenbergs, David Greenglass, and Lee Pressman. “Not a single one,” he told his startled congressional colleagues, “has ever been a member of a Christian church. There is not a white Gentile in the entire group, and the same may be said of at least seventy-five percent of the Communists in this country.” These persons “have been stealing our atomic secrets . . . and plotting the overthrow of this government and the destruction of our Christian civilization.” On one occasion Rankin even included Klaus Fuchs among the Jewish atomic traitors even though Fuchs had been raised as a Lutheran.33 Rankin’s anti-Jewish diatribes continued virtually until his last days in Congress. In 1952 he recommended that every American should read the antisemitic tract Iron Curtain over America by John Beaty of Southern Methodist University. As a parting shot, Rankin warned America about “those insidious alien enemies who are now plotting the overthrow of the American way of life, and the wiping of Christianity from the face of the earth.”’ Rankin was equally as spiteful toward Jewish congressmen who answered these calumnies. He accused Abraham Multer of representing “more Jewish Communists than any other man in Congress” and attacked Arthur G. Klein for abusing both the British Empire and America’s whites by supporting Zionism and the elimination of school segregation in the District of Columbia. In describing Samuel Dickstein, he declared, “I do not

32 CR, 78th Cong., 1st Sess., July 1, 1943, A3371; 79th Cong., 1st Sess., Nov. 21, 1945, 10886; 80th Congress, 1st Sess., Feb. 13, 1947, 1014. 33 CR, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess., Aug. 29, 1950, 13725-27

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want any such man to . . . pretend to speak for me or for those old-line Americans that I have the honor to represent.”34 Rankin had a celebrated confrontation with Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn. In April 1943, Rankin referred on the floor of the House of Representatives to Celler as “the Jewish gentleman.” Celler immediately accused the Mississippian of intolerance, malice, and cruelty, and of deliberately seeking to promote religious divisiveness. “He glories in such strife. It tickles his vanity to create racial animosities.” Rankin responded that Celler had been “doing the Jews of this country immeasurable harm” by “attacking the white people of the South ever since he has been in Congress.” Rankin then warned Celler that he would “probably be expelled” if he continued making such attacks on members of Congress. At this point the Speaker of the House warned the southern congressman to be more careful or he would be disciplined.35 Two years later the two congressmen had another encounter. This was occasioned by Celler’s protest against a purported recommendation by the American Dental Association to limit the admission of Jews to dental schools. “I am getting tired of the gentleman from New York raising the Jewish question in the House,” Rankin harangued while shaking a fist at Celler. “Remember that the white Gentiles of this country have some rights.” A few months later Rankin again referred to Celler as the “Jewish gentleman” and, when Celler protested, he asked whether Celler objected to being called “Jewish” or “gentleman.”36 These attacks on Celler were mild compared to what Rankin said about other Jews critical of his racial and diplomatic stances, particularly the radio and newspaper columnist Walter Winchell. Rankin claimed Winchell’s real name was “Lipshitz” (this was incorrect), that he was a “loathsome” Jew, and that he was part of the clique persecuting America’s white Christians. This “little communistic ‘kike’” resembled a “ghoul at night, that invades the sacred precinct of the tomb, goes down into the grave of a buried child, and with his reeking fingers strips from its lifeless form the jewels and mementoes placed there by the trembling hands of a weeping mother.” How much longer, Rankin cried out, “will the decent, patriotic Jews of America have to endure the punishment he is

34 CR, 82nd Cong., 2nd Sess., June 30, 1952, 8633; 80th Cong., 2nd Sess., May 19, 1948, 6109; Goodman, The Committee, 117. 35 CR, 78th Cong., 1st Sess., Apr. 2, 1943, 2880, 2885, 3062-66. 36 CR, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., Feb. 7, 1945, 872; New York Times, Feb. 8, 1945, 17. See also CR, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., Oct. 24, 1945, 10032.

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to bring upon them? How much longer will patriotic Gentiles have to endure his infamous persecutions?”37 In order to prevent further “persecution,” Rankin introduced legislation in 1949 amending the Communications Act of 1934 to make it easier for private individuals to sue the radio and television networks for defamation. As might be expected, Bilbo shared Rankin’s animus towards Winchell. After Winchell discussed the “Dear Dago” letter on his radio show, Bilbo wrote him a nasty letter describing him as a “limicolous liar and notorious scandalizing kike,” a “rabble-rousing, strife-breeding Communist” who spews “venom and hate and if anybody calls your hand you immediately try to hide behind your race and yell ‘persecution.’”38 Rankin charged Winchell with working closely with the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to defame America’s white Gentiles. The ADL, he claimed, was a “subversive organization” responsible for leaking information to Winchell about George Patton’s slapping of hospitalized soldiers in Sicily during World War II. This was supposedly done to discredit the anti-communist general. In order to protect the nation from this “Yiddish Ku Klux Klan” and “Communistfront organization,” Rankin introduced legislation in 1949 to outlaw the ADL. Anyone belonging to the ADL or participating in its activities could be imprisoned for up to one year and fined a maximum of ten thousand dollars. Rankin believed “an organization of white Gentile Americans” was needed to combat this alien “gestapo of an organization.” He proposed such an organization to the antisemitic retired general George Van Horn Moseley, requesting assistance in fighting “those insidious, treacherous influences that are trying to undermine and destroy our country as well as our Christian civilization.”39 Rankin’s hatred for Winchell was exceeded only by his enmity toward Sidney Hillman, the foreign-born head of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) Political Action Committee. For Rankin, Hillman represented those alien social and political influences infecting the South with wage-and-hours laws, 37 PM, Jan. 27, 1944; CR, 78th Cong., 2nd Sess., Feb. 21, 1944, 1925-26; 79th Cong., 2nd Sess., Feb. 11, 1946, 1225. 38 CR, 81st Cong., 1st Sess., May 9, 1949, A2763; Green, Bilbo, 102; CR, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., Aug. 1, 1945, A3702-703. 39 CR, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess., Jan. 4, 1950, A28; 79th Cong., 1st Sess., Feb. 2, 1945, 758; 81st Cong., 1st Sess., June 13, 1949, A3647, Oct. 19, 1949, 15103; John E. Rankin to George Van Horn Moseley, Nov. 18, 1947, Moseley Scrapbook, Moseley Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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equal pay for Negroes, militant labor unions, and anti-poll tax agitation. Hillman’s “oriental mug” reflected his un-American makeup. He was a “communist agitator” and a labor “racketeer.” Rankin had never been sympathetic toward the labor movement, believing it threatened southern industry, small business, and white supremacy. The prominence of Hillman the Jew within the CIO merely strengthened Rankin’s aversion to labor unions.40 By the mid-1940s Rankin had discovered a concerted Jewish conspiracy to dominate and pervert American culture through control of the mass media. He was a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and, more than any other person, was responsible for the investigation of communist influences in Hollywood during 1945 and 1946. He described the motion picture industry as the scene of “one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of the government” and “the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States.” Jews had “virtually driven Christian American actors and actresses from the moving-picture field.” Hollywood, for Rankin and his ilk, was a center of debauchery, social and racial experimentation, and advanced ideas, the very antithesis of, say, Tupelo, Mississippi. From Hollywood there emanated the poison undermining morality, Christianity, and white supremacy. The purveyors of such filth were Trotskyites who spoke in “broken English.” He singled out such subversive figures as David Daniel Kaminsky (Danny Kaye), Edward Iskowitz (Eddie Cantor), Emanuel Goldenberg (Edward G. Robinson), and Melvyn Hesselberg (Melvyn Douglas). These, and others like them, sought “to bring to the Christian people of America the murder and plunder that has taken place in the Communist-dominated countries of Europe.” While eager to investigate Hollywood, Rankin refused to allow the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities to examine the Ku Klux Klan. “After all,” he noted, “the Klan is an American institution, its members are Americans. Our job is to investigate foreign issues and alien organizations.”41 Convinced that American communists were mostly Jews and other aliens, Rankin zealously opposed any modification of the nation’s immigration laws to accommodate the post-World War II refugees. In fact, he wished to put an 40 New York Times, July 27, 1937, 1, 11; CR, 78th Cong., 2nd Sess., May 18, 1944, 4640; June 23, 1944, A3389. 41 CR, 81st Cong., 1st Sess., Oct. 19, 1949, A6677; 79th Cong., 1st Sess., July 9, 1945, 7371-72, July 18, 1945, 7737; 80th Cong., 1st Sess., Nov. 24, 1947, 10792; Ellen H. Posner, “AntiJewish Agitation,” The American Jewish Year Book 5707, ed. Harry Schneiderman and Julius Maller (Philadelphia, 1946), 183.

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end to what he termed the “immigration racket” so that “riffraff ” and the “longnosed” do not flood the nation, bringing with them “atheism, anarchy, infidelity, and hatred of our form of government.” During the war he proposed cutting off all immigration, and in 1945 he introduced a bill forbidding immigration until the number of unemployed Americans was less than one hundred thousand.42 Rankin consistently opposed anything that reeked of foreign influences. He portrayed foreign aid as benefiting “long-nosed grafters” and warned against surrendering American sovereignty to the United Nations, “an international Sanhedrin” controlled by “a gang of long-nosed internationalists.” The pacifist and internationalist Albert Einstein also infuriated the Mississippian. Einstein, Rankin declared, was “one of the greatest fakers” in history and should be deported immediately. In addition to equating Jews with communism and internationalism, Rankin also characterized them as international bankers. The distrust of metropolitan bankers, especially those of New York, had long been a staple of midwestern and southern demonology. Rankin’s complaint regarding the “shylocks” exploiting farmers and small businessmen thus was not original, but it was explosive when uttered within the context of the intense antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s.43 At one time or another Bilbo and Rankin expressed most of the antisemitic stereotypes popular in twentieth-century America. Jews were international bankers, communists, urban slum dwellers, polluters of American culture, and enemies of Christianity. In turn, contemporary Jewish spokesmen described the two Mississippi politicians as the most degenerate politicians in Washington. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, called Rankin “the most treasonable enemy of American democracy.” The Jewish War Veterans of the United States termed Rankin and Bilbo “‘un-Americans” and called for their removal from Congress. Not surprisingly, Rankin and Bilbo were viewed as American versions of Hitler.44 There were, however, crucial differences between Rankin and Bilbo and the Nazis, stemming from the critical fact of Mississippi politics: the division between whites and Negroes. Jews had white skins and hence were part of 42 CR, 79th Cong., 2nd Sess., Mar. 20, 1946, A1527; 80th Cong., 1st Sess., Mar. 17, 1947, 2142; 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., Oct. 2, 1951, 12494; 78th Cong., 1st Sess., Oct. 29, 1943, 8880; 79th Cong., 1st Sess., May 22, 1945, 4913. 43 CR, 80th Cong., 1st Sess., June 6, 1947, 7747; 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., May 7, 1951, 4987; 77th Cong., 1st Sess., Apr. 25, 1941, 3328-29; 81st Cong., 2nd Sess., Feb. 13, 1950, A1022. 44 New York Times, Apr. 26, 1946, 15; Nov. 26, 1946, 23.

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a racial aristocracy. These two Mississippi antisemites never argued that Jews were undesirable because of ineradicable biological characteristics; rather, Jews were resented because of their supposed cultural and political traits. Rankin and Bilbo never disowned all Jews, and they always held out to Jews the possibility of acceptance if only they would change their nefarious agitation on racial issues. “God knows I got nothing against the Jewish people,” Bilbo said. “The Jews we got in Mississippi are fine people. They are some of the finest people we got. They’re natives. They fought on our side in the Civil War.” Bilbo always claimed that the “high-class Jews” of Mississippi voted for him, while Rankin alleged that “the better element of the Jews” was ashamed of, and alarmed by, the activities of Jewish radicals. Their enemies were, of course, the Hillmans, Cellers, Kopplemanns, and Winchells. They were also aware of other types of Jews such as the man who worked in Bilbo’s 1946 reelection campaign, or Judah Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State, or David Cohn, the southern writer. The antisemitism of Bilbo and Rankin was also held in check by the war with Germany. Unwilling to be identified with the nation’s mortal enemy, or with a Nazi ideology so alien to America, Bilbo and Rankin continued to espouse a racism that remained traditional to the South: the racism of white supremacy.45 It is not surprising that antisemitism in the South has diminished over the past several decades. No longer is the Jew the alien, the radical, the fomenter of racial discord. The outward transformation of southern racial attitudes and practices has blunted whatever overt antisemitism might have existed because of the close identification of Jews with the 1960s civil rights movement. Furthermore, the State of Israel had diminished the identification between Jews and radicalism. Perhaps in no part of the country is there as much admiration for the martial virtues and opposition to communism than in what the historian John Hope Franklin had called “the militant South.” There the Israeli is seen not as the insidious subversive of Rankin’s imagination, but rather the gallant warrior holding back the tide of communism and Arab radicalism. Support for Israel also rests upon the reservoir of southern religious fundamentalism that, as Harry Golden liked to remind us, contains a deep strain of philo-Semitism. The nationalization of American culture resulting from the impact of the mass media and demographic mobility has diminished the southern sense of regional distinctiveness as well as the South’s perception of being persecuted by the Yankees. If anything, it is the North that feels oppressed by the economic and 45 Harry Henderson and Sam Shaw, “Bilbo,” Collier’s, July 6, 1947, 20; “Senator Bilbo Meets the Press,” American Mercury, November 1946, 534.

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political challenge of the Sun Belt. The antisemitism of a Rankin and a Bilbo, which fed on the identification of the Jew and the city, is difficult to sustain when the fastest growing metropolis in the nation during the last several years has been Houston and when San Antonio is now larger than Pittsburgh, Boston, or Cleveland. The populist rhetoric and radicalism which lay at the heart of Bilbo and Rankin’s Judeophobia is a thing of the past. One would be foolhardy to predict the complete demise of southern antisemitism, but one can safely surmise that, if and when antisemitism again rears its ugly head in southern politics, it will not resemble that of Bilbo and Rankin.

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The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstrong In October 1949 George Washington Armstrong, a Fort Worth, Texas oilman and Mississippi land baron, publicly offered a seemingly princely gift to tiny Jefferson Military College ( JMC) in Washington, Mississippi, a small town in southwest Mississippi a few miles from Natchez. The gift was conditional on, among other things, teaching the doctrine of racial supremacy and not admitting Jews as students. This was among the most blatant examples of antisemitism in the history of American education. A couple of years later Armstrong made a similar offer to Piedmont College, a small church-related college in Georgia. These offers were not accompanied by any of the euphemisms that had previously accompanied efforts to limit the Jewish presence in academia, such as the need to geographically balance the undergraduate student body or the inability of prospective Jewish graduate students, the children of poor urban immigrants, to comprehend the genius of American history and English literature. Armstrong and his proposed gifts to JMC and Piedmont College are not discussed in any of the standard histories of American antisemitism, even though he was one of America’s most prominent antisemites during the 1930s and 1940s. He had long been on the radar of Jewish organizations combating antisemitism, and the two proposals were widely covered in the press, including the New York Times.1 Leonard Dinnerstein’s Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience (1987) and Anti-Semitism in America (1994) do not mention Armstrong, and there is only one reference to him, but none to his proposed contributions, in Michael Dobkowski’s The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (1979). The local and national response to Armstrong’s offer to Jefferson Military College, coming just four years after the end of World War II and five years prior 1

See, for example, “Memorandum on GEORGE W. ARMSTRONG,” July 18, 1947, Armstrong File, American Jewish Committee Library, New York.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

to the outlawing of school segregation by the Supreme Court in the Brown decision, throws light on American attitudes toward antisemitism in the wake of the Holocaust, the changing racial attitudes in the Deep South during the post-war years, and the strategies adopted by Jews in fighting antisemitism. At first glance the Mississippi of the 1940s might appear to be a congenial place for a person such as Armstrong. W. J. Cash’s classic The Mind of the South (1941) argued that antisemitism was part of the “savage ideal” that lay at the heart of southern identity, and no state was more southern than Mississippi. For much of the 1940s it was represented by two of the most notorious antisemites ever to sit in Congress—Congressman John E. Rankin and Senator Theodore G. Bilbo. Rankin accused Jews of attempting “to destroy Christianity and everything that is based on Christian principles. They are now trying to undermine and destroy America. God save our country from such a fate,” he told his fellow congressmen. Bilbo warned those whom he called New York Jewish “Kikes” that they faced deportation to Palestine if they continued their agitation in behalf of civil rights for African Americans and the mongrelization of the South.2 Thus if there was any place in the Union that one could assume would be sympathetic to someone of Armstrong’s ilk it would have been Mississippi. But here, as well as in other aspects of the history of Armstrong’s gift, including its size, the response of the institution’s board of trustees, and even the nature of Jefferson Military College itself, the story is more surprising and complicated than it might appear at first glance. First of all, Jefferson Military College was not a college but a military preparatory boarding school for boys eight to eighteen years old. Such schools were found throughout the South, but few had a history as old and as illustrious as that of JMC. Chartered by the territorial government of Mississippi in 1802 during the administration of Thomas Jefferson and named for the third president, it became fully operational in 1811. JMC’s charter stated that its trustees should “take effectual care that students of all denominations may, and shall be admitted to equal advantages of a liberal education, and to the emoluments and honors of the college, and they shall receive fair and generous treatment, during their residence therein.” A guide to the school published around the time of the Armstrong controversy a century and a half later noted, “Each year there are cadets of different faiths and no cadet receives any interference with his own religion. The daily service in chapel is so arranged as to fit the needs of all cadets.” In this spirit, the school had admitted Jewish students and it even had Jewish trustees. But the guide also stated that 2

Armstrong dedicated his 1947 book World Empire to Rankin.

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“a wholesome Christian influence prevails” at JMC and that “on Sundays each cadet attends the church of his choice.” This ambiguity as to the limits of the school’s religious latitudinarianism would surface in 1949 when Armstrong announced his willingness to help the school financially.3 The administration and graduates of JMC took pride in its history. The Mississippi trial of Aaron Burr for treason in 1807 supposedly occurred on its campus under two giant oak trees; Andrew Jackson camped here during the War of 1812; the Mississippi statehood convention of 1817 met in a church that later became part of the school’s campus; Lafayette reviewed the school’s cadets in 1825; and federal troops were stationed on the campus from July 1863 to July 1866. The artist and naturalist John James Audubon taught at JMC during the 1820s, and its graduates included Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy. JMC’s students came primarily from the South and Latin America, a fact that would influence the conditions that Armstrong’s attached to his gift. For about a century the school had flourished, sending its graduates off to a variety of military academies and southern universities. By 1949, however, it was in serious financial straits. There had even been a question whether it would open for the fall semester. It did, but its enrollment had dropped to under fifty, it had only seven faculty members, and its physical plant was in a state of disrepair. One recent superintendent had been killed when he was blown up by a boiler he was repairing, and two recent fires had seriously damaged the main dormitory. Routine maintenance such as painting had been put off because of a lack of funds. There was little money in the bank, and persons associated with JMC were not certain whether the school could meet its fiscal obligations and finish out the academic year. Any offer of financial relief would certainly receive a careful hearing by its board of trustees, even one with noxious conditions which seemingly violated its charter.4

3

“Tullis Heads Effort to Save Jefferson Military College,” New Orleans Times Picayune, December 12, 1949; Jefferson Military College: Preparatory Schools for Boys 8-18 (undated), 5. A copy of this guide to the school is in the George W. Armstrong Papers, Special Collections, University of Texas at Arlington Library, Arlington, TX.

4

“Virtue Triumphs: School Refuses to Teach Bigotry for $50 Million,” Life, November 14, 1949, 108-11; Charles F. Sudduth, “Jefferson Military College: A Brief History,” http:// www.mississippidays.com/jmc. JMC struggled on until 1964 when the state of Mississippi took over the school and paid off its debts of sixty-six thousand dollars. “Governor Johnson Confident State Will Acquire Jefferson,” Natchez Democrat, May 30, 1964.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

Armstrong’s relationship to JMC stemmed from his ownership of thirtyeight plantations in southwest Mississippi near Natchez. Here he lived the life of an ante-bellum planter-intellectual—raising cattle and cotton, reading, writing antisemitic tracts, and corresponding with virtually all of the leading American antisemitic figures of the 1930s and 1940s. By the mid-1940s, Armstrong was a source of funds for George Van Horn Moseley, Gerald L. K. Smith, and other prominent antisemites. Armstrong, however, had bigger goals in mind than simply sending checks to fund the antisemitic activities of others. The financial difficulties of JMC provided him the opportunity to put his grandiose ambitions into practice, which included the transformation of JMC into a full-fledged university committed to the teaching of antisemitism and white supremacy. Armstrong, a graduate of the University of Texas law school, had accumulated a fortune in Texas from oil and gas, steel, ranching, banking, real estate, flour milling, ginning and exporting of cotton, public power, and the practice of law. He was one of the most prominent Texas businessmen of the early twentieth century and had served as president of both the Texas Chamber of Commerce and the Associated Industries of Texas. He was also a prominent figure in Democratic state politics in Texas. In 1917 he purchased the first of his Mississippi plantations, and in 1925 he bought a plantation named Woodstock, located twelve miles south of Natchez. Here he spent much of his time during the 1930s and 1940s, punctuated by a return to Texas in 1932 in order to run in the Texas Democratic Party primary for governor. His platform condemned the Federal Reserve System and the gold standard, and supported the establishment of a state currency system and the revival of a populist alliance of southern Democrats and western progressive Republicans against Wall Street. His campaigns in the Democratic Party primary and as an independent gubernatorial candidate garnered little support. Armstrong detested the New Deal and Roosevelt. In 1943 he urged that FDR be impeached and the white South divorce itself “from the eastern wing of the party dominated by aliens and negroes and political bosses with their corruption, and . . . form a new party with the people of the western and middle states.” Eight years earlier he had described Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal” as “a deliberate and well managed campaign to destroy State sovereignty and our Constitutional form of government. This is the program of the Zionist Jewish conspiracy.”5 Why Armstrong ever became an antisemite and a racist in the first place remains a mystery. His privately printed autobiography is of limited help in this 5

Memoirs of George W. Armstrong (Austin, 1958), 152-61, 311, 318

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regard. He had few if any social or business contacts with Jews or African Americans while growing up in Texas. The autobiography does note, however, the influence of his father, a Confederate veteran, Methodist minister, and one of the founders of Texas Wesleyan University. The father was deeply religious and intolerant of deviance from Protestant religious orthodoxy. “With him right was right and wrong was wrong, and the Bible was the one and only standard of right and wrong,” Armstrong recalled. “There was no middle ground and no compromise. If he ever sinned it was the sin of intolerance of evil.” Religion dominated family life with daily prayer sessions in the morning and at night. Perhaps here was the source of Armstrong’s own intolerance and revulsion from ambiguity and complexity. His father saw himself as an intellectual and writer (one of his publications was a book titled Romanism vs. Protestantism). Armstrong also became interested in intellectual matters. From an early age, he said in his memoirs, he also had wanted “to influence people through my writing.”6 But if Armstrong’s authoritarianism and intolerance can be traced to his early years, this still does not explain why he focused on Jews (and African Americans) rather than on Roman Catholics, Mexican Americans, or Asians in the decades after World War I. Here again his autobiography is silent, although there is a clue in his bankruptcy in 1923 which stemmed from the death of cattle on his plantations due to tick fever.7 He attributed his inability to borrow money to avoid bankruptcy to the machinations of New York bankers, the newly instituted Federal Reserve System, the gold standard, and the international financial system, all frequent targets of western and southern monetary radicals during the populist-progressive period. Armstrong had been interested in the money question even before his bankruptcy, and his first book, The Crime of ’20: An Official Story of Frenzied Finance, which appeared in 1920, attacked the Federal Reserve System. Further reading and his bankruptcy broadened his understanding of monetary issues, particularly their “Jewish origin.” It was helpful in this regard that Felix M. Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, the son-in-law of Jacob Schiff, had been a leading advocate of the Federal Reserve System.8

6

George W. Armstrong, Memoirs, 20, 62. Armstrong’s father had been the chaplain of his Confederate regiment and a circuit riding minister. His two brothers were also Methodist ministers.

7

“Judge Armstrong of Natchez Only Living Man for Whom Oil Field in State Has Been Named,” Jackson (Miss.) Daily News, October 20, 1949.

8

Armstrong, Memoirs, 113.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

A staple of antisemitic literature in the early twentieth century was the claim that Jewish international bankers, particularly the Rothschild interests, were responsible for the world’s economic ills. This made sense to the unsophisticated and provincial Armstrong, and his mission for the last three decades of his life was unmasking the machinations of Jewish financiers, including those of the J. P. Morgan investment house, which Armstrong believed to be a Jewish bank. This struggle against Jewish international finance gave purpose and meaning to his life, provided him with the key that unlocked many of the world’s mysteries, and supplied him with the topic that could bring him the intellectual acclaim and influence he craved. Until his death in 1954 Armstrong’s monomania regarding Jewish financiers would shape his understanding of national and international politics and was reflected in the titles of many of his pamphlets and books. They include To Hell With Wall Street, The Story of the Dynasty of the Money Trust in America, The Mighty Rothschild Power, Rothschild Money Trust, The Zionists, Third Zionist War, Zionist Wall Street, and The Reign of the Elders. Armstrong was an antisemitic crank, but a dangerous one because of his wealth and intellectual pretensions. His antisemitism was unique in its crudity, extremism, and resistance to common sense, encased in a veneer of fake scholarship and gullibility, most notably exhibited in his taking at face value the notorious forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion and his use of fake quotes from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. His ignorance of Jews and American politics was breathtaking. He asserted that Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman were Jews, that Jews ruled the British Empire at the very time when the British government was enforcing the White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, and that Jews were responsible for American entry into both world wars even though not a single Jew had a significant policy-making position in the War Department and State Department in 1917 and 1941. He wrote that Lincoln was murdered by the Jew John Wilkes Booth; Jews murdered William McKinley, Warren Harding, Huey Long, and Archduke Ferdinand; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Ethel Merman were Jews; the Rothschild family owned half the wealth of the world, and America’s fifteen million Jews owned four-fifths of the wealth in the United States.9 Jews, Armstrong claimed, dominated America’s newspapers, magazines, cinema,

9

The American Jewish population was, in fact, less than one-third of the fifteen million figure claimed by Armstrong. It is likely that Henry Ford was the source of Armstrong’s idea that John Wilkes Booth was Jewish.

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radio networks, railroads, principal industries, both political parties, and naturally the Roosevelt administration.10 Armstrong emphasized the connection between Jews and communism. He wrote that Jews controlled the Soviet Union at the same time that Stalin was conducting an antisemitic and anti-Zionist campaign. In The March of Bolshevism, Armstrong said that Kuhn, Loeb & Company had financed the Russian Revolution, and that the communist Jews had “crucified Christ and . . . overthrew the Russian Czar and . . . is now seeking to undermine and destroy our constitutional form of government.” The source of Armstrong’s insights regarding Jews, he declared, was Jesus, overlooking the fact that Jesus himself was a Jew. Jesus, Armstrong wrote in his memoirs, was an antisemite and had provided him “the intelligence and the experience to understand the subject of money and the sinister control of it, and the will and courage to expose the evil.” With a few exceptions, Jews were traitors and should be banished from America or executed and their property confiscated.11 Particularly venomous was Armstrong’s comments regarding World War II and the Holocaust. These first come out in his 1940 book The Rothschild Money Trust, which he dedicated to a rogue’s gallery of American antisemites, including Henry Ford, the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, William Dudley Pelley, George Van Horn Moseley, and Gerald B. Winrod. They were, Armstrong wrote, “patriots who despite calumny and persecution, have boldly proclaimed the truth regarding the Jewish menace. . . . If our country is saved from revolution and our republican form of government is preserved it will be due largely to the educational work of these brave men.” In this same book Armstrong said that Hitler “abhorred” war, and he blamed the outbreak of the conflict in 1939 entirely on the British and French, who were fighting on behalf of their Jewish masters. Hitler was merely trying to liberate the German people from the clutches of their Jewish oppressors. The Jews “have had a great picnic and very rich picking, and they are now paying for their fun.”12 During the war Armstrong disseminated seditious hate literature that, among other things, accused Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Samuel Rosenman,

10 In The Zionists (1950), 91, Armstrong claimed that the fortune of Franklin Roosevelt stemmed from a Jewish ancestor involved in the opium trade. 11 George W. Armstrong, The March of Bolshevism (1945), 17, 29; Armstrong, Memoirs, 204, 365. 12 Ibid., The Rothschild Money Trust (1940), 78-80.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

and Roosevelt of engineering the Pearl Harbor attack. His 1950 book The Zionists praised Hitler for waging war “according to the rules of civilized warfare,” said that the German dictator was a better man than Roosevelt or Churchill, and that he did not seek war but merely wanted the return of Germany’s pre-World War I possessions by peaceful agreement. Armstrong described the Nuremberg trials as a frame-up and the mass murder of Jews as “alleged crimes.” None of the defendants at Nuremberg were guilty of war crimes, he claimed. Rather, they were persecuted by a pro-Zionist court “for the offense of being opposed to Zionism and communism.” If anyone should have been put on trial it should have been Henry Morgenthau and Felix Frankfurter.13 A theme common to Armstrong and other antisemites, particularly in the South, was the role that Jews had had in promoting racial integration and the “mongrelization” of the races. He proudly announced that he was a white supremacist, declared that no Black was his equal, and called for the repeal of the first sections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which guaranteed citizenship to African Americans and forbade anyone from being denied the vote on the basis of race. African Americans, as well as Asians and immigrants, he argued, should not be allowed to vote, hold office, have any interest in a newspaper, radio station or movie studio, or belong to any secret organization. African Americans, he declared, are not my equal nor are their children the equals of my children or grandchildren. I am superior by blood and inheritance to any and every man of African or Asiatic ancestry. The Anglo-Saxon race is superior to every other race. We are God’s chosen people. Through us God has created this Christian civilization which we enjoy, and our forefathers founded this Christian government without the help of Jews or negroes. If that is bigotry then I am a bigot, but I regard it as pride of blood and ancestry.14

Despite his early anti-Catholicism, Armstrong by the 1930s was advising the Ku Klux Klan to welcome Roman Catholics into its ranks and to concentrate its fire on African Americans and Jews.15 13 Ibid., The Zionists, 107-14. The extent of Armstrong’s ignorance is revealed by his use of the word “Israeli” when referring to the Jewish state rather than “Israel.” 14 Ibid., Memoirs, 187, 200. Armstrong’s contempt toward African Americans is indicated by his refusal in his autobiography and elsewhere to capitalize “Negro.” 15 Armstrong to Samuel W. Roper, 7 September 1951, Gerald L. K. Smith Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

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It is unlikely that the JMC’s board of trustees were unfamiliar with Armstrong’s extreme views regarding Jews and African Americans. Nevertheless, they initiated the contacts that led to his financial assistance. In January and February, 1949, Stanley M. Murphy, the chairman of the school’s executive committee wrote to one of Armstrong’s sons, Allen Jack Armstrong, regarding the school’s desperate financial straits and its plans to become a college that “could be unique in its character” if sufficient funding could be found. “Mr. Armstrong, knowing your father’s inclination and knowing that he is a champion for Jefferson Democracy, it is hoped that he will visualize the possibilities of Jefferson Military College and see fit to support this institution.” At first the school suggested a 7,500 dollar loan, later modified to a loan of 6,500 dollars to be used for repairs and school equipment.16 George Armstrong responded affirmatively to the latter request and loaned the school 6,500 dollars with the understanding that he would not demand payment of interest or principal. The school then named Allen Armstrong to its board of trustees, selected him as chairman of its executive committee, and appointed him the school’s business manager. In late October 1949 Armstrong’s foundation announced that it was offering a major gift to JMC which was widely estimated to be worth as much as fifty million dollars. As was true of much of the story of the Armstrong gift, the fifty million dollar figure was a fantasy. Fifty million dollars in 1949 was the equivalent of 475,000,000 dollars in 2010. This would have been an unprecedented figure in the history of fund-raising by American educational institutions, and few Americans, and Armstrong was certainly not among them, had the resources for such a gift. Many of Armstrong’s business ventures were doing poorly in the late 1940s, and persons familiar with Armstrong’s finances believed his financial resources were a fraction of what the press assumed them to be.17 At times Armstrong refused to attach any precise monetary figure to his proposed gift. The fifty million dollar figure, he said, was pure speculation. But on other occasions he used the fifty million dollar figure himself, and he even said that the gift could be worth more than that. But neither he nor anyone else could 16 Stanley M. Murphy to Allen J. Armstrong, 2 January 1949, 24 January 1949, 2 February 1949, Jefferson Military College Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi. 17 R. Gordon Grantham, a Jackson, Mississippi attorney, was one of those who was skeptical regarding Armstrong’s wealth and the value of his proposed gift to JMC. Grantham to Jacob Spolansky, 5 November 1949, Armstrong File, American Jewish Committee Library. See also “Personal History and Background of George W. Armstrong, Sr.,” 1-4, 12, ibid. This document concluded that Armstrong’s net wealth barely exceeded a million dollars.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

be certain of its value. He proposed giving to JMC the surface title to twentyeight of his plantations totaling twenty-six thousand acres of land, in addition to one-half of his six-tenths mineral rights in an additional forty-two thousand acres. The remaining four-tenths were owned by members of the Armstrong family and Armstrong’s foundation. It was not clear how much oil and gas the plantations contained, and it was impossible to predict the future value of either of these commodities or the price which the school would receive should it decide to sell some of the land. At the time of the gift there were only three functioning oil wells on all his land in Mississippi. Nevertheless, the figure of fifty million dollars stuck and was frequently used in the many newspaper and magazine accounts of the gift.18 It was not the amount of the gift that brought notoriety to JMC and Armstrong but the conditions he attached to it. First of all he insisted that the school’s board of fifteen trustees be replaced by a new board of five persons, three of whom he would appoint and the other two selected by the outgoing board. Armstrong’s nominees were Allen Armstrong, United States Attorney Joseph E. Brown, and George Van Horn Moseley. Allen Armstrong was a racist and antisemite himself, and Brown saw nothing inappropriate about the proposed gift. “If a Jew embraces the Christian faith,” he remarked, “he can attend just as well as any other Christian.”19 Of the three, Moseley was undoubtedly the vilest. For years Armstrong had sent Moseley a monthly stipend, undoubtedly in appreciation for Moseley’s continuing fidelity to the antisemitic cause.20 The depth of Moseley’s antisemitism is indicated by a speech he gave in 1938 at Tulane University in New Orleans before a group of medical reservists in which he stated that he would allow refugees from Nazi Germany to be admitted into the United States provided they all agreed to be sterilized. The United States, he said on other occasions, 18 Among the publications that used the fifty million dollars figure were the New York Times, Life, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, San Antonio Express, Dallas Morning News, Houston Post, Oklahoma City Times, and Memphis Commercial Appeal. The headline in the New York Times of October 26, 1949 proclaimed, “Little School Accepts 50 Million to Champion White Supremacy.” For examples of Armstrong’s use of the fifty million dollars figure see his letter in the Natchez Democrat of May 8, 1949, and his letter to Congressman John E. Rankin, 16 July 1949, Armstrong Papers. 19 “College Offered 50 Million to Teach Race Superiority,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 26, 1949. 20 For Armstrong’s financial support of Moseley, see George Van Horn Moseley to Y. Q. McCammon, 5 May 1952, Armstrong Papers.

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must immediately begin “selective breeding, sterilization, the elimination of the unfit, and the elimination of those types which are inimical to the general welfare of the nation,” and there is little doubt as to whom Moseley regarded as particularly unfit. The Jew, he exclaimed, would always be a permanent “human outcast.” Writing about Jews “is like writing about something loathsome, such as syphilis.” Moseley admired Nazi Germany for its antisemitism and declared that Nazism and fascism were perfectly compatible with American values and institutions. During the war he said that Jews were receiving their just desserts, and that the most humane solution to the Jewish problem was “breeding all Jewish blood out of the human race.”21 Armstrong wanted Moseley to become chairman of JMC’s board of trustees.22 The involvement of Moseley, however, was not the most noteworthy aspect of the Armstrong gift. This, rather, was his announced objective of using the gift to promote white supremacy and antisemitism. Under the terms of the gift, both African Americans and Jews would be forbidden from attending the school. The issue of African Americans attending JMC was a moot point since the segregation laws of Mississippi precluded school integration, and the school’s trustees were fervent segregationists. But the issue of Jews attending JMC was not moot since Jews were presumably white, although not in the eyes of Armstrong. Armstrong also demanded that white supremacy become the regnant ideology of the school and be emphasized in its promotional literature.

21 These quotes are from Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York, 2000), 21-22, 38, 203, 249-58. Moseley wrote the introduction to Armstrong’s memoirs. On pages 85-86 of the memoirs is a November 29, 1949 letter by James H. Sheldon, chairman of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. It quoted from a speech Moseley gave the preceding month in St. Louis at a meeting of antisemites. “I have only one thing to say about the Jews,” Moseley reportedly said. “As for me, the whole tribe should be eliminated from the human race.” Moseley never denied saying this. Moseley remains a model for American antisemites, and their web sites continue to quote him. His son, Col. George Van Horn Moseley Jr., commanded the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division during the parachute drop into Normandy on the evening of June 5-6, 1944. He broke his ankle during the drop, and for a day or so commanded the regiment from a wheelbarrow. Moseley was part of the composite character played by John Wayne in the movie The Longest Day. Wayne leads his troops while in a wheelbarrow, but his character is named Benjamin Vandervoort. Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort commanded the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division during the Normandy invasion. It is possible that the movie used the name Vandervoort rather than Moseley because of the senior Moseley’s reputation. 22 Armstrong to Moseley, 18 June 1949, Armstrong Papers.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

Armstrong asserted that since African Americans and Jews had their own schools, white Christians also had the right to have schools of their own. He was simply seeking equality for white Christians, he lamely argued, and not discriminating against African Americans and Jews. Armstrong’s definition of “white Christians” was very elastic. He excluded Asians as racially inferior but included Latin Americans, perhaps because there had been a Latin American presence at the school for decades. Also, although most Latin Americans were not Protestants, they at least were Christians, but this was not true of Asians. It was irrelevant to Armstrong that “Latin Americans,” “Anglo-Saxons,” or “white Christians” were not recognized by anthropologists or other social scientists as legitimate racial categories. Within a few weeks of offering the small loan to JMC, Armstrong enlarged his focus and broached the possibility of a major gift of land and mineral rights to the JMC board of trustees. He wrote to Murphy on February 14, 1949, outlining the proposed gift and his conditions.23 Two weeks later the board wrote Armstrong that it had unanimously accepted his proposal, including all of his conditions. The board expressed “its genuine appreciation to you for your selflessness and magnanimity in making it possible to re-create an institution that has been so long associated with American principles of democracy.” The proposed gift was a “noble deed,” and, the board hoped, “will provide the spark and the impetus that shall build a monument which the entire United States shall cherish and . . . future generations shall pay homage and respect to your name.”24 The next day Murphy wrote to Armstrong confirming the board’s decision. Ironically, this letter was written on the stationery of Murphy’s insurance company that was located in the Levy Building in downtown Natchez.25 And on October 20, 1949, during the final discussions of the board regarding the gift, Murphy wrote to Armstrong of the board’s gratitude. “May your name ever be perpetuated, not only through the institution which you are endowing, but through the men and women who are taught the principles of Constitutional Government!”26 At no time prior to the announcement of the acceptance of the gift in late October did the board of trustees object to any of Armstrong’s conditions. 23 Armstrong to Stanley Murphy, 14 February 1949, Jefferson Military College Papers. 24 Trustees of Jefferson College to Armstrong, 28 February 1949, Jefferson Military College Papers. 25 Murphy to Armstrong, 1 March 1949, Armstrong Papers. 26 The letters of Stewart and Murphy are reprinted in Armstrong, Memoirs, 196-97.

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Nor was the general JMC community ignorant of Armstrong’s plans for the school. Allen Armstrong had outlined his father’s thinking in a commencement speech he gave at the end of the 1948-1949 school year. He first described the land and mineral rights that were to be conveyed to the school. These, he avowed, would, as a minimum, provide millions of dollars to the school. But this gift, he warned, was predicated on the school remaining faithful to the “traditions of the South.” These included opposition to political collectivism in any form, constitutional government, “true democracy,” states rights, free enterprise, and “belief in the Christian faith and in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races over those of African or Asiatic origin with their false gods and ideologies.”27 On Monday, October, 24, 1949, Allen Armstrong formally announced that JMC had accepted Armstrong’s gift, including the provisos that it would teach the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin-American races and that no one of Asian or African origin would be admitted as a student or even be employed by the school. The younger Armstrong anticipated that his father’s gift would enable JMC to evolve into a junior college and then into a university, and he said that similar gifts to other schools were being contemplated. He specifically mentioned Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, a Presbyterian institution, and Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth as possible recipients.28 Although he realized that the conditions of the gift might arouse opposition in some quarters, Allen Armstrong did not anticipate any obstacles to consummating the gift. In fact he was already planning a gala ceremony in November or December celebrating the gift. Possible speakers at this event included Fielding Wright, the governor of Mississippi and the Dixiecrat vice-presidential nominee in 1948.29 There was good reason for Armstrong’s confidence. The school’s trustees had never expressed any reservations about the gift. They had, in contrast, predicted the Armstrong gift would transform JMC into “the finest military institution in the South, if not the entire nation,” and that eventually it would become “a great university.”30

27 Allen J. Armstrong, “Excerpts From Jefferson Military College 1949 Commencement Address,” Armstrong Papers. 28 “School Gets Five-Tenths of Armstrong Minerals in State: Policy Revealed,” Natchez Democrat, October 25, 1949. 29 Allen Armstrong to George W. Armstrong Jr., 25 October 2949, Armstrong Papers. 30 Announcement of the Board of Trustees of Jefferson Military College on the occasion of the Armstrong gift, Armstrong Papers. This document is untitled and undated.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

But, much to its surprise, the board was now confronted with a public relations disaster. Northerners and southerners, Jews and Gentiles alike, were outraged both by the gift and the school’s acceptance of it. Southerners in particular had reason to be angry and embarrassed since Armstrong had seemingly substantiated the widespread stereotype of the South as benighted and bigoted. Dozens of newspaper editorials throughout the country strongly condemned Armstrong for his bigotry and severely censured the school for accepting his gift. The Boston Globe of October 26 said Armstrong’s offer was “a startling reminder that there is plenty of un-Americanism to combat here in this country,” while the St. Louis Dispatch that same day described it as “$50,000,000 worth of ignorance.” Jewish organizations naturally strongly condemned Armstrong’s gift. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith compared it to “Hitler’s technique of using educational institutions to spread Nazi religious and racial doctrines.”31 Radio commentators and newspaper columnists, most notably Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, also criticized JMC and Armstrong. In his radio program of October 30, Winchell called Armstrong’s gift a “slimy deal” and described Armstrong as a “miserable old man.” “The greatest service this unspeakable bigot could perform is to create a foundation for the education of himself,” Winchell said, “or build a modern mental institution and reside in it, until he drops dead.”32 Armstrong immediately protested to the American Broadcasting Company. He demanded a transcript of Winchell’s comments as well as fifteen minutes of free airtime to answer him. This should be provided gratis by the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, the automobile manufacturer and Winchell’s sponsor. ABC rejected both of these requests.33 Armstrong also complained to the Federal Communications Commission regarding Winchell’s supposed misuse of the airways and threatened to sue for slander if he was not granted his fifteen minutes of fame. Neither ABC nor the FCC offered any relief to Armstrong, and Armstrong did not carry through on his threat to sue although he did consult with a couple of attorneys.34 31 “George W. Armstrong,” The Facts, November 1949, 4. The Facts was a monthly publication of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. 32 There is a transcript of the Winchell broadcast in the Armstrong Papers. 33 Mark Woods to Armstrong, 9 December 1949, Armstrong Papers. Woods was president of ABC. 34 Armstrong to Moseley, 21 December 1949, and Mark Woods to Wayne Coy, 23 November 1949, Armstrong Papers. Coy was the chairman of the FCC. Armstrong later changed his demand to two ten-minute segments and the right to purchase a five-minute slot for as

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On October 30, Pearson also denounced Armstrong over the radio. Armstrong responded by writing a twenty-page pamphlet titled The Truth About My Alleged $50,000,000 Donation in which he claimed that Winchell’s original name was “Lipschitz,” described Winchell and Pearson as “public enemies,” said they had spread “malicious lies” about him, and charged they were inspired by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League and were agents of the Zionist-financial conspiracy.35 On the evening of October 27, JMC’s trustees announced that they could not assent to Armstrong’s demands to exclude Jewish and Asian students, to restrict the faculty to white Christians, and to incorporate the doctrine of racial superiority in its teaching. They claimed that Armstrong had never made clear the conditions that he attached to the gift; they expressed surprise that Armstrong actually wanted to exclude Jews from the school; and they professed ignorance regarding the racial views of Armstrong and Moseley. This is hardly credible. Armstrong had clearly enunciated his objectives to the trustees when they initially approached him for the loan in January 1949. He told the school then that he was “interested in financing a first class university” on his Whitehall Plantation provided that the provision in the 1802 charter guaranteeing admittance of applicants from all religious denominations be deleted. This would weed out Jews. He also said at this time that he wanted the school to exclude Asians and Africans as students.36 The trustees claimed that the misunderstanding with Armstrong was partially due to semantics. Armstrong, the board pointed out, at times had said that long as ABC aired the Winchell show. Armstrong to Woods, 12 December 1949, Armstrong Papers. Winchell continued his attacks on Armstrong in his newspaper column. See, for example, his column in the Chicago Herald-American, December 5, 1949 and December 12, 1949. 35 One version of this pamphlet is reprinted in Armstrong, Memoirs, 183-204. Another version is found in the Gerald L. K. Smith Papers. It was common for other American antisemites, including Congressman John Rankin, to claim Winchell’s original name was Lipschitz, perhaps because of its scatological association. Reputable encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries give the original name as Weinschel, Winchel, Wincheles, or Winschel. The standard biography of Winchell, Neil Gabler’s Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (New York, 1994), does not discuss the Armstrong-Winchell hullabaloo. 36 Armstrong to Murphy, 26 January 1949, Jefferson Military College Papers. Armstrong also wrote to others of his plans for an “Armstrong University,” his wish that the offensive section in JMC’s charter be deleted, and his hope that the first sections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution be repealed. Armstrong to W. C. Wells, 3rd, 26 January 26 1949, ibid.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

he wanted the school to remain “primarily” an institution for white Christians, while at other times he used the word “exclusively.” But there could have been little doubt about his ultimate intentions. The trustees chose to hear what they wanted to hear. The board also claimed that Allen Armstrong had announced the school’s acceptance of the gift without its authorization. But there was nothing in the board’s actions over the previous nine months that would have lead Allen Armstrong to believe that the board opposed George Armstrong’s intentions. Murphy issued a statement absolving the board of blame for this “complete misunderstanding.” For the board, the sticking points were antisemitism and the teaching of white supremacy, not the exclusion of Asians, Africans, or African Americans from the student body or the appointment of Moseley to a new board of trustees. Armstrong’s antisemitism, Murphy said, was “utterly foreign to the thinking of all the members of the board.” “There are some things money cannot buy,” he continued. “There is not enough money in the world to make us go through with a philosophy of education based on religious bias or antiSemitic feeling.” Of course the trustees had been eager to do precisely that a few weeks earlier. In addition, the board announced that racial supremacy would never be taught at the school, although the school would continue admitting only white students. To admit “colored” students, the board asserted, was simply “unthinkable.”37 On October 29, after learning of the school’s change of heart, Armstrong withdrew his gift. He also said he would not demand repayment of the one-year loan so that JMC could finish the scholastic year. The board also rejected this, and in February 1950 it paid off the loan, including interest. Armstrong concluded that the board had caved in to Jewish pressure. He said that he planned to transfer the assets that would have gone to JMC to the Judge Armstrong Foundation, established three years earlier, which, he declared, “was under attack by the Truman New Deal Administration.” This referred to the government’s effort to remove the foundation’s tax exemption as a charitable organization. Armstrong also mentioned that he hoped to establish a university either in Mississippi or Texas, to be named the Judge Armstrong University, and that he was not

37 “Chronological Statement of Events with reference to Proposal of Judge George W. Armstrong to Endow Jefferson Military College and the Ultimate Rejection of the Offer”; “Statement with Reference to Endowment of Jefferson College”; George Armstrong to Murphy, 28 October 1949, Jefferson Military College Papers; “George W. Armstrong,” 3-4.

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opposed to the Jewish and Negro races. “But I am opposed to mongrelization.” He also reiterated his opposition to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.38 JMC won plaudits throughout the nation for its rejection of the Armstrong gift and its courageous stand on behalf of religious tolerance and fair play. The New York Herald Tribune of October 31, 1949 said the school had showed its “spunk” by rejecting Armstrong’s riches. “Let us trust that temptation is rejected as boldly elsewhere.” Southern newspapers praised JMC’s stand. The Greenville (Miss.) Times called Armstrong “a fool” with money. The News and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina and the News and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina complimented JMC for not agreeing to teach the anti-Christian and un-American doctrine of racial superiority.39 Elliott Trimble, the editor of the Natchez Democrat and JMC’s public relations counsel, wrote that the school’s board deserved the congratulations of all Americans for rejecting a gift that was “inimical to American freedom and ideas.”40 Five months earlier, a June 4, 1949 editorial in the Natchez Democrat titled “Logical Expansion” had described Armstrong’s proposed gift as “ambitious” and “inspiring.” We can think of . . . no better cause for financial aid,” it stated. But the paper sang a different tune in late October. Now it praised JMC’s rejection of the gift in an October 29 editorial titled “New Day Ahead.” Americans could breathe “a sigh of relief ” now that the school had unequivocally rejected Armstrong’s “abhorred philosophy” of antisemitism and white supremacy. The board of trustees, the paper said, had never planned to do otherwise. “This was not a new policy . . . for at no time . . . has the reverse been true—news stories and broadcasts to the contrary.” The proper response for lovers of democracy and freedom, the paper advised, would be to send checks to the school. As far as those who had slandered the trustees as racists, “LET THEM NOW PRAISE THE SAME TRUSTEES WHOM THEY HAVE ACCUSED OF ADVOCATING THE TEACHING OF RACIAL SUPERIORITY WHEN IN FACT 38 “$50,000,000 Endowment Offer to Jefferson Is Withdrawn by Oil Man,” Jackson Daily News, October 29, 1949; Allen Armstrong to George Armstrong, 21 October 1949, Armstrong Papers. Allen Armstrong agreed with his father that Jewish influence had caused JMC to reject his father’s gift. Allen J. Armstrong to Moseley, November 1, 1949, Armstrong Papers. A typescript copy of George W. Armstrong’s statement is in the Armstrong Papers. In November 1894 Armstrong was elected a county judge of Tarrant County. He served two terms, and was defeated for renomination in 1898. Armstrong liked the title of “Judge,” and his family and friends frequently referred to him as such. 39 “Things Money Can’t Buy—Murphy,” Natchez Times, October 28, 1949. 40 Elliott Trimble, “The 8th Column,” Natchez Democrat, October 30, 1949.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

NOTHING COULD BE FARTHER FROM THE TRUTH.” (capitals in original) Evidently the paper believed that the rejection of racial superiority referred only to non-Christian students and teachers. Left unsaid was the school’s continuing ban on Black students and teachers that, of course, conformed to the laws of Mississippi mandating segregation in the state’s schools. Praise in the press, while welcome, did not alleviate JMC’s desperate financial straits and the fear that the school would have to close before the end of the academic year. In early November the school launched a “Save Jefferson” and “Dollars for Democracy” financial campaign to raise 100,000 dollars. Checks poured in from throughout the country, including one for 5,000 dollars from Nathan J. Klein, a wealthy Houston Jewish ice cream manufacturer, so that the school could repay its debt to Armstrong. JMC even received contributions from African Americans, though the school would not have admitted any of their children. The fund-raising campaign was a limited success, and less than forty thousand dollars was raised.41 This money alleviated the short-term fiscal troubles of JMC and removed the threat of imminent financial collapse. But it did not resolve the bleak long-term fiscal situation of JMC due to shrinking enrollment and lack of an endowment. The school would ultimately close its doors in 1964, the same year that Congress passed its historic civil rights law. Armstrong and his foundation, the Judge Armstrong Foundation, were well known to American Jewish defense organizations. Beginning in 1947, the American Jewish Committee’s Legal and Investigative Division had attempted to get the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the tax-exempt status of the foundation on the basis that it had violated its charter by engaging in political activities and spreading hateful propaganda. The foundation had been established in November 1945, ostensibly for charitable, religious, and educational purposes, and Moseley was one of its trustees. In reality, as the American Jewish Committee pointed out several times to the IRS, the bulk of the foundation’s grants underwrote the publication and distribution of Armstrong’s antisemitic and racist tracts. The IRS, the AJC maintained, should not be in the business of encouraging religious and racial bigotry. The IRS agreed, and on December 8, 1949 it

41 “Jefferson to Launch Its 148th Year with Faith in the Future,” Natchez Times, September 10, 1950. Approximately ninety percent of the funds raised by the school in the aftermath of the Armstrong controversy came from Jews according to a report by the school’s endowment fund committee to its board of trustees. A copy of this report is in the Jefferson Military College Papers.

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rescinded the foundation’s tax-exempt status.42 Armstrong then transferred the assets he had been planning to give to JMC to a new foundation with the innocent sounding name Texas Educational Association.43 Armstrong, a true believer, was not discouraged by the JMC fiasco or the revocation of his foundation’s tax-exempt status. He received overtures from a few small church-related colleges in the Deep South for funds. Nothing came of these or of his plans to establish a university in Forth Worth or Port Arthur. This would be named for himself and only accept white Christian students. At the time of the JMC flap a controversy arose over a five million dollar gift which Armstrong had supposedly offered to Southern Methodist University in Dallas provided it “disassociate itself from Jews,” including not admitting any Jewish students. Rev. W. Harrison Baker, a member of the SMU board of trustees, claimed Armstrong had made such an offer and when it was rejected by Dr. Umphrey Lee, the university’s president, he demanded that the board discharge Lee and reconsider his proposal. Armstrong strenuously denied that he had made any such offer, and Lee confirmed this. Armstrong said he would never have made such an offer because of SMU’s involvement in interfaith work, particularly its sponsorship of a lecture series at Temple Emanu-El, a Dallas synagogue. This was an “unholy alliance,” Armstrong said, because Jews are not Methodists. “They are anti-Christ.” (italics in original)44 There was no doubt, however, regarding Armstrong’s interest in 1950 in making a gift to Texas Wesleyan College (TWC) in Forth Worth. The previous year Armstrong had announced plans to donate 826 acres of land adjacent to Port Arthur, Texas, which he valued at over 1,000,000 dollars, to TWC. Nothing came of this proposal, which had been prompted in part by estate tax 42 “Armstrong Exemption Revoked,” New York Times, December 9, 1949; E. I. McLarney to Judge Armstrong Foundation, 9 December 1949, Armstrong Papers. McLarney was the deputy director of the Internal Revenue Service, and his letter informed the foundation of the revocation of its tax-exempt status. For the involvement of the American Jewish Committee in the revoking of the foundation’s tax-exempt status, see McLarney to George J. Mintzer, 22 December 1947, and John Slawson to George Kellman, 12 December 1949, Armstrong File. The American Jewish Congress opposed the attempt to deprive the Armstrong Foundation of its tax-exempt status, perhaps because of civil libertarian concerns. 43 George W. Armstrong to Thompson, Walker, Smith & Shannon, 7 November 1949; Moseley to Armstrong, 17 July 1951; Y. Q. McCammon to Armstrong, 15 August 1952, Armstrong Papers. McCammon, a nephew of Armstrong, was also his accountant. 44 George W. Armstrong to H. A. Boaz, 18 October 1949, and Armstrong to Umphrey Lee, 16 June 1949, Armstrong Papers; Armstrong, Memoirs, 192; “SMU Shuns Endowment to Bar Jews,” Dallas Morning News, October, 28, 1949.

Chapter 13. The Educational Crusade of George W. Armstron

considerations.45 The 1950 gift was much different. TWC had announced its intention of hiring Texas Congressman Martin Dies, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to teach courses in government and to give speeches throughout the country. Dr. Law Sone, TWC’s president, asked Allen Armstrong whether his father’s foundation would pay part of Dies’ salary and expenses, and the younger Armstrong conveyed the request to his father. George Armstrong was enthusiastic and agreed to pay one thousand dollars per month for three years. Within a few days, however, he withdrew the offer. The problem was Sone’s chairmanship of the Fort Worth campaign for “Brotherhood Week,” and his invitation to Dies to speak in Fort Worth on behalf of this cause. Armstrong told Moseley that he could not support any Zionist program such as Brotherhood Week and was skeptical of Dies because he had become a pawn of the Jews. He did not foreclose the possibility of funding a position in government at TWC, but only if an appropriate person was hired. His candidates included such noxious antisemites as Merwin K. Hart and Gerald L. K. Smith.46 In March 1951 Armstrong was in the news again when the press reported that the board of trustees of Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia had been receiving since January of that year a monthly check of five hundred dollars from the Texas Educational Association.47 The critics of the monthly gifts focused on Moseley since he lived at the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta, only seventy-five miles from Demorest, was president of the TEA and controlled its funds, and had visited the Piedmont campus. Hoping to tap the foundation’s money, the college had honored Moseley at a student-faculty banquet in November 1950. It is unlikely that the college was aware of Moseley’s outlook when it solicited the TEA, along with over a thousand other foundations and individuals, for financial aid. But once the college accepted TEA’s money, it dug its heels in. Moseley was notorious because of his attacks on Jews, African Americans, and democracy, and his sympathy for Nazi Germany, and his chief critic on campus was a war hero,

45 In January 1949 the Fort Worth National Bank, following Armstrong’s instructions, had a trust officer draw up an estate plan that provided for the creation of a perpetual trust for the benefit of Texas Wesleyan College. The bank estimated that Armstrong’s estate was worth approximately eight million dollars. For the details of this plan, see R. E. Harding to Armstrong, 24 January 1949, Armstrong Papers. Harding was the president of Fort Worth National Bank. 46 Allen Armstrong to Moseley, 24 February 1950 and George Armstrong to Moseley, 27 February, 1950, Gerald L. K. Smith Papers. 47 At this time Piedmont’s enrollment was approximately 335 full- and part-time students, and it had a faculty of twenty-three.

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English professor Hoyt E. Bowen. Bowen had been a naval combat pilot and was wounded during World War II.48 The furor over the monthly gifts lasted nearly a year and resulted in the firing of David Eddy, the school’s treasurer, and the failure to renew the contracts of A. R. Van Cleave, the college’s dean, and Bowen. All three men had protested the TEA as undemocratic, anti-Christian, and un-American, but the trustees and James E. Walter, the college’s president, accused the protesters as being insubordinate. Walter stated that Piedmont’s policy was “to accept money without strings or qualifications for purposes of Christian higher education” and that the actions of the dissenters were harmful to this goal of Christian education. Piedmont had been founded in 1897 as a Congregational institution, Walter was a Congregational minister, and the school retained ties to the church. The college’s critics argued that the Christian character of the college was being polluted by its association with Armstrong and Moseley.49 Eddy responded in March 1951 by gathering the signatures of over one hundred students demanding the resignation of Walter “to spare the college . . . the necessity of our washing still more of your dirty linen in public.”50 That same month sixteen members of the faculty called on the college to reject any money from TEA, and students voted 114-14 for Walter’s resignation and the return of all TEA money. Two months later during commencement festivities the alumni voted 25-3 that it no longer had any confidence in the Walter administration and that he should be dismissed. The board of trustees, in response, denied that it could be bought off by a mere six thousand dollars per year or that any strings were attached to the gift. They instead focused on the college’s dire financial situation and what good things Piedmont could do with Armstrong’s tainted money. As one trustee put it, the only tainted aspect of Armstrong’s money was that it wasn’t “taint enough.”51

48 See, for example, Bowen’s letter in the Atlanta Constitution, May 28, 1951. 49 Celestine Sibley, “Students Hit Firing of 2 at Piedmont: College Rift Laid to Moseley Gifts,” Atlanta Constitution, March 3, 1951; Davenport Steward, “Piedmont College Group Fights Grant: Students and Faculty to Ask Return of $1,500 to Moseley’s Texas Association,” Atlanta Journal, March 4, 1951. 50 “College Ousts Official: Piedmont in Georgia Continues to Accept Protested Gifts,” New York Times, March 21, 1951; “Piedmont Uprising,” Time, April 2, 1951, 68. 51 Phil Curtiss, “The $500-a-Month Sellout,” ADL Bulletin, April, 1952, 5, 8; “Alumni Challenge Piedmont President,” New York Times, June 4, 1951.

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The school’s stance was strongly condemned in editorials and letters-tothe-editor in newspapers in Atlanta and Chattanooga. The Anti-Defamation League considered bringing pressure to remove the college’s tax exemption and accreditation and offered its services to the American Association of University Professors in any action it might take against the college for violating the academic freedom of Bowen.52 In February 1952 the college’s board reaffirmed its acceptance of TEA’s monthly stipends. Trustee Josephine Wilkins, a former Georgia state president of the League of Women Voters, promptly resigned over “a vital issue of principle,” namely the racism and antisemitism of Armstrong and Moseley. Within a year, however, the issue was moot since the TEA had stopped supporting Piedmont. Various bodies within the Congregational Church had demanded Walter’s resignation, and its National Board of Home Missions had cut off its annual contribution to Piedmont as long as it accepted money from the TEA. The mayor and city counsel of Demorest even passed a unanimous resolution calling for Walter’s removal “in the name of civil responsibility, quality education of our youth and Christian unity in our community.”53 Walter remained as president. The Piedmont College controversy was the last chapter in Armstrong’s crusade to purify American higher education. He died five months after the Supreme Court in the Brown decision of May 1954 outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s schools.

Coda On July 14, 1996, the New York Times carried the wedding announcement of Christine Mitchell Armstrong, the daughter of George W. Armstrong 3rd of Natchez, Mississippi. A graduate of the University of Texas, she worked as an analyst at the investment banking firm Lehman Brothers in New York. Lehman Brothers had been established in the nineteenth century by a family of German Jews living in Alabama, and, according to antisemites, was an important part of the Jewish financial conspiracy controlling the American economy. The groom

52 Isaiah Terman to Milton Kulick, 26 March 1951; Terman to George Kellman, 26 April 1951; Theodore Leskes to Ralph E. Himstead, March 26, 1951, Armstrong File. Himstead was the general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. 53 “School Takes Fund Despite Race Bias: Piedmont College in Georgia Refuses to Disown Group That Gives $500 Monthly,” New York Times, February 20, 1952; Moseley to George W. Armstrong, 26 February 1953, Armstrong Papers; “College With a Hate Endowment,” ADL Bulletin, June, 1953, 6.

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was Benjamin Edward Nickoll of Beverly Hills, California. Nickoll was a bond trader at Morgan Stanley & Company, and his father was chairman of a commercial finance company in Los Angeles. The marriage took place in Salisbury, Connecticut with Rev. James Petty, a Church of Christ minister, and Rabbi Joel S. Goor officiating. George Armstrong’s warning about the power of Jewish finance and Jewish “mongrelization” had seemingly come to pass. But he could not have anticipated that it would occur in his own family within four generations. Nor could he have predicted the establishment of the Armstrong Nickoll Foundation which, along with foundations with Jewish sounding names such as the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Litowitz Foundation, and the Slifka Foundation, contributed to the capital campaign of a Shakespeare theater in Brooklyn, New York, home to the largest Jewish population in the United States as well as to one of the largest Black ghettos. But by the date of the wedding George W. Armstrong had been dead for over two decades, and the retrograde impulses that he personified were of interest only to historians.54

54 “Weddings: B. E. Nickoll, Christine Armstrong,” New York Times, July 14, 1996. For the contribution of the Armstrong-Nickoll Foundation, see http://www.tfana.org/capital/support_meetourdonors.html.

C h ap t e r 14

Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot The Crown Heights riot of August 1991 was the most serious antisemitic incident in American history. It took place in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, the worldwide center of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, and lasted for three days. The riot was precipitated by an automobile accident involving a motorcade carrying the Lubavitcher Rebbe back from one of his periodic trips to the Lubavitch cemetery in the borough of Queens. The accident killed a young boy named Gavin Cato and injured his cousin Angelina. The riot terrorized and traumatized the twenty thousand Lubavitchers of Crown Heights. Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian student living temporarily in Crown Heights, was murdered; Bracha Estrin, a Lubavitch survivor of the Holocaust, committed suicide; six stores were looted; 152 police officers and thirty-eight civilians claimed to have been injured; twenty-seven police vehicles were damaged or destroyed; and 129 persons were arrested.1 While the property damage and the number of killed and injured were small compared to other riots in American history, it did not appear so to contemporaries. The extensive attention the riot received was due in part to the fact that it occurred in the media center of America, if not of the world. The riot was preceded by two other events in 1991 which, along with the riot, seemed to indicate that the fabled liberal political alliance between African Americans and Jews was unraveling, and that a new chapter in the history of Black-Jewish relations and of New York City had opened. The first of these was the publication of the first volume of the Nation of Islam’s The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which emphasizes the involvement of Jews in the slave trade and slavery. The second was a much-discussed speech in Albany in 1991 by Leonard Jeffries, a professor at City College of New York. He accused Jews of having controlled 1

Richard H. Girgenti, A Report to the Governor on the Disturbances in Crown Heights, vol. 1, An Assessment of the City’s Preparedness and Response to Civil Disorder (Albany, 1993), 139.

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the slave trade and of subjecting African Americans to derogatory stereotyping through their control of the mass media, particularly Hollywood. Jeffries’s speech created an uproar in New York and was one of the factors leading to his dismissal as chairman of his college’s Black Studies Department.2 Many questions emerged in the riot’s aftermath. They involved, among other things, the nature of the medical care which Rosenbaum received at Kings County Hospital; the culpability of David Dinkins, the city’s mayor, and Lee Brown, the police commissioner, in the city’s failure to put down the riot immediately; the extent of aid provided the beleaguered Jews of Crown Heights by the Jewish establishment; and the history of Black-Jewish relations and BlackLubavitch relations in Crown Heights prior to 1991. But the most important question concerned the character of the riot itself. What precisely had occurred in Crown Heights beginning in the evening of August 19, 1991? Almost immediately after the riot a host of differing interpretations emerged seeking to explain its nature and origins. This effort at explanation, which continued throughout the 1990s, reflected the diverse political, religious, and social circumstances, the differing ideological assumptions, and the divergent understandings of the past by the journalists, sociologists, political activists, and historians who wrote about the riot. This was to be expected. As the literary historian Alan Mintz has said, all historical narratives, “from the personal story to complex novels, are not simply naive and faithful transcriptions of experience but are built around preexisting armatures or schemata or master plots. New narratives may add to, play with, and subvert these story lines, but an appreciation of their uniqueness must begin with an understanding of the preexisting models.”3 Historians have distinguished between narratives of “memory” and narratives of “history.” While memory is a product of folk remembrances and is shaped by contemporary concerns, history defers to professional standards and respects the integrity and complexity of the past. In his book Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, the Stanford historian Steven J. Zipperstein argued that the historian’s role has been to “implode collective memory, to juxtapose as starkly as possible the differences between history and myth, scholarship 2 Nation of Islam Historical Research Department, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Volume One (Chicago, 1991). For the text of Jeffries’s speech, see New York Newsday, August 18, 1991. Interestingly enough, there is no mention of the Crown Heights riot in Donald Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, 2001). 3

Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle, 2001), 72.

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

and error.” This distinction between memory and history has been particularly significant in efforts to understand the American Jewish past because many American Jews consider themselves to be repositories of quasi-sacred memories involving Jewish identity, continuity, and antisemitism. As New York University historian Hasia R. Diner noted, the study of American Jewish history has been complicated by a Jewish collective memory which provides “a series of linked images that have grown organically out of the contemporary cultural needs of the public, however diverse it may be, as it defines and justifies itself and its present condition.” These images “provide the intertwined leitmotiv in American Jews’ understanding of where they have been, where they are now, and possibly, even where they might be heading. This bundle of memories plays a crucial role in the creation of an American Jewish narrative.” But, Diner concluded, “the right to interpret the experience” of American Jews must necessarily reside not with the general Jewish population but with professional historians because of their “academic training and emotional distance.”4 For the Jews of Crown Heights, the riot was simultaneously both enigmatic and intelligible. Accustomed to viewing Jews as victims, they denied any responsibility for the events of August 1991 and were mystified as to its outbreak. They believed relations with their Black and West Indian neighbors had been, if not close, at least cordial. “Today,” wrote Edward Hoffman in Despite All Odds, a sympathetic study of Lubavitch Jewry, “Crown Heights is one of the few truly integrated sections of New York City, where Black and Jewish homeowners co-exist as next-door neighbors, each determined to maintain the safety and viability of their community as a place for families to live peacefully. The contrast to other sections of Brooklyn could not be more striking: burned-out tenements and boarded-up storefronts dominate the rubble-strewn landscape.” The Lubavitchers claimed that the rioters could not have come from Crown Heights. They must have been from other parts of Brooklyn and had been stirred up by outside agitators such as Alton Maddox, Sonny Carson, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, and the Reverend Al Sharpton.5 For a small number of Crown Heights’ Jews, the riot was not simply an old-fashioned pogrom, but a portent of the messianic era. For the Lubavitch messianists, it was not fortuitous that the riot had been triggered by an accident 4

Steven J. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle, 1999), 95; Hasia R. Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton, 1999), 18-19.

5 Edward Hoffman, Despite All Odds: The Story of Lubavitch (New York, 1991), 148.

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involving a motorcade in which the head of the Lubavitch community, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was a passenger. Messianism had assumed a more prominent view among the Lubavitch Hasidim in the 1980s when Schneerson declared that the coming of the Messiah was impending, and that it was their responsibility to make preparations. The often cryptic comments of Schneerson regarding messianism encouraged a minority of his followers to conclude that he, in fact, was the Messiah. This growing messianism took place at a time when earth-shaking events could be interpreted as signs of the coming of the messianic era. In 1989 there was the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the student protests in Communist China, the break-up of the Soviet empire, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the mass exodus of Jews from Russia to Israel and the West. These events were followed by the airlifting of Ethiopian Jews to Israel and America’s war with Iraq in 1991, which, despite the fears of Jews and the threats of Iraq, left Israel virtually unscathed. And then, almost simultaneous with the rioting in Crown Heights, there was Hurricane Bob and an unsuccessful coup in the Soviet Union. A full-page advertisement in the August 30 issue of the Jewish Week of New York, paid for by Joseph Gutnick, a wealthy Australian supporter of Lubavitch, put these events into an apocalyptic framework. “Any one of these phenomena by itself is enough to boggle the mind. Connect them all together, and a pattern emerges that cannot be ignored,” it declared. “The Era of Moshiach is upon us. Learn about it. Be a part of it. All you have to do is open your eyes. Inevitably, you’ll draw your own conclusion.”6 But what conclusion could be drawn about the riot? On the one hand, most Lubavitch spokesmen downplayed any messianic significance of the riot. It was a despicable act of anti-Jewish violence, pure and simple. But, on the other hand, it had begun as a result of an accident involving a car in Schneerson’s own entourage. The accident could not be fortuitous, since everything that happened was part of God’s plan. Schneerson’s failure to speak directly about the riot fueled speculation that he believed it to be further confirmation of the impending arrival of the messiah. The ambivalence of Rabbi Shmuel Butman, who delivered the keynote eulogy at Yankel Rosenbaum’s funeral, was characteristic of those

6

Allan Nadler, “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” New Republic, May 4, 1992, 2; Jonathan Mark, “Crown Heights: ‘Great Test’ for Messianists,” Jewish Week, August 30, 1991; David Remnick, “Waiting for the Apocalypse in Crown Heights,” New Yorker, December 21, 1992, 53; Binyamin Jolkovsky, “Waiting for the King Messiah—and Wondering,” Forward, November 19, 1994; Michael Specter, “Rabbi Menachem Schneerson: The Oracle of Crown Heights,” New York Times Magazine, March 15, 1992, 35-38, 67-76. “Moshiach” is Hebrew for Messiah.

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

Lubavitchers imbued with Lubavitch messianic fervor. For him the riot was both an attack on Jews everywhere and a sure sign that the messianic era was near.7 This conflict between memory and history appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Crown Heights riot, as participants, onlookers, and scholars vigorously argued over the meaning of the riot. The conflict began with the description of Yankel Rosenbaum. According to the press and representatives of the Lubavitch community, Rosenbaum was a “rabbinical student,” a “religious scholar,” “a “seminarian,” a “talmudic scholar,” and a “divinity student.” Rosenbaum was not, in fact, a Lubavitch Hasid, although his clothing and beard were typical for members of this community, nor was he a yeshiva student immersed in the study of Jewish religious texts. Rather, he was a future academician, and he was in New York researching Eastern European history during the 1930s in the archives of the YIVO Institute for his Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Melbourne. This mischaracterization of Rosenbaum was not accidental. It heightened his Jewishness and linked his death with the long and painful history of antisemitism, which many Jews in Crown Heights had experienced personally in Europe, including Rosenbaum’s own parents, both Holocaust survivors. For the image makers, Rosenbaum’s significance was as a Jewish victim rather than as a Jewish history graduate student who happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would have been incongruous to portray Rosenbaum as an academic since the Lubavitchers of Crown Heights did not, by and large, go to college, and they disdained the social and intellectual milieu of the university. Portraying Rosenbaum as an academic would have also have detracted from the simplistic and dramatic imagery of Black-Jewish conflict in Crown Heights. Also, for those unfamiliar with Jewish history, it was natural to equate being Jewish with being religious, being religious with being an Orthodox Jew, and being an Orthodox Jew with being a student of Judaism’s holy texts. This distortion of Rosenbaum’s background was pervasive, and it occurred in a variety of Jewish and secular newspapers and magazines. This imagining of Rosenbaum was part of a more general view of the riot as a “pogrom” and the rioters as modern-day “Cossacks.” “Pogrom” remains the favorite word of the Lubavitchers of Crown Heights to describe the events of August 1991. It was virtually inevitable that “pogrom” would be used since many of the Jewish families in Crown Heights had experienced the Holocaust, and the rioters were clearly hostile to Jews. They marched through Crown Heights 7 Nadler, “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” 28; Mark, “Crown Heights: ‘Great Test’ for Messianists.”

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chanting “Heil Hitler” and singling out Jews in Hasidic garb to attack. Even selfstyled Black “spokesmen” emphasized that the targets of African Americans in Crown Heights were not an undifferentiated group of whites but the Jewish “diamond merchants” of Crown Heights. Others besides Lubavitchers also used “pogrom” to describe the riot. Among these was New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal. In his September 3, 1991 column, titled “Pogrom in Brooklyn,” Rosenthal argued that the antisemitism exhibited in the Crown Heights riot would spread to other neighborhoods and cities if Jews remained “blind to reality, deaf to history—and suicidal.” “Black pogromists” exhibited the classic symptoms of antisemites—the dehumanization and demonization of Jews, the call for violence, and the exaggeration of grievances against a peaceful minority. Rosenthal was particularly disparaging of the news reporting of the riot which pictured it as “some kind of cultural clash between a poverty-ridden people fed up with life and a powerful, prosperous and peculiar bunch of stuck-up neighbors—very sad of course, but certainly understandable.” Journalists unable to distinguish between political thugs and legitimate spokesmen for African Americans, Rosenthal suggested, “are in the wrong business.” Some of these would turn out to be employees of the Times itself. Rosenthal’s column was quite critical of the mayor and the police commissioner. Not only had David Dinkins and Lee Brown been amiss in not immediately putting down the riot, but they had compounded this failure by meeting with Sharpton, Maddox, and other “hate peddlers” and according them the respectability they desperately craved. Rosenthal was also scornful of the indifference of Jewish organizations to the suffering of the Jews of Crown Heights. “Their usually ferocious faxes were either silent or blurped out diplomatically balanced condolences to all concerned.” Rosenthal’s column was noteworthy since the Times had been generally supportive of the Dinkins administration, and its reporters had been guilty of the type of reporting which Rosenbaum believed should encourage them to find other employment.8 By contrast, the New York Post and Eric Breindel, the editor of its editorial page, had been strongly critical of the mayor long before August 1991, and the riot confirmed their opinion that he was simply out of his depth. The paper continually insisted during the remaining twenty-eight months of Dinkins’s tenure that he had to go, and it offered as evidence his performance during the riot, which Breindel, a child of Holocaust survivors, persistently referred to as 8

A. M. Rosenthal, “Pogrom in Brooklyn,” New York Times, September 3, 1991.

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

a “pogrom.” Former mayor Ed Koch, Mike McAlary, and Pete Hamill described the riot in Crown Heights as a pogrom in their New York Post columns, and the paper called it the first pogrom in the West since the end of World War II.9 Breindel used “pogrom” in his column of September 5, 1991. Titled “Brooklyn Pogrom: Why the Silence?” it called the riot a “genuine pogrom” similar to those Jews had experienced in Europe. Breindel anticipated the major criticism of the use of “pogrom.” He denied that a pogrom had to be sponsored by the government. A riot deserved to be called a pogrom if the government did not vigorously condemn the rioters and the police failed to put down the violence immediately. Breindel rejected any attempt to put a sociological gloss on the riot by portraying the riot as a response to economic and social deprivation. “This pogrom,” he said, “was a case of the poor terrorizing the poor. Jews who read life in terms of class rather than race should bear this reality in mind.” In any case, attempts to understand the thinking of the rioters are misguided, including the question “why do so many black leaders dislike Jews?” Jews should fight all manifestations of antisemitism and not be sidetracked into futile and undignified attempts to mollify antisemites.10 By September 1991 it had become de rigueur within Jewish circles to describe the riot as a pogrom and would remain so for some Jews a decade later. While the city government did not incite the rioters, Jews explained, the failure of the police to protect Jewish lives and property warranted identifying it as a pogrom. On August 22, 1991, New York City Councilman Noach Dear, who represented the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Boro Park, called the riot a “pogrom, just like we saw in Russia under the Czar, just like in Germany in 1939. This has to be stopped before the violence spreads.” An editorial in the August 30 issue of the Jewish Week, the most important weekly Jewish newspaper in New York City, declared “A Pogrom Grows in Brooklyn,” and ran articles

9

For an analysis of the New York Post’s coverage of the Crown Heights riot, see the unpublished paper by Prof. Laurence Roth of Susquehanna University, “Tabloid Blacks and Jews: The New York Post Covers the Crown Heights Riots”; Richard Goldstein, “The Politics of Hate: Crown Heights and the Future of New York,” Village Voice, December 15, 1992, 12.

10 Eric Breindel, “Brooklyn Pogrom: Why the Silence?” New York Post, September 5, 1991. The editor of a collection of Breindel’s writings retitled this column “Kristallnacht in Brooklyn.” John Podhoretz, ed., A Passion for Truth: The Selected Writings of Eric Breindel (New York, 1999), 108-11. In a New York Post editorial of June 10, 1993 which strongly defended the use of “pogrom,” Breindel rejected the notion that a pogrom by definition must be state sanctioned. Podhoretz, ed., Passion for Truth, 120-22. See also the editorial “An Ugly Word Grows in Brooklyn,” New York Post, August 29, 1991.

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with such titles as “After the Pogrom—An Analysis and Proposal.” Similarly an October 29, 1992 press release by Judah Gribetz, president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, termed the Brooklyn riot of August 1991 a “pogrom.” The Jerusalem Post also called it a pogrom and claimed it had been “fed by Arab propaganda and financed by Arab sources.” The paper hoped the riot would encourage the Jews of Crown Heights to wonder whether “the time has not come to join their brethren in Kfar Habad in Israel.” Nearly seven years after the riot the Forward, a weekly national Jewish newspaper, referred to the riot as a “pogrom,” and on the riot’s tenth anniversary the Jewish Press, a right-wing Orthodox weekly newspaper published in Brooklyn, carried an editorial by Rabbi Shmuel Butman titled “The Crown Heights Pogrom: Ten Years Later.”11 The description of the Crown Heights riot as a pogrom was insufficient to some residents of Crown Heights. They preferred “Kristallnacht,” a reference to November 8, 1938, when Nazis destroyed synagogues and Jewish-owned stores in Germany. A group called the Crown Heights Emergency Fund placed a fullpage statement in the New York Times of September 20, 1991 headlined “This year Kristallnacht took place on August 19th right here in Crown Heights.” The statement warned that the Crown Heights riot was just the beginning and that Jews “everywhere” could expect attacks by “latter day Nazis.” This neo-Nazism “does not distinguish between Hasidic and non-Hasidic, Orthodox and Reform, affiliated or non-affiliated.” The Jews of Crown Heights,” it concluded, “are the first line of defense for all Americans Jews and for all law-abiding citizens of good will—regardless of race, color or creed.” Other Jews compared the riot to Kristallnacht. An article in the Jewish Press bewailed the reluctance of America’s Jews to look realistically at the riot. “For some reason we are afraid to call it by name. It was America’s Kristallnacht. Shame on us. Shame on all of us.” A Jewish resident of Crown Heights who had survived the Holocaust agreed. “This has been like the pogroms,” Hannah Popack said. “Or like Kristallnacht. It is almost as though Hitler has come to life again.” Frequently the Jews of Crown Heights 11 Councilman Noach Dear News Release, “Dear Calls Upon Police Commissioner to Stop Pogrom,” August 22, 1991, American Jewish Community Archives, New York; Simon Schneebalg, “After the Pogrom—an Analysis and Proposal,” Jewish Week, September 27–October 3, 1991; “Statement of Judah Gribetz, President, JCRC,” October 29, 1992, Jewish Community Relations of New York Archives, New York; “Crown Heights Closure?” Forward, April 3, 1998; “The Brooklyn Pogrom,” Jerusalem Post, August 26, 1991; Shmuel M. Butman, “The Crown Heights Pogrom: Ten Years Later,” Jewish Press, August 17, 2001. In the index of Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York, 1997), there is a listing for “Crown Heights pogrom.”

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

called upon both Jewish and American history to make sense of the riot. “What has happened to black people?,” one Crown Heights Jew asked. “Why will no black leaders condemn these black Nazis, the black Ku Klux Klan?” And when the accused murderer of Yankel Rosenbaum was acquitted in October 1992, one survivor of Kristallnacht said, “again, I heard the tinkling of the glass.”12 While the Crown Heights riot did not rise to the level of a pogrom, much less the Holocaust, it was infused with antisemitism. The riot was, as the New Republic said, “an anti-Semitic depravity.” (The New Republic also said that the riot “looks more and more like the first pogrom in American history.”) The rioters’ rhetoric was directed at Jews, and they only attacked Jews, those who looked like Jews, and the police who were protecting Jews. If recent history had taught Jews anything, it was to take very seriously the words of those seeking to do them harm. Jews were frightened even more by the failure of some Black political and religious leaders to immediately condemn the rioters and Black antisemitic agitators. This indicated, they feared, that antisemitism within the Black community was not restricted to a lunatic fringe.13 The controversy over how to define the Crown Heights riot was not merely an issue of semantics. Politicians, both past and present, resorted to words redolent of the bloodshed and mass devastation suffered by European Jews to discredit Dinkins and his administration. Ed Koch, who had been defeated by Dinkins in the 1989 Democratic mayoralty primary and was a fierce critic of the mayor, continually used “pogrom” in characterizing the riot. It was, he said 12 Jonathan Rieder, “Crown of Thorns,” New Republic, October 14, 1991, 28; Ellin Ronee Pollachek, “America’s Kristallnacht: Anti-Semitism in Our Own Backyard,” Jewish Press, October 11, 1991; Popack quoted in Dennis Duggan, “A Divide Uncrossed by Either Side,” New York Post, August 22, 1991. George Fletcher, With Justice for Some: Victims’ Rights in Criminal Trials (Reading, 1995), 69. For a criticism of the September 20, 1991 advertisement as a “betrayal of Jewish history and ethics” by a person who experienced Kristallnacht firsthand, see Henry Schwarzschild’s letter to the editor, New York Times, October 5, 1991. Schwarzschild wrote, “However ugly were the anti-Semitic slogans and the assaultive behavior of people in the streets of Crown Heights a month ago, one thing that clearly did not take place was a Kristallnacht. . . . To speak, as the advertisement does, of neo-Nazism is to act as if the black community, itself under immense pressures of discrimination and social misery, were governmentally sponsored storm troopers. This abuses the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust for transient political and financial gain, dangerous in a community like New York, these days a tinderbox of group antagonisms.” 13 “Crown Depths,” New Republic, August 8, 1993, 7-8; Craig Horowitz, “The New Anti-Semitism,” New York January 11, 1993, 23-24; Irving Greenberg, “Confronting anti-Semitism: Steps for Blacks, Jews,” Jewish Week, September 27, 1991; Richard Cohen, “Victims of Black Antisemitism,” Washington Post, October 4, 1991.

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in 1993, “an ugly term, but it applies.” Other political foes of Dinkins also used “pogrom” since it implied that he had been indifferent to the attack on Jews. Andrew Stein, a candidate in the 1993 Democratic mayoralty primary, used it in an unsuccessful effort to oust Dinkins. The controversy over the word came to a head during the 1993 mayoralty election. Rudy Giuliani, the RepublicanLiberal candidate, made Crown Heights a key issue in his campaign, and he used “pogrom” frequently in attacking the mayor. “You can use whatever word you want,” he said in a Memorial Day weekend speech in the predominately white neighborhood of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, “but in fact for three days people were beaten up, people were sent to the hospital because they were Jewish. There is no question that not enough was done about it by the city of New York. One definition of pogrom is violence where the state doesn’t do enough to prevent it.”14 Not surprisingly, Dinkins and his supporters realized the political potential of the word and they totally rejected its application to the Crown Heights situation. They argued that pogroms only applied to riots that were state-sanctioned, and no one could claim the Dinkins administration had fomented the Crown Heights riot. “To suggest that this is,” Dinkins said, “is not to contribute to the resolution of the problem but to exacerbate tensions and problems that are there.” Earl Caldwell, a Black columnist for the New York Daily News, charged that Giuliani’s use of “pogrom” was inaccurate, racially divisive, and politically driven. Giuliani’s speech “does not bode well for a city that already has enough trouble.” The City Sun, a Brooklyn-based Black nationalist weekly, charged that Giuliani’s use of “pogrom” resulted from a “quiet deal” he had made with the Crown Heights Jewish community. If any group was susceptible to a pogrom it was the city’s African Americans since they faced the prospect of a police state lead by Giuliani and supported by white right-wing Republicans and Crown Heights Hasidim. Al Sharpton said that Giuliani was engaged in “race-baiting” by using the word “pogrom.”15

14 Ed Koch, “‘Pogrom’ Is an Ugly Term, But It Applies,” New York Daily News, June 11, 1993; Guiliani quoted in New York Daily News, July 1, 1993. See also Koch, “City Silent in Face of a New Pogrom,” New York Post, August 30, 1991. The August 26, 1996 issue of the New York Observer contained an editorial titled “The Pogrom in Crown Heights.” 15 Dinkins and Sharpton quoted in Frank Lombardi, “Rev. Al: Rudy’s Race Baiting,” New York Daily News, June 2, 1993; Earl Caldwell, “Saying ‘Pogrom’ Does Violence to the City,” New York Daily News, June 2, 1993; City Sun, June 2, 1993.

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

Dinkins refrained from such improbable conspiratorial notions. But he was personally offended by the use of “pogrom” since it insinuated that it was state sanctioned and that he personally was an antisemite. “I am incensed by it,” he told radio personality Don Imus. It is “patently untrue and unfair.” Dinkins had many close Jewish friends, had appointed Jews to high positions within his administration, and had gone out of his way to support Jewish causes. To be called an antisemite for political gain was, in his view, unconscionable, even in a city where the politics of personal destruction had become an art form. And to make matters worse, posters displayed at Jewish political rallies in Brooklyn during the campaign even charged Dinkins with responsibility for the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. “Rarely has political discourse become so debased,” wrote the journalist David Remnick, “and yet this language of rage is tremendously influential.”16 But history, if not the memory of the Jews of Crown Heights, was on Dinkins’s side. Michael Stanislawski, a Columbia University historian and a specialist in modern European Jewish history, noted that it was “historically inaccurate” to couple “pogrom” with Crown Heights, because the word denoted organized violence against Jews “having some sort of governmental involvement.” Joyce Purnick, a writer for the New York Times, agreed. Giuliani’s Bay Ridge speech, she said, was not only inflammatory and wrong, but “an insult to those who lived through the real thing.” The city’s police “didn’t fail to protect the Jews of Crown Heights because they and David Dinkins wanted to see Jews killed. They weren’t Cossacks in blue. Thousands of Jewish New Yorkers were not murdered.”17 Liberal Jews who were emotionally committed to a Black-Jewish political entente were also loath to use “pogrom.” Henry Siegman, the executive director of the American Jewish Congress, warned against using such a loaded term. “It is strategically dumb and factually incorrect to insist that the violence in Crown Heights is essentially a black-Jewish problem,” he said shortly after the riot. “It is not. It is essentially a black-white problem and . . . for Jews to insist that it is a black-Jewish problem is to take the monkey off the back of white Americans and to put it on our own back.” Marc D. Stern of the AJC agreed. The riot, he said, was “in large part an anti-white riot, directed at the nearest available white 16 Dinkins quoted in Paul Schwartzman, “Angry Dinkins: Crown Hts. Wasn’t a ‘Pogrom,’” New York Post, December 8, 1992; Remnick, “Waiting for the Apocalypse in Crown Heights,” 57. 17 Stanislawski quoted in Joel Siegel, “Dinkins Huffy at Wordplay,” New York Daily News, December 8, 1992; Joyce Purnick, “Crown Heights Was Not Iasi,” New York Times, June 3, 1993.

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community.” But it was also “the frustration of an inner-city black population which is beset by familiar urban ills—unemployment, drug abuse, teen-age pregnancy, and most telling of all, utter despair and hopelessness.”18 If the Crown Heights riot was not a pogrom, then what was it? David Dinkins provided one analogy. As an American Black man with a different historical narrative than that of the Jews of Crown Heights, the answer was readily at hand, although it took Dinkins three weeks to voice it. Yankel Rosenbaum and the Jews of Crown Heights, the mayor said, had experienced precisely what African Americans had known in the American South—racially motivated mob violence. Dinkins used the terms “bias crime” and “lynching”—words which resonated deeply within the historical consciousness of African Americans—to describe the murder of Rosenbaum, and likened it to the “lynching” of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager who had been killed by a mob of white youths in 1989 in Brooklyn while checking out a used car. “No question,” Dinkins said. “Whatever term one gives to these kinds of vicious murders, that’s what it is.”19 By emphasizing the shared experience of victimization of African Americans and Jews, Dinkins sought to repair the frayed political ties between the two groups, the basis of the city’s liberal political culture, and to salvage his own political future, which depended upon support from both communities. Other African Americans, however, strongly dissented from his use of “lynching” to characterize the killing of Rosenbaum. They also resented any comparison of Rosenbaum’s murder with that of Hawkins. Just as Jews believed they had a proprietary interest in such words as “pogrom” and “Holocaust,” so African Americans argued that “bias crime” and “lynching” should be used only when describing the murders of African Americans. “How could the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum be called a lynching?” asked Colin Moore, the Black nationalist lawyer. “To even describe it in the same breath as Yusuf Hawkins is an abomination. It’s pandering to the votes of a certain people.” Moore and others of his ilk hoped

18 Siegman quoted in Jerome A. Chanes, “Intergroup Relations,” in American Jewish Year Book, 1993, ed. David Singer (Philadelphia, 1993), 93; Marc D. Stern, “The Problem of Crown Heights,” Congress Monthly, January, 1993, 12. 19 Dinkins quoted in New York Times, September 7, 1991. The New York Post, the mayor’s leading journalistic foe, touched all the ethnic bases in describing Crown Heights riot. On its first anniversary, it published an editorial titled “Anniversary of a Lynching” (New York Post, August 19, 1992).

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

to use Dinkins’s terminology as a weapon in their struggle against the Black political establishment of New York City 20 Some Black radicals also denied that African Americans could be guilty of racism, as Dinkins’s statement claimed. Al Sharpton speculated that Rosenbaum was murdered while being robbed. It was common within Black radical circles of the early 1990s to argue that racism consisted of two elements—prejudice and power. While African Americans could be prejudiced, they could not be racists since they lacked the power to put their prejudices into effect. United States Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, an authority on American racial and ethnic relations, strongly disagreed. “The notion that there is any race that is immune to the failings and sins of other people is itself a racist idea.”21 Moynihan drew upon a pastiche of American historical precedents to understand the Crown Heights rioting. He called the murder of Rosenbaum a “KKK-style lynching,” and said that New York could use the South as a model. “We got rid of the lynching in the South by a process of first, just public abhorrence, so the people involved became ashamed, and law enforcement, which took a long time.” In describing the riot itself, Moynihan called it a “race riot,” one that “was as bad as what happened in Detroit in 1943 when black workers were dragged from streetcars and killed by white workers.” Moynihan’s analogy at least put the Crown Heights riot within an American setting, although it is not accurate to equate Crown Heights with the riot in Detroit, which resulted in thirty-four deaths and required the military to restore order.22 Another interpretation of the Crown Heights riot argued that it was not directed at Jews per se, but at the Lubavitchers, and that it had not been caused by antisemitism but by the jostling of African Americans, West Indians, and the Lubavitchers for housing, government funds, political power, and city space. This jostling had been going on for years, but without large-scale violence and rioting. A decade before the riot, Tim Robbins wrote in City Limits, a journal devoted to the study of New York City, that Crown Heights had seen “an ongoing tussle over turf and power between a large Black and a West Indian population and an expanding community of Hasidic Jews.” The historian Richard Wade agreed. Both groups, he said, were “locked into a unique historical struggle over 20 New York Times, September 10, 1991; Moore quoted in New York Amsterdam News, September 14, 1991. 21 Moynihan quoted in New York Post, September 7, 1991. 22 Ibid.

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a limited amount of space.” From this perspective, the riot was simply another chapter in the history of ethnic relationships and tensions in New York City— African Americans vs. Italians, Haitians vs. Koreans, West Indians vs. African Americans. The riot, the sociologist Jonathan Rieder said, must be understood within “the totality of ethnic relations in Crown Heights.”23 This jostling, however, had been going on for years but without any large-scale violence and rioting. What caused this “unique historical struggle” to escalate into a full-scale riot? The belief that the Crown Heights riot was an ethnic conflict helped explain why Jews living in other areas in the city were not so fearful regarding the future of ethnic and race relations in the city. According to Harriet Bogard, director of the New York regional office of the Anti-Defamation League, the circumstances in Crown Heights were unique and provided little instruction for understanding Black-Jewish relations in general. The insular life-style of Lubavitchers was “culturally dissonant from what one assumes is normative for an American lifestyle,” and made it difficult for them “to reach out beyond their own community.” This resulted in a lack of contact with their neighbors that, in turn, led to a want of knowledge and understanding between the two groups.24 This “lack of contact” theory of prejudice became part of the conventional wisdom regarding the roots of the riot. But closer and more frequent contact between groups does not necessarily further harmony. They can lead just as easily to hostility and contempt, as was the case in Crown Heights, where the contacts between African Americans and Jews resulted from physical proximity and not from cultural interaction. The Lubavitchers rejected the “contact” theory. They noted that they were one of the few segments of the city’s Jewish population living in close proximity to African Americans and West Indians, and they believed they were sufficiently familiar with the life-styles of their neighbors. By contrast, they pointed out, Jewish national organizations that espoused the contact theory were staffed by persons who resided in the suburbs or in the city’s white neighborhoods. Little wonder, then, that the Lubavitchers’ became cynical about the advice proffered by the mainstream Jewish organizations headquartered in Manhattan. 23 Tim Robbins, “Tales of Crown Heights: The Fruits of Harassment,” City Limits, December 6, 1981, 12; Wade quoted in Goldstein, “Politics of Hate,” 11; Jonathan Rieder, “The Tribes of Brooklyn: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the Crown Heights Riots,” in The Tribal Basis of American Life: Racial, Religious, and Ethnic Groups in Conflict, ed. Murray Friedman and Nancy Isserman (Westport, 1998), 71. 24 Bogard quoted in New York Newsday, August 26, 1991.

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

Those who argued that the riot was directed at the Lubavitch community and not at Jews were, by and large, unsympathetic to the Lubavitch way of life. Peter Noel, a reporter of Caribbean background, claimed that the Lubavitchers were in large part responsible for the animosity of their Black and West Indian neighbors. This resentment, Noel wrote, stemmed from the Lubavitchers’ aggressive lobbying for funds from government poverty programs, their assertive search for housing for their growing population, and their forceful demands for preferential treatment by city agencies, particularly the police. In responding to a question regarding the sources of mutual distrust between African Americans and Hasidim in Crown Heights, Msgr. John Powls, the white pastor of St. Barbara’s Catholic Church in the depressed ghetto of the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, provided another answer. “The real problem,” he said, is that “nobody understands how desperate inner-city communities like Crown Heights and Bushwick are right now. Young people there have absolutely nothing to live for. There are young adults nineteen or twenty with nothing to do.” While this might have been true, it does not explain why only in Crown Heights did ethnic rivalry and conflict—a longstanding feature of New York City’s history—escalate into a riot. Day-to-day relations between Italians and African Americans were even worse than between Jews and West Indians and between Jews and African Americans. But no anti-Italian riot occurred as a result of the killing of young African Americans in the Italian neighborhoods of Howard Beach in Queens and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn in the late 1980s.25 The Lubavitchers believed that characterizing the riot as anti-Lubavitch rather than antisemitic transformed them from victims into perpetrators. Even if everything said about the Lubavitch way of life was correct—which the Lubavitchers strongly rejected—did this justify violence against them? Were the Lubavitchers required to sit down at meals with their neighbors, to have their children play with non-Lubavitch children, to participate in inter-religious and inter-ethnic activities, and to educate others about the Lubavitch way of life in order to prevent rioting? Lubavitchers feared that characterizing the riot as anti-Lubavitch diminished the culpability of the actual rioters. Jonathan Rieder provided the most extensive and sophisticated “ethnic” explanation of the riot. He strongly argued in several articles that the roots of the riot were multifaceted and “defy neat and easy categorization.” These included elements of racial, class, ethnic, economic, and generational conflict. In fact, 25 Peter Noel, “Crown Heights Burning: Rage, Race, and the Politics of Resistance,” Village Voice, September 3, 1991, 37-40; Powls quoted in New York Newsday, August 26, 1991.

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Rieder said, while Jews were targeted by the rioters, “there was little evidence of coherent, formal anti-Semitic belief systems at work in Crown Heights,” and the “mob’s anti-Jewish rhetoric is hardly self-evident.” Rather, the riot resulted from the dysfunctional nature of ghetto culture, with its “repertoire of violent reprisals, collective allocation of blame, and communal vengeance” stemming from “alienation, antiwhite resentment, and retributive frustration.” At various times this Black rage was directed at whites in general, Korean grocery store owners, or Hasidic Jews.26 Crown Heights Jews naturally were astonished by Rieder’s attempt to fit the riot into a liberal academic framework. What were they to make of his claim that racial and ethnic epithets were ambiguous and murky, especially to “outside observers who may not understand the communicative routines and linguistic codes that shape both the usage and significance of vernacular denigration?” Even the meaning of “Hitler should have finished the job” was not so self-evident to this sociologist. “Some of this opacity is of relatively recent vintage; but some of it is timeless, too.” If formal antisemitic belief systems were not present among the rioters as Rieder believed, most of whom were young and poorly educated, certainly informal ones were. As even Rieder noted, the rioters baited Jews with shouts of “Hitler should have finished the job,” “Hitler was right,” “Sieg Heil,” and “kill the Jew.” Recent history had taught the Jews of Crown Heights, who certainly were not “outside observers,” not to discount the words of those who said they wanted to kill Jews. Rieder’s revisionism, by contrast, “shockingly” defied common sense. It also challenged the relevance of the Jews’ own historical narrative.27 Rieder was one of many observers who stressed the social and economic roots of rioting in general and the Crown Heights riot in particular. The historian Robert Fogelson expressed the conventional liberal wisdom regarding the riots of the 1960s. They were, he said, “articulate protests against genuine grievances . . . [and] attempts to call the attention of white society to the African Americans’ widespread dissatisfaction with racial subordination and segregation.” Since the 1960s, liberals and radicals frequently described rioters as 26 Rieder, “Tribes of Brooklyn,” 63-66; Rieder, “Reflections on Crown Heights: Interpretive Dilemmas and Black Jewish Conflict,” in Antisemitism in America Today: Outspoken Experts Explode the Myths, ed. Jerome A. Chanes (New York, 1995), 358-69; Rieder, “Crown of Thorns,” New Republic, October 14, 1991, 26-31. 27 Rieder, “Tribes of Brooklyn,” 62, 64, 66; Marvin Greisman, “Liberal Professor Engages in Crown Heights Revisionism,” Jewish Press, April 12, 1998.

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

“protesters,” the riots as “insurrections” and “rebellions,” and riotous behavior as “retaliatory violence.” To their conservative critics, such explanations and terminology served to rationalize the violence of the rioters and to foster bizarre conspiratorial theories. Thus, Richard Goldstein, a writer for the Village Voice, a left-wing weekly, said that the real culprit behind the Crown Heights riot was a white power establishment, which sought to funnel Black rage on to poor Jews. They hoped this would deflect Black anger away from themselves and drive a wedge between progressive-minded African Americans and Jews in the city. There was, however, no evidence for such a conspiracy, and Goldstein’s theory was credible only to the paranoid.28 More thoughtful observers emphasized the social and economic environment of the rioters. Their sociohistorical narrative underscored the role of material deprivation, alienation, and despair in determining the behavior of the poor, and was part of a cult of victimization and complaint that had become increasingly prominent in the nation since the 1960s. Taken to an extreme, this explanation could lead to exculpating and even justifying the rioting. According to proponents of this sociohistorical narrative, the proper context for understanding the riot was the history of racism, both nationally and in New York City. Riots were, in effect, protests against racism and intolerable social and economic conditions, and the most important thing about the Crown Heights riot was the social and economic makeup of the rioters and not the ethnic and religious character of their targets. This emphasis on the rioters explains why some observers could write stories about the riot without dwelling on the religious and ethnic nature of the victims. From their perspective, antisemitism was a minor element of the story. One of these observers was New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen. Quindlen noted in her column of September 7, 1991 that while the antisemitic rhetoric of the rioters was “unforgivable and disgraceful,” it was “also predictable” (so predictable that neither she nor anyone else had predicted it). She held to the conventional wisdom of the Times and other liberal outlets that the riot was, in essence, not a Black-Jewish conflict but a racial clash between whites and African Americans. “The misery that envelops the lives of poor black people in this country is so pervasive, so amorphous,” she claimed, that “fixing blame” for the violence perpetrated by African Americans in America “is often impossible.” 28 Robert Fogelson, “Violence as Protest,” in Riot, Rout, and Tumult: Readings in American Social and Political Violence, ed. Roger Lane and John J. Turner (Westport, 1978), 343; Richard Goldstein, “The New Anti-Semitism: A Geshrei,” Village Voice, October 1, 1991, 34-36.

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Quindlen’s failure to mention Yankel Rosenbaum was understandable since his death was not a major part of her story of Crown Heights. Seeking justice from his killers—“fixing blame”—was a distraction from the struggle to better the lot of African Americans. Quindlen concluded by saying that “the rage in Crown Heights is not about the death of one child,” but about the daily racism experienced by African Americans. “What must you feel,” she asked her readers, “if your whole life is a slur, if you read the handwriting on the wall of your existence and the graffiti seems to say, ‘Who cares?’” Quindlen was selective in her sympathy, implying that rage was seemingly something that only African Americans could justifiably feel. But weren’t the Jews of Crown Heights also warranted in feeling rage? They had been the targets of a three-day riot, and one of them had been murdered.29 The urban rioting beginning in the 1960s had convinced many Americans that race was the key to understanding urban unrest. This became an article of faith particularly within the American Left, and it was strongly affirmed by the Kerner Commission, established by the Johnson administration in the aftermath of the rioting in Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit, and other major cities between 1965 and 1967. The commission’s mandate was to analyze the causes of the riots and then to suggest remedies, and its final report claimed that America was fast becoming two nations—one white, affluent, and suburban and the other Black, poor, and urban. Although this racial paradigm was hardly accurate even during the 1960s, and was even more remote from reality during the following decades, it became the most convenient and easiest explanation for urban discontents. Cornel West, the Black philosopher and political activist, argued that for African Americans, Jews were not Jews but whites. “The particular interaction of Jews and blacks in the hierarchies of business and education cast Jews as the public face of oppression for the black community, and thus lend evidence to this mistaken view of Jews as any other white folk.” The Black provocateur Sonny Carson said that he wasn’t antisemitic. He simply hated all white people.30 Race provided the context for the New York Times’s reporting on the Crown Heights riot. Even when a Times article of August 21, 1991 noted that the 29 Anna Quindlen, “The Graffiti on the Wall,” New York Times, September 7, 1991. 30 Cornel West, Race Matters (New York, 1994), 111. See Rieder, “Reflections on Crown Heights,” 381, for an attempt to put the Crown Heights riot within the context of class and status conflict: “The ethnic framing is a consequence, not a cause of the social conditions of unequal encounter. As Koreans have filled once-Jewish retail niches, antimercantilism now takes anti-Asian form.”

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antagonists were African Americans and Hasidim, not simply African Americans and whites, the headline read “Two Deaths Ignite Racial Clash in Tense Brooklyn Neighborhood.” The Times forced a conflict involving at least three groups—African Americans, Caribbeans, and Hasidim—into a racial pattern that hardly did justice to the manifold economic, political, and social factors at work. “The antagonists of African descent,” said the political scientist Carole B. Conway, “belonged to ethnic groups that had very different histories and relationships with the Jewish community. An exclusively black/white or even black/Jewish frame misled readers when it referred to ‘blacks and Jews’ or ‘blacks and Hasidim.’” Conway was particularly concerned with the effect of the Times reporting on the image of African Americans. “The inability to conceive of persons of African descent as having interaction more complex than racial conflicts with people whose skin color is white,” she protested, “is symptomatic of a larger problem in American society itself—one that fails to define and understand individuals and communities of color as persons who have a complete range of humanity in their being, both for good and for evil.”31 The Times’s emphasis on race enabled it to bend over backwards when describing the rioters, to narrow the moral differences between the rioters with their Hasidic victims by slighting the anti-Jewish animus of the rioters, and to stress that more had to be done in addressing the root causes of racial tensions. Hence the headline of one Times’s article read “For Young Blacks, Alienation and a Growing Despair Turn into Rage,” while another said “The Bitterness Flows in Two Directions.” The Times continued well beyond 1991 to stress the racial nature of the riot. In an April 1992 article discussing the arrest of a suspect in the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, the Times reporter noted that in Crown Heights it had “served only to expose the scars left from the racial violence last summer.” When Lemrick Nelson and Charles Price were convicted in February, 1997 of violating the civil rights of Rosenbaum, the Times’s article claimed that the jury’s decision had “laid bare once again New York’s deep racial divide.” This emphasis on race ignored the fact that the victims of the Crown Heights riot, excluding the injured police, were not simply whites but Jews, or Gentiles mistaken for Jews.32

31 Carole B. Conway, “Crown Heights: Politics and Press Coverage of the Race War That Wasn’t,” Polity 32 (1999), 106, 118. 32 New York Times, August 23, 1991, April 9, 1992; February 11, 1997; Hilton Kramer, “What the Times Still Won’t Say About the Crown Heights Riot,” New York Post, April 2, 1996.

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The take of the New York Times on the Crown Heights riot reflected the political correctness of its ownership, editorial board, and reporters, and was part of a pattern of reporting regarding racial issues. This included the paper’s account of a three-day riot fomented by illegal immigrant Dominican drug dealers, which it portrayed as justified community outrage prompted by the use of deadly force by the police; its coverage of the December 1995 arson slayings at a Jewish-owned clothing store on 125th Street in Harlem in which the murderer was described as a soft-spoken man of principle and the store owner as an insular religious Jew; its description of the violence suffered by Asians at the hands of African Americans, which downplayed the anti-Asian bias of the culprits; and a three-part series in March 1994 on Louis Farrakhan, which suggested that he was less extreme than commonly believed.33 Even those who did not share the politics of the Times used the racial paradigm in explaining the riot. These included the New York Daily News and the New York Post, hardly paladins of political correctness. The News, in two editorials in the week after the riot, called it a “racial explosion” and a “race riot.” Neither even mentioned antisemitism or dwelled on the religious and ethnic identity of the riot’s victims. Reporter Mike McAlary titled one of his New York Post articles “Let’s now seek justice in Yankel’s lynching,” and Eric Breindel, who had been among the first to depict the riot as a “pogrom,” characterized it in 1993 as “New York’s worst race riot in recent memory.” In one piece for the Wall Street Journal, Breindel managed to call the riot an “Anti-Semitic riot,” an “urban race riot,” and a “racial disturbance,” and to state that Rosenbaum was “lynched.” The two-volume report issued by Richard H. Girgenti, New York state’s director of criminal justice, also called the riot “the most extensive racial unrest New York City has experienced in over twenty years.”34 The racial character of the Crown Heights riot came almost automatically to those who believed that race was the key to understanding the recent history of New York. These included New York Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who had been attacked by African Americans while covering the riot. “Blacks against

33 William McGowan, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (San Francisco, 2001), 26, 64-69. 34 “Cooling Crown Heights is a Long-Term Job,” New York Daily News, August 22, 1991; “Crown Heights: The Vultures Descend,” ibid., August 23, 1991; New York Post, September 9, 1991; Breindel, “The Lemrick Nelson Trial: Still No Valid Explanation,” New York Post, July 29, 1993; Breindel, “Autopsy of a Riot,” Wall Street Journal, July 22, 1993; Girgenti, Report to the Governor on the Disturbances in Crown Heights, I, iii.

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whites is the fundamental story of the city in our time,” he wrote in a July 1993 column. “Only now it is intensified to the point where the city rises or falls on the ability of whites to live with blacks.” Left unstated was whether the city’s rise or fall also depended on the ability of blacks to live with whites. For Breslin what made Crown Heights distinctive was not being the world center of the Lubavitch Hasidim or the center of the West Indian population in the United States. Rather, it was “the only place in the United States where you can find a group of whites in a neighborhood that is predominately of color.” And the Lubavitch were distinctive not because of their Jewishness, but because they had not moved when Blacks invaded their territory. The Lubavitch were “better than any other whites because they stayed and everybody else ran.”35 The historical narrative of Black politicians and journalists differed from that of Jews and white journalists. Its central theme was the deep-seated and ever-present racial oppression of African Americans by whites. Mary Pinkett, who represented parts of Crown Heights in the New York City Council, denied that the central story of the riot was antisemitism. “The incident,” she said, “was the culmination of anger. The complaint the blacks have is the racism of American society.” This complaint included the city’s dealings with the African Americans of Crown Heights. Black resentment, Pinkett concluded, will continue “until the police and other agencies begin to do their jobs without fear or political favoritism.” This attempt to put a civil rights gloss on the rioting explained the use of the mantra “no justice, no peace” by African Americans marching in Crown Heights. For them, the key event was not the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, but the initial accident which killed Gavin Cato.36 A few African Americans interpreted the Crown Heights riot within the matrix of Black nationalism and third worldism. For them the proper analogy was not only between Crown Heights and Mississippi, but also between Crown Heights and Soweto or Crown Heights and the Middle East. Through such legerdemain, the Jews of Crown Heights were transformed from victims into oppressors. Al Sharpton described the Jews of Crown Heights as “diamond merchants,” implying that the relationship between them and the oppressed African Americans of Brooklyn was similar to that between South African diamond mine owners and their Black employees. “Talk about how Oppenheimer 35 Jimmy Breslin, “The Lubavitchers Will Never Run,” New York Newsday, July 21, 1993. 36 Mary Pinkett quoted in Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 337; Pinkett quoted in Andrew W. Cooper, “The Two Nations of Crown Heights,” New York Times, January 6, 1992.

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in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants here in Crown Heights,” he said in his eulogy at the funeral of Gavin Cato. “The issue is not Anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid.” Sharpton also used his eulogy to encourage the young rioters to keep the pressure up. “Young people, don’t apologize. Don’t be ashamed and don’t back up. You come from a great people. . . . In your body runs the blood of Malcolm X and Fannie Lou Hamer. Stand by; don’t ever sit down. Forward ever, backward never! We will win because we’re right.”37 Radical African Americans also accused the Jews of Crown Heights of oppressing the African Americans of Crown Heights in much the same way that the white European capitalistic Israelis had suppressed the Palestinians, a people of color. That the Lubavitchers of Crown Heights were not wealthy, that few were involved in the diamond trade, that they had little influence over events in the Middle East, and that over fifty percent of the Israelis were as much a “people of color” as the Arab Palestinians mattered little to the purveyors of Black nationalist conspiracies. As one fantasist Black publication put it, Crown Heights was linked to South Africa and Palestine by “the common thread of racial and economic repression,” while the international power of the “zionist [sic] lobby” was indicated by David Dinkins’s mistaken description of young African Americans in Crown Heights as “hoodlums” rather than freedom fighters.38 For Black nationalists, Crown Heights was not a riot but a justified “rebellion” against racist exploitation. This was argued by a flier put out by the “Black Consciousness Movement” advertising a rally on September 4, 1991 in Crown Heights to honor “The True Heroes of the Crown Heights Rebellion . . . Black Youth.” The flier described them as “the children of Malcolm X,” and said that it was “better to fight on Utica and President Street than in Panama or the Persian Gulf, killing our own people of color.” This nationalist argument persisted in a variety of forms throughout the 1990s.39 One egregious example was an article by Fred Goldstein in Workers World, published in the wake of the conviction of Lemrick Nelson in federal court for violating the civil rights of Yankel Rosenbaum. The trial and verdict, Goldstein 37 Sharpton quoted in J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, 1996), 307-8. 38 Arm the Masses, September 1991, 3. This magazine was published by the December 12th Movement. 39 The flier is in the Crown Heights riot files in the archives of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

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said, was an example of “ruling-class retribution for an act of rebellion by an oppressed people.” But the real villains were not the Lubavitchers of Crown Heights but the American ruling class, which had manipulated Crown Heights Jewry “for the purposes of oppression and division—in much the same way that the United States supports the Israeli state against the Palestinians and all the Arab people.” Rebellion was inevitable under such conditions. “And in every rebellion there will be casualties.” Goldstein did not explain how the largely Protestant power elite used the Jews of Crown Heights or how they benefited from the poverty and high rate of unemployment of African Americans in central Brooklyn and from the “relatively privileged” status of the Lubavitch community.40 Not all radicals, however, agreed with the Black nationalists and their supporters. A group called the International Committee Against Racism published a statement that put the rioting within a non-nationalist Marxist framework. It favored uniting the working class against the “rich and powerful,” irrespective of skin color. The events in Crown Heights, it said, were “only the tip of the iceberg; the rebellion is about many other things like police brutality, unemployment, rotten schools and health care, racist education, [and] bad housing.” It warned that attacking Jews and other whites because of their race and ethnicity divided the working class and this furthered the capitalists’ strategy of divide and rule. “We urge young people, who are in the leadership of this rebellion, not to be sucked into nationalist ideology. There are potentially thousands of white and other minority workers who would love to get involved in the struggle, if they felt they would be accepted as comrades-in-arms.” Once this takes place, then we could move on to the overthrow of our “rotten system in a united, multiracial, multicultural way.”41 New York City liberals offered explanations of the riot that did not assume the racial balkanization of the city and the overthrow of capitalism. This was particularly true of liberal Jews, for whom left-wing politics was a significant component of their Jewish identity and who rejected the idea that the Crown Heights riot signaled the end of the Black-Jewish political alliance. One such individual was Victor A. Kovner, the chief corporation counsel during the Dinkins administration and a noted civil libertarian. In receiving the 1999 Stanley 40 Fred Goldstein, “No Justice, No Peace: Behind the Crown Heights Verdict,” Workers World, February 20, 1997. 41 The statement of the International Committee Against Racism is in the Crown Heights riot files in the archives of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

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M. Isaacs Human Relations Award from the New York chapter of the American Jewish Committee, Kovner provided an interpretation of the riot that virtually ignored its antisemitic dimensions. He denied that the riot arose out of a basic conflict of interest between the city’s Jewish and Black communities. Rather, it had been triggered by “misunderstandings,” particularly the widespread resentment of the special privileges accorded the Lubavitch by the city, including the police escort provided to Rabbi Schneerson on his frequent trips to the Lubavitch cemetery in Queens. Kovner was gratified that Jews dedicated to the civil rights movement had not been dissuaded by the riot. If anything, he believed, their commitment had intensified.42 Rabbi Marshall Meyer of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, ground zero for the city’s liberal Jews, provided an alternative liberal explanation for the riot. Meyer had fled Argentina during the 1980s for political reasons and his experience of living in a country dominated by an antisemitic military junta had shaped his understanding of the causes of antisemitism. These causes were to be found in economic and social injustices, whether in Argentina or in the United States. “It’s no surprise that we might expect a problem with antisemitism after twelve years of Reagan and Bush in which social inequalities have grown,” he said in 1993. To blame Reagan and Bush for the Crown Heights riot shows the extent to which the riot had become a Rorschach inkblot in which people saw whatever they wanted.43 Conservatives, for their part, asserted that liberalism and multiculturalism were part of the problem, not part of the solution. Richard Brookhiser of the right-wing magazine National Review believed that the Crown Heights riot stemmed from the attenuating of a common civic identity and the undermining of respect for authority brought about by multiculturalism. The riot had “exposed multiculturalism as an unworkable civil ideal, though whether anyone will come up with a workable one is another question.” But conservatives believed that multiculturalism was merely symptomatic of the deeper rot with 42 Kovner quoted in Peter Noel, “Hillary’s Crown Heights Problem,” Village Voice, August 24, 1999, 63. For a statement of the Brooklyn chapter of the left-wing New Jewish Agenda in the aftermath of the riot that denied that antisemitism was rife among African Americans and called for strengthening the Black-Jewish coalition, see the Amsterdam News, September 14, 1991. 43 Meyer quoted in “Beyond Crown Heights: Strategies for Overcoming Anti-Semitism and Racism in New York,” Tikkun, January–February 1993, 60. For an article which blames unemployment for the riot, see Sheryl McCarthy, “In Crown Heights, Jobless Numbers Tell the Story Behind the Violence,” New York Newsday, August 26, 1991.

Chapter 14. Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot

which the Left had infected New York City. A contempt for the racist police force, a cult of victimization which excused violence when committed by those suffering from racial discrimination and economic deprivation, and a belief that social and economic conditions and not individual qualities determine one’s fate—all of these ideas were key components in the world view of the American Left and had seeped into the mind set of the rioters. Conservatives also criticized explanations of the riot that emphasized its social and economic “root causes.” These, conservatives believed, provided a patina of legitimacy and sociological exoneration for what was essentially lawlessness. For conservatives, it was not surprising that such rationalizations and the riot itself would occur in America’s quintessentially left-wing city.44 Their criticisms of liberal “root causes” theories of the Crown Heights riot did not prevent conservatives from providing their own “root causes” for the riot, and these, not surprisingly, emphasized the culpability of the left. Amity Shlaes in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal published a week after the riot delineated the social roots of the riot. It had primarily resulted from “thirty years of welfare culture in which fostering minorities’ sense of entitlement has caused only greater rage.” From Shlaes’s perspective, rioting was rational for people embittered by society’s indifference to their legitimate claims. The major problem with the conservative interpretation of the Crown Heights riot, as well as with the leftist claim that rioting was inevitable given the depressing social and economic conditions of the ghetto, is that there should have been additional riots in other parts of the city since the welfare culture and the poverty within the racial and ethnic communities of New York City had existed prior to August 1991 and persisted after that date. But, in fact, the Crown Heights was sui generis. Neither conservatives nor the Left offered a credible explanation for the absence of other riots. This shows the inherent weakness of any interpretation of the Crown Heights riot that downplays its ethnic and racial dimensions.45 While disagreeing as to the roots of the riot, liberals and conservatives agreed that the Crown Heights riot had a logic to it. In so doing they were in the tradition

44 Richard Brookhiser, “On the Offensive,” National Review, February 2, 1993, 24; for a rejection of the “root causes” explanation of the riot, see the editorial “Failure in Crown Heights,” New York Post, July 21, 1993. 45 Amity Shlaes, “In Brooklyn, Not Just Another Racial Incident,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1991. The article on Crown Heights in the conservative monthly Commentary argued that the motivating force behind the riot was Black antisemitism. Philip Gourevitch, “The Crown Heights Riot and Its Aftermath,” Commentary, January 1993, 30-31.

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of sociologists as ideologically diverse as Gustave LeBon, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Park, Georg Simmel, Neil Smelser, and Talcott Parsons who had sought to fathom the sociological patterns of civil violence. In addition, historians such as Charles Tilly, E. P. Thompson, George Rude, and Georges Lefebvre had asserted that rioting in France and England had not been aimless but purposeful. Recent American urban violence strengthened this tendency to believe that rioting was rational. The rioting in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Newark and other American cities during the 1960s, it was argued, was an attempt by the poor and inarticulate to make themselves heard, to effect economic and social change. As Paul A. Gilje said in his history of American rioting, “riotous crowds do not act merely on impulse and are not fickle. There is a reason behind the actions of rioters, no matter how violent these actions may be. . . . In any given situation, rioters have an infinite number of options. But the activity selected by rioters is not capricious nor random.”46 Not everyone agreed. The McCone Commission, which investigated the Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965, concluded that it had been irrational and purposeless. Some observers of the Crown Heights riot came to the same conclusion. The rioters, in fact, did not articulate any social and economic goals, and their leaders did not advocate any collective political objectives. The columnist Murray Kempton argued that the ultimate cause of the 1991 riot was the existence of “a class of surplus persons, for whom no useful function is available and who are kept alive badly fed and warehoused and denied most means of expression beyond the angry shouts on the street.” It was impossible to fathom a purpose behind the nihilistic actions of this lumpenproletariat besides assuaging their desperate and empty lives. If in 1991 this was to be achieved by attacks on Jews, in the future the aimless fury of the underclass will have other targets.47 Residents of Crown Heights—Jews, African Americans, and West Indians alike—claimed that the riot was fomented by violence-prone and alienated outsiders with little concern for the welfare of the area’s residents, and that it had conveyed a distorted view of the neighborhood’s race relations. Martin

46 James B. Rule, Theories of Civil Violence (Berkeley, 1988); Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington, 1996), 6. 47 Murray Kempton, “Blood and Anger and Indifference,” New York Newsday, August 28, 1991. For other journalistic statements in this vein, see Felicia R. Lee, “For Many Young Blacks, Alienation and a Growing Despair Turn Into Rage,” New York Times, October 25, 1991; Sam Roberts, “On the Mean Streets, A Greater Sense of Alienation,” New York Times, September 8, 1991.

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Markowitz, who represented Crown Heights in the New York State Senate, described it as an “unfortunate incident” caused by outsiders “who see no hope for themselves and the future.” Some persons emphasized the random and irrational nature of the Crown Heights riot in order to salvage what remained of the Black-Jewish progressive political entente. Cornel West argued that the riot was an unorganized and “random act” brought on by the death of Gavin Cato. It was not proof of widespread antisemitism among African Americans. In fact, African Americans “unequivocally” opposed antisemitism. Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice also stressed the random nature of the riot. Its real lesson, he said, “is that Jews must learn to live in a more dangerous world, where hate goes unanswered and primitive passions are stroked as a safety valve for helpless rage.”48 In Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, his classic account of Jewish historiography, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi noted that the historian aspires to do more than merely fill in the gaps in memory. “He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.” This has been particularly difficult regarding the Crown Heights riot because of intense memories involving ethnicity and political ideology. These memories were not only popular ways to understand the riot. They were also instruments in the maintenance and acquisition of power. In questioning these memories, the historian steps on sensitive toes, but he has no choice. History, a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses says, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.” But memory can be even more frightening.49

48 Markowitz quoted in New York Newsday, August 26, 1991; Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Blacks and Jews: Let the Healing Begin (New York, 1995), 181; Richard Goldstein, “The New Anti-Semitism: A Geshrei,” Village Voice, October 1, 1991, 38. West had argued previously that the riot was not a random act but a product of the economic desperation spawned by capitalism. “Without some redistribution of wealth and power, downward mobility and debilitating poverty will continue to drive people into desperate channels.” West, “Black AntiSemitism and the Rhetoric of Resentment,” Tikkun, January–February 1992, 16. 49 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982), 94.

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The Cognitive Dissonance of American Jews Cognitive dissonance, the ability to believe two diametrically opposite ideas at the same time, has interested psychologists and other social scientists for over half a century. How do people rationalize smoking when they want to live a long and healthy life? How do they justify adultery when they know it is wrong? How do they excuse cutting checks to philanderers espousing “family values” who are running for public office? The pioneering work in the study of cognitive dissonance is When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, published in 1956 by psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter of the University of Minnesota. Festinger et al. examined a group of two dozen or so individuals called the Seekers who were convinced that the Earth would soon be destroyed by a flood, and that they would be saved by flying saucers sent from the planet Clarion. The Seekers had been informed of this by several residents of Clarion whom they called the Guardians. One of these was named Sananda, who was actually Jesus. Once the Earth was cleansed, the Seekers would be returned to Earth. So certain was the Seekers’ leader in the imminent flood that she gave a precise date, December 21, 1955, when this would occur. The true believers were certain of the coming apocalypse. “I’ve given up just about everything. I’ve cut every tie: I’ve burned every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe,” said one, a physician. But what happened to the group when December 21st came and went without the world’s destruction? A minority was disillusioned and left the group, but the majority became even more committed. As Festinger et al. noted, “Although there is a limit beyond which belief will not withstand disconfirmation, it is clear that the introduction of contrary evidence can serve to increase the conviction and enthusiasm of a believer.” This would occur when the belief was held with deep conviction; when the person holding this belief had taken some important action for the sake of this belief such as joining an organization or contributing

Chapter 15. The Cognitive Dissonance of American Jew

money; when other events such as floods and earthquakes indicated that something was in the works; and when the individual was surrounded by other likeminded persons. In such a setting, the individual would reject clear disconfirming evidence and even attempt to convince others of the truth of the belief. This increased proselytizing is necessary if the pain resulting from disconfirmation is to be reduced to a tolerable level. In the case of the Seekers, its leader argued that the fact that the earth had not been destroyed actually confirmed the truth of the belief in its imminent destruction since it demonstrated God’s mercy. “For from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth,” she told her followers. Helping making acceptable the pain of disconfirmation was the social support that individual Seekers received from other true believers. Without the continual encouragement from others, it is unlikely that most of the members of the groups would have remained in their state of cognitive dissonance. “The presence of supporting cobelievers,” Festinger et al. wrote, “would seem to be an indispensable requirement of recovery from such extreme disconfirmation.” The Seekers were not the first or the last group to predict the Earth’s destruction or the coming of the messianic era. The Millerites and the Jehovah’s Witnesses had also made similar predictions. The most prominent contemporary group making such prophesies is the quasi-religious environmental movement, but there are others. When Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the messianic Lubavitch movement, an Orthodox Jewish group, died in 1994, some of his followers danced in the street because they assumed the messianic era was imminent. Some even purchased second homes near the cemetery in the New York City borough of Queens where he was buried so that they would be on the scene when he returned from the dead. The movement has flourished since 1994 even through Schneerson has not risen and the messianic era seemingly remains as distant as ever. The Lubavitchers are, however, not the only group of American Jews exhibiting cognitive dissonance.1 Public opinion surveys indicate that American Jews believe, contrary to all evidence, that antisemitism in the United States is pervasive, and some Jews even think it is growing. The Bernard Madoff financial scandal was just one of many events in the past several decades that Jews feared would bring to the surface latent and widespread antisemitic feelings. That this has not occurred did 1

See especially Joel M. Cooper, Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory (London, 2007) and Simon Dein, Lubavitcher Messianism: What Really Happens When Prophecy Fails? (London, 2011).

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not prevent Jews from fearing the imminent appearance of a strong antisemitic movement. The fact that it has not yet surfaced so far is proof of the insidiousness of antisemites who are waiting for just the right moment to strike. It is not surprising that American Jews have exaggerated the threat of antisemitism. What the historian Salo W. Baron has termed the “lachrymose” interpretation of Jewish history was based on historical events, most notably the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the Holocaust. The Holocaust was planned and carried out by a well-educated and culturally advanced population and took place in a modern industrial society. Those who deny that something similar to this could not occur in America, Jewish alarmists declare, are blind to the lessons of history. Jewish liturgy and the Jewish calendar are replete with prayers and fast days commemorating catastrophes that have befallen Jews. Modern Jewish historiography, as Michael Brenner emphasized in his recent book Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History (2010), has reinforced this pessimism. Most prominent nineteenth and early twentieth-century Jewish historians, with the notable exceptions of Baron and Cecil Roth, residents of the United States and Great Britain respectively, have offered a bleak view of Jewish history. This is hardly surprising since they lived at a time of heightened antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust and the Soviet campaign to destroy all remnants of Judaism and Jewish identity in Eastern Europe. Zionist historians had an additional reason to stress the more dismal aspects of Jewish history in the diaspora. These, they argued, demonstrated the need for a Jewish state. Even in the United States, where antisemitism has been a private and peripheral matter, and where antisemitism has been notable for its absence from politics and governing, it is de rigueur for histories of American Jews to include lengthy chapters on antisemitism. Dozens of Holocaust museums, memorials, research institutes, and archives located throughout America reinforce this message. Since its founding in 1977, one of the most successful, if not the most successful, American Jewish domestic organization in terms of fund-raising has been the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C. has been able to secure generous funding from American Jewish benefactors since its opening in April 1993, despite the doubts of some observers who wonder whether Washington is an appropriate place to locate a museum dedicated to the memory of events which took place in Europe. The fact that the Holocaust Museum is located close to the Washington Monument and near the sacred space of the Mall in Washington shows the extent to which Jews have become part of the American mainstream. When it came time to name a new Jewish museum in

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New York City, which opened in 1997, its founders decided to capitalize on the memory of the Holocaust by calling it the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Besides these three major institutions, there is hardly a major American city that does not have a Holocaust museum or at least a memorial of some sort. Holocaust memory has also been disseminated by the many American colleges that offer courses on the Holocaust. These are among the most popular offerings of Jewish Studies departments. American Jews have also pressed for the mandatory teaching of the Holocaust in public schools in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, California, and other states with a significant Jewish population. This has been justified on the grounds that secondary students must learn the “lessons” of the Holocaust so that nothing like it will ever appear again. But it is not clear what these lessons are. Certainly Jews were not the only victims of World War II. Around six million Jews were murdered during the war by the Nazis, but somewhere between an additional fifty to sixty-five million persons were killed during the conflict. And who were the bad guys? Many more Chinese died at the hands of Chinese Communists after the war than Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, and until 1942 the Soviet Union killed more people than did the Nazis. Holocaust education has had other difficulties besides the question of whether Jews should be singled out for special attention. One has been the not unexpected demands of other groups—African Americans, Hispanics, Armenians, Indians, homosexuals—to be included in the status of victims of their own Holocaust and thus worthy of public recognition and government aid. Another problem has been supplying secondary schools with personnel sufficiently versed in the history of the Holocaust who are able to teach more than platitudes, particularly at a time when the teaching of history itself on the secondary level has become a national scandal. And finally, there is the question of what precisely are the “lessons” of the Holocaust. On this, of course, there will be disagreements stemming from religious, political, and ideological differences. Despite these caveats, Holocaust education has become one of the sacred cows of the American Jewish agenda. The fears of American Jews regarding domestic antisemitism are continually being stoked by organizations whose very survival is at stake should American Jews come to believe that American antisemitism has become a marginal phenomenon. Without the existence of domestic antisemitism, much of the raison d’être of organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith would be called into question. This is not to say that these organizations have outlived their usefulness. Antisemitism is a growing phenomenon in Great Britain, Italy,

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Norway, France, and other European countries, encouraged mainly by immigration from Arab countries, Pakistan, and Turkey. And Jewish “defense” organizations also do valuable work in fostering better relations among America’s many ethnic, religious, and racial groups. But certainly these same organizations have inflated the reality of American antisemitism. A curious example of the status of contemporary American antisemitism is Eric Alterman’s article in the February 27, 2012 issue of The Nation titled “Sheldon Adelson and the End of American Anti-Semitism.” Alterman, a professor of English at Brooklyn College and a left-wing blogger, while grateful for the demise of antisemitism was also, strangely enough, wistful for the time when antisemitism, “this once wholly respectable American prejudice,” was not so somnolent. The source of Alterman’s pique was Newt Gingrich’s seeming change of heart regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict after his campaign for the Republican nomination for president had received generous funding from Sheldon Adelson. Adelson, an enormously wealthy gambling magnate, strongly supported Israel’s tough policies regarding the Palestinians. Alterman believed Gingrich’s metamorphosis was a pay-off. Alterman noted that there was a time when Adelson’s generosity would have been properly attacked by antisemites as evidence of “dual loyalty” and an “Israel-first” mentality, and he wondered how “the self-proclaimed ‘richest Jew in the world’ can buy the foreign policy of a major party’s potential presidential candidate on behalf of a vision of endless Israeli aggression—up to and including US support for yet another potentially disastrous pre-emptive attack—and the historically abused entity of ‘the Jews’ has somehow escaped the blame?” Surely the status of American antisemitism has reached its nadir when a Jew can utter such words in order that Israel can be put in its proper place. A final reason for the exaggeration of American antisemitism has been the changing nature of American Jewish identity. The future of American Jewry is dependent in part on how American Jews define their identity as Jews. America’s Jews are one of the most secular segments of American society, and a Jewish identity exclusively focusing on religion has little appeal to most Jews. Other forms of Jewish identity, including radical politics, Yiddish culture, and ethnicity, have also dissipated as Jews have acculturated into American culture. This acculturation has encouraged some Jews to argue that Jews must instead emphasize “Jewish values.” But this is problematic since there is no agreement among Jews as to what these values precisely are. There is in addition the question of how Jewish values differ from the values of other Americans. The mantra of Jewish values is most often voiced by liberals who argue that universal health care,

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abortion rights, and other liberal pieties are mandated by Jewish values. But to argue that Jewish values are somehow intertwined with such causes is ethnocentric since one does not have to be Jewish to favor such causes. Gentiles certainly don’t believe they are expressing Jewish values when they support Obamacare, gay marriage, or abortion rights. The emphasis on Jewish values takes an instrumental view of Jewish identity. From this perspective, Jewish identity is to be valued only because of its compatibility with causes which seem to have only a tangential relationship to the distinctive needs of Jews. With the attenuation of alternative definitions of Jewish identity, the struggle against antisemitism has become more important in defining Jewish identity. One can express his or her commitment to Jewish identity by supporting organizations fighting antisemitism. To acknowledge that antisemitism has become a peripheral and minor irritant in America would deprive many Jews of an important, if not the sole, factor in their Jewish identity. Jews thus hold on tightly to the vision of American Jewry as an oppressed group. This is particularly true among Jews on the left who identity with oppressed groups such as African Americans, Hispanics, and homosexuals by emphasizing that they also are members of an oppressed group, even though the statistics on Jewish economic and social mobility and surveys of attitudes of American Gentiles toward Jews, including their willingness to vote for Jewish political candidates, would indicate otherwise. The message that American Jews should remain Jews and become involved in Jewish organizational life because others dislike them is not an idea that will prove attractive to Jews who have grown up during the open and tolerant post-war years. But it is a message that appeals to Jews who are otherwise alienated from Jewish life. The elevated status of American Jews is one of the themes of Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell’s recent book, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Putnam, a professor at Harvard and the author of Bowling Alone, and Campbell, who teaches at Notre Dame, have written what is arguably the most important volume on contemporary American religion to appear during the past quarter of a century. Their conclusions, based on a close examination of voluminous American public opinion surveys, will undoubtedly surprise many American Jews who are skeptical of their findings regarding the widespread admiration for America’s Jews throughout the United States. Doubters will wonder whether these polls reveal what people really believe, or do they merely reveal what people are comfortable in telling outsiders. But even if there is a disparity between what people believe and what they say to others, it does say something about the state of American public

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opinion when negative views regarding Jews cannot be expressed openly for fear of violating community norms. Skeptics will also question the Putnam/Campbell image of America’s Jews. For Putnam and Campbell, America’s Jews, despite their widespread indifference to Judaism and their low level of religious observance, comprise a “clearly” demarcated religious group. Yet Jews are anything but a “clearly” demarcated religious group. The minority of American Jews who are serious about religion are, in fact, members of a host of competing groups, all of which claim to be authentically Jewish. There are Modern Orthodox, “black hat” Orthodox, Hasidim, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, and Reconstructionist Jews. There are even synagogues for gays and for humanistic Jews who deny the existence of God and reject virtually all of the fundamental tenets of traditional Judaism. The diversity of American Judaism is accentuated by the different languages and customs of America’s Jews. There are American synagogues in which the predominant language of the congregants is Spanish, Hebrew, Farsi, and Russian. Putnam and Campbell compare Jews to Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Hindus, and other American religious groups, but this comparison is problematic. Religion is highly respected in America, and it is not surprising that Americans give high marks to Jews when they are viewed mainly as members of a religion. But Jews comprise not a religious but an ethnic group with a strong religious component and with strong ties to Jews in other parts of the world irrespective of their religious practices (or non-practices). Whether Americans would give such high marks to Jews if they were viewed as a religio-ethnic group is another matter. The figures are also skewed by the fact that American Grace asked large religious groups such as Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics how warmly they felt about other religions. Had Evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism been evaluated by a cross-section of the population, which would include large numbers of Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics, then these religions would undoubtedly have ranked higher on the “warmth” index. But these reservations about the methodology used in American Grace cannot refute its major point regarding the now elevated status of American Judaism. One noteworthy aspect of the recent poll figures examined by Putnam and Campbell is how they compare with public opinion polls of the 1930s and 1940s. One wartime survey indicated that Jews were more distrusted than any other American ethnic group with the exception of Italian-Americans. (Presumably attitudes toward Japanese-Americans were not surveyed.) The shared nationalism experienced by all ethnic groups during the war and the close

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wartime interactions of Americans with diverse ethnic, geographical, and economic backgrounds did much to lay the foundation for the rapid decline of prejudice after 1945. According to the survey literature cited by Putnam and Campbell, Jews are not only a widely admired religious group, but they are “the best liked religious group in the country.” (Not surprisingly, the least popular are Muslims.) They are supposedly more popular than mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, and far more popular than Evangelical Protestants, Mormons, Buddhists, and, of course, Muslims. But as Putnam and Campbell note, Jews are reluctant to accept such astounding news. They are, in fact, “one of the groups most likely to report being exposed to critical comments about their religion,” and twelve percent of Jews say they “often” hear negative comments about their religion. Putnam, a convert to Judaism from Protestantism, has professed surprise by the gap between the reality of American attitudes toward Jews and Judaism and American Jews’ perception of this reality. “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger et al. wrote. When presented with undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong, the person “will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.” As Abba Eban once remarked, American Jews can’t take “yes” for an answer. One of the key questions asked by pollsters regarding the acceptance of minority groups by Americans is whether you would vote for a member of these groups to be President. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released in the spring of 2011, sixty percent of Americans said they would be “somewhat or entirely uncomfortable” voting for an atheist; fifty-nine percent for a Muslim; thirty-six percent for a Mormon; twenty-six percent for an Evangelical Christian; and only fifteen percent for a Jew. Conversely, eighty percent said they would be “somewhat or entirely comfortable” voting for a Jew, while sixty-seven percent said they would be comfortable voting for an Evangelical Christian, and sixty-percent would be comfortable voting for a Mormon. These figures are more striking when compared to polling figures regarding Roman Catholics. The same Quinnipiac University poll revealed that eighty-three percent of the respondents would be comfortable having a president who is Roman Catholic, and only thirteen percent would be uncomfortable, this despite the country’s long history of anti-Catholicism. Based on these figures, Roman Catholics and Jews are more accepted in America today than are Evangelical Christians.

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Along with these polling statistics there are the statistics regarding the acceptance of Jews in a much more important and intimate setting—marriage. The intermarriage rate has skyrocketed over the past half century, so much so that well over forty percent of recent marriages involving Jews have been intermarriages. Except for the Orthodox world where barriers to intermarriage remain high and impermeable, American Jews have come to view intermarriage as inevitable and emphasize “outreach” to the non-Jewish spouses in the hope that they will convert or at least agree to raise their children as Jews. A parallel phenomenon has been the dramatic increase in the rate of acceptance of the prospective Jewish spouse by the future in-laws. The growing intermarriage rate is both a cause and a result of the decline in antisemitism. It is very difficult to remain an antisemite when a Jew might now be a member of your immediate family. (The same phenomenon has also taken place regarding homosexuals. One of the reasons for the rising acceptance of homosexual marriage is the increasing number of gays who have gone public. It is difficult to ostracize homosexuals when they might be close relatives.) For the overwhelming majority of Americans, a Jewish background is no longer a stigma, and the rejection of intermarriage in today’s America is viewed as intolerant and a violation of the nation’s civic religion. This is reflected in the many television shows featuring intermarriages. Indeed, what is uncommon on television is an endogamous marriage involving Jews. American Jews, except members of the Orthodox community, have largely given up the battle against intermarriage. It is common today within the Reform movement for Gentiles to sit on the board of trustees of Reform synagogues and even to serve as presidents of such congregations. The ability of American Jews to believe in the saliency of domestic antisemitism has been immune not only to polling numbers and the rise in intermarriage, but it has also been immune to the great changes in their own status that they have personally experienced or witnessed since World War II. During these seven decades Jews became one of the most highly educated, prosperous, and influential groups in American society. It would have been incomprehensible even a couple of decades ago for Jews to believe that anyone with a Jewish background could be appointed a president of Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, America’s three most prestigious universities, but this is precisely what took place. In an age when a direct descendant of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a relative of Barack Obama are rabbis, when Hillary Clinton, Wesley Clark, and Madeline Albright reveal their Jewish connections, when Jews have filled the most important positions in Washington, including Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and

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chairman of the Federal Reserve System, and when well over a quarter of the names on the annual Forbes listing of America’s wealthiest four hundred individuals are Jews, anything is possible. But what is difficult to argue is that these could have occurred while antisemitism remained an important phenomenon. That American Jews are not completely comfortable with their new status partially explains their exotic politics. By all social and economic indices, they should comprise one of the most conservative political groups, but the exact opposite is true. Jews dependably vote for liberal Democratic candidates and are a financial mainstay of the Democratic Party, in part because they believe that the Democrats are the party of the have-nots and the defenders of the oppressed. It is also because many Jews view Republicans as members of the country-club set with which they have little in common, even though many Jews are members of Jewish country clubs and have the same economic and social profile of their Gentile counterparts. The liberalism of American Jews is particularly evident when it comes to such social issues as gay marriage and abortion. The fact that Christian religious groups have opposed gay marriage and abortion evokes in Jews memories of Christian antisemitism in Europe. Indeed, the maintenance of the high wall of separation between church and state against incursions from Christians has been, along with support for Israel, the political default position of most Jews. The claim that in crucial respects Christians and Jews might be natural allies is discounted in Jewish circles where a reflexive suspicion of Christians and Christianity is palpable. Jewish fears of antisemitism are continually being stoked by Republican politicians playing the Christian card. The enthusiastic support for Israel by certain American Christian groups has not allayed these qualms, and Jews suspect that Christians might have ulterior motives, including the conversion of Jews to Christianity. It is unlikely that in the near future American Jews will modify their cognitive dissonance since this would require a fundamental rethinking of their identity as Jews. For decades Jewish conservatives have been predicting an imminent Jewish political transformation that would align their political choices with their class interests and their support for the State of Israel. And for decades these conservatives have been disappointed by Jewish voting patterns and by the choices Jews make when dispensing contributions to political candidates. As Festinger et al. noted over a half century ago, it is difficult for people to renounce deeply held opinions.

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C h apter 16

Jewish Historians and American Capitalism In 1954, in reaction to the emphasis on national planning and revulsion from the free market during and after the Great Depression and World War II, the University of Chicago Press published a thin volume edited by F. A. Hayek, the free-market economist and author of the 1944 best-selling polemic The Road to Serfdom. Titled Capitalism and the Historians, the book’s six essays by Hayek, T. S. Ashton, Louis M. Hacker, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and W. H. Hutt discuss the general ill repute among historians of capitalism. The essay most relevant for students of American history is Hacker’s “The Anticapitalist Bias of American Historians.”1 Hacker, a prominent economic historian at Columbia University and the author of Triumph of American Capitalism (1940), argued that ignorance about and hostility toward capitalism among his fellow American historians was widespread. This ignorance and hostility has remained a feature of historiography in general and American Jewish historiography in particular. In 1972 the economist and future Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman delivered a paper before the libertarian Mount Pelerin Society titled “Capitalism and the Jews.” Friedman’s paper examined the seeming paradox that while Jews “owed an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism,” many “have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.” Such Jews resembled parlor socialists who “bask in self-righteous virtue by condemning capitalism while enjoying the luxuries paid for by their capitalist inheritance.” Jews who, in contrast, point out the clear superiority of free-market economies to collectivist ones in providing economic growth and individual 1

The other essays are “History and Politics” (Hayek), “The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians” and “The Standard of Life of the Workers in England, 1790-1830” (Ashton), “The treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals” (de Jouvenel), and “The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century” (Hutt).

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freedom are disparaged as “intellectual deviants . . . [and] traitors to a supposed cultural and national tradition.” Perhaps the most prominent of these deviants and traitors, Friedman recognized, was himself. Friedman’s paradox was particularly puzzling in view of the fact that anticapitalism sentiments have been one of the major sources of modern antisemitism. “For centuries,” the historian Jerry Z. Muller recently wrote, “Jewish economic success led anti-Semites to condemn capitalism as a form of Jewish domination and exploitation, or to attribute Jewish success to unsavory qualities of the Jews themselves.” It is not coincidental that antisemitism has been weaker in capitalist nations such as the United States and Great Britain than in states that have adopted non-capitalistic models of economic growth. “An affirmative approach toward capitalism often went together with a measure of sympathy toward the Jews,” Muller noted, while antipathy to capitalism and to Jews “typically went hand in hand.” Hayek, for example, believed that Jews “embodied precisely those characteristics that were essential to capitalist progress.”2 Friedman was certainly correct that American Jews have done exceedingly well. The historian Eli Lederhendler noted that by 1990 the per capita income of Jews, who were mostly immigrants, the children of immigrants, or the grandchildren of immigrants, was almost twice as high as the national mean.3 There have been many attempts to explain why American Jews have been so antagonistic to the free market that has treated them so well. One prominent example is Brandeis University historian Lawrence H. Fuchs’s 1956 volume Political Behavior of American Jews. This book attributed the skepticism of American Jews toward capitalism and their support of a variety of governmental interventions in the economy to the liberal values of Jewish religion and culture. But this is questionable since the most Jewish of Jews—those who wear distinctive Jewish clothing, observe Judaism’s commandments, spend their leisure time studying Jewish texts, speak Jewish languages, eat Jewish foods, and send their children to Jewish schools—are generally not as hostile to capitalism as more acculturated 2

Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010), 2, 12, 64-70.

3 Eli Lederhendler, “American Jews, American Capitalism, and the Politics of History,” in Text and Context: Essays in Modern Jewish History and Historiography in Honor of Ismar Schorsch, ed. Eli Lederhendler and Jack Wertheimer (New York, 2005), 505. Lederhendler argued that this economic success was not due to the cultural values that Jews brought with them from Europe but to the social and economic conditions they encountered in America. Jews, he said, were creatures not of habit but of habitat. Their willingness to divest themselves of their cultural baggage explained their economic mobility. “The discontinuity between Old World and New World was embraced, not resisted” (533).

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Jews. In fact, Jewish acculturation and anti-capitalism appear to have a symbiotic relationship. Traditional Judaism has a generally favorable attitude toward private property, commercial enterprise, and the free market, although it also warns against financial chicanery and the danger that the seeking and possession of wealth poses to piety and morality. The aversion of American Jewish historians toward capitalism is reflected in the fact that they have written more about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg than about Julius Rosenwald and more about Emma Goldman than about Goldman Sachs. Some observers have speculated that this was due to the fear that drawing attention to the economic success of some Jews under American capitalism would fuel antisemitism. It has also been due to the leftist bent of the historians themselves. A good example is Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009), a work of sophistication and scholarship, which, unfortunately, is marred by a tendency to attribute the destitution of the 1930s to capitalism and capitalists rather than to the endemic poverty found in capitalist and non-capitalistic nations alike and to erroneous government policies. Thus Dickstein describes the hustler Sammy Glick, the protagonist of Budd Schulberg’s famous Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), as the embodiment of the capitalist values of the film industry, an industry “fueled by greed, ego, philistinism, and betrayal.” Greed, ego, philistinism, and betrayal, it goes without saying, antedate modern capitalism by several thousand years. The year after the publication of What Makes Sammy Run?, the great Jewish historian Salo W. Baron published his essay “Modern Capitalism and Jewish Fate” in the Menorah Journal.4 Baron conflated capitalism with commerce and industrialization and argued that the sweatshop, child labor, mechanization, economic concentration, and “technological unemployment” were “concomitant evils” of capitalism, even though all of these were present in non-capitalistic societies as well. Baron, writing in the midst of World War II, was also pessimistic about Jewish prospects under advanced capitalism. “The combined forces of individualism, materialism, rationalism, and secularism,” he said, “have placed so many question marks upon the future destinies of Jewry as to outweigh the benefits of early and advanced capitalism in the minds of many patriotic Jews, who consider the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people a matter of supreme

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Volume 30 (Summer 1942). This essay also appears in Arthur Hertzberg and Leon A. Feldman, eds., History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses by Salo W. Baron (Philadelphia, 1964), 43-64.

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importance to themselves and the world at large.” One can safely assume that Baron numbered himself among the “patriotic Jews.” A new book edited by the historian Rebecca Kobrin of Columbia University, Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (2012), purports to explore the impact of capitalism on America’s Jews. Unfortunately, the essays in the volume never define “capitalism.” They elide the basic features of capitalism such as property rights, economic individualism, equality before the law, opposition to rent-seeking, and the setting of wages, interest rates, prices, and output by the free market rather than by government fiat. Instead, they equate capitalism with business, commerce, industrialization, entrepreneurship, economic exploitation, class stratification, colonialism, and material acquisitiveness, none of which are unique to capitalism. Materialism has been around since the time of Adam and Eve, commerce has existed in virtually all societies, and economic exploitation and class stratification has been pervasive in pre-capitalist societies. Those essays in Chosen Capital which examine the involvement of Jews in the garment industry of New York City (by Phyllis Dillon/Andrew Godley and Andrew S. Dolkart), the scrap and second-hand goods industry of the Midwest (by Jonathan Z. S. Pollack), the production and distribution of liquor (by Marni Davis), the music of African Americans (by Jonathan Karp), the marketing of American Indian curios (by David S. Koffman), the commercialization of the voice of cantor Yossele Rosenblatt (by Jeffrey Shandler), and the development of machine-made matzah (by Jonathan D. Sarna), are interesting and worth reading, but it is unclear what any of them have to do with capitalism. Left unanswered by the essayists are such questions as the impact of capitalism on Jewish entrepreneurs and workers, the effect of capitalism on Jewish economic mobility, the difference between the economic profile of Jews in America and their counterparts in less capitalistic-oriented societies, and the impact on Jews of such anti-capitalist measures as licensing regulations, wage and hours legislation, farm price supports, government-sponsored health insurance and old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, rent control, public housing, protective tariffs, and high federal and state income and estate taxes. Nor do they discuss why Jews have been so successful in the capitalistic United States or compare the adaptation that Jews have made to American capitalism to that of other American ethnic groups. Daniel Katz’s essay “The Multicultural Front: A Yiddish Socialist Response to Sweatshop Capitalism” is particularly egregious in its understanding of capitalism. He argues that the revolutionary Jewish socialists in Russia struggled

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against a capitalist system of pogroms and of governmental restrictions limiting the economic, educational, political, and judicial rights of Jews. “The czarist system linked capitalist exploitation with an ethnic cultural repression that restricted Jewish access to all forms of institutional power, including the gymnasium and university,” Katz writes. Educational institutions “became arenas of cultural conflict between czarist efforts to control the economic, political, and social mechanisms of the empire on one hand, and Jewish nationalist resistance to those efforts on the other.” Jews rightfully protested such injustices, but these injustices were not the products of capitalism. The Russia of the Czars could be described as capitalistic only by distorting the conventional understanding of capitalism. The czarist attempts at the economic, political, and social repression of Jews were not manifestations of capitalism but their antithesis. When, according to Katz, the forces of “capitalism” pushed millions of East European Jews during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to emigrate, their favorite destination was not away from capitalism but to capitalistic America. Here local, state, and national governments have never restricted the economic, political, or social rights of Jews or discouraged Jewish social mobility and economic enterprise. Katz, however, argues that the differences between Russia and the United States in this respect were less important than the fact that both were capitalistic. “Jewish workers’ encounter with capitalism, first in Russia, then in the United States,” he claims, “was accompanied in different ways and to different degrees by the subordination of ethnic cultures, including and especially Jewish cultures.” Katz’s conflating of capitalism with state control is not uncommon among intellectuals, as indicated by the widespread contemporary use among historians and political scientists of the oxymoronic term “state capitalism.” Katz’s interpretation of the American economy during the peak years of Jewish immigration is also ahistorical. “Work and living conditions were brutal,” he writes. This is true by American standards of the twenty-first century, but brutal working conditions and poverty were then the norm throughout most of the world, as they had been throughout history, and they remain widespread in the Third World. They were certainly not unique to capitalism or due to capitalism. And it has been the spread of capitalist ideas and institutions that has been partially responsible for the economic growth and the reduction of poverty in places such as Hong Kong and South Korea. This was also true for the Jewish urban neighborhoods of the first half of the twentieth century. The American Jewish immigrant “sweatshop capitalism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely a one-generation

Chapter 16. Jewish Historians and American Capitalism

phenomenon, and it was rare for the children of immigrant garment workers to follow in the economic footsteps of their parents. Places such as the Lower East Side, the center of sweatshop capitalism, were the launching pad for American Jewish immigrants. They lived there for a decade or so, accumulated some capital, and then moved to nicer neighborhoods. Immigrant areas were continually replenished by new Jewish immigrants until the 1920s when new immigration laws restricted entry into America. When the initial flow of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to the United States began in the late nineteenth century they were the beneficiaries of a rapid growth in income and life expectancy, due in part to capitalism, that continued into the next century. “One central promise of capitalism has been that it will lead to increasing material prosperity,” James Otteson, a professor of philosophy at Yeshiva University, noted. “It seems fair to say that this promise . . . has been fulfilled beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.” Jerry Muller agreed but with an important caveat. Modern capitalism, he remarked, “has generated a phenomenal leap in human progress, leading to both previously unimaginable increases in material living standards and the unprecedented cultivation of all kinds of human potential.” But this has also been accompanied by growing inequality and insecurity that Muller believes are intrinsic to capitalism and responsible for much of contemporary anti-capitalist sentiment. It would appear that for some of capitalism’s detractors, equality in the midst of poverty is preferable to inequality in the midst of economic growth.5 Since the nineteenth century, critics of capitalism and industrialization have been more concerned with their social and aesthetic impact than with its economic results. They have argued that capitalism destroyed the handicraft trades and the small shopkeeping class, concentrated the ownership of productive property into fewer and fewer hands, and increased economic exploitation and inequality. Rare is the critic of capitalism who has provided realistic alternatives to capitalism for achieving economic growth, or to acknowledge that economic exploitation in the countryside could be even worse than that in factory towns or commercial centers or that rural hovels could be as unsightly as urban slums. The massive movement of population from the rural areas to the cities and factories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries indicates that tens of millions of people believed that industrialization and capitalism offered greater opportunities for economic and social betterment. This would include the millions of 5

Jerry Z. Muller, “Capitalism and Inequality: What the Right and Left Get Wrong,” Foreign Affairs 92 (March–April 2013), 30-31, 48.

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East European Jews who migrated from the countryside to city and from Europe to the Western Hemisphere. Capitalism’s critics also have an exaggerated confidence in the ability of government planning in alleviating the admitted imperfections of capitalism, and they have underestimated the potential dangers of centralized government. Recent history has shown that the greatest of all exploiters to be government, as evidenced by the examples of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, communist China, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Individual freedoms, by contrast, are more likely to be found in places such as Western Europe and North America where there are fewer limitations on economic enterprise. The relevant dichotomy in analyzing the history of capitalism is not between advanced commercial and industrial capitalist economies on the one hand and less advanced non-capitalist economies on the other. Commerce and industry are features of all modern economies, whether organized along capitalist lines or not. The relevant dichotomy is between those economies organized on the basis of the free market and economic individualism and those governed by interventionist and collectivist principles. “Capitalism” should not be used as a catch-all term for commerce, industrialization, enterprise, and technology. Nor should it be used as a synonym for greed, economic chicanery, and exploitation. The fact that “capitalism” has been so used indicates the extent to which American academic discourse has been infected by collectivist assumptions.

C h a p t e r 17

The Absent American Jewish Business Mogul When the twenty-three Jewish refugees from Brazil arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654 they met a hostile reception from Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of the Dutch colony. Stuyvesant was a devout Calvinist and had no love for Jews. The refugees, he informed the Dutch West India Company, would engage in “their customary usury and deceitful trading with Christians” and would undermine the Christian character of the colony. Not only were they “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ,” but their poverty would burden the colony with their upkeep. Stuyvesant requested permission from the company to eject the interlopers. The Jewish refugees sent their own message to Amsterdam. Addressed to the Jews of the city, it requested they intervene on the settler’s behalf, and they did so. Their petition to the company emphasized the economic benefits which would result from allowing the commercially adept refugees to remain, at a time when Holland and the Dutch West Indies Company were competing in the New World with the trading companies and colonies of Spain, Britain, France, and Portugal. The petition also noted that “many of the Jewish nation are principal shareholders in the Company” who wished the Jews to remain in New Amsterdam. These arguments influenced the company’s directors, and in 1654 they instructed Stuyvesant to allow the Jews to “travel and trade and live and remain there.” Thus from the very beginning of American Jewish history the role of wealthy Jewish businessmen was significant. In America profits trumped religious piety, and Jews, a commercial people par excellence, were not excluded from its many opportunities. American Jewish mythology would have us believe that Jews migrated to America mainly to escape racial and religious persecution, but they actually migrated largely for the same reason that Gentiles did, for economic and social advancement. European rabbis warned their flocks against immigrating to America, a supposedly impure land where they might find economic rewards but only at the expense of their souls. These warnings were largely ignored. Jews

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grasped the commercial opportunities offered by a free economy, and their economic and social mobility has been one of the great success stories of American history. The mobility of Jews through entrepreneurship was extensive and unexpected, and it occurred despite the lack of access to normal sources of credit and without the familial and social ties that were so helpful to their Gentile competitors. So rapid has been the Jewish economic ascent that a second-generation Jewish garment worker was rare, and Jewish participation in the labor union movement, except for unions of teachers and other white-collar workers, was a one-generation phenomenon. This affinity for business has resulted in the rapid accumulation of wealth. Over a quarter of the names on the Forbes magazine annual list of America’s four hundred richest individuals are Jewish businessmen and women, even though Jews are only about two percent of the general population. Since the Forbes list began in 1982, seven Rockefellers and four Mellons have been listed, but so have fourteen Pritzkers and seven Goldmans along with five Lerners, three Levines, and four Tisches. The significance of this over-representation has not been fully appreciated or even recognized by Jews or Gentiles. Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan’s All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make—and Spend Their Fortunes (2007) tells their readers where America’s super-rich went to college, whether they ever slept in the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, how many spent time in prison, what charities they support, and how many wives (or husbands) they have had. But nowhere is there mention of the ethnic composition of the list. Jews would prefer that Jewish economic success not be advertised on the principle that the nail that sticks out receives the hammer’s blow. Gentiles, for their part, are largely ignorant of Jewish financial success, or, if they are aware of it, the reasons for it. A good example of this is The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy (1996), a book written by two professors from a Georgia state college. The book attempts to explain why some people become rich and others don’t. One factor it emphasizes is ethnicity, and it ranks various ethnic groups on the basis of how many millionaires they have produced. Jews are not one of the ethnic groups listed, the authors evidently believing that Jews comprise a religious and not an ethnic group. The Millionaire Next Door notes that Hungarian-Americans have been particularly notable in accumulating wealth. In fact, most of these Hungarian-Americans, such as the financier George Soros, are actually Jews. There is hardly a sector of the American economy without a major Jewish presence, even in fields such as insurance, commercial banking, automobile

Chapter 17. The Absent American Jewish Business Mogu

manufacturing, and telecommunication which previously did not welcome Jews. Julius Rosenwald, Abraham Lincoln Filene, and Louis Bamberger pioneered the revolution in mass merchandising which occurred in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 1948 Eugene Ferkauf and Joe Zwillenberg, the founders of the low-cost department chain E. J. Korvette, were partially responsible for the demise of state fair-trade laws which had limited retail discounting by empowering manufacturers to set prices. In 1966, Ferkauf lost control of his company and spent much of the next four and a half decades giving money away, particularly to Yeshiva University. In the twentieth century, Jews have established other retail empires such as Joseph A. Bank, Chico’s, Duane Reade, Dunkin’ Donuts, Family Dollar Stores, Federated Stores, Food Fair, The Gap, Giant Food, Home Depot, The Limited, Petrie Stores, Neiman Marcus, Pathmark, Stein Mart, Starbucks, Sunglass Hut, and Zales. American Jews also founded companies involved in airline leasing (International Lease Finance Corp.), alcoholic beverages (Rheingold and I. W. Harper), automobiles (Checker), book and magazine publishing (Bantam Books, Random House, and Triangle Publications), cameras (Polaroid), cigarettes and cigarette lighters (Philip Morris and Ronson), cosmetics (Max Factor, Estée Lauder, Revlon, and Helena Rubinstein), credit cards (MBNA), cruise lines (Carnival), diet products (SlimFast), food (Sara Lee), home construction (Lennar, Levitt, LeFrak, and Toll Brothers), gambling casinos (Las Vegas Sands and Wynn Resorts), glass (Guardian Industries), investment banking (Goldman Sachs), luggage (Samsonite), luxury goods (Michael Kors), mining (lvanhoe Mines), movies (DreamWorks Studio, MGM, Miramax Films, and Warner Brothers), paper (International Paper and Crown Zellerbach), petroleum (Amoco, Hess, Kaiser-Francis Oil, and Samson Resources), pharmaceuticals (Ivax), real estate (Related Companies, Lerner Enterprises, and First Allied), steel (Inland Steel), toys (Mattel and Hasbro), and watches (Movado and Bulova). Probably the most fruitful venue for Jewish financial success has been real estate, and virtually every major American city has Jewish real estate moguls. American Jews also established major businesses involved in the importing of sugar and fruit (International Fruit and Kempner), catalogue merchandising (Spiegel’s), television and radio (Bloomberg News, Radio Corporation of America, and Viacom), college counseling (Stanley Kaplan), fashion (Polo, Ralph Lauren, and Timberland), and hotels (Hyatt and Loews). Billionaires B. Gerald Cantor, Steven Cohen, Carl Icahn, Bruce Kovner, Edward Lampert, Michael Milken, John Paulson, Ira Rennert, David Rubenstein, Stephen Schwarzman, James Simons, George Soros, David Tepper and Bruce Wasserstein,

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the brother of the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, made their fortunes in the new world of hedge funds, venture capital, and leveraged buyouts. Probably the most unique Jewish contribution to American business was Murder Incorporated, a murder-for-hire gang of Jewish thugs during the 1930s. Other Jews such as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Longy Zwillman helped transform American crime into a business. American Jews have been particularly important in the recent revolution in communication technology. While an undergraduate at the University of Texas, Michael Dell created a business that became the world’s leading manufacturer of home computers. The Roberts family of Philadelphia established Comcast; Andrew Grove was one of the three founders of Intel; Mark Cuban was a cofounder of Broadcast.com; Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google; Mark Pincus founded Zynga; Larry Ellison created Oracle; and Mark Zuckerberg established Facebook. Every year dozens of newly minted Jewish millionaires, and even billionaires, are being created by the dot.com revolution. Especially notable in the history of the American Jewish mogul has been the presence of women. On a per capita basis there have been more Jewish female moguls than that of any other ethnic group. In cosmetics there were Estée Lauder and Helena Rubinstein; in catalogue merchandising Lillian Vernon; in high tech, Sandra Lerner, a co-founder of Cisco Systems; in dieting, Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers; in mass merchandising, Mary Ann Magnin of I. Magnin and Lena Bryant of Lane Bryant; in toys, Ruth Handler of Mattel, the largest toy company in the world; and in women’s clothing, Ida Rosenthal of Maidenform. Jewish women have also carved out careers as financial gurus and Wall Street executives. They include Suze Orman, Sylvia Porter, and Muriel Siebert. The significance of the American Jewish business mogul, however, has transcended the mere making of goods and money. They have been important sources of funds for various social causes, political campaigns, and philanthropic institutions. There is hardly a major American city without a museum, concert hall, school, or medical institution not bearing the name of a Jewish benefactor. In Washington, DC, there is the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden along the National Mall; in Miami there is the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts; in Los Angeles there is the Museum of Contemporary Art founded by Eli Broad; and in New York City there is Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. The moguls have been particularly generous in funding medical institutions. David Geffen gave two hundred million dollars to the UCLA School of Medicine; the financier Sandy Weill and his wife, Joan, gave two hundred million dollars

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to the Cornell University medical complex in New York City; and Mortimer Zuckerman donated the same amount to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital in New York City. Eli Broad gave two hundred million dollars to fund the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard to study biomedical research. The estate of Leonard Miller of the Lennar home building empire donated one hundred million dollars to the medical center associated with the University of Miami medical school, as did the Lerner family of Cleveland to the Cleveland Clinic. In North Carolina alone there is the Moses Cone Health Department Systems in Greensboro, Brenner Children’s Hospital in Winston Salem, Levine Children’s Hospital in Charlotte, and the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. Jewish names adorn libraries, athletic centers, dormitories, and classroom buildings at many of America’s leading universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Tulane, George Washington University, and the University of California, just to name a few. A relatively recent phenomenon in the history of American Jewish philanthropy has been the donation of mega-gifts to university schools of business. The business schools at Temple University, New York University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Oklahoma now bear the names of Jewish benefactors. In 2004, the business school at Carnegie Mellon was renamed the David A. Tepper School of Business after Tepper, an alumnus and the founder of Appaloosa Management, a New Jersey hedge fund, gave fifty-five million dollars to the school. A few weeks after Tepper’s gift was announced, the University of Michigan business school disclosed that New York City real estate magnate Stephen M. Ross, an alumnus, had given one hundred million dollars to the school. In attendance at the ceremony in Ann Arbor at which Ross’s gift was formally announced was Ross’s uncle Max Fisher, whose name adorns the business school of Ohio State University. Jewish moguls, of course, have also generously funded Jewish institutions in America and Israel. These include religious institutions as well as hospitals, universities, think tanks, and athletic centers. The gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson, for example, has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel drug treatment centers, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, and Taglit-Birthright Israel. The moguls have also been generous in funding various social causes and political candidates. Walter Annenberg, the publishing magnate, gave away more than two billion dollars during his life, including a half a billion dollars to improve the nation’s public secondary schools. At the time this was the largest single philanthropic donation in history. Annenberg also gave 150 million dollars

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to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for educational television programming. George Soros has given over eight billion dollars to various philanthropic and political causes. He and insurance magnate Peter Lewis contributed nearly fifty million dollars in 2004 in an unsuccessful effort to defeat George W. Bush’s re-election bid. Steven Bing, the movie producer and businessman, chipped in with fourteen million dollars, and Herbert and Marion Sandler, the owners of Golden West Financial Corporation, a major building-and-loan bank in California, gave thirteen million dollars to elect John Kerry. Lewis also has given eight million dollars to the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Sandlers have contributed over thirty million dollars to Human Rights Watch, at least twenty million dollars to the left-leaning Center for American Progress, established Pro-Publica, a center for investigative journalism, with an initial commitment of thirty million dollars, and promised twenty million dollars to a research facility at the University of California San Francisco medical center to study parasitic diseases. Since the nineteenth century there has hardly been a liberal cause that has not depended in large part on wealthy Jewish businessmen and women. Jews helped fund major liberal advocacy publications such as the Nation and the New Republic and have been generous contributors to both political parties, but particularly to the Democratic Party. Jewish moguls have also contributed generously to conservative causes. Bruce Kovner has funded right-wing think tanks, while Sheldon Adelson contributed twenty million dollars to the Newt Gingrich campaign for the presidency and promised to spend at least one hundred million dollars to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. The status of Jewish entrepreneurs is indicated by the fact that many have garnered the most significant trophy in contemporary American life—ownership of professional sports teams, especially ownership of franchises in the National Football League. In the 2005 Super Bowl, both teams—the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles—were owned by Jews. (Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, had been selected by a Boston magazine in 2004 as Boston’s most important resident. His wife, a member of a wealthy Jewish business family from Worcester, Massachusetts, was a significant philanthropist in her own right.) In 2005, Jews also owned National Football League teams in Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, and Oakland, as well as owning many teams in major league baseball, basketball, and hockey. One would think that Jewish historians would have been interested in the American Jewish business mogul, but this has not been the case. There is not one scholarly volume on the topic, and Gerald Krefetz’s popular survey, Jews and Money: The Myths and the Reality (1982), is more myth than reality.

Chapter 17. The Absent American Jewish Business Mogu

Despite the recent dramatic increase in wealth of individual American Jews, things have not changed much from the 1980s when the eminent historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz complained about the disregard of entrepreneurial history by historians of American Jewry. “As far as Jewish entrepreneurial history is concerned,” she noted, “the available materials are largely anecdotal. Even biographies are in short supply.” She believed that a leftist outlook of the historians was responsible for this neglect, and she hoped that the book she was then researching would challenge this denigration of trade and commerce. Is it not strange, she asked, that while the largest segment of the American population, including Jews, were employed in the services industries, “we are still captive to Marxist notions about the unproductivity of the middleman.” She wished to demonstrate how Jewish entrepreneurs “served the American economy” and to “restore to the merchant and the businessman the recognition of their social usefulness and the moral dignity of which they were stripped first by the French Enlightenment, then by the German Marxists, and finally by the East European revolutionaries.” Except for a few volumes such as Marni Davis’s book, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (2012), the mogul has been notably absent from American Jewish historiography. Davis argued that “Jewish entrepreneurial history matters. Jews’ relationships to commercial capitalism, to particular commodities, to one another within commodity chains (even illicit ones), and to their customers and competitors profoundly shaped their experiences, both as members of a community endeavoring to define Jewish identity in their new setting, and as immigrants and outsiders striving to become more secure in their American identities.” In such iconic works as Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (1976) Jewish immigrants are portrayed not as seekers of material riches and social mobility but as poverty-stricken workers seeking to transform America into a socialist utopia. Howe’s description of David Dubinsky, the head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, is typical. Dubinsky, Howe wrote, remained true to the Yiddish-speaking socialist environment of his formative years. “He stemmed . . . from the vigorous folk who brought flesh, blood, noise, and strength to Jewish life.” But Howe did not describe the Jewish businessman (and women) in such a lofty manner. In his book’s conclusion, Howe told his Jewish readers that they should be grateful to be the descendants of “those self-educated workers, those sustaining women, those almost-forgotten writers and speakers devoted to excitements of controversy and thought.” Howe

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also slighted those aspects of the American Jewish past, such as Judaism and Zionism, which did not fit into his political perspective. He also ignored the passionate quest of Jewish immigrants for economic betterment through business. Moses Rischin’s The Promised City: New York Jews, 1870-1914 (1962) noted that in the city’s predominately Jewish Lower East Side there were labor union organizers, socialist politicians, and left-wing Yiddish writers. But the neighborhood also had “a fervent commercial life infused with a vitality that made it something more than a mass of tenements.” If, as Howe wrote, American Jews should remember with affection their ancestors’ “sense of plebian fraternity,” should they not also remember with gratitude their ancestors’ entrepreneurial drives which enabled them and their descendants to escape the slums and become part of the American economic and social mainstream? Historians of American Jewry have written numerous biographies of leftwing Jews such as Sidney Hillman, Emma Goldman, Morris Hillquit, Abraham Cahan, and David Dubinsky, but there are few serious biographies of the Jewish mogul. There is, for example, no biography of Louis Bamberger, the great Jewish merchant prince of Newark, New Jersey who, along with his brother-in-law, Felix Fuld, funded the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, although Linda Forgosh of the New Jersey Historical Society of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ is writing one. And when Jewish moguls have been the subjects of books, as in Christopher Orden’s Legacy: A Biography of Moses and Walter Annenberg (1999), they tend to be journalistic. This historiographical lacuna has left unanswered such questions as why Jews gravitated to certain fields of enterprise and not to others, why they succeeded, what they did with their wealth, and what contributions they made to their industry and to the American Jewish community. Even Hasia R. Diner’s otherwise fine survey of American Jewish history, The Jews of the United States, published in 2004 during the celebration of the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement on mainland America, ignored the Jewish business titan. She noted, for example, that between the two world wars American Jews “achieved wide recognition as articulators of American culture. They made movies, composed music, and wrote plays accepted by the public as exemplars of American popular culture.” But except for a sentence on the Hollywood Jewish moguls, the book does not mention any Jews who during these years founded successful businesses or any pre-World War I or post-World War II Jewish entrepreneurs. The only reference to A. L. Filene, the founder of the Boston department store and its famous bargain basement, concerns his role in settling

Chapter 17. The Absent American Jewish Business Mogu

the 1909 strike of New York City garment workers. The book twice mentions the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin but says nothing about the Handler family, the founders of the Mattel toy company and its Barbie doll, America’s most popular doll. The Jews of the United States refers to Lucy Stone, the nineteenth-century advocate of women’s rights, Hannah and Abraham Stone, allies of Margaret Sanger in the birth control movement during the interwar years, and an otherwise obscure Washington, DC rabbi named Abram Stone. But it does not discuss the Stone family of Cleveland, which founded the American Greeting Card Company, America’s second largest greeting card company, and provided the funds for the Stone Chumash containing the weekly readings from the Torah which is used in most American Orthodox synagogues. While Diner’s book brings up Caroline Klein Simon, a neighborhood lawyer who edited the magazine Birth Control Review in 1939 and 1940, it does not discuss the Simon family of Indianapolis, which controls the nation’s largest shopping mall empire and owns the Indiana Pacers basketball team in the National Basketball Association. The book refers in one place to Stern College, the women’s undergraduate college of Yeshiva University, but not to Max Stern, who founded Hartz Mountain Products and endowed the school, or to his son, Leonard Stem, a billionaire real estate magnate for whom the business school of New York University is named. And while The Jews of the United States discusses the social role of the Catskill resorts, the “Jewish Alps,” it overlooks their economic significance and ignores the contributions of the Catskill resort entrepreneurs, such as Jennie Grossinger and the Parker family of the Concord Hotel. Other one-volume histories of America’s Jews have also overlooked the moguls. The chapter in Rufus Learsi’s The Jews in America: A History (1954) on the interwar years is titled “Rage of the Heathen” and focuses on the antisemitism of Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan, and Father Charles E. Coughlin. But it omits any mention of the rapid economic upward mobility of America’s Jews during these two decades or of the businesses they established. Arthur Hertzberg’s The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History (1989) examines I. F. Stone, the radical journalist, but not the Stone family of Cleveland. Howard M. Sachar’s lengthy A History of the Jews in America (1992) does discuss briefly the Jewish mogul but ignores its significance to American Jewish history. Thus it mentions the Stern family of New Orleans, who helped finance the civil rights movement and other liberal causes, but not Max Stern. Henry L. Feingold’s Zion in America: The Jewish Experience from Colonial Times to the Present (1974) mentions the New York City political figure Arthur Levitt, but not the Levitt family

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that pioneered the mass building of homes and gave their name to towns in New York and New Jersey. Not surprisingly, “business” is not found in the indexes of the Diner, Learsi, Hertzberg, Sachar, and Feingold volumes. They prefer, rather, to dwell on more peripheral and transient aspects of American Jewish history, such as the Jewish Defense League, Christian efforts to evangelize the Jews, and Jewish anarchists of the early twentieth century. The same bias is exhibited in the sixteen-volume Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971-72), a major source for all things Jewish. The encyclopedia devotes 26 pages to Jews and socialism and has lengthy articles on Jews in sports and the arts. It has an article on Jews and banking but not one on business or economics even though successful Jewish businessmen and women were more numerous and important than Jewish athletes, musicians, and painters. Nor does the encyclopedia have an article on Jews and capitalism, although it does have a two and a half page article on capital punishment. Wherever Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled in large numbers in the twentieth century—the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France, Latin America, Australia, and South Africa—there emerged successful business entrepreneurs. This would appear to be a phenomenon worthy of attention from historians since it speaks to the culture and values which the immigrants brought with them and then conveyed to their children, as well as to the economic and social systems of the host countries which enabled them to prosper. The Jewish culture of Central and Eastern Europe valued thriftiness, the deferral of gratification, risk-taking, sobriety, a long-term perspective, economic and social mobility, and commerce. In addition, Jewish immigrants had a greater familiarity with cities and factories than did other immigrant groups. The successful Jewish entrepreneur simply does not fit into the classic narrative of twentieth-century American Jewish history, which emphasizes antisemitism, Jewish involvement in left-wing politics, and the role of labor unions, public higher education, and liberal government programs in facilitating Jewish social and economic mobility. This narrative is highly moralistic and replete with such terms as “bosses,” “sweat shops,” and “slum lords.” It emphasizes such things as the Triangle Shirt Waist fire, Jewish garment workers and their leftwing garment unions, the socialist Forward daily newspaper on whose masthead were the words “workers of the world unite,” and the Jewish affinity for the New Deal and the New Left. Black-Jewish relations loom large in the narrative because of the belief that these two historically oppressed groups are natural allies. The heroes of this narrative are labor organizers, liberal politicians, feminists, and civil rights marchers.

Chapter 17. The Absent American Jewish Business Mogu

This narrative reflects the leftist orientation of the historians themselves. They, as well as other elements within the American Jewish intelligentsia, have viewed Jews as victims rather than victors, and they perceive business as part of a conservative establishment that has been traditionally hostile to the interests of Jews. By definition, therefore, the Jewish mogul cannot be central to this narrative. Thus The Jews of the United States does not contain a photograph of a successful modern Jewish businessman (or woman), but it does have photos of a Workmen’s Circle school, a left-wing Jewish summer camp, an FBI poster asking for information in the disappearance of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in Mississippi in 1964, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching alongside Martin Luther King. Jr. in Alabama in 1965, and a member of Jews for Racial Justice picketing the South African embassy in Washington. These are, of course, important concerns, but so also is the American Jewish mogul. The American Jewish business mogul is an orphan in American Jewish literature as well. There are many novels and plays written by Jews dealing with petty and medium-sized Jewish businessmen and women. These include the garment manufacturers in Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937), the grocer in Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant (1957), and the glove manufacturer in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997). But the major theme of these works is not business or the Jew as a small-time entrepreneur. Rather, business serves as a backdrop for examining other topics, including acculturation, family relations, and capitalism. And when the Jewish entrepreneur is discussed, as in such works as Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and Meredith Tax’s Rivington Street (1982) and Union Square (1988), he is often caricatured. This antagonistic stance toward business is particularly evident in the writings of major American Jewish playwrights. “Much of Jewish dramaturgy,” wrote Stephen J. Whitfield, a leading authority on American Jewish culture, “takes an adversarial stance toward the national ethos, and when speaking of it we really mean business.” Clifford Odets’s classic Awake and Sing! (1935) features Uncle Morty, a clothing manufacturer, who has a single-minded devotion to business and promises to kick striking workers “in the kishkas.” Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) is an iconic negative portrait of salesmanship and economic striving. David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), with its injunction to “always be closing,” is arguably the most cynical view of the real estate business in American literature. Mamet worked for a year in a real estate office in suburban Chicago and came away with a loathing for an industry in which those who closed received Cadillacs and those who didn’t were fired. Jerry Sterner’s Other

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People’s Money (1989) is the counterpart in the world of hostile takeovers to Glengarry Glen Ross. Sterner wrote the play while head of a real estate firm involved in syndicating partnerships, and it opened at a time when several prominent Jews had recently been implicated in Wall Street insider trading scams. Predatory capitalism provides the context for the play, and its major character is a pushy and greedy operator named Larry “the Liquidator” Garfinkle. Sterner emphasized the Jewishness of his protagonist, who uses words such as “bubkes” and “putz.” When Other People’s Money appeared on film two years later, Larry Garfinkle had been transformed into Larry Garfield, played by the Italian-American actor Danny DeVito. Nowhere in the corpus of American Jewish fiction are there works about Jewish business moguls comparable, say, to the description of acculturation by Anzia Yezierska, Abraham Cahan, Daniel Fuchs, and Meyer Levin; to the proletarian writings of Michael Gold and Samuel Ornitz; to the story of Hasidim in America by Robert Cohen and Chaim Potok; to the examination of the tension between secular feminism and Orthodoxy in the writings of Pearl Abraham and Rebecca Goldstein; to the picture of adolescence and the Jewish family of Grace Paley and Henry Roth; to the politically charged messages of Tony Kushner, Arthur Miller, and Clifford Odets; to Cynthia Ozick’s concern with Jewishness and Judaism; to the portrayal of Holocaust memory in the work of Melvin Bukiet, Thane Rosenbaum, Dani Shapiro, Art Spiegelman, and Edward Lewis Wallant; to the depiction of Black-Jewish relations by Gerald Green and Paul Hond; to the emphasis on suffering by Bernard Malamud; to Philip Roth’s exploration of American-Jewish identity; to the discussion of the impact of Israel on American Jews by Allegra Goodman, Tova Reich, and Anne Roiphe; to the dramatization of intermarriage by Myron Kaufmann and Neal Oxenhandler; and to Saul Bellow’s picture of the Jew as the quintessential marginal and alienated figure. Gentile American writers, by contrast, have not neglected the American Jewish mogul. One finds him in the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Robert Herrick, Jack London, Frank Norris, David Graham Phillips, Henry Adams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, and in a host of nineteenth-century dime novelists, where he is generally portrayed negatively. None of the standard surveys of American Jewish literature, including Allen Guttmann’s The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (1971), Sanford Pinsker’s Jewish American Fiction, 1917-1987 (1992), and Andrew Furman’s Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the Exiled (2000), discuss literary works on Jews and business or even mention the topic in their indexes. In his Jewish American Literature

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Since 1945: An Introduction (1999), Stephen Wade argued that a key impulse of American Jewish writers has been “a need to depict the earthy, direct physicality of Jewish life and thought.” But this need did not extend to the ruthless and competitive world of the Jewish mogul, even though Jews have clawed themselves into the loftiest realms of American business. One exception to this, if Canada can be considered part of America, is Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989). Richler, the son of a scrap yard dealer, grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal along St. Urbain Street, a neighborhood which served as the backdrop for his novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), a classic picture of the Jewish hustler. Solomon Gursky Was Here describes the rarefied world of the Gursky clan, an extremely wealthy and powerful Montreal family that controlled much of the country’s liquor production. The novel is roughly based on the Bronfman family, who at one time owned Seagram’s, the world’s largest distillery empire. Another exception might be Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel The Rise of David Levinsky, considered by many to be the most important American Jewish novel. Its protagonist is an immigrant from Lithuania who manages to become a wealthy New York City garment manufacturer. The novel provides a sensitive portrayal of Jewish acculturation in America and an excellent picture of the New York garment industry at the turn of the century. John Higham, the prominent social and intellectual historian, called it “among the best novels of American business.” Isaac Rosenfeld agreed. In his famous 1952 Commentary essay on Cahan, “America, Land of the Sad Millionaire: Abraham Cahan’s Legend Succeeds Horatio Alger’s,” Rosenfeld said that The Rise of David Levinsky was “a remarkable novel” and “an intimate and sophisticated account of American business culture, and it ought to be celebrated as such.” Levinsky’s sadness and emptiness, Higham and Rosenfeld believed, came from his immersion in America’s commercial culture. But the major theme of The Rise of David Levinsky is not the impact of commercial values on its protagonist, but acculturation and Americanization, the same themes Cahan had explored in his earlier work Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896). Business success actually meant very little to Levinsky. He remarks in the book’s opening paragraph that, “Sometimes, when I think of my past in a superficial, casual way, the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and . . . I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being

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precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.” The novel ends with Levinsky, the former yeshiva student, asking whether it had been a mistake to leave the traditional Jewish world of Eastern Europe for the freedom, opportunities, and vanities of America. “No, I am not happy. . . . There are moments when I regret my whole career, when my very success seemed to be a mistake,” he concludes. “I cannot escape from my old self. . . . David, the poor lad, swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher’s Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak-manufacturer.” This lack of interest by American Jewish writers in the Jewish mogul is not because of the absence of source material. American history is replete with colorful and successful Jewish businessmen who, had they been Gentiles, would have been the subjects of novels and plays. They include David Sarnoff, the founder of the National Broadcasting Company, William S. Paley, the creator of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Michael Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg News, who became one of the richest Americans and then mayor of New York City for three terms, and even the infamous Bernie Madoff. The American Jewish writers’ sense of marginality, which they share with Levinsky, perhaps explains why they have shied away from depicting the mogul, a quintessentially American figure. They recognize that the economic successes of American Jews, particularly that of the moguls, challenges the image of the Jew as the classic outsider, and they prefer to dwell on more marginal phenomena such as homosexuality, radical feminism, and dysfunctional families. Thus it is not surprising that the chronicler of the American Jewish economic elite, those Jews who “made it,” is a Gentile, Stephen Birmingham. He wrote Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York (1967), The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite (1974), and “The Rest of Us”: The Rise of America’s East European Jews (1984), popular histories of the German, Sephardic, and East European Jewish economic and social elites in America. In “The Rest of Us,” Birmingham noted that the achievements of “brash and young, ambitious and daring” East European Jewish entrepreneurs “have been accepted by the rest of the population with equanimity and respect, without envy or rancor.” Few Jewish historians would agree. For them, corporations, Wall Street, country clubs, white shoe laws firms, and private clubs were part of a “goyish” world, foreign and even hostile to what they saw as the authentic American Jewish experience. Yiddish writers also found business distasteful, although they were unfamiliar with the world of big business and the moguls. For them business involved

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the petty shopkeeping prevalent in East Europe. The great Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, came from a thicker Jewish culture than did American Jewish writers, and his qualms regarding business went deeper. In his masterful two-volume novel The Yeshiva he emphasized the conflict between the values of traditional Judaism and business. This conflict is personified in the life of the novel’s major character, Tsemakh Atlas, who gives up a career in his wife’s family business to establish a yeshiva in a small town. Atlas views the businessman as materialistic and vulgar, and he yearns rather to cultivate spiritual perfection in himself and his students. At the conclusion of the first volume, another rabbi emphasizes that a yeshiva student who enters business is confronted by many temptations. “Day in and day out he has to give honest weight for a pound of grits; he must not stretch the cloth on the yardstick; and he has to know how to get along with his family, his townsmen, and the village peasants.” Such a person must be on constant alert lest he violate the ethical teachings he learned while young. “These texts have to be open books in his heart from the time he sat studying in a corner of the beth medrash. The light of the Torah and his young yeshiva years has to illumine his path later, when he’s in his store amid village peasants and barrels of herring.” From Atlas’s perspective, a life of commerce is beneath what God requires of a yeshiva student. When one of his students becomes engaged to the daughter of a poor widowed landlady, the other students are not surprised. “Why shouldn’t the match appeal to him? He’s never dreamed of anything better than becoming a businessman, a little shopkeeper.” For them the life of a businessman was degrading since it left little time and energy for the study of the holy books. The character Avraham-Shaye Kosover, who is modeled on Grade’s teacher, the Chazon lsh (Avrohom Y. Karelitz), one of the giants of East European Orthodoxy of the first half of the twentieth century, criticizes such thinking, not because it demeaned the shopkeeper but because it isolated the Torah scholar from those whom he should teach and lead. “Whoever is imbued with the Creator of the Universe also feels His presence when he is in the market place and in the shop. His thoughts are celestial, even though the people around aren’t aware of this— and shouldn’t be,” Kosover declares. “But the way of the Torah is indeed the difficult one of participating with everyone in the affairs of the world while still remaining a recluse in your mind and heart.” The spiritual concerns of Kosover were, however, foreign to most Jewish immigrants. They fervently sought to become true-blue Americans and in the process to achieve economic and social mobility. Business was their avenue of ascent, and they would have agreed with Calvin Coolidge that the business of

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America was business. This had been true from the beginning when the earliest British colonies in North America, such as the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company, were established as private venture joint-stock companies. Today over a half a million new American businesses are founded annually (and the same number of businesses fail), and proportionately this is a higher figure than that of any other country. Entrepreneurship is widely respected in the United States, and individuals such as Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs have been national heroes. American book stores have sections devoted to the establishing and running of businesses, and parents encourage their children from an early age to get a paper route, open a lemonade stand, mow lawns, and babysit. This mentality has spawned a literature of success and get-rich-quick schemes. Here is one of the reasons for the failure of socialism in America. Americans seek not to destroy but to become part of the owning class, and this partially explains why American workers are less critical of their bosses than their counterparts elsewhere. Americans tolerate disparities in income between owners and their employees that are unacceptable in Europe and Asia, and attacks on the rich are considered to be manifestations of an un-American philosophy of class warfare. With such a mindset, it is not surprising that Gentiles admire the successful American Jewish businessman and that he has not generated significant antisemitism. Government in America is also friendlier to business than elsewhere. It is easier to open a business, regulations on business are less onerous, employees work longer hours, and it is less difficult to fire workers. Political and legal efforts to curb business are generally aimed at wayward firms that have committed egregious sins, or to provide greater opportunities for new businesses struggling against economic goliaths. Capitalism and business are part of the national creed, and there is little desire to deprive the successful of the fruits of their labor. Kenneth S. Lynn’s book The Dream of Success: A Study of the Modern American Imagination (1955) shows how central the myth of success was in American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, David Graham Phillips, Frank Norris, and Robert Herrick were not shy about examining the place of the businessman in American culture. “Dreiser asserted with a blunt directness which no other American writer at the turn of the century could match,” Lynn wrote, “that pecuniary and sexual success were the values of American society, that they were his values, too, and that they were therefore worthy of his total attention as a literary artist.” The businessman Frank Cowperwood, the central character in Dreiser’s trilogy of

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The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947), is one of the most famous figures in all of American literature. For H. L. Mencken, Cowperwood was not simply a businessman but a Nietzschean figure, and he said Dreiser’s depiction of him was the “best picture of an immoralist in all modern literature.” The American Jewish community has not as yet produced its own Dreiser. It was a Gentile, the historian David Hollinger, who declared in his 2004 essay in the Jewish Quarterly Review, “Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Rather than Avoided or Mystified,” that the time had come for Jewish intellectual and economic achievements in America to be studied and not ignored. This is not to say that there is no scholarship by Jews on Jewish wealth and the American Jewish mogul. But this has been done largely by social scientists (sociologists and economists) rather than by humanists (historians and literary specialists). A good example of the former is Paul Burstein’s 2007 essay “Jewish Educational and Economic Success in the United States: A Search for Explanations” in the journal Sociological Perspectives. Based on extensive reading in the sociology of American religion and ethnicity and in economic theories of human and social capital, the essay sought to explain why Jews were “much more successful educationally and economically than other ethnic, racial, and religious groups in the United States. ” Burstein concluded that while the fact of Jewish success is clear, the reasons for it remain cloudy. This was, he noted, partially due to the reluctance of Jewish social scientists to publicize something that could provoke antisemitism. Another reason might be that none of the theories explaining the sources of Jewish success were deeply grounded in American Jewish history. Why should American Jews be the only American ethnic group that feels defensive regarding the economic success of its members? And has the time come for American Jews to confront their history honestly and without preconceptions? The study of American Jewish history will have come of age when historians take seriously the symbiotic relationship between Jews and American capitalism and no longer ignore or downplay the economic success of America’s Jews and the significance of the American Jewish mogul.

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From Participant to Owner: The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports In the 2008 Superbowl, the US football championship and the greatest of all American sports events, there were no Jews on the squads of the two competing teams—yet both teams, the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots, were owned by Jews. Two years earlier, the same phenomenon had occurred in the National Basketball Association (NBA) semi-finals. The owners of three of the four teams—the Dallas Mavericks, the Detroit Pistons, and the Miami Heat—were Jews, and yet there was not one Jew playing for any of the teams. In fact, the number of Jews who played in the NBA that season did not outnumber David Stern, the association’s Jewish commissioner. Today there are more Jews owning teams in major league baseball, the National Football League (NFL), the National Hockey League (NHL), and the NBA than there are Jews on the rosters of teams in these leagues. There are many Jewish sports agents, but they would starve if they had to rely on Jewish clients. As one joke puts it: “A bar mitzvah is when a Jewish boy realizes he’s more likely to own a ball club than to play on it!” If any individual is a logical candidate for affirmative action, it is the American Jewish professional athlete. The phenomenon is apparent across the spectrum of U.S. sports. The only male Jewish golfer of note during the past quarter of a century has been Corey Pavin, who once won the U.S. Open—as it happens, though, Pavin had previously converted to Christianity. There is not one Jew today ranked among the top fifty American men golfers. The same is true of tennis. Barely fifteen years ago, there were three Jews who were ranked among the top American professional tennis players: Jay Berger, Brad Gilbert, and Aaron Krickstein. Today there are none, and none are on the horizon. There has also been a shortage

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of female Jewish professional athletes. With one exception, no American Jewish woman has won a major tennis or golf tournament in decades. (On April 1, 2007, eighteen-year-old Morgan Pressel won the Kraft Nabisco Championship, one of the four Ladies Professional Golf Association major tournaments. Pressel, just nine months out of high school, was the youngest winner ever of an LPGA major. She is Aaron Krickstein’s niece.) Wherever one looks among American professional atheletes, Jews, by and large, are absent, and there is little likelihood that this will change. No American Jew was chosen in the 2006 draft conducted by the NBA, although two Israeli Jews were selected. No American Jewish boxer has won a title in several decades, and not one is among the top contenders in any weight division. There are only a handful of Jews playing in the National Football League, and it has been at least a decade since a Jew was selected as all-pro or participated in the post-season Pro Bowl. It has also been several decades since a Jew was an All-American in either football or basketball. The decline in the number of professional Jewish athletes has been particularly noticeable in baseball, the so-called “national pastime.”1 Jacques Barzun, the prominent Columbia University historian of European culture, once remarked that “to know the heart and mind of America one must learn baseball.” The historian Peter Levine noted that, for young Jews, baseball both provided entry “to an American childhood and confirmed their American identities.”2 The belief that knowledge of America’s game could facilitate entry into the American cultural mainstream perhaps explains why so many Jewish novelists have written about baseball. In his 1896 novella, Yekl, Abraham Cahan has his protagonist, Jake, instruct an immigrant named Bernstein on how to become “an American feller, a Yankee”—for one thing, he tells him, “you must know how to peetch.” Bernard Malamud, who said that he was a baseball fan “from the time I was a kid and went to Ebbets Field whenever I could,” wrote his first novel, The Natural (1952), about baseball, using the game as a backdrop for an exploration of the 1 In 2003, the American Jewish Historical Society offered for sale a set of cards featuring every major league Jewish baseball player from the 1870s to 2003. There were a total of 142 cards, a paltry figure when compared to the total number of players during those years. When the list was updated in 2006, an advertisement for the cards noted that thirteen Jews had played in the 2005 season. A total of thirteen was not something to brag about; it amounted to about one percent of players in the major leagues that year. Furthermore, most of the thirteen were fringe players, and not one of them had an outstanding season. 2

Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (New York, 1992), 98.

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contemporary relevance of medieval mythology. Other American Jewish novelists who have written about baseball include Philip Roth (The Great American Novel, 1973), Mark Harris (The Southpaw, 1953, and Bang the Drum Slowly, 1956); Eliot Asinof (Men on Spikes, 1954); Chaim Potok (The Chosen, 1967); Joseph Heller (Good as Gold, 1979); and Eric Rolfe Greenberg (The Celebrant, 1983). There now are probably more Jews writing about baseball than playing in the major leagues. Stephen J. Whitfield has noted that, while Jews have written some of the most important books on baseball, most notably Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer (1971), they themselves have left “professional competition to the goys of summer.”3 In the meantime, even those American Jews whom one would least expect to be interested in baseball have had a love affair with the national pastime. Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff, an American-born teacher at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, once gave a eulogy (hesped) for Joe DiMaggio, the great centerfielder for the New York Yankees.4 And the Jewish Press, a Brooklyn weekly popular among the right-wing Orthodox community, published an article lamenting “the vanishing Jewish baseball player” that asked: “Where have you gone, latterday versions of Harry Danning, Sid Gordon, Hank Greenberg, Al Rosen, and Sandy Koufax?” The question must have startled many readers who were more accustomed to reading hagiographic portraits of Orthodox leaders and rabbinic decrees on recondite topics.5 In the 1950s, the American and National League had eight teams each, and each team had a roster of twenty-five players. Today there are thirty such teams, and yet there has been a decline in the number of Jews making it to the major leagues. During the 1950s, twenty-one Jews played in the major leagues. Eighteen played in the 1960s, seventeen in the 1970s, and thirteen in the 1980s,

3

Cahan and Malamud are both quoted in Stephen Whitfield, “In the Big Inning,” in his Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden, 1984), 172-79; on Jews and baseball, see also Eric Solomon, “Jews and Baseball: A Cultural Love Story,” in Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture, ed. George Eisen and David K. Wiggens (Westport, 1994), 75-101; and Allen Guttman, “Out of the Ghetto and into the Field: Jewish Writers and the Theme of Sport,” American Jewish History 74 (March 1985): 274-86. For the full story of the Jewish involvement in baseball during its early years, see Burton A. Boxerman and Benita W. Boxerman, Jews and Baseball: Entering the American Mainstream, 18711948 ( Jefferson, 2006).

4

For the eulogy, which is part of a lengthy Torah lecture, see http:/tinyurl.com/2pa7sr (part 1) and https://tinyurl.com/y6pa7d52 (part 2). Rakeffet-Rothkoff was a student of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

5

Jason Maoz, “The Vanishing Jewish Baseball Player,” Jewish Press, April 6, 2006.

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and this number has not appreciably changed.6 In fact, the number of Hispanics on many major league teams outnumber the Jews playing on all the teams combined.7 So desperate are Jewish baseball fans for ethnic heroes that in 2006 a group decided to honor Mike Jacobs, the first baseman for the Florida Marlins—only to discover that he wasn’t Jewish. The contemporary status of the professional Jewish baseball player is symbolized by the sad saga of Adam Greenberg of the Chicago Cubs. Greenberg’s first, and until now only, appearance in a major league game was on July 9, 2005. He was beaned in the ninth inning by the first pitch thrown to him by Florida Marlins pitcher Valerio de los Santos. Greenberg was put on the disabled list and was then sent back to the minor leagues. The next season he was released from the Cubs’s lower minor league affiliate and was signed by the Los Angeles Dodgers, who then sent him to their minor league affiliate, the Jacksonville Suns. Unless he returns to the major leagues, Greenberg will have a perfect major league on-base percentage, but no batting or fielding percentage. But Greenberg, in contrast to most professional baseball players, did graduate from college. The career of a third Greenberg can be added to that of Hank and Adam. The paternal grandfather of Shawn Green, an outfielder for the New York Mets, had shortened the family name from Greenberg to Green “for business reasons.” His grandson was a high school baseball phenomenon and an excellent student at Tustin High School in southern California, good enough to rank third in his high school class and to be admitted to Stanford University. “If Shawn doesn’t make the majors,” his mother said at the time, “he’ll just become a doctor.”8 Green was the first-round pick of the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1991 amateur draft and received a 750,000 dollar signing bonus—a high figure for those days. Four years later, he was in the Blue Jays starting line-up. His breakout season was 1998, when he hit forty-two home runs and had 123 runs batted in (RBIs). In 2001, his best year, he hit forty-two home runs and had 125 RBIs. Thirty-five years after the retirement of Sandy Koufax, another Jewish baseball superstar had seemingly arrived. There was even talk in Jewish newspapers and over the

6

Steven A. Riess, ed., Sports and the American Jews (Syracuse, 1998), 53.

7 In view of the rapid increase in the number of baseball players from South America and the Caribbean, some have suggested that the real story is not the vanishing Jewish ballplayer but the vanishing American player. 8 Quoted in Michael Bamberger, online at shawngreen.net/articles/promisedland.html (3).

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Internet that Green was destined to join Koufax and Hank Greenberg in the Baseball Hall of Fame. One enthusiast composed a ditty in his honor: Shawn Green’s not Irish. He is in fact a Jew. The best Judeo batsman Since that awesome Rod Carew!9

Green had grown up in a secular household and was unfamiliar with Jewish religious practices. While playing in Toronto, however, he became interested in things Jewish and, recognizing the potential benefits of being more visible as a Jew, began attending synagogue services. When the Blue Jays, reluctant to pay Green his market value, decided to trade him after the 1999 season, Green insisted that it be to a city with a large Jewish population. In November 1999, he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers. He then signed an eighty-four million dollar, six-year contract, at that time the fourth-largest contract in baseball history. While in Los Angeles, Green continued the tradition started by Hank Greenberg and observed by Sandy Koufax and other Jewish players, and refused to play on Yom Kippur. He had not suddenly become a devout Jew—in fact, he had a sui generis approach to the concept of separation of church and plate. In 2004, for instance, he played on Yom Kippur night but did not play the next day. “I just had to do what I feel is right and what’s most consistent with my beliefs,” Green explained. “Everyone has different ways of expressing their beliefs. For me as a Jewish person and a teammate, I feel that this is the right decision for me.” (It must also have felt right because the Dodgers were in a tight pennant race and playing an important series against the San Francisco Giants.) In any event, after the season, the Dodgers traded Green and his contract to the Arizona Diamondbacks.10 In August 2006, the Diamondbacks traded Green to the New York Mets. This was a match made in heaven. A Jewish player intent on capitalizing on his Jewishness and eager to participate in a World Series was now to play in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world and for a team owned by a Jew. Jewish fans were ecstatic. One fan waved a sign saying “Shalom Shawn” 9

Rod Carew, star hitter of the Minnesota Twins in the 1960s and 1970s, was not a Jew. He married a Jew from the Twin Cities and raised his children as Jews, but he never converted.

10 Seth Swirsky, “Friday Night Game Earns Green a Strike,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Oct. 1 2004; Steve Springer and Jason Reid, “Dodger Star Will Observe, and Play on, Yom Kippur,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2004.

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when Green appeared for the first time in a Mets uniform. By 2006, however, there was no more talk about Green and the Hall of Fame. His home run and RBI production had tailed off over the past five seasons, and his best years appeared to be behind him. He was recognized as a good, but certainly not a great player. Instead, attention now focused on the probability that sometime during the 2007 season he would overtake Hank Greenberg as the Jewish player with the most home runs. As of the time of writing, it seems likely that when Green retires his total number of homers will be about one-half of the record set by Hank Aaron.11 But when it comes to athletic accomplishments, Jewish fans can’t afford to be choosy.12 As the number of Jewish athletes in professional hockey, basketball, and football has declined during the past half century, the number of teams in these sports has more than tripled, the size of their rosters has increased, and the salaries of the players have skyrocketed, with leading baseball, basketball, football and hockey players earning well over a million dollars a year. Yet in the late 1980s, when John Frank was one of the few Jewish football players in the NFL, he chose to retire. Rather than continuing in professional sports, he opted to fulfill every Jewish mother’s dream by entering medical school. “Jews,” the historian George Eisen notes, “have always viewed sports participation as a means for achieving something else—gaining social status or scholarships to universities, or going into business—not an end in itself.”13 Other historians and sociologists have speculated on the reasons for the shortage of Jewish professional athletes. One explanation has emphasized Jewish cultural and religious values. In his paean to the left-wing immigrant culture of East European Jews in America, World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe ignored the interest of the second generation in American sports and made only one brief mention of the popularity of boxing among Jews. For Howe, Jewishness was cerebral, not physical: “Suspicion of the physical, fear of hurt, anxiety over the sheer ‘pointlessness’ of play: all this went deep into the recesses of the Jewish

11 On August 7, 2007, Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s record when he hit his 756th home run. This record, however, remains controversial because of the likelihood that Bonds had been using steroids to bolster his muscles. 12 Green subsequently retired from major league baseball in February 2008 with a total of 328 home runs. 13 George Eisen, “Jews and Sport: A Century of Retrospect,” Journal of Sport History 26 (Summer 1999): 235.

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psyche.”14 This might have been true of the immigrant generation, but certainly not of their children. They were infused with the importance of physical training and sports while in the public schools, took an avid interest in professional sports, and the most athletically gifted saw sports as an avenue of social and economic mobility. And yet even Jews who did not share Howe’s politics agreed with him that there was something “un-Jewish” about the Jewish athlete. Thus Jeffrey S. Gurock’s Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports emphasizes the conflict between the values of traditional Judaism and those of athletic competition. “An age-old question would perplex Jewish circles,” Gurock writes. “Was it possible for a dedicated player to maintain strong ties to the faith—or at least to continue to ally himself with his people and its past—as he made every effort to emulate the ways of the Gentiles to succeed in a modern arena?” For traditional Jewish voices, the answer was clearly “no.”15 This emphasis on Jewish values cannot account for the prominence of Jews in European sports and cannot explain why Jews won a disproportionate number of the Olympic medals awarded to Europeans prior to the Second World War. Nor can a stress on values explain why second-generation American Jews, who presumably were closer to the values of the “world of our fathers” than those of the succeeding two generations, were more successful in professional sports. More important factors were urbanization, industrialization, secularization, and acculturation. Since sports was such an important element in American popular culture, Jews, particularly second-generation Jews, became more American by cheering for the home team, reading the sports page of the daily newspaper, and playing America’s games. Even American Jewish radicals were not immune to the seductive pull of sports. They may have argued that pennant races and batting averages reflected the competitive and individualistic ethos of capitalism, but they also realized that Jews were attracted to sports. Left-wing labor unions sponsored athletic competitions, and the communist Daily Worker even had a sports page. Sports have long provided an entry for minorities into the American mainstream. German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Black, and Hispanic athletes have 14 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976), 182. 15 Jeffrey S. Gurock, Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington, 2005), 27. For Gurock, who is a runner, a basketball enthusiast, a professor at Yeshiva University, and a traditional Jew, the conflict between his own athletic interests and the Orthodox skepticism regarding sports has a personal meaning.

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used professional and collegiate sports to move up the social and economic ladders, and their accomplishments have stimulated ethnic and racial pride. The victories of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis provided inspiration for African Americans during the Depression years of the 1930s, as did Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947. Given all of this, it should not be surprising that many of the most successful recent American Jewish athletes have been immigrants or the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe. These include the basketball player Ernie Grunfield, the figure skater Sasha Cohen, the football player Igor Olshansky, the boxer Dimitriy Salita (the only ranked American Jewish boxer), the Olympic gold-winning swimmer Lenny Krayzelburg, and third baseman Ryan Braun, the National League’s 2007 rookie of the year. By and large, these athletes have attenuated Jewish identities.16 In contrast to their American-born counterparts, they are not products of the current American Jewish ethos that has young Jews channeling their competitive drives into becoming lawyers, doctors, accountants, academicians, or businesspeople. It was during the interwar decades that most of the outstanding Jewish athletes came to the fore: Benny Leonard and Barney Ross in boxing, Hank Greenberg in baseball, Nat Holman in basketball, and Benny Friedman, Sid Luckman, and Marshall Goldberg in football. Jewish athletes were particularly prevalent in boxing and basketball. Between the world wars approximately twenty American Jewish boxers were world champions, a figure comprising sixteen percent of the total number of world champions. Allen Bodner, the historian of American Jewish boxing, believes that about a third of American boxers during the 1920s and 1930s were Jews. Among the best was Barney Ross, who went from the Maxwell Street ghetto of Chicago to become a world champion during the 1930s in three different divisions (and later, a hero in the Second World War). In fact, so renowned were Jewish boxers that a few non-Jewish pugilists—Max Baer comes most readily to mind—actually claimed to be Jewish. Baer, who was briefly the 16 Dimitriy Salita, who was born in Ukraine, is the exception. He was influenced by the Lubavitch hasidic movement during the yearlong mourning period for his father, and he now eats only kosher food and does not fight on the Sabbath. He has a large following among Orthodox Jews who sing “David, King of Israel” when he enters the ring. Salita has been alone among American Jewish boxers in being religiously observant, although Barney Ross did refuse to fight on the Jewish New Year in the early 1930s. This was before the baseball player Hank Greenberg decided not to play on Yom Kippur in 1934. Ross came from an Orthodox family, and while not personally observant, was emotionally attached to the world of his parents. Greenberg, in contrast, disdained all religion, including Judaism, and he did not bring up his children as Jews.

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heavyweight champion in the early 1930s, even had a Star of David on his boxing shorts. American popular culture recognized the role of the Jewish boxer. One of the most popular American boxing films was Body and Soul (1947), starring John Garfield (himself a Jew), which portrayed the career of Charlie Davis, a Jewish boxing champion from the tenements of New York City. Nor was the Jewish role in boxing confined to the ring. Nat Fleischer founded and operated Ring Magazine, boxing’s semi-official publication, and many of the leading trainers (Whitney Blimstein, Charley Goldman, and Ray Arcel), managers (Al Weill, Joe Jacobs, and Irving Chen), and promoters (Mike Jacobs, Harry Markson, and Bob Arum) were Jews. Jewish involvement in all areas of boxing declined rapidly after the Second World War, however, and Bodner fittingly used the past tense in the title of his history of Jews and American boxing—When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport.17 Jewish prominence in boxing, as in other sports, was largely a second-generation phenomenon. Boxers from other ethnic groups have also usually been second-generation Americans, but Jewish boxers were distinctive in not encouraging their sons to follow in their footsteps. Nor were their sons attracted to the ring. They, along with other Jews, went to college. “If the rise of Jewish boxing was consistent with a pattern of ethnic progression,” Bodner notes, “its demise was meteoric, much more rapid than with any other nationality.”18 The prosperity of the country after the Second World War, combined with the Jews’ rapid rise up the economic and social ladder, eliminated the major reason why young Jews ever felt the need to go into boxing in the first place. In this respect, Jewish boxers resembled Jewish criminals, who also were a secondgeneration phenomenon. The boxers and criminals came from the same neighborhoods, had similar ambitions, and viewed boxing and crime as avenues of economic and social mobility. Just as the children of Jewish boxers avoided the ring, so the children of Jewish mobsters did not go into the family business. “For Jewish gangsters,” Rich Cohen writes, “crime was not a way out of the system; it was a way in.” There is nothing comparable among American Jews to the ItalianAmerican intergenerational crime families. From the beginning, the children 17 Allen Bodner, When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (Westport, 1997), 2-6 and appendix B. On Ross, see Douglas Century, Barney Ross (New York, 2006). 18 Bodner, When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport, 168. Also see Steven A. Riess, “A Fighting Chance: The Jewish American Boxing Experience,” American Jewish History 74 (March 1985): 222-53.

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of Jewish criminals went to college. A son of Meyer Lansky, the most famous of American Jewish mobsters, even graduated from the United States Military Academy, served in the army for ten years, and then became a computer programmer. Lansky and the other Jewish mobsters craved respectability and their children provided it, albeit vicariously.19 Basketball was the most popular sport among Jews during the 1920s and 1930s. Jews were among the most outstanding players during these decades, most notably Nat Holman of the original New York Celtics team, and they were disproportionately represented within the various semi-pro leagues prior to the Second World War. Of the ninety-one persons who played in the professional American Basketball League during the 1937-1938 season, forty-five were Jews. The presence of Jews in basketball did not go unnoticed. Sociologists, sports writers, and others claimed that the genetic make-up of Jews was ideal for basketball. The reason for the Jews’ proficiency in basketball, explained the sportswriter Paul Gallico, was that their “Oriental background” was well suited for a game that emphasized “an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smartaleckness.”20 (Left unexplained was the proficiency of African Americans in basketball, which certainly was not due to any “Oriental” background.) Even Jews resorted to racial reasons to explain their proficiency in the game. Stanley Frank, who wrote about American Jews and sports, argued that no other sport was so compatible with Jewish characteristics: “mental agility, perception . . . imagination and subtlety. If the Jew had set out deliberately to invent a game which incorporates those traits indigenous in him . . . he could not have had a happier inspiration than basketball.”21 After the Second World War, professional basketball came of age with the establishment in 1946 of the Basketball Association of America, the forerunner of the NBA (founded in 1949). The first basket scored in the BAA was by Ossie Schectman of the New York Knickerbockers against the Toronto Huskies, and the Knickerbockers won the league championship that year with seven Jews on its squad. This was the high-water mark of the Jewish presence in American 19 Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams (New York, 1998), 150-53. For the best histories of Jews and crime, see Jenna Weissman Joselit, Our Crowd: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900-1940 (Bloomington, 1983); Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America (New York, 1980). 20 Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sports (New York, 1938), 325. See also Jon Entine, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk about It (New York, 2000), 202-3. 21 Frank, quoted in Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, 27.

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professional basketball. Within a decade, few Jews were in the league, and of these only Dolph Schayes was an exceptional player. The rise and decline of Jews in college basketball occurred at virtually the same time. In 1950, the City College of New York won both the National Invitation Tournament and the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament with a predominantly Jewish team, including three of the five starters. (The other two were Black.) But since 1950 the number of Jews playing college basketball has declined, and today it is rare for an American Jewish player to start on a major college team.22 In fact, the most noteworthy Jewish college players during the past two decades have been imports from Israel. This drop in the Jewish presence in college and professional basketball resulted from the disappearance of the densely populated inner-city Jewish neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, South Philadelphia, Chicago’s West Side, and other localities where basketball had once been one of the most popular outlets for young Jews. As Peter M. Axthelm noted in his history of the sport, basketball was always the preeminent “city game.”23 Proficiency in basketball, however, did not have the same sociological importance as did mastery of baseball. There had been many Jewish professional baseball players in the 19th and early twentieth century, but it was not until 1933, when Hank Greenberg began his Hall of Fame career with the Detroit Tigers, that Jews had an authentic Jewish baseball superstar.24 During the 1930s, Greenberg was the most widely known American Jewish athlete and possibly the most famous American Jew. He became a hero to American Jews for refusing to play on Yom Kippur in 1934. Although not religious, Greenberg believed that not playing on Yom Kippur was a matter of self-respect. Actually, by this point in the 1934 season, it no longer made much of a difference. (Ten days earlier, on Rosh Hashanah—while the Tigers were still in a hot pennant race—Greenberg did play. But by Yom Kippur, the Tigers had already clinched the pennant.) Nevertheless, Greenberg’s act set a precedent, and later Jewish major league ball22 The documentary film “The First Basket: A Jewish Basketball Story,” describes the Jewish presence in basketball. The title comes from Ossie Schectman’s basket. For the CCNY basketball teams of 1950 and 1951, see my “The Shame of the City: CCNY Basketball, 1950-51,” in Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship, ed. Jack Kugelmass (Urbana, 2007), 175-92. 23 Peter M. Axthelm, The City Game: Basketball in New York from the World Champion Knicks to the World of the Playgrounds (New York, 1970). 24 The best source on the life of Greenberg is his autobiography, The Story of My Life, edited and with an introduction by Ira Berkow (New York, 1989). Among Greenberg’s predecessors was Lipman Pike, supposedly the first person to be paid to play baseball. In 1857, while he was only thirteen years old, Pike was receiving twenty dollars a week.

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players also did not play on Yom Kippur. These included the great pitcher Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who did not pitch on Yom Kippur in the first game of the World Series of 1965. Following Koufax as an American Jewish sports hero was the swimmer Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals at the infamous 1972 Munich Olympics. But Spitz proved to be the last of his kind. In the late 1990s, there was a publicity campaign portraying Tamir Goodman, who played basketball for a Baltimore Jewish high school, as the “Jewish Michael Jordan.” The myth crumbled when Goodman went to college and his modest skills were exposed. Shawn Green was also described at about this time as a great Jewish baseball prospect, but as has been seen, his career, while good, has fallen short of greatness. Quarterback Jay Fiedler was supposed to become the next great Jewish football player, but his career sputtered. In contrast to their parents and grandparents, third-generation American Jews seem little concerned with the paucity of great American Jewish athletes. For them it is more an object of humor than of chagrin. In the movie Airplane, for instance, a flight attendant asks a passenger whether he would like something to read. He asks whether she has something light, and her response is, “How about this short leaflet: “Famous Jewish Sport Legends’?” Decades ago, when American Jews were less secure in their identities as Americans, proficiency in and knowledge of American sports was proof to themselves and to their detractors that they were fully Americanized. Now there is little need for such puffery.25 In the past, Jewish insecurity with regard to their status as full-fledged Americans had a stronger basis in fact. In his 1914 book, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People, the sociologist Edward A. Ross argued that Jews from Eastern Europe were a different type of being than were America’s Anglo-Saxon pioneers. This was because of innate biological characteristics and the ghetto environment of Eastern Europe that had stunted the physical development of Jews. “Not only are they undersized and weak-muscled,” he wrote, “but they shun bodily activity and are extremely sensitive to pain. Says a settlement worker: ‘You can’t make boy scouts out of Jews.’” By comparison, the native American possessed “great physical self-control” and was “gritty, uncomplaining, merciless to the body through fear of being ‘soft.’ To this roaming, hunting, exploring adventurous breed what

25 Eisen, “Jews and Sport,” 231-32.

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greater contrast is there than the denizens of the Ghetto.”26 For Ross, the Jews’ supposed aversion to exercise and athletic competition reflected their physical weakness and lack of courage. Nor was Ross the only one with such views. The nativist anthropologist William Z. Ripley, in his 1899 book, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, argued that Jews preferred to live by brain and not brawn, and thus, over the centuries, had become physical degenerates. Ripley noted in particular that Jews were “distinctly inferior to Christians in lung capacity, which is generally an indication of social environment.”27 American Jews sought to disprove such canards. A 1923 editorial in the Chicago Yiddish Daily Jewish Courier encouraged Jews to participate in athletics in order to refute the stereotype of the Jew as physically decadent. “While we are proud to emphasize our interests in matters intellectual,” it editorialized, “we must not brand ourselves as physical weaklings, but by displaying an allaround development, we will best gain the respect of the world.” The more Jews exercised, the paper believed, the more they would be accepted.28 Wealthy Jews agreed. They funded Jewish community centers with gymnasiums and swimming pools in order to propagate Max Nordau’s “muscular Judaism” and Theodore Roosevelt’s “strenuous life.” It was hoped these centers would transform the stunted physiognomy of the East European Jewish immigrants, encourage participation in American sports, and instill a cult of physical competition. Several books were also written by Jews extolling the exploits of American Jewish athletes, including Stanley Frank’s The Jew in Sports (1936), Harold U. Ribalow’s The Jew in American Sports (first published in 1936 and subsequently reprinted several times), and—several decades later—Robert Slater’s Great Jews in Sports (1983). These books made popular bar mitzvah gifts alongside the proverbial fountain pen. Today, no longer fearful of their status in the larger U.S. society, American Jews have redirected their insecurities. It is now unimportant whether there are

26 Edward A. Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York, 1914), 289-92. Interestingly enough, Ross noted that second-generation Jews were attracted to sports. “The second generation, to be sure, overtop their parents and are going in for athletics. Hebrews under Irish names abound in the prizering, and not long ago a sporting editor printed the item, ‘Jack Sullivan received a letter in Yiddish yesterday from his sister’” (ibid., 290). 27 Ripley, quoted in Joseph W. Bendersky, “The Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York, 2000), 40. 28 Quoted in Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, 16.

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a representative number of Jews on the American Olympic team; what is important is that Israel has its war heroes. Paul Breines noted in his Tough Jews (1990) that, for American Jews, the Israeli soldier has displaced the athlete as the embodiment of Jewish strength and bravery. Apart from this, American Jews have conformed to the sociological truth that as an ethnic group ascends the economic and social ladder, fewer from their group will be attracted to professional sports, and when they are, it will be to higher-status games such as tennis or golf.29 Accompanying the movement of Jews up the social and economic ladder was a migration from densely populated urban Jewish neighborhoods to suburbia, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. It is no accident that, during these decades, the decline in the athletic prowess of Jews became noticeable. The physicality so central to the urban Jewish ethos was not part of the suburban lifestyle. Thus, while Jews in suburbia remained an achieving people, their competitive drives focused less on athletics and far more on their own success in business and the professions, and the admission of their children to elite universities.30

A Reversion to Type? The Rise of the Jewish Sports Mogul The flip side of the dwindling presence of American Jewish professional athletes is the vastly increased numbers of Jewish sports announcers, sportswriters, historians of sports, agents and union leaders, and—in particular—sports executives and sports owners. In 2006, three of the four American sports leagues were headed by Jews: David Stern of the NBA; Gary Bettman of the National Hockey League; and Bud Selig of major league baseball. The commissioner of Major League Soccer, Doug Garber, was also Jewish. (He was formerly the senior vice president of the National Football League’s international division.) Jews were also among the leading executives of professional sports teams, including Randy Levine of the New York Yankees and Theo Epstein of the Boston Red Sox. There 29 Paul Breines: Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York, 1990). In his history of Jews and American sports, Peter Levine titled the chapter dealing with the post-Second World War years “Where Have You Gone, Hank Greenberg?” 30 On the emphasis on physicality in one Jewish neighborhood, see Cohen, Tough Jews. On the post-Second World War movement of American Jews to suburbia, see my A Time for Healing: American Jews since World War II (Baltimore, 1992), ch. 5.

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was also the case of Steven Greenberg, the son of Hank, who captained his Yale University baseball team but was not good enough to play professionally. Instead, he became a deputy commissioner of the major leagues. The increase in the number of Jews owning professional teams has been particularly remarkable.31 As of early 2006, Jews—who comprised barely two percent of the American population—owned outright or were majority owners of more than one third of the NBA teams, nearly one third of the NFL teams, and one fifth of the teams in the NHL and major league baseball. Several Jews owned more than one team. William Davidson owned the Detroit Pistons (NBA), the Tampa Lightning (NHL), and the Detroit Shocks women’s basketball team; Robert Kraft owned football’s New England Patriots and soccer’s New England Revolution; and Jerry Reinsdorf was the controlling partner of the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Bulls. Malcolm Glazer owned not only the Tampa Bay Buccaneers but also an English soccer team, Manchester United, the most valuable sports franchise in the world. When Glazer announced plans in 2004 to purchase the team, many of its rabid fans protested—not because he was a Jew or an American, but because they feared the purchase would saddle the club with excessive debt. The sale eventually took place in 2005, with Glazer paying 1.4 billion dollars for ninety-eight percent of the club, a record purchase price for a sports team.32 Glazer’s purchase of Manchester United was followed the next year by Randy Lerner’s acquisition of Aston Villa, another leading English soccer team. The Cleveland-based Lerner family also owned the Cleveland Browns.

31 On the involvement of Jews in the ownership of sports teams in one city, see Diane L. Jacobsohn, “City of Champions: Major League Sports and Baltimore Jews,” Generations (2004), 55-71. (Generations is the annual magazine of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.) On February 23, 2008, the Miami Herald reported that Wayne Huizenga, the owner of the Miami Dolphins, had sold a half-interest in the football team to New York City Jewish real estate magnate Stephen M. Ross. The agreement between Ross and Huizenga gave Ross, who had been a minority owner of the New York Islanders hockey team and in 1999 had unsuccessfully attempted to acquire the New York Jets football team, the opportunity to purchase Huizenga’s remaining stake in the Dolphins within four years. When and if this occurs, Jews will own seven of the nine professional basketball, hockey, baseball, and football teams in Florida, including all three teams in Tampa and all four teams in the Miami area. But if recent history is any indicator, not one Jew will be playing for any of these teams. 32 The phenomenon of Jews owning sports teams is not restricted to America. Several teams in the elite European soccer leagues as well as teams in the Canadian Football League are owned by Jews.

Chapter 18. From Participant to Owner

Owning a sports team has become a trophy for wealthy businessmen, ranking alongside summer homes, family philanthropic foundations, the chairmanship of elite cultural, educational, or medical institutions, and election to public office. Herb Kohl has two such trophies, being both the owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team and a U.S. senator. George Soros, who spent more than twenty-five million dollars in an unsuccessful effort to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004, attempted to buy the Washington, DC Nationals baseball team the following year. To own the franchise of a team that was based in the nation’s capital—could there be a better way for a person with a European accent and a reputation as a political radical to cement his Americanness? Such trophies are particularly important for self-made individuals who are often psychologically insecure with regard to their status in the social and economic pecking order. The ownership of a sports team indicates, and not without justification, that one has “arrived” and is worthy of recognition by his or her peers.33 Note that in 2004, a local Boston magazine proclaimed that Robert Kraft was the city’s leading resident, outranking any of the Cabots, Lodges, Forbes, or Kennedys. As in athletic competition, entertainment, and crime, there has been an ethnic progression in the ownership of teams. At first, virtually all of the teams were owned by individuals with a British background. In the early twentieth century, they were joined by wealthy German Americans such as the Busch family of St. Louis (St. Louis Cardinals) and Irish Americans such as the Rooney family of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Steelers), the Mara family of New York (New York Giants), and the Dolan family of New York (both the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers). As members of other ethnic groups have become enormously wealthy, they also have purchased professional teams. Thus, there are now Italian-American owners of the Baltimore Ravens, the San Francisco 49ers (football) and the Buffalo Sabres (hockey); a Hispanic American owns the Los Angeles Angels (baseball); a Chinese American owns the Long Island Islanders (hockey); an Arab American family owns the Sacramento Kings (basketball); and Greek Americans own the San Diego Chargers (football), the Carolina Hurricanes (hockey), and the Baltimore Orioles (baseball). But it has been Jews

33 Owning a sports team can also be enormously profitable, despite the complaints of owners regarding skyrocketing salaries for players and cramped stadiums and arenas that lack lucrative luxury boxes. During the past decade, the value of sports franchises has more than doubled. In 1994, Kraft paid 172 million dollars for the Patriots, a league record, but the team was worth at least a billion dollars by 2006. See Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2006.

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who have been the most noticeable in this ethnic progression in sports ownership.34 Part of the explanation lies in the rapid increase in the number of extremely wealthy American Jews. Since 1982, Forbes magazine has published an annual listing of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. (By 2007, one had to have at least 1.3 billion dollars in order to be included.) Jews constituted more than twenty-five percent of the initial list, and this percentage has increased over time; they also are disproportionately represented among those at the very top of the list. In 2006, Forbes also ran an article titled “Jocks,” which noted that many of those on the top-400 list of that year were team owners. (“It’s an expensive hobby, but the thrill of victory makes it all worthwhile.”)35 Of the twenty persons or families listed on the “Jocks” list, eight were Jews. Money aside, the increase in Jewish ownership of teams probably would not have occurred were it not for the dramatic decrease in antisemitism in the United States since the 1940s. In recent decades, Jews have served as presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; they have headed some of America’s largest and most elite law firms and corporations, including DuPont, Walt Disney, and Merrill Lynch; they are to be found at the top of some of the most distinguished medical and cultural institutions in the United States; and they have been appointed to some of the most prestigious of government positions, heading the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury as well as the Federal Reserve. It is thus not unexpected that Jews en masse would also gain entry into the clubby world of professional sports owners, and that, once there, they would play a major role. In addition to owning sports teams on the East Coast and in longstanding centers of Jewish population such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, Jews also have had major interests in teams located in cities with relatively small Jewish populations, such as Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Tampa. This fact reflects the nationalization of Jewish wealth, the flow of Jewish population from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, and the fact that present-day owners of sports franchises do not necessarily live 34 Many of these owners do not have complete ownership of their teams. They either own the largest share or are listed as the managing partner. For wealthy Jews uninterested in owning a team, there is the option of endowing a university field house, as is the case with the Charles E. Smith Center at George Washington University and the Jerome Schottenstein Center at Ohio State University. 35 “Jocks,” Forbes, Oct. 10, 2005, 204.

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where their teams play. Thus, Ziggy Wilf, the majority owner of the Minnesota Vikings football team, is from metropolitan New York, and the investors who owned the Atlanta Hawks were led for a time by Steven Belkin of Boston.36 The wealth of Jewish sports moguls comes from a variety of sources. Most commonly, their fortunes have been based on real estate. Melvin and Herbert Simon, the owners of the Indianapolis Pacers basketball team, are the nation’s largest and most successful shopping center developers. Ziggy Wilf ’s family owns a real estate empire that originated in New Jersey and is now nationwide. Preston Robert Tisch, the co-owner of the New York Giants, first made his fortune with real estate investments and the ownership of the Loews hotel chain. Both Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers (NBA), and Lewis Wolff, who owns the Oakland Athletics, are successful real estate entrepreneurs in southern California. Bruce Ratner of the New Jersey Nets (NBA) is a scion of the Ratner family of Cleveland, owners of the giant Forest City Enterprise real estate development company. Fred Wilpon of the New York Mets is a co-founder of Sterling Equities, a real estate development company on Long Island. Malcolm Glazer’s fortune began with investments in mobile home parks and expanded into the ownership of shopping centers and nursing homes before he purchased the Tampa Bay football team and Manchester United. (Glazer also bought the nearly bankrupt Zapata company, an oil and gas outfit founded by George H.W. Bush.) Abe Pollin of the Washington Wizards (basketball) owned a construction company in Washington, DC before becoming involved in the sports industry. Ted Lerner of the Washington Nationals is a major real estate developer in the Washington, DC area and built the White Flint shopping center in Rockville, Maryland. The fortune of Larry Tanenbaum, the chairman of the board of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., which owns the Toronto Raptors (basketball) and Toronto Maple Leafs (hockey), had its origin in construction, asphalt, and steel. Several of the sports moguls made their money in the merchandising of goods and services. Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlantic Falcons football team, was a co-founder of the Home Depot company, the largest home improvement chain. Ed Snider, of the Philadelphia Flyers, grew up in Washington, DC, where his family owned grocery stores. Howard Schultz, a former part owner of the Seattle Supersonics (basketball), founded the Starbucks coffee chain. Herbert Kohl’s family founded Kohl’s, a chain of department stores. Daniel Snyder, 36 Non-Jewish owners also do not always live where their teams play. An example is George Steinbrenner, the majority owner of the New York Yankees, who lives in Tampa.

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a college dropout from the University of Maryland, founded Snyder Communications, a direct marketing and database marketing concern, when he was still in his 20s. In 1999, he bought the Washington Redskins and its stadium for eight hundred million dollars, at that time the largest sports transaction in history, and six years later he purchased controlling interest in Six Flags, the world’s largest amusement and theme park operator. Steven Belkin, who had headed the group of investors who owned the Atlanta Hawks (basketball) and Atlanta Thrashers (hockey), founded Trans National Group, a direct marketer of financial, travel, and other services. Other Jewish team owners made their fortunes in high tech, among them Mark Cuban, who in 1995 was a co-founder of Broadcast.com, which provided multimedia on the Internet. Five years later, the company was sold to Yahoo for 5.7 billion dollars in stock, and Cuban used some of the proceeds to purchase the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. The Comcast Corporation, a major cable company controlled by the Roberts family of Philadelphia, owns much of the Philadelphia 76ers and the Philadelphia Flyers. Henry Samueli, a former engineering professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, co-founded Broadcom, a manufacturer of high-speed communication chips and switches. Broadcom went public in 1998, and Samueli became a multibillionaire. In 2005, he purchased the Anaheim Ducks hockey team from the Walt Disney company for an estimated seventy-five million dollars. Before purchasing the Florida Panthers hockey team, Alan Cohen, a pharmacist, founded Best Generics company and Andrx corporation, two generic drug manufacturing and distribution companies. The remaining Jewish sports moguls made their money in a variety of ways. A few are industrialists, including Lester Crown of Chicago, a minority owner of the New York Yankees (baseball), the St. Louis Blues (hockey), and the Chicago Bulls (basketball). William Davidson, owner of the Detroit Pistons (basketball) and the Tampa Bay Lightning (hockey), controls Guardian Industries, the world’s largest privately owned glass company. Robert Kraft is a major manufacturer and distributor of paper and packaging products. Leslie Alexander of the Houston Rockets (NBA) and Stuart Sternberg of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (baseball) made their fortunes in the securities industry. Alexander is a venture capitalist, and Sternberg was a managing director at Goldman Sachs. The late father of Mickey Arison, the owner of the Miami Heat (NBA), founded Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise ship operator. The patriarch of the Lerner family of Cleveland, owners of the Cleveland Browns, founded the credit card giant MBNA. Jeffrey Loria of the Florida Marlins baseball team made his

Chapter 18. From Participant to Owner

fortune in the antiques business. The Montreal Expos baseball team was owned at one time by a scion of Samuel Bronfman, who founded Seagram’s, the largest manufacturer of alcoholic beverages. The Jewish owners of sports teams have been open about their ethnic and religious ties, and many of them are major benefactors to Jewish institutions. Larry Tanenbaum recently gave fifty million dollars (Canadian) to a foundation controlled by the Toronto Jewish federation. William Davidson contributed twenty million dollars to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York along with thirty million dollars to the Technion and twenty million dollars to the Weizmann Institute, both in Israel. The Wilf family has made major gifts to Shaare Zedek hospital in Israel.37 Members of the Tisch and Kraft families are also generous donors to a variety of Jewish philanthropic causes, including a 250,000 dollar gift the Krafts made toward the building of the Kraft Family (baseball) Stadium in Jerusalem. Abe Pollin, a friend of Yitzhak Rabin, changed the name of his basketball team from the Bullets to the Wizards after the Israeli prime minister was gunned down. David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, was honored by both the United Jewish Appeal and Israel Bonds, and Ed Snider is on the board of the Simon Wiesenthal museum in Los Angeles. In addition, some American Jewish sports moguls have invested in the Israeli economy. Davidson purchased a glass factory in Nazareth, the largest and most technologically advanced of its kind in Israel, while Kraft is the largest shareholder of Israel’s largest packaging plant, located in Caesarea. The decline in America of the Jewish professional athlete and the concomitant rise of the Jewish sports owner did not occur in a historical vacuum. Both stemmed from the transformation of the economic and social profile of American Jewry after the Second World War and from changes within the host society. Affluence, suburbanization, and the decline of antisemitism shaped the context in which Jewish involvement in American professional sports took place. So too did the movement of Americans from the Northeast to the South and West, which resulted in the growth of large Jewish communities in Florida and California.38 It is this intersection between the entrepreneurial talents of individual Jews and the opportunities offered by a growing and dynamic economy that 37 When Ziggy Wilf purchased a majority ownership in the Minnesota Vikings in 2005, it was widely publicized that he was the child of Holocaust survivors and had been raised in a traditional Jewish family. 38 The best book on the rise of the Miami and Los Angeles Jewish communities is Deborah Dash Moore’s To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A.

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explains the phenomenon of the Jewish sports owner. The changing role of Jews in sports attests to the opportunities offered in America to the talented and ambitious. Every year, Fred Wilpon’s New York Mets holds a “Jewish Heritage Day” during which the team mascot dances on the top of the thirdbase dugout to the tune of “Hava Nagila.” This secular Hebrew song advises its listeners to rejoice, to be happy, and to sing. It is an appropriate sentiment for those Jews in attendance at Shea Stadium who wish to celebrate their identity as Americans and as Jews—though few, if any, of the ballplayers will understand the words.

(New York, 1994), though it does not discuss the role of Jewish athletes and Jewish sports owners.

Part Five

P o l i t i cs

C hapter 19

Waiting for Righty? An Interpretation of the Political Behavior of American Jews Waiting for Lefty, the 1935 play by the radical Jewish playwright Clifford Odets, involves a meeting during the Great Depression of a committee of taxicab drivers and their union boss to determine whether the cabbies should go out on strike. The head of the union warns against hasty action and argues that communists are behind the call for a strike. Lefty, the committee’s chairman, is late for the meeting, and the workers need his advice and leadership because they fear that the union leadership has betrayed them to management. “Where’s Lefty,” they ask. At the end of the play it is revealed that Lefty has been murdered by management goons. Odets ends the play with a call for revolution. Hear it, boys, hear it! Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE’RE STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS. WORKERS OF THE WORLD . . . OUR BONES AND BLOOD! And when we die they’ll know what we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces. We’ll die for what is right! Put fruit trees where our ashes are!1

Odets’s revolution never occurred, and American leftists are still asking the question, “Where’s Lefty?” Precisely the opposite question, “Where’s Righty?” has been asked regarding the political behavior of American Jews. In fact, there is a cottage industry of sociologists, historians, political scientists, and laymen investigating the political attitudes of American Jews. This stems from the fact that American Jews seem to 1

Clifford Odets, Six Plays (London: Metheun, 1982), 31.

Chapter 19. Waiting for Righty?

have repealed one of the basic laws of American political sociology: that people become politically more conservative as they move up the economic and social ladder; that acquiring a mortgage and becoming a property owner are conducive to voting Republican. This has been true of other ethnic groups such as the Germans, Irish, and Italians, but not of Jews. Jews, in fact, are America’s only ethnic group which continues to vote overwhelmingly for left-of-center political candidates in the face of upward social and economic mobility, and they are the most liberal white ethnocultural group in the country. Twice as many Jews as Gentiles describe themselves as liberals, and for every Jew who calls himself a conservative, two call themselves liberals. The bulk of political contributions made by Jews—and Jews have been extremely generous political donors—has gone to liberal candidates and to liberal causes. The political behavior of American Jews is particularly strange in view of the fact that Jews have been America’s most successful major ethnic group by far in terms of economic and social mobility. If any group should have moved to the right it should have been the Jews.2 Historian David Biale has argued that “the question of Jewish politics lies at the very heart of any attempt to understand Jewish history. . . . It may therefore not be an exaggeration to say that modern Jewish historiography is the historiography of Jewish politics, even when its explicit concerns appear to lie elsewhere.” This is particularly true of American Jewry. The literature on the political behavior of American Jews is full of such words as “paradoxical,” “anomalous,” “incongruous,” “dissonant,” “peculiar,” “strange,” “curious,” “unique,” and “idiosyncratic.” “The Jewish businessman and professional, if he were following his self-interest,” wrote the sociologist Nathan Glazer, “would by now have become a Republican, as his Catholic and Protestant business and professional colleagues have become. The Jewish suburbanite, if he were following his selfinterest, would have joined his Catholic neighbors in moving from the Democratic to the Republican Party.” Jews, Milton Himmelfarb quipped in 1969, earn money like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans. Since 1969 more Hispanics have been voting Republican, particularly Cuban-Americans, while 2 Edgar Litt, “Jewish Ethno-Religious Involvement and Political Liberalism,” Social Forces 39 (May 1961), 328-32; Seymour M. Lipset and Earl Raab, “The American Jews, the 1984 Elections, and Beyond,” in Survey of Jewish Affairs, 1985, ed. William Frankel (Cranbury, 1985), 155; Robert Lerner, Altheas K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman, “Marginality and Liberalism Among Jewish Elites,” Public Opinion Quarterly 53 (Fall 1989): 330-52; William Spinrad, “The Politics of American Jews: An Example of Ethnic Group Analysis,” in Ethnicity, Identity, and History: Essays in Memory of J. Cahnman, ed. Joseph B. Maier and Chaim I. Waxman (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction, 1983), 249-72.

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Episcopalians have not been so proficient in earning money as previously. Jews, by contrast, have lost neither the ability to make money nor the tendency to vote Democratic. When it comes to their politics, American Jews, Himmelfarb notes, have been “die-hard conservatives” in persisting in their liberalism. When Mark R. Levy and Michael Kramer published their 1972 book, The Ethnic Factor: How America’s Minorities Decide Elections, they titled chapter four “The Jews: Forever Liberal Wherever They Are.” Over two decades later, Seymour M. Lipset and Earl Raab’s Jews and the New American Scene appeared. The title of its chapter on politics is “Still on the Left.”3 The practice of Jews voting for Democrats, and particularly for left-of-center Democrats, has been long-standing. For over half a century Jews have voted Democratic by twenty-five percent more than the rest of the electorate, and today less than fifteen percent of Jews identify themselves as Republicans, and of these two-thirds consider themselves “weak Republicans.” By contrast, fiftynine percent of Jews identity themselves as Democrats. In 1932, eighty-two percent of Jews voted for Franklin Roosevelt and only eighteen percent for Herbert Hoover. Four years later Roosevelt’s percentage among Jews went up by three percentage points, and in 1940 it reached ninety percent when he ran against Wendell Willkie. While Roosevelt’s Jewish vote was inflated to some extent by foreign policy considerations, the leftist bias of Jewish voters nevertheless continued after World War II.4 In 1948 the combined vote for Harry Truman and Henry Wallace among Jews was ninety percent. Even the towering presence of Dwight Eisenhower did not bring a majority of Jewish voters into the Republican camp. In 1952 Eisenhower got only thirty-six percent of the Jewish vote, and in 1956 he received forty percent. The election of 1960 saw Jewish voters return to their voting habits 3 David Biale, “Modern Jewish Ideologies and the Historiography of Jewish Politics,” in Reshaping the Past: Jewish History and the Historians, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York, 1994), 3; Glazer quoted in Ruth R. Wisse, If I Am Not For Myself . . . The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (New York, 1992), 30; Nathan Glazer, “The Anomalous Liberalism of American Jews,” in The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 133-43; Milton Himmelfarb, “Is American Jewry in Crisis?” Commentary, March 1969, 38-39; Milton Himmelfarb, “American Jews: Diehard Conservatives,” Commentary, April 1989, 44-49; Mark R. Levy and Michael Kramer, The Ethnic Factor: How America’s Minorities Decide Elections (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), ch. 4; Seymour M. Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Cambridge, MA, 1995), ch. 6; Alan Fisher, “Realignment of the Jewish Vote?” Political Science Quarterly 94 (Spring 1979): 97. 4 Leonard Fein, “Standing Firm on Liberalism,” Sh’ma, November 1, 1996. 1-3.

Chapter 19. Waiting for Righty?

of the 1930s and 1940s. Eighty-eight percent of Jews voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, a higher percentage than the eighty-one percent he received from his fellow Roman Catholics. In 1964 ninety percent of Jews voted for Lyndon Johnson, despite the fact that his Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, was descended from a pioneer Jewish family in Arizona. Rabbi Joachim Prinz of Newark, New Jersey, a former president of the American Jewish Congress, told his congregants that “a Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide.”5 In 1968 eighty-one percent of Jews voted for Hubert Humphrey, while seventeen percent voted for Richard Nixon. Nixon improved his percentage to thirty-five percent when he ran for reelection in 1972. This election was particularly revealing of Jewish voting behavior. George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, had difficulty in raising funds from wealthy Jews, a traditional mainstay of Democratic financial support, because they suspected he was not a firm friend of Israel. McGovern had other problems as well. He favored a radical (in the American context) redistribution of wealth, a stance which should not have won favor among Jews whose income and wealth was higher than the norm. In addition, the Republicans had successfully painted McGovern as a cultural radical, an advocate of acid, abortion, and amnesty for fugitives from the draft. McGovern even committed the faux pas of ordering milk with his corn beef sandwich while campaigning in New York’s garment district. Despite these drawbacks, two-thirds of Jews voted for McGovern. By contrast, McGovern received no more than thirty percent of the votes of other American white voters. This means that the gap between Jewish and Gentile white voters was an astounding thirty-five percent.6 In 1976, Jimmy Carter, the first southerner to run for President since the Civil War, received a minority of the votes of white southerners but 65 percent of the votes of Jews. The combined Carter and John Anderson vote in 1980 among Jews was 61 percent. Reagan’s 39 percent was the highest cast for a Republican presidential nominee since the candidacy of Eisenhower in 1956. In 1984, however, Reagan’s percentage among Jews declined to 31 percent, the only major group, with the exception of the unemployed, in which Reagan did not improve 5

Saul Brenner, “Patterns of Jewish-Catholic Democratic Voting and the 1960 Presidential Vote,” Jewish Social Studies 26 ( July 1964): 169-78; Peter Steinfels, “American Jews Stand Firmly to the Left,” New York Times, January 8, 1989, E7; Nathaniel Weyl, The Jew in American Politics (New Rochelle, 1968), 166.

6

Milton Himmelfarb, “The Case of Jewish Liberalism,” Emerging Coalitions in American Politics, ed. Seymour M. Lipset (San Francisco, 1978), 301.

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his 1980 vote. Jews gave Reagan fewer votes than Hispanics or union members. This occurred despite the economic boom that had taken place during the last two years of his first term and despite the fact that most American Jews believed they were economically better off in 1984 than in 1980. The reason for Reagan’s decline among Jewish voters was not mysterious. His opponent was Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice-president and a protégé of liberal Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey was virtually a political icon among America’s Jews, and they saw Mondale carrying on his liberal legacy. The national vote, by contrast, went 59-41 for Reagan. Again, the split between Jews and other white voters was dramatic.7 Reagan’s Jewish supporters questioned the accuracy of the surveys of Jewish voting patterns in 1984. They simply could not believe that Jewish voting behavior could deviate so much from the rest of the population, and they accused the pollsters of using skewed data and of political bias. Polls sampling the votes of Jews in Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn, they claimed, would have increased Reagan’s percentage. But by how much? Jewish Republicans argued that Reagan’s true Jewish vote was around forty percent. Their claim, ironically, demonstrated the seemingly congenital Democratic voting preferences of Jews. If a popular Republican President running at a time of peace and prosperity could secure at most forty percent of the votes of Jews, and if Jewish Republicans could exult in this figure, then Jews were certainly living in another political universe than other Americans. But, in fact, it appears that the original lower estimates of Reagan’s Jewish vote were accurate. The American political guru William Schneider examined the controversy surrounding the Jewish vote in the 1984 election and concluded that the polls correctly plotted the drop of Reagan’s vote in 1984. He attributed this decline not only to Mondale’s popularity but also to Reagan’s association with the Christian Right. “The Democrats,” Schneider wrote, “can still expect to carry the Jewish vote and that is not very likely to change as long as the Republicans continue to court right-wing Christian fundamentalists. On the other hand, the Democrats have lost ground among Jews since the 1960s. Not even Jerry Falwell could push the Jewish Democratic vote back up to where it used to be.” Schneider’s prediction was wrong.8

7 Lipset and Raab, “American Jews,” 141-48. 8

William Schneider, “The Jewish Vote in 1984: Elements in a Controversy,” Public Opinion 7 (December–January 1985), 18-19, 58.

Chapter 19. Waiting for Righty?

In 1988, Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate, received sixty-eight percent of the Jewish vote against George Bush, but only forty-five percent of the non-Jewish vote. Dukakis’s vote among Jews was higher than his vote among fellow Greek Americans (fifty-five percent). Four years later, according to the New York Times, Bush’s Jewish vote declined to twelve percent. (Other estimates put it at fifteen percent). This was only slightly more than the ten percent of Jewish voters who favored Ross Perot. In the 1996 presidential election, according to a poll conducted by the American Jewish Congress in ninety key precincts in ten states and the District of Columbia, only thirteen percent of Jews voted for Robert Dole, another four percent voted for Ross Perot, and eighty-three percent voted for President Clinton’s reelection. This tilt toward the left among Jews has also been true for congressional elections. According to a New York Times survey, the Jewish vote in 1996 for the House of Representatives split 74-26 Democratic. Today ten Jews sit in the United States Senate. Nine are Democrats and, with one exception, all are identified with the left wing of the party. “Apparently impervious to political fashion,” wrote Philip Baum, executive director of the American Jewish Congress shortly after the 1996 election, “the Jewish community remains indomitably liberal. . . . Given the relative affluence of American Jewry the motivation of the Jewish vote plainly is not primarily economic selfconcern.”9 The liberalism of American Jews has manifested itself in local as well as national elections. The votes of Jews were responsible for the election of Black mayors in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City. Jews have also been far more supportive than other whites of open housing legislation, police complaint review boards, and other local issues identified with liberalism. Jews were the only white ethnic or religious group in New York City to favor a civilian police review board, and they were the only such group in California to vote against a referendum overturning the state’s fair housing law.10 Idiosyncratic by American standards, American Jewish voting patterns have also been idiosyncratic by Jewish standards as well. Jews in Australia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom at one time also voted for the parties of the moderate Left, but this has changed during the past several decades. As late as the 1966 election, thirty-eight of the forty Jewish members of the British 9

Alan M. Fisher, “Where the Jewish Vote is Going,” Moment, March, 1989, 41-43; New York Times, November 5, 1992, B9; New York Times, November 7, 1996, B6; “The Jewish Vote,” Congress Monthly, January–February 1997, 5.

10 Lipset and Raab, “American Jews,” 144.

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Parliament were members of the Labor Party. By 1983, however, there were more Jewish Conservative MPs than Labor MPs, seventeen to eleven. At one time there were five Jews in Margaret Thatcher’s Tory cabinet. In Australia there has also been a move to the right. Why has British and Australian Jewry moved to the right while American Jewry has not? Perhaps the answer lies in statistics. American Jewry totals nearly six million, while British Jewry totals around three hundred thousand, and Australian Jewry perhaps a third of that. American Jews, because of their greater numbers, have been better able to withstand the effects of acculturation and assimilation. Whether this will remain true in the future, in view of the current high rate of intermarriage among Jews, remains to be seen. In any case, liberalism is for many Jews the most important element in their Jewish identity. They are Jews because they believe that to be a Jew means to be a liberal. “Jews who maintain only the most pro forma links with the Jewish religious tradition, who know little or nothing of Jewish culture,” Daniel J. Elazar wrote, “increasingly express themselves Jewishly in connection with Jewish political causes or interests.”11 American Jewish political behavior has been particularly odd to conservatives, Jews and Gentiles alike, who believe that Jews should be staunch conservatives. Thus Nathaniel Weyl, a conservative, began his 1968 book The Jew in American Politics by stating that “American Jewish political behavior is an anomaly and a contradiction.” “Evidently we are dealing with a political phenomenon that is unique and not explicable in the standard terms of public opinion analysts,” Weyl noted. “The aberrant political behavior of American Jewry has deep roots in the religious, economic and political history of the Jewish people.” The Australian W. D. Rubinstein, another conservative, also found Jewish political behavior to be an anomaly. In his 1982 book The Left, the Right and the Jews, Rubinstein predicted wishfully that “the familiar left-liberal stance of most American Jews is undergoing a significant shift. . . . It may well be American Jews are at last moving—as elsewhere in the West—to their ‘natural’ political home.” This will end “the political paradox of American Jewry.” Jewish neoconservative 11 Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews of Europe Since 1945 (London, 1996), 74-75, 240-41; Geoffrey Alderman, “Not Quite British: The Political Attitudes of Anglo-Jewry,” in British Political Sociology Yearbook, vol. 2, ed. Ivor Crewe (London, 1975), 188-211; ibid, The Jewish Community in British Politics (Oxford, 1983); ibid., “The Political Conservatism of the Jews in Britain,” in Values, Interests and Identity; Jews and Politics in a Changing World, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York, 1995), 101-16; Peter Y. Medding, “Factors Influencing the Voting Behaviour of Melbourne Jews,” in Jews in Australian Society, ed. Peter Y. Medding (South Melbourne, 1973), 141-59; Daniel J. Elazar, “The Jewish Context of the New Jewish Politics,” in The New Jewish Politics, ed. Daniel J. Elazar (New York, 1988), 73.

Chapter 19. Waiting for Righty?

intellectuals such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol also eagerly anticipated a change in the leftist politics of American Jewry which, they believed, did not foster the economic, social, or foreign policy interests of American Jewry. The liberalism of American Jews, Kristol predicted in 1990, “cannot endure much longer” in the face of economic and political realities.12 There is no debate about the leftist political instincts of American Jews. Scholars have, however, differed over the sources of these instincts. Their interpretations can be divided roughly into two categories. The first argues that Jewish political attitudes are a product of Jewish religious teachings; that the Bible, in other words, is a left-wing book. The belief that the Jewish “prophetic” tradition mandated left-wing political views has been a staple of the religious Reform movement for the past century and a half. The most influential attempt to see American Jewish political behavior as a product of Judaism is Lawrence H. Fuchs’s The Political Behavior of American Jews (1956), which argued that the emphasis placed by Judaism on righteousness, charity, community responsibility, and learning resulted inevitably in Jews becoming political liberals. From this perspective, a non-liberal Jew betrays the essence of Jewishness and Judaism. Thus Reform Rabbi Alexander Schindler could write during the 1984 election year that the essence of the Jewish political vision is to use the state to protect the persecuted, the old, the sick, and the poor. The liberalism of the Democratic Party, he concluded, is translating “the ethical imperatives of the Hebrew Prophets into programs to feed the hungry, heal the sick and house the homeless.” Reform rabbi Eugene Borowitz agreed. “Liberalism,” he asserted, “may not be the Messiah—but it remains our best way of living with less sin.”13

12 Weyl, Jew in American Politics, 1, 8; W. D. Rubinstein, The Left, the Right and the Jews (London, 1982), 142-48; Irving Kristol, “The Liberal Tradition of American Jews,” in American Pluralism and the Jewish Community, ed. Seymour M. Lipset (New Brunswick, 1990), 116. 13 Alexander Schindler, “Beyond the Dilemma of Jewish Voters,” New York Times, July 3, 1984; Eugene Borowitz, “Liberalism and the Jews,” Commentary, January 1980, 24. For an abbreviated version of Fuchs’s argument, see Lawrence H. Fuchs, “American Jews and the Presidential Vote,” in American Ethnic Politics, ed. Leonard H. Fuchs (New York, 1968). Gerald Sorin has argued that the politics of American Jewish socialists stemmed from Jewish cultural and religious values, despite the fact that many were estranged from Judaism and Jewish culture. The Jewish socialists “were a prophetic minority, responding to biblical norms of social justice, interpreted in a modern context. They were men and women who had been deeply immersed in the moral commandments of Torah and Talmud, in messianic belief-systems, traditions of tsedaka (not mere charity, but righteousness and justice toward others), mutual aid, and communal responsibility” (Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920 (Bloomington, 1985), 3).

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Jews on the left have pointed to the Jewish neoconservative intellectuals who write for Commentary magazine as particularly deserving of censure for selling out the moral imperatives of Judaism since they should know better. Earl Shorris wrote a curious book in 1982 titled Jews Without Mercy: A Lament. The lament was for the rise of neoconservatism in general and for Jewish neoconservative intellectuals in particular. By cutting themselves off from Jewish ethics, Shorris charged, these neoconservative intellectuals have ceased to be Jews, becoming instead oxymoronic “Jews without mercy.” “Mercy is the soul and the shield of the Jew,” Shorris wrote. “He is an ethical man, therefore a political man. A Jew without mercy is a man prior to the covenant; he belongs to the horde; he invites the desert.”14 It is doubtful that the political liberalism of American Jews can be traced back to the Bible and the ethics of Judaism. The political culture of Jews prior to the nineteenth century was not liberal but deeply suspicious of the politics of the non-Jewish world, and this disaffection from the political world of the Gentiles continued to be espoused by Orthodox spokesmen even after emancipation. It hardly makes sense to argue that liberal Jews are more Jewish than Jews of the pre-modern era or their modern counterparts. The most Jewish of American Jews, namely those Jews who eat kosher food, wear traditional Jewish clothing, regulate their lives according to a Jewish calendar, and only marry other Jews are politically the least liberal segment within American Jewry. Bush in 1988 received around seventy percent of the Jewish vote in the Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Boro Park, and Williamsburg. Nor do American Jews of Sephardic background exhibit the same liberal tendencies as Jews with an Ashkenazic background. It is also insulting to Gentiles to argue that liberalism is a natural product of Biblical faith. Members of the American Christian Right take the Bible seriously, and they can hardly be described as liberals. Is one to claim that their reading of the Bible is erroneous? “There is little support,” Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen recently asserted, “for the notion that Jewish liberalism derives from an attachment to the Jewish religious tradition.”15 Instead of viewing liberalism as a logical product of Judaism, it makes more sense to argue that Jews are liberal because sociology and history has made them

14 Earl Shorris, Jews Without Mercy: A Lament (Garden City, 1982), 87-88, 191. 15 Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, “Jewish Liberalism Revisited,” Commentary, November 1996, 51-53.

Chapter 19. Waiting for Righty?

so. Sociologists have attributed Jewish political behavior to a variety of factors, including the sense of marginality, insecurity, and vulnerability felt by American Jews that supposedly attracted them to the universalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and pluralism inherent in liberalism. According to this interpretation, Jews believed liberalism would facilitate their integration into American society. But why have other marginal groups in America not had the same political profile as Jews? In the nineteenth century, Irish Catholics confronted signs saying “No Irish need apply,” but this did not make them confuse politics with messianism. Furthermore, the most marginal of Jews—the extreme Orthodox—are the least, not the most, liberal. Sociologists have also argued that Jews became liberals and radicals in order to change the society that did not accord them the social status commensurate with their economic and intellectual achievements. “In so far as Jewish liberalism is a response to alienation from the social mainstream,” Steven Cohen wrote, “we may expect sustained Jewish liberalism so long as Jews continue to feel socially insecure.”16 History would seem a more logical place to look for the explanation of American Jewish liberalism, particularly the political values which Jews brought with them from Eastern Europe and which were part and parcel of their culture. East European Jews who settled in Western Europe, Canada, South Africa, and Australia exhibited political tendencies similar to those of Jews who migrated to the United States. The politics of American Jews is thus more than merely a matter of political preferences. Rather, it is part of a culture which has been passed on from generation to generation, a tradition into which young Jews are socialized at an early age, and this explains why Jewish voting patterns have been so stable. As other elements of this culture have attenuated, such as the speaking of Yiddish and endogamy, liberal politics has assumed a greater importance in maintaining Jewish identity. Marshall Sklare’s famous study of the Jews of Lakeville, a pseudonym for a Chicago suburb, revealed that the most important element in the Jewish identity of these Jews was neither kashrut nor observing the Sabbath but supporting humanitarian and liberal causes. Two decades after the publication of Sklare’s findings, a 1989 Los Angeles Times survey discovered that half of American Jews believed that the most important quality of Jewish identity was supporting “equality.” This was three times more important than 16 Steven M. Cohen, American Modernity and Jewish Identity (New York, 1981), 151. Chapter 7 of this book is titled “Liberalism as the Politics of Group Integration.” Chapter 3 of Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (New York, 1982) is titled “Radical Jews: The Dilemmas of Marginality.”

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observing the dictates of Judaism or supporting Israel. For American Jews, Liebman and Cohen wrote, “liberalism is not merely a characteristic but clearly a major component of their understanding of what it means to be a Jew.”17 Lying at the basis of this Jewish political culture is a deep suspicion of the Gentile world and a fear of and alienation from power, what Werner Cohn called a “radical feeling of estrangement from the State.” It was this lack of political power that Zionism, above all else, sought to cure. “What the Zionists introduced and what Israel established in Jewry,” the Zionist and Israeli historian David Vital noted, “has been politics.” European Jews were skeptical of state authority and the good intentions of its functionaries, and saw official authority as something to be manipulated and bypass, and not something that should command automatic assent. A document issued by a Russian government commission in 1888 drew attention to the fact that Jews felt very little stake in the Russian state. It was not surprising in view of the history of Jews in Russia, the document stated, that Jews are among those “who are less exact in the discharge of their civic duty, who shirk their obligations toward the State, and do not fully join Russian life.” This alienation affected virtually all areas of Jewish life in Europe. “In Eastern and Central Europe,” Jerome R. Mintz wrote, “smuggling, bribery, and tax evasion were not only commonplace, at times they can be seen as having been acts of protest and even heroism. In the absence of civil justice, one managed by one’s wits, often within the framework of a more popular, underground social system.”18 East European Jews perceived the governments of Eastern Europe, which unfairly taxed them, conscripted their sons into the army, and encouraged pogroms, to be, in the words of the historian Eli Lederhendler, “a savage beast.” The most famous expression of the attitude of East European Jews toward authority is in that definitive study of the culture of East European Jewry, Fiddler on the Roof. The rabbi of Anatekva is asked to say a prayer for the Czar. After being momentarily at a loss for words because of the Czar’s hostility to the Jews, he responds that God should keep the Czar—far away from us. Jews brought this fear of authority with them to America. Here also, as Nathan Glazer has 17 Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences (New Haven, 1990), 97. 18 Werner Cohn, “The Politics of American Jews,” in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York, 1958), 621; David Vital, The Future of the Jews (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 144; David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (London, 1975), 30; Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 12.

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written, Jews “looked with a cold and hostile eye on the world of received things, traditional religion, traditional culture, the traditional order of society. All these had historically meant for Jews oppression, antisemitism, restriction. Freedom and fraternity and human possibility were for them bound up with the breaking of old forms and the letting in of anything new and radical.” This intolerance of authority explains the over representation of young Jews in the New Left of the 1960s, which focused its wrath on authority and the “establishment.”19 It was this alienation from power, the inability to conceive of politics as a means for group and individual advancement, which gave Jewish politics in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century its apolitical character. Politics is, after all, concerned with the manipulation of power, and political power was precisely what Jews lacked. European Jewry, Vital wrote, was “virtually washed clean of political habits and political ideas, let alone of political capabilities.” Estranged from political realities, Jews tended to see politics in ideological terms. This resulted in fantasy, utopianism, messianism, and dogmatism permeating Jewish politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Not surprisingly, two of the histories of the politics of Eastern European Jewry of this time are titled The Politics of Futility and Prophecy and Politics.20 The programs which Jewish political leaders proposed to alleviate the situation of European Jewry—Zionism, Bundism, diaspora nationalism, back-tothe-land, auto-emancipation—envisaged a radical restructuring of European society which was unlikely in view of the political realities in Czarist Russia, Romania, the Austrian-Hungarian empire, or post-World War I Poland. Not one member of the General Jewish Workers Union (the Bund) was ever elected to the Polish parliament during the interwar years, despite the fact that the Bund was during these two decades one of the two or three major Jewish political movements in Poland. Nor did the Bund forge an alliance with non-Jewish socialist parties. Its program of secular Jewish national autonomy was abhorrent to the Poles who comprised two-thirds of the population. Secular Jewish national autonomy also was not popular among the Orthodox and Zionists sectors of Polish Jewry. The Bund, Bernard K. Johnpoll concluded, was “encased in 19 Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (New York, 1989), 81-82; Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York, 1961), 167; Nathan Glazer, “The Jewish Role in Activism,” Fortune, January 1969, 129; Henry L. Feingold, “The Jewish Radical in his American Habitat,” Judaism 22 (Winter 1973): 92-105. 20 Vital, Origins of Zionism, 154.

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a context of foggy unreality. . . . Unable to affect the life of the nation, isolated from the mainstream of Polish life, persecuted economically and politically, the members of the Jewish labor movement found escape through discussing broad issues, which did not directly affect them but which allowed them to give vent to their proclivity for intellectual debate.”21 Historian Joseph Marcus has shown that the lack of Jewish political influence in interwar Poland was markedly disproportionate to their economic influence. While Jews controlled some forty percent of the country’s industry and commerce, their political influence was virtually nil. What Jonathan Frankel said about Jewish socialism of the time was true also of other Jewish political movements. The attempt of Jewish socialists “to create something so new and so great within a setting so narrow, was the source of both extraordinary political energy and of profound political weakness; of genuine tragedy and genuine farce.”22 The only measure which improved conditions for the Jews—migration to the west—involved their complete alienation from Eastern European society and politics. For every Jew between 1880 and 1920 who settled in Palestine, forty Jews came to the United States. The estrangement of Jews from the secular politics of Eastern Europe was also encouraged by traditionalist religious elements. Orthodox spokesmen contended that Jews in Europe were living in exile, and that they should have little contact with the politics of the Gentile society. A rabbi in Minsk warned against political involvement in general and involvement in radical politics in particular. “How do we Jews, who are likened to a little worm, the worm of Jacob, come to get messed up in such matters? . . . How do we Jews dare to climb up to such high places and meddle in politics?” Jewish interests would be secured not through the political involvement of the Jewish masses but through quiet personal relationships with influential Gentiles. A book published in Warsaw argued that “Public affairs must never be the subject of idle chatter of the crowd or of women. There is no greater disaster for the nation than the transfer of its business from the private domain of individual leaders to the public domain, where youngsters and even girls are free to meddle.” The spread of socialism and Zionism, however, led the Orthodox to establish their own political party, Agudat Israel, in Poland in 1912 in order 21 Bernard K. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 19171943 (Ithaca, 1967), 141-42. 22 Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Berlin, 1983), 326-27; Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge, 1981), 560.

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to represent the concerns of the religious. Even this step, however, was viewed by some Orthodox elements as a dangerous compromise with secular values. Despite this skepticism, Agudat Israel became the second most popular Jewish political party in interwar Poland, after the Zionists.23 Accustomed to viewing authority, particularly the authority of the state, as threatening, feeling little stake in the society, it is not surprising that Jews should distrust authority or that they should be found in disproportionate numbers among those political movements seeking to overthrow it. Perhaps thirty percent of those arrested in the Russian empire for revolutionary activity were Jews. (One of Tevye’s daughters in Fiddler on the Roof marries an intellectual revolutionary.) This opposition to authority was not limited to secular political authority. During the nineteenth century, Jews in Eastern Europe continually protested the authority of the local kehillah, which was responsible for taxation and selecting recruits for the Czar’s army. Together with the spread of secularism, socialism, and Zionism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there also existed a growing opposition among East European Jews to the power and authority of the Orthodox religious establishment. It is revealing that the Bund was established in 1897 in Vilna, which Ezra Mendelsohn called the “capital of Russian Jewish socialism.” But Vilna was also the center of nineteenth-century rabbinic Orthodoxy and the home of the Vilna Gaon, arguably the greatest Orthodox figure of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The political scientist Geoffrey Graham Levey has argued, correctly in my opinion, that antagonism to religious authority in Europe was a formative influence in shaping the political attitudes of European Jews and their descendants. This helps explain why religious Jews in America are less liberal than secular Jews. Their support of established religious authority also makes them more willing to accept established political authority.24

23 Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (New York, 1987), 150; Lederhendler, Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 156; Gerson C. Bacon, “Agudat Israel in Interwar Poland,” in The Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman et. al. (Hanover, 1989), 21-27. 24 Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, 1970), 27, 47; Geoffrey Braham Levey, “Toward a Theory of Disproportionate American Jewish Liberalism,” in Values, Interests, and Identity: Jews and Politicis in a Changing World, ed. Peter Y. Medding, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 11 (Oxford, 1995), 72-76; Jonathan Frankel, “Modern Jewish Politics East and West (1840-1939): Utopia, Myth, Reality,” in The Quest for Utopia: Jewish Political Ideas and Institutions Through the Ages, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Armonk, 1992), 90. For the support of German Jews for socialism,

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Most studies of Jewish political behavior in Europe and the United States have stressed the support of a minority of Jews for socialism. Generally ignored, however, was the strong libertarian strain among Jews. In his book on the Jewish radicals of London’s East End at the turn of the century, William J. Fishman noted that “In 1914 the Anarchists were the most dynamic element in East End political life.” The same was true in the United States. During the late nineteenth century, wrote historian Paul Avrich, “anarchism emerged as probably the largest and certainly the most dynamic movement among Jewish radicals in the United States.” While anarchism in general and Jewish anarchism in particular has had little influence since World War I, the impulses which gave birth to it lived on among some Jews. Thus Jews such as Ludwig von Mises, Gary Becker, Murray Weidenbaum, Israel Kirzner, and Milton Friedman were important in the postWorld War II revival of free-market economics, while Ayn Rand wrote famous novels advocating individualism and the dismantling of political collectivism.25 This distrust of authority and power was ubiquitous in the culture of East European Jews and their descendants in America. Indeed, so pervasive has it been that some Jews have sought to make a virtue of their supposed powerlessness. Michael Selzer, an American Jew, contended in his volume Zionism Reconsidered that powerlessness is the essence of Jewish ethics and purpose, and that Zionism, by seeking to empower Jews, was anti-Jewish. The essence of Judaism, he said, “involved a revolution to radicalize the world through Jewish powerlessness and suffering.” (italics in the original) Ellen Willis, another American Jewish radical, also emphasized the powerlessness of Jews. “The status of Jews as . . . persecuted outsiders,” she wrote, “is at the core of what Judaism and Jewishness all about.”26 The Jewish attitude toward authority and power influenced language and literature, employment patterns, and, of course, politics itself. Yiddish literature is a literature of victims to whom things happen. It is not the literature of heroic characters, of knights killing dragons and winning the hearts of damsels in distress. Nor is it the literature of two boys floating down a great river in search of freedom or of a demented ship’s captain seeking to destroy a great white whale. see Robert S. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (Rutherford, 1982). 25 William J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals (London, 1975), 302; Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, 1988), 180. 26 Seltzer quoted in David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York, 1986), 5; Willis quoted in Liebman and Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism, 46-47.

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Yiddish literature is pessimistic and bitter, and bears little resemblance to the cloying quaintness and sentimentality of Fiddler on the Roof. As Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg wrote in their introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954), “The virtue of powerlessness, the power of helplessness, the company of the dispossessed, the sanctity of the insulted and the injured—these, finally, are the great themes of Yiddish literature.”27 In America these themes appeared in the novels and short stories of Bernard Malamud and other writers of the post-World War II Jewish literary renaissance. In “The Magic Barrel,” one of Malamud’s finest stories, a young yeshiva student is tormented by the experience of seeking a bride. “Out of this, however,” Malamud wrote, “he drew the conclusion that he was a Jew and that a Jew suffered.” This is also the theme of Malamud’s novel The Assistant in which the main character undergoes the pain of ritual circumcision to become a Jew. He recognizes at the end of the novel that such pain is an integral part of being a Jew.28 Jewish humor also reflected the culture of a people for whom authority and power are the enemy. Yiddish humor is populated by schlemiels and schlemazels. (The classic definition of a schlemiel is someone who pours soup on someone else; the schlemazel is that someone else.) Jewish humor was transformed in America, but it remained the humor of outcasts. It is the humor of the great New York Yiddish performer Menashe Skulnik singing, “It wouldn’t happen to a dog.” It is the humor of the Catskills comedians telling of a man crying in a cemetery, “Max, why did you die?” When asked who Max is, he responds, “My wife’s first husband.” It is the humor of the Marx brothers, with its anarchism and deflating of all authority figures. It is the humor of Lenny Bruce, attacking all authority, and proclaiming yes, we Jews did kill Jesus, we killed him because he did not want to go to medical school. It is the humor of Rodney Dangerfield, crying out that no one respects him, and the humor of the Seinfeld television show in which Jerry and his friends are continually victims of the fates. Their love lives are a disaster, their professional lives are going nowhere, and their relations with their parents leave something to be desired. Finally, it is the humor of Woody Allen, that quintessential schlemiel, a man who subscribes to a magazine that is a combination of Commentary and Dissent, only it is called Dysentery.

27 Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York, 1953), 38 (italics in the original). 28 Bernard Malamud, Selected Stories (London, 1985), 136.

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It is no coincidence that a disproportionate number of America’s leading intellectuals are Jews, because the task of the modern intellectual has been to question and subvert authority and to overturn traditional ways of viewing reality. Other American ethnic groups, because of their different histories, have had different attitudes toward authority and power. Notable in this respect are the American Irish. If Jews have staffed the faculties of New York City’s schools and colleges, the Irish have until recently dominated the city’s police and fire departments. Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, represented a Boston congressional district with a large Jewish population. He once remarked that he loved his Jewish constituents but they wrote too many letters. Tom Clancy, the best-selling author of techno-thrillers, perceptively analyzed the approach to authority of his fellow American Irish in his novel Patriot Games. Jack Ryan, the hero of the novel, is a former Marine and a professor of history at the Naval Academy, who does freelance work for the Central Intelligence Agency saving the world from bad guys. While in London, accompanied by his wife and daughter, to give a speech at a scholarly conference, he foils an attempt by Irish terrorists to kidnap Prince Charles. Ryan is wounded by IRA gunfire and is visited in the hospital by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh who thank him for saving their son. The Queen, however, is mystified why someone named Ryan would have put himself in harm’s way to save a member of the royal family. He is, after all, an Irish-American, and presumably bears no love for the British or the royal family. Ryan answers: Your Majesty, I cannot speak to your Irish problem. I’m an American citizen, and my country has enough problems of its own without having to delve into someone else’s. Where I come from we—that is, Irish-Americans—have made out pretty well. We’re in all the professions, business, and politics, but your prototypical Irish-American is still a basic police officer or firefighter. The cavalry that won the West was a third Irish, and there are still plenty of us in uniform—especially the Marine Corps, as a matter of fact. Half of the local FBI office lived in my old neighborhood. They had names like Tully, Sullivan, O’Connor, and Murphy. My dad was a police officer for half his life, and the priests and nuns who educated me were mostly Irish, probably. Do you see what I mean, Your Majesty? In America we are the forces of order, the glue that holds society together—so what happens? Today the most famous Irishmen in the world are the maniacs who leave bombs in parked cars, or assassins who kill people to make some sort of political point. I don’t like that, and I know my dad wouldn’t like it. He spent his whole working life taking animals like that off the street

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and putting them in cages where they belong. We’ve worked pretty hard to get where we are—too hard to be happy about being thought of as the relatives of terrorists.29

American Jews, by contrast, have not gravitated to the ranks of the police, the fire department, the CIA, the FBI, or the military. When Alan King joked at the Republican convention of 1972 in Miami Beach that it was nice to be in a city in which the head of the police was named Rocky Pomerance, he got a laugh because of the incongruity of a Jew commanding a police department. (Six hundred miles north another Jew headed a police department. But Reuben Greenberg of Charleston also happened to be Black.) Jews also, until recently, tended to avoid employment in large bureaucracies, with the exception of government. This Jewish alienation from power expresses itself politically in several ways. First of all, it is responsible for the emphasis that Jews put on ideology and causes in politics. Jews have not thought of politics as an avenue for personal advancement but as an arena for achieving ideological goals. Few Jews have made politics a career, and it was not until 1973 that New York City elected a Jewish mayor, Abe Beame.30 Jews have viewed politicians with suspicion and contempt and politics as a rather disreputable profession. This emphasis on ideology also characterized Jewish politics in Eastern and Central Europe. As Ezra Mendelsohn, the foremost contemporary authority on Jewish politics in Europe, remarked, “The absence of real rewards for sticking together meant that ideological differences led almost inevitably to organizational splits,” and these splits invariably revolved around ideological differences over the Jewish question.31 One of the most biting descriptions of this phenomenon is the English Jewish writer Israel Zangwill’s short story “Samooborona” (“self-defense” in Russian) published in 1907. This satire on the divisive, schismatic, overly intellectual, dogmatic, and illusionary Jewish politics of Eastern Europe concerns the efforts of a young Jew named David Ben Amram to alert the residents of the imaginary town of Milovka in Poland to a pogrom being planned by the Black

29 Tom Clancy, Patriot Games (New York, 1988), 40. 30 Technically, Fiorello La Guardia was Jewish, but he identified as a Christian, and Jews of his time never regarded him as Jewish. 31 Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington, 1987), 47.

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Hundreds. An outsider, he was sent to Milovka to organize a local self-defense military unit. As he travels to the town his heart swells with thoughts of the Maccabean deeds to be achieved by a regenerated Jewish population. He will be cruelly disappointed. The Jewish residents of Milovka want nothing to do with him and they ignore his warnings. They are resigned to their fate and fear that he will merely stir up trouble with the Gentiles and provoke the pogrom he seeks to prevent. Also, the Jews of Milovka are so ideologically divided that cooperation is impossible. They live in a dream world in which self-defense takes a backseat to doctrinal purity. He had a nightmare vision of bristling sects and pullulating factions, each with its Councils, Federations, Funds, Conferences, Party-Days, Agenda, Referats, Press-Organs, each differentiating itself with meticulous subtlety from all the other Parties, each defining with casuistic minuteness its relation to every contemporary problem, each equipped with inexhaustible polyglot orators speechifying through tumultuous nights.

It seemed to David as he “stumbled blindly through the ill-paved alleys that a plague of doctors of philosophy had broken out over the Pale, doctrinaires spinning pure logic from their vitals, and fighting bitterly against the slightest deviation from the pattern of their webs.” They advocated “logically-perfect structures of Zionism without Zion, Jewish Socialism without a Jewish social order, Labor Parties without votes or Parliaments. The habit of actualities had been lost; what need of them when concepts provided as much intellectual stimulus? Would Israel never return to reality, never find solid ground under foot, never look eye to eye upon life?” Distressed, David commits suicide, the ultimate form of samooborona that not even the Czar’s minions could prevent.32 This estrangement from power, this belief that considerations of power should not pollute political discussion, still resonates among American Jews. Historian Henry L. Feingold, the leading authority on the American response to the Holocaust, has reminded us that when people lack power they emphasize morality. This has characterized the approach of American Jews to foreign affairs. American Jews are generally distrustful of solving diplomatic problems by military means, the ultimate exercise of power, and have favored the nuclear weapons freeze and lower defense appropriations in far greater percentages than other Americans. (This has not prevented them from favoring more military aid to Israel.) Jews were more opposed to the Vietnam War than the general 32 Israel Zangwill, “Samooborona,” in Ghetto Comedies (London, 1925), 375-424.

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population. Jews were even skeptical about Desert Storm, the war against Iraq in 1991, even though Iraq was an enemy of Israel. A majority of Jewish senators opposed granting President Bush the authority to wage war. This aversion to the exercise of military power is the flip side of the once enthusiastic faith of Jews in the United Nations. “No single ethnic or religious group in the United States has produced such a disproportionate number of scholars in the field of international law as have Jews,” Irving Kristol wrote, and “no other group has been so reluctant to recognize that this messianic vision, when applied to political actualities, has proved to be political utopianism, wishful thinking.” Nor can Jews “even bring themselves openly to support the indispensable precondition for the exercise of American influence on behalf of Jewish interests in the world: a large and powerful military establishment.”33 Making up less than three percent of the population, American Jews have lacked the power to sway the American government from acting in what it perceives as American self-interest, even if this should adversely affect Israel. The response of American Jews has not been to emphasize the congruency between the national interests of America and Israel or to stress the importance of Israel’s military power. Rather, American Jews have preferred to argue that Israel is deserving of American support because it is America’s only true and reliable friend in the Middle East or because Israel is the only real democracy in the region. These things might be true, but they are hardly convincing arguments for American policy makers. Another area in which morality rather than power considerations predominate in the minds of American Jews concerns the Holocaust. One hardly needs to be reminded in the era of Schindler’s List, the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) of the role the Holocaust has played in American Jewish life. The Holocaust, Michael Berenbaum wrote, “has entered the domain of shared sacredness.” No question has troubled American Jews more than the seeming lack of response by the American government to the plight of European Jewry. “Why didn’t the American government do more?” The unstated assumption behind such a question is that Washington had a responsibility to save the Jews of 33 Lipset and Raab, “American Jews,” 152; Alan Fisher, “Iraq, the U.S., and Two Jewish Questions Revisited,” Comment and Analysis [newsletter of the Susan and David Wilstein Institute of Jewish Studies] 2 ( June 1991): 1, 3-4; Irving Kristol, “The Political Dilemma of American Jews,” Commentary, July 1984, 26-27.

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Europe. But is this correct? Are there other examples in history in which a government has felt responsible for the inhabitants of other countries? Is it realistic to expect the American government to have allowed the rescue of European Jewry to deflect it from its primary goal of defeating Hitler? Instead of making the case that it would have been in the self-interest of America to do everything possible to save the Jews of Europe, American Jews have preferred to utter bromides on the moral obligations of American policy makers and to transform Elie Wiesel into an American Jewish icon. A recent example of this tendency of American Jews to moralize regarding American foreign policy and the Holocaust is Michael Dobkowski’s article “Historians, Politicians, and Morality: America and the Holocaust.” According to Dobkowski, historical interpretation “must be grounded in a moral imperative.” American inaction regarding European Jewry during World War II stemmed from the fact that “there were not enough Americans who cared about Europe’s beleaguered Jews.” In fact, as the historian David Engel has said, Allied governments “did little to extricate the Jews of Hitler’s Europe from their mortal peril because they could see no compelling political, strategic, or legal reason to do so.”34 A third area in which Jewish political perceptions have been shaped by an aversion to power and authority concerns race relations. A close relationship with African Americans, or at least with Black American leadership, has been a basic component of the politics of American Jews throughout the twentieth century. For Jews, this relationship has rested on something more fundamental than mere opposition to racial injustice. American Jews have long believed that there was a similarity of interests and perspectives among African Americans and Jews, and that each group instinctively empathized with the plight of the other because of a common history of oppression and powerlessness. Even European Jews believed this. The autobiography of Zalman David Levontin, one of the most prominent European Zionists at the turn of the century, remarked on the influence that Black history had on him.35 Even as a boy when I studied geography and learned that the Republic of Liberia had been founded by Negroes in Africa, I asked myself: if the 34 Michael Berenbaum, After Tragedy and Triumph: Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience (Cambridge, 1990), 3-6; Michael Dobkowski, “Historians, Politicians and Morality: America and the Holocaust,” Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies 10, no. 1 (1996): 29-33; David Engel, “The Western Allies and the Holocaust,” in From “Shtetl” to Socialism: Studies from “Polin,” ed. Antony Polonsky (London, 1993), 419. 35 Levontin quoted in Vital, Origins of Zionism, 98.

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Negroes could found a state for themselves, why should we not go and found a state for ourselves too in the land of our ancestors?

In his short stories “Angel Levine” and “Black Is My Favorite Color” the American writer Bernard Malamud also emphasized the similarities between Jews and African Americans. Evidence of antisemitism within Black America has dismayed American Jews not primarily because all indications of antisemitism are dismaying. Rather, it is because Black antisemitism challenges one of the major pillars of American Jewish liberalism: the belief that Jews and African Americans are natural political allies because both groups lack power and are outsiders. One response of Jews to Black antisemitism is to ignore it or to downplay its significance, while exaggerating the presence of antisemitism in large corporations and the Pentagon. It is, however, impossible today to argue that African Americans and Jews share a common status. There is nothing within the Jewish community remotely resembling the economically depressed and socially dysfunctional Black ghettos of urban America. Nowhere is the Jewish distrust of institutions and power more clearly manifested than in the area of civil liberties. With the growing emphasis of liberalism on social and cultural and not on economic issues, Jewish support for liberalism has, if anything, increased. No segment of American society has been more supportive of the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations that challenge constituted authority. Sociologists have noted that this reflects the structure of the Jewish family in which child-rearing patterns are permissive and physical discipline infrequent. The Jewish defense of individual liberty and distrust of authority results in strong support for gay rights despite Judaism’s abhorrence of nontraditional sexual practices. Regarding the abortion issue, Jews, wrote Jay P. Lefkowitz in Commentary in 1993, “are the single most pro-choice group within the electorate. 62 percent favor abortion on demand.” Jews support an unqualified right to abortion about twenty-five percent more than the rest of the population. This is particularly true for Jewish women’s organizations who have made freedom-of-choice an article of faith. This support for abortion rights, Lefkowitz noted, rests “primarily on the commitment to individual freedom that is central to the secular humanism with which most assimilated Jews—and that means most Jews by far—identify.”36

36 Jay. P. Lefkowitz, “Jewish Voters and the Democrats,” Commentary, April 1993, 40.

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At first glance, this would seem to be incongruous. Not only is freedom of choice completely antithetical to Jewish law, but one would think that, in the wake of the Holocaust, the priority for Jewish organizations should be to increase Jewish numbers. Also, since the American Jewish birth rate is below replacement level and is considerably lower than the Gentile birth rate, it is clear that Jewish women have already limited the size of their families and that they stand to benefit little personally from the pro-choice movement. Jewish men and women are staunch supporters of freedom of choice not because it benefits them personally but because the abortion question touches on matters of state power and individual liberty that resonate strongly within American Jewish culture. The essence of politics is the manipulation of power and authority. The expression “power politics” is a tautology since politics without power is meaningless. But this is precisely the type of politics that has been espoused by many American Jews. So alienated are Jews from considerations of power that they are horrified when attention is drawn to their political power, as President Bush did in 1991. The stating of what seemed to be a political truism, namely that Jews were seeking to use their political muscle to influence American Middle East policy, was seen by Jews not only as false but also antisemitic. Everyone should know that Jews are powerless and that when Jews enter politics it is in behalf of issues and not crass self-interest. “With the vicissitudes of their long history,” Bernard Rosenberg and Irving Howe wrote in 1974, “the Jews have been prepared for almost anything but to be taken as part of the dominant ‘majority.’” But at a time when the presidents of America’s three most prestigious universities are named Rudenstine (Harvard), Levin (Yale), and Shapiro (Princeton), or when the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System is named Greenspan, or when the secretary of Treasury is named Rubin, it is difficult to deny that Jews lack power or status. Jews have power no matter how much they would like to deny it. As Carl A. Sheingold said, “the most important general challenge confronting Jewish politics today is that of taking responsibility for power. Conversely, Jews cannot and should not take pride in feeling or acting as if they are outsiders to power . . . when they are not.” American Jews, Abba Eban once said, cannot take yes for an answer. This, more than anything, explains the continuity of the political profile of America’s Jews.37 37 Bernard Rosenberg and Irving Howe, “Are American Jews Turning to the Right?” Dissent 21 (Winter 1974), 32; Carl A. Sheingold, “Towards a Politics of Paradox: The Jewish Confrontation with Power,” American Pluralism and the Jewish Community, 129.

Chapter 20

Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish History Historians distinguish between narratives of “memory” and narratives of “history.” Narratives of memory result from folk remembrances and help define and heighten group identity. Narratives of history, by contrast, conform to professional historical standards, respect the complexity of the past, and frequently contradict narratives of memory. Narratives of memory have been particularly influential in how American Jews have interpreted their past. They believe, for example, that antisemitism was mainly responsible for Jewish immigration to the Western Hemisphere. In this telling, Jewish immigrants were modern Israelites, with Europe their Egypt, the czars their pharaohs, and America the land of Canaan. This legend linked the story of Jewish immigration with the enduring founding myth of America that tells of Pilgrims and Puritans fleeing England during the seventeenth century to escape religious persecution. But there was nothing unique about Jewish immigration. Most European Jewish immigrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were responding to the same economic and social dislocations which caused Gentiles to immigrate, namely rapid industrialization, the growth in population, urbanization, and the breakdown of the rural European agrarian economy in which Jews had played a crucial economic role. Some Jews have also mistakenly assumed that their immigrant ancestors were religiously Orthodox, when, in fact, the majority had deserted Orthodoxy prior to leaving Europe. Over a half century ago the Conservative rabbi-historian Herbert Parzen objected to the “incorrect, uninformed, and unhistorical” vision of “a kind of holy, integral Jewish life, untainted by modernism that is supposed to have been lived by our fathers in Eastern Europe.” In fact, Parzen noted, the Holocaust destroyed “not a totally traditional Jewry absorbed in the old medieval ways of Orthodox piety, but a Jewry agitated by new ideas and busy

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expanding its secular life.” Fiddler on the Roof is hardly a complete portrait of East European Jewish life. Another part of the American Jewish conventional narrative is that a passion for higher education by the people of the book explains their rapid economic and social mobility. In this narrative the City College of New York and other urban universities have assumed a mythic status as the launching pad for American Jewish economic and social upward mobility. In fact, the American Jews’ attraction to business and their willingness to defer gratification were far more important in the early stages of their rise out of poverty, and they were fortunate in being strategically located to capitalize on the opportunities offered in urban merchandising and manufacturing by an expanding economy. The initial goal of the majority of Jewish immigrants and their sons was to become independent small businessmen, not lawyers and physicians, and few American Jews (or Gentiles) aspired to the professions or attended college until after the Great Depression. American Jews have also cultivated a narrative of memory regarding their involvement in the civil rights movement during its “golden years” of the 1950s and 1960s. It is true that every major civil rights rally or march during these years included prominent Jews, including Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joachim Prinz, and Joseph Rauh, and that the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and dozens of local Jewish community-relations organizations expended much effort and money in behalf of African Americans. Jews comprised a disproportionate percentage of the lawyers involved in civil rights litigation, Jews provided a large percentage of the funds used to break down Jim Crow, and many of the whites who went down south to work for civil rights had Jewish backgrounds. Jewish leaders believed their interests and values were closely aligned with those of African Americans since both groups sought to eliminate prejudice and discrimination. Indeed, American Jews often conflated their history with that of American African Americans. Jews resembled those ancient Greeks who, Thucydides said in his History of the Peloponnesian War, written twenty-five hundred years ago, “made their recollections fit in with their sufferings.” But was the history of America’s Jews and African Americans similar, or is this aspect of the American Jewish narrative also seriously flawed? June 21, 2014 was the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, three civil rights workers who had been attempting to register Black voters in Mississippi during Freedom Summer of 1994. Goodman and Schwerner were from New York City, and Chaney was

Chapter 20. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish History

an African American from Mississippi. Their slayings were the subject of the Oscar-winning film Mississippi Burning starring Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman, the documentary film Neshoba: The Price of Freedom, and two made-forTV movies, as well as novels, songs, and paintings. June 21, 1964 has become an iconic date for some American Jews. Coming less than two decades after the end of World War II, the martyrdom of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney supposedly demonstrated that Jews and African Americans comprised a community of the oppressed sharing a history of prejudice and bloodshed. Both African Americans and Jews emphasized that the fate of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner showed the close ties between the two groups. The Black civil rights leader James Farmer described the three men as “two Jews and an African American who shared a martyr’s grave.” The Jewish activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin concurred. The three were “shared martyrs” who had “a common vision of justice, a common passion for the liberatory Exodus paradigm.” “Both blacks and Jews have known Egypt,” she wrote in her 1991 autobiography, Deborah, Golda, and Me. “Jews have known it as certain death (the killing of the firstborn, then the ovens and gas chambers). Blacks have known it as death and terror by bondage.” Both groups “remain perennial outsiders, second-class citizens,” and history “has taught us that the fate of each outgroup is inevitably linked to the destiny of the others.” Such thinking was widespread among Jews. Thus Ben Shahn’s famous 1965 lithograph Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By commemorating the deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner shows a black hand and a white hand interlocked with Hebrew and English inscriptions. The caption comes from Leviticus 19:16: “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor.” The political scientist Gilbert N. Khan asserted that there was a “natural bond” between Jews and African Americans. In the 1960s “the children and grandchildren of former American slaves and the new American immigrants and their children—who themselves had suffered so much prejudice in Europe—marched together, united in their determination to achieve freedom for all and to remove bias in all of American life.” Despite contemporary disagreements between Jews and African Americans, the Jewish and African-American communities, Kahn suggested, “could do well to choose this 50th anniversary occasion to reaffirm their commitment to the joint ‘dream’ from which both communities can and must benefit.” African Americans and Jews should return to the golden era of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner and “march again.” This supposedly close and friendly relationship between African Americans and Jews has been an important element in the American Jewish narrative of

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memory for over a century. Of the many pieties of American Jewry, few have been so widely accepted as the assumption that African Americans and Jews share what has been described as a “comradeship of excluded peoples.” A 2012 compilation of “The 18 Most Iconic Jewish Photos Ever Taken,” which includes photographs of David Ben-Gurion reading the 1948 Declaration of the State of Israel, Israeli soldiers standing rapturously next to the Western Well in Jerusalem at the conclusion of the 1967 Six-Day War, and Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands at the White House in 1993 after signing the Oslo Peace Accord, also includes the famous photo of Martin Luther King Jr. walking alongside rabbis Maurice Eisendrath and Abraham Joshua Heschel during the famous voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. Eisendrath, in the center, carries a Torah with a Jewish star on the fabric covering the scroll. In Malka Drucker’s prize-winning 2008 juvenile book, Portraits of JewishAmerican Heroes, there are chapters on Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner as well as on Haym Salomon, Levi Strauss, Louis Brandeis, Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Hank Greenberg, and Leonard Bernstein. Goodman and Schwerner have joined the pantheon of American Jewish heroes, and it has become common for historians to use “Jew” or “Jewish” when writing of them. In his book Anti-Semitism in America (1994), the historian Leonard Dinnerstein described Goodman and Schwerner as “two northern Jewish activists.” Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the Jews in America (1992) referred to Goodman and Schwerner as “Jews,” and Gerald Sorin’s Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (1997) also mentioned that Goodman and Schwerner were “Jews.” Hasia R. Diner’s The Jews of the United States, 1654-2004 (2004) published during the celebration of the 350th year of Jewish settlement in North America, included an FBI missing persons poster containing photos of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. While Goodman and Schwerner “may not have articulated a connection between their actions and their Jewishness,” Diner wrote, “American Jews saw them as their martyrs in a common moral crusade.” Undoubtedly the reason they did not articulate such a connection was that there was no connection to articulate. Goodman and Schwerner were certainly Jews by descent, but whether Judaism or Jewishness played any role in their lives is another question. For some this was not important. The political philosopher Michael Walzer depicted Jews such as Goodman and Schwerner as having a symbiotic “double identification.” By identifying with the civil rights movement they were also identifying more strongly with Jewishness. “These few made the double identification seem more authentic than it was for most of us.” Thus those Jews involved

Chapter 20. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish History

with the movement were the most authentic of Jews, even if being Jewish was unimportant to them. For Murray Friedman, the regional director of the Pennsylvania office of the American Jewish Committee during the 1960s, the Jewish identity of those who went to the South was significant, although he admitted that they might not have always recognized its saliency. “It is as if these boys were wearing their yarmulkes without knowing it.” To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Chaney-GoodmanSchwerner slayings, the American Studies Department at Brandeis University sponsored a three-day conference on June 10-12, 2014 on “Blacks, Jews, and Social Justice in America.” The flier announcing the conference featured a photo of the Ben Shahn lithograph and invited proposals for papers that would address “the relations between members of these two groups in campaigns for social justice—whether in politics or the arts—throughout American history.” The conference was partially underwritten by the university’s Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice, and Georgia Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis delivered the keynote address. Lewis was one of the so-called Big Six civil rights leaders of the 1960s and, as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1965, helped plan the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign of 1964 that drew Goodman and Schwerner to the state. For students of American Jewish history, one of the key issues prompted by the Brandeis conference concerns its central assumption that throughout American history African Americans as African Americans and Jews as Jews have marched together in campaigns for social justice, and that Goodman and Schwerner and the other Jewish civil rights workers who went South during the 1960s were somehow representative American Jews. The evidence indicates otherwise, and members of the Goodman and Schwerner families thought it was bizarre to believe that being Jewish had anything to do with Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner going to Mississippi. “It never even occurred to any of us or to Andy that he went down [to Mississippi] as a Jew,” Carolyn Goodman, his mother, said. “They went down because it was the most important thing to do at the moment.” In his essay “A Jewish View of the Racial Crisis,” published a year after the Mississippi murders, the journalist Charles Silberman emphasized that few of the Jews involved in the civil rights movement had any commitment to Judaism or believed that their activities could be traced back to any positive Jewish elements in their lives. “Many,” he wrote, “would have thought you insane had you even suggested that notion.” Four years later the sociologist Nathan Glazer

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published his essay “The Jewish Role in Student Activism” in Fortune magazine. It focused on Jews involved in the New Left and not on those active in the civil rights movement, but his conclusions apply to the latter group as well. Jews of the New Left, Glazer wrote, make nothing of any Jewish identity, “are scarcely conscious of it, and are not aware of it in connection with their political activities. Indeed, on the basis of some quite unsystematic and casual conversations with Jewish radicals, I don’t think many of them have ever thought of it.” Stephen J. Whitfield, a professor of American Studies at Brandeis, agreed. His essay “Famished for Justice: The Jew as Radical” noted that few Jews involved in the various left-wing causes of the 1960s made their Jewish origins “a source of self-consciousness or reflection about either their motives or their ideals.” The more radical was the Jew, “the less he or she is likely to know (or care) about normative Judaic practice.” For Jews with little contact with Judaism and Jewish culture, the civil rights movement provided them with meaning and purpose. They did not reject Judaism but were simply indifferent to it. In Debra L. Schulz’s Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (2001), a study of fifteen women who worked with SNCC in the South between 1900 and 1967, the author’s own “tenuous connection” to things Jewish mirrored that of her subjects. Their minimal Jewish identity stemmed from memories of the Holocaust, which they equated with the treatment of African Americans in Mississippi. They also would have thought it odd to believe that coming to the South had anything to do with Judaism. These women, Schultz wrote, “were more comfortable fighting for Black rights than for specifically Jewish causes.” Schultz recounted the response of Dorothy Miller Zellner when she went to a Jewish hospital in the South and was asked for her religious affiliation. She wrote “none’’ and found the question to be “very annoying and offensive.” Schultz concluded that “the muted nature of Jewish identity in the (civil rights) movement is consistent with the universalist, non-nationalist ethics espoused in the early 1960s.” But it did not have to be “muted” since it was not prominent to begin with. Clayborne Carson, the Black historian and expert on the history of SNCC, claimed there was no evidence that Judaism motivated Jews to become active in the civil rights movement. Those who were involved tended to be those least likely “to be representatives of Jewish organizations or even to identify themselves as Jewish rather than white.”They gravitated to the movement because of their politics and not religion, and their politics had often been shaped while growing up in leftist families. This was certainly true for Goodman and Schwerner. For them, as well as for many other radical Jews of the 1960s,

Chapter 20. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish History

Jewish identity was largely a matter of biological descent rather than ideological assent. Schwerner, in fact, denied that he was a Jew, described himself as an atheist, opposed all organized religion, and preferred to think of himself as simply a man. This alienation from Judaism occurred early in his life, and when he became thirteen he refused to participate in the traditional bar mitzvah ceremony marking a Jewish boy’s transition to adulthood. This did not elicit much opposition from his parents who had moved away from Jewish observance and drifted into left-wing politics. His father, Nathan, would eventually become the national secretary of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, the left-wing counterpart to the American Civil Liberties Union. Michael Schwerner’s denial of any Jewish identity continued beyond his death. His parents and wife wanted his body to be buried in an African-American cemetery in Meridian, Mississippi, but no white or Black undertaker in the state would agree to this. Instead his body was returned to New York City where a funeral service was held at the Community Church in Manhattan on August 8, 1964. The body was then cremated. The attenuated Jewish identity of Andrew Goodman is confirmed in the 2014 memoir of his mother, Carolyn Goodman, published seven years after her death. Nowhere in My Mantelpiece: A Memoir of Survival and Social Justice is there an indication that being Jewish played any role in his decision to participate in the Mississippi summer project. This was not surprising since the Jewish identity of his parents was quite thin. Except for a couple of brief remarks about her ancestors and a reference to the rabbi who officiated at her wedding, a reader of her memoir would not even know that Carolyn Goodman was a Jew. She remarked that people are products of their “cultural surroundings and traditions,” but the surroundings and traditions that influenced her while growing up were certainly not Jewish. “We didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays. We celebrated Christmas and not Hanukkah (though we did stay home from school on the Jewish High Holy Days; my father figured it was the right thing to do). . . . I never recall feeling the sting of anti-Semitism. But then religion itself never had much of an impact of me.” In the 1930s she helped organize farmers’ cooperatives in upstate New York, served on a committee that aided Spanish Republicans who had fled Spain after the Spanish Civil War, and was involved with the League Against War and Fascism, but she does not mention any similar concern with the plight of Jewish refugees. Nor does she mention any impact that World War II had on her, even though she was born in 1925 and must have been aware of the Holocaust. This estrangement from Jewish concerns was reinforced

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by Robert, her first husband and Andrew’s father, who came from a left-wing socialist family. When it came time to choose a school for Andrew, Carolyn Goodman said, the couple selected the progressive Walden School rather than a public school, much less a Jewish school, “because a public education would not allow the freedom to discuss the current oppressive state of the union.” In the Walden School, Robert Goodman declared, “individual needs supersede the demands of system.” It is not surprising that Andrew Goodman also did not participate in any bar mitzvah ceremony. Andrew Goodman’s parents, wrote William Bradford Huie in his book Three Lives for Mississippi (1965), “were humanists in the liberal Jewish tradition. . . . He, too, stressed his faith in Man and in justice in the here and now.” But also in the here and now there was nothing to distinguish Andrew Goodman from those Gentiles who also felt impelled to go to Mississippi. To counter the “oppressive state” of America, Carolyn and Robert Goodman immersed themselves in a variety of liberal and radical causes popular in their Upper West Side Manhattan neighborhood. These included the Women’s Strike for Peace, civil rights, and feminism. Their apartment hosted a variety of left-wing personalities, including the actor Zero Mostel, the convicted spy Alger Hiss, the communist author Howard Fast, and Martin Popper, the leftwing attorney for the Hollywood Ten. The only mention in Carolyn Goodman’s memoir of involvement by her or her husband in any Jewish philanthropy or organization concerned the Givat Haviva Educational Foundation, an Israeli organization devoted to Jewish-Arab relations which funded Interns for Peace. During the 1960s, Robert Goodman was chairman of the board of the nonprofit Pacifica Foundation, which oversaw a group of left-wing radio stations in Berkeley (KPFA), Los Angeles (KPFK), Washington (WPFW), Houston (KPFT), and New York (WBIA). When Robert Goodman died in 1969, his funeral service also took place at the Community Church in Manhattan. Three years later Carolyn Goodman became chairman of the board of the Pacifica Foundation. Undoubtedly the most unexpected aspect of Carolyn Goodman’s life occurred when her eldest son, Jonathan, became interested in traditional Judaism in the mid-1960s. “Mom,” he told her, “I’ve decided I better find out what it means to be a Jew.” He soon became a Lubavitcher Hasid, and moved to Kfar Chabad, a Lubavitcher settlement in Israel near Tel Aviv. She did not approve. “I was at odds with his whole outlook on things when he became profoundly religious,” she said, but she eventually learned to “tolerate” it. “We remained as stubborn as ever in our disparate beliefs. But we came to understand that love

Chapter 20. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish History

can bridge any divide.” This divide was manifested at her funeral memorial service, which she had carefully planned. It took place at the Meeting House of the Society for Ethical Culture in New York, the same place at which the memorial service for Andrew was held in August 1964. There was no Jewish element in the service. Instead, “Amazing Grace” was sung, and an African-American choir chanted a medley of gospel songs. The memorial ended with the audience clapping and singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” One wonders what Jonathan Goodman made of all this. A quarter of a century after the murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, another chapter in the fantasy narrative of Black-Jewish relations appeared. This involved the supposed liberation of Jewish prisoners in Dachau and Buchenwald by Black soldiers. On November 9, 1992, the fifty-fourth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Public Broadcasting System documentary film titled Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II and narrated by Denzel Washington premiered at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center in New York City. Two days later, Veterans Day, the documentary appeared on PBS’s The American Experience series, and on December 17 the ninety-minute film was shown at the Apollo Theater in Harlem under the sponsorship of a group calling itself the Liberators Commemoration Committee and with funding from the TimeWarner Corporation. The showing of the film was preceded by a buffet featuring a politically correct menu of grits, gefilte fish, catfish fritters, collard greens, and kishke. Twelve hundred people attended the Harlem event during which African Americans and Holocaust survivors wept, hugged one another, and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Perhaps the film’s most moving scene showed two African Americans with arms around a Jew who was viewing Buchenwald where he had been an inmate decades earlier. “An image of black American and Jew embracing through the pain of their memories,” wrote John J. O’Connor in the New York Times, “is all the more moving in the current context of scattered tensions between the two groups.” These tensions include a serious riot in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in August 1991 where for two and a half days gangs of young Black men destroyed property, assaulted Jews, and killed an Australian Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum. The Liberators film thus appeared at a propitious time for the city’s political and civic leaders who wished to heal the discords between African Americans and Jews. At the same time as the release of the film, a three-hundred-page companion book recounting the liberation story was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Authored by Lou Potter, the book repeated the claim of the film that Black soldiers “led the way for U.S. forces in the liberation of the Nazis’ most

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notorious concentration camps, Buchenwald and Dachau.” The New York City Board of Education proposed distributing copies of the documentary to all of the city’s junior and senior high schools, and Jewish philanthropists competed for the privilege of funding this venture. The film’s producers also hoped to raise funds to provide copies to all of America’s seventy thousand junior and senior high schools. Liberators won an award from the International Documentary Association and on February 12, 1993 received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary, but by this time the film had already been withdrawn from circulation because serious doubts about its veracity had been raised by Black World War II veterans, Holocaust survivors, and World War II historians who complained of its slipshod research and dubious conclusions. “Invention,” wrote the journalist Stephen J. Dubner, “does indeed seem to have played its part in this sad scenario of good intentions gone wrong.” An internal review of the film by WNET, the New York City affiliate of PBS, emphasized its “paucity of basic research and an almost exclusive reliance on oral history. Apparently little effort was made to seek corroboration of this oral history, either from the military record or from other primary or secondary sources.” The book’s publisher eventually remaindered the volume and inserted a statement in each copy stating that “it is now clear that certain facts are in dispute in Liberators, for which Harcourt Brace and Company must take at least partial responsibility and which we deeply regret.” Among these facts is that, while Black soldiers had been near the concentration camps, they had not done any liberating. Black veterans were particularly angry because they feared the film’s distortions could discredit their exemplary service during the war. E. G. McConnell, one of these soldiers, said, “We had been stripped of our history in our slavery, and I didn’t want to come up with anything that could tarnish our record. But apparently some other people didn’t mind a few lies.” McConnell sued Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Lou Potter, WNET, and the Black and Jewish co-producers of the film, Bill Miles and Nina Rosenblum, for defamation. Miles and Rosenblum never recanted and claimed to be victims of censorship. Rosenblum described those whites who had questioned the film’s veracity as racists, even though it was the Black veterans themselves who had been among the first to raise doubts about the film. She described McConnell as “severely brain-damaged” due to wounds suffered in the war. Rosenblum was not the only Jew to defend the film. Peggy Tishman, a prominent philanthropist in the city and one of the co-hosts for the Apollo showing, asked rhetorically, “Why would anybody want to exploit the idea that this is a fraud? What we’re trying to do is make New York a better place for you

Chapter 20. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish History

and me to live,” and this required bringing Jews and African Americans closer together. The truth or falsity of the film was seemingly irrelevant. “There are a lot of truths that are very necessary,” she said. “This is not a truth that’s necessary,” particularly because it had the potential of obstructing Black-Jewish cooperation. Letty Cottin Pogrebin also feared the controversy could endanger Black-Jewish relations. She denied that Liberators was a hoax, and said the objections to the film had obscured the search for truth “at a level deeper than facts.” Among these deeper truths was that African Americans had helped Jews just as Jews had helped African Americans. If the film was not true in the conventional understanding of truth, she seemed to be saying, so much the worse for truth. More important was “the liberal vision of Black advancement and the struggle for Black-Jewish harmony.” By emphasizing the similarities of American African Americans and Jews and the quest for inter-group harmony, the fantasy narrative of Black-Jewish relations has distorted the history of both groups. The central theme of the history of African Americans, at least until the late twentieth century, has been racism, slavery, segregation, and social and economic degradation. The African American has been the perennial American outsider, and for them America has been “My country ‘Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Bigotry.” By contrast, and without denying the existence of American antisemitism, the history of American Jews has been far sunnier. Benefitting from having white skins, Jews were never enslaved or subjected to pogroms, their citizenship was never questioned, and they experienced rapid economic and social mobility. The central concern of America’s greatest Jewish writers, including Mary Antin, Cynthia Ozick, Emma Lazarus, Philip Roth, Henry Roth, and Saul Bellow, has been acculturation and assimilation, not prejudice and discrimination. No significant American Jewish writer has replicated the anger and estrangement of, say, a James Baldwin or a Malcolm X, nor felt the need to exile themselves, either physically or psychologically, from the United States as did Baldwin and Malcolm X. It is highly unlikely that an African American could ever have conceived of writing “God Bless America,” as did Irving Berlin, a Jew born in a Russian ghetto who conquered the world of American popular music, or write, as did Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein in Oklahoma, “we know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand.” Nor could any African American, locked into an impermeable racial definition of Black identity, imagine that American ethnic identity could be fluid, as did the Jewish British writer Israel Zangwill in his popular play The Melting Pot. If America for Jews has been an Emersonian nation, the land of individualism and self-reliance, it has

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been for African Americans a land in which they are, to cite the title of Gunnar Myrdal’s famous book, An American Dilemma. The propagation of any fantasy narrative of Black-Jewish relations that overlooks the vast differences between the two groups encourages sociological and historical illusions. By and large, it has been Jews and not African Americans who have disseminated this fantasy narrative, and this ultimately stems from what is arguably the greatest theme of American Jewish history—the defining of Jewish identity. What does it mean to be a Jew in America? The openness and freedom of America have enabled Jews to be whatever type of Jew they wanted, as in the case of Jonathan Goodman, or even to reject being Jewish at all, as in the case of Michael Schwerner. America has given birth to new forms of Judaism such as Conservative Judaism, Reconstructionism, and Humanistic Judaism, as well as to new definitions of secular Jewish identity involving Zionism and Jewish culture. In America there is both a widespread indifference to Judaism as well as a rapidly growing population of the right-wing Orthodox, and there is also a simultaneous pervasive Jewish illiteracy as well as an explosive growth in the number of Jewish museums, films, television programming, and books. African Americans, by contrast, have been locked into an identity involving apparently immutable racial characteristics. For decades, liberalism has been one of the most popular ways of defining Jewish identity in the United States. Jews have defined themselves as Jews because they voted for liberal politicians, supported liberal causes, and voiced the pieties of contemporary liberalism. Central to their liberalism was support for the civil rights movement. The sociologist Marshall Sklare discovered back in the 1950s when studying “Lakeville,” a heavily Jewish suburb in the Midwest, that its residents believed championing civil rights for African Americans to be more important in defining their identity as Jews than supporting the state of Israel or observing any Jewish religious rituals, including eating kosher food and observing the Sabbath. For the Jewish residents of Lakeville, Jewish identity and the civil rights movement had a symbiotic relationship. Their identity as Jews was strengthened by their involvement in the movement, and their involvement in the movement strengthened their sense of Jewishness. Central to this identity has been the narrative that Jews have created of their relationship with the Black community. “It can be dangerous to question the stories people tell about themselves because so much of our identity is both shaped by and bound up with our history,” Margaret MacMillan said in her book Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (2010). “That is why dealing with the past, in deciding on which version we want, or on what we want to

Chapter 20. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and American Jewish History

remember and to forget, can become so politically charged. . . . For all of us, the powerful and weak alike, history helps to define and validate us.” One can also add that what we want to invent, as in the examples of Goodman, Schwerner, and the Liberators, can also be politically charged. While completely objective history is unattainable since all historians are inevitably the products of their environment, it should remain the goal of serious historians. Fritz Stern, the prominent historian of modern Germany, noted in his introduction to The Varieties of History (1957) that the measure of the historian’s “intellectual and moral achievement” is the search for truth. But this goal is often impossible and the historian has to be “content with a suggestive tentativeness, knowing that the complexity of history is in itself an expression of the great and unpredictable variety of man.” This tentativeness is particularly important when the historical issue being examined evokes passionate feelings and when profound moral matters are involved, as, for example, those evoked by the civil rights movement. It does not detract from the bravery of those involved in the movement, including Goodman and Schwerner, to note that they were not motivated by Jewish impulses and are hardly “Jewish” heroes.

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Jewish Intellectuals and the American Conservative Movement When I told a friend that I was writing an essay on the Jewish role in the American conservative movement for a volume on Jews and American politics, he jested that mine would certainly be the shortest one in the book. He meant by this that American Jewish conservatives were doubly marginalized, as conservatives living in the world’s leading liberal nation and as Jews in a movement that historically has been seen as unfriendly to Jews and to Jewish interests. Conservatism seemed to have little relevance for a nation born in revolution and steeped in individualism, democracy, industrialism, and capitalism. It was this image of conservatism as an American irrelevancy that explains why Clinton Rossiter titled the second edition of his history of American conservatism The Thankless Persuasion. The United States, the political scientist Sheldon Wolin argued, “presents a formidable challenge to the conservative imagination.” Indeed, it was not so long ago that, to quote the conservative columnist George Will, conservatism “was widely considered, at best, an eccentricity and ‘conservative’ was an epithet.” In the introduction to his 1950 collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling asserted that “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. . . . [T]he conservative impulse and the reactionary do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” That same year a man was arrested in the Midwest for creating a public disturbance. A witness stated, “he was using abusive language, calling people conservative and all that.” There are few segments of American society in which conservatism has been so suspect than among Jews. Indeed, so pervasive has been the association of Jews with the political Left, so widespread was the belief that the fate of Jews and the Left were inextricably bound together, that the notion of a conservative

Chapter 21. Jewish Intellectuals and the American Conservative Movement

Jew seemed almost oxymoronic. When Rabbi Dov Berish Meisels of Cracow, a member of the Austrian parliament in the mid-nineteenth century, was asked by the surprised speaker of the parliament why he sat with the Left, he quipped, “Juden haben keine Rechte” ( Jews have no rights). And when the Israeli Knesset first met, no political party wanted to sit on the right, and so a new parliamentary seating arrangement had to be devised. This Jewish affinity toward the political Left survived the mass migration of Jews to the Western Hemisphere. In his book Jew vs. Jew, Samuel G. Freedman notes that so deep was the commitment of America’s Jews to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal that a Bronx mother insisted to the rabbi officiating at her son’s bar mitzvah that he hold a portrait of FDR alongside the Torah scrolls during the procession through the sanctuary. Her attitude was not idiosyncratic. Rabbi William F. Rosenbloom of New York called FDR “the Messiah of America’s tomorrow,” while Rabbi Stephen Wise in his autobiography, published four years after Roosevelt’s death, wrote about his “immortality.” Judge Jonah Goldstein, a New York Republican, asserted wryly that his fellow Jews appeared to have three velts (worlds): die velt (this world), yene velt (the other world, the afterlife), and Roosevelt. The hold of political liberalism on Jews has been so strong, wrote the sociologists Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, that it had become “a major component of their understanding of what it means to be a Jew.” That Jews would identify politically with the Left was not surprising. In Europe, the Left favored the emancipation of the Jews, opposed restrictions on Jewish economic and social mobility, and supported the separation of church and state. Conservatism, by contrast, defended established political and religious institutions that had been hostile to Jewish interests. The modern Jewish attitude toward authority, both public and private, was radically opposed to that of conservatism. Basic to modern Jewish political culture, the sociologist Werner Cohn said, is a “radical feeling of estrangement from the State,” and this estrangement was found in the most insular and the most assimilated of Jews. The alienation from politics was deeply rooted in the Jewish religious outlook. For Jews, the political philosopher Michael Walzer noted, politics “was mostly a matter of war and conquest, killing and being killed, and . . . God had set Israel apart from all those hostile and fatal engagements, destined it for a different existence. Politics was for the Gentiles.” Politics would be legitimized only with the dawning of the messianic age. Jewish immigrants carried these attitudes of distrust of authority and estrangement from politics with them from Europe. This was particularly true

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regarding the intrusion of religion into politics. Jews remembered the resistance within the European Christian churches to Jewish emancipation, and that the Church had been the most consistently antisemitic element in Europe for thousands of years. There is no more widely and deeply held political assumption among American Jews than that their security is threatened by the undermining of the secular basis of the polity and the intrusion by organized religion into what Reverend John Neuhaus has called the “public square,” except when, as in the case of Martin Luther King Jr., this intrusion advances liberal goals. Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith have been in the forefront of opposition to governmental aid to parochial schools and to public efforts to accommodate the religious sensibilities of Christians (and Jews). “American Jews,” Elliott Abrams wrote, “believe simply as an article of faith that a more religious society threatens them— and this has been a much more powerful credo for the American Jew than any of the laws of Moses.” America’s Jews, the sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote, have “looked with a cold and hostile eye on the world of received things, traditional religion, traditional culture, the traditional order of society. All these had historically meant for Jews oppression, antisemitism, restriction. Freedom and fraternity and human possibility were for them bound up with the breaking of old forms and the letting in of anything new and radical.” Here is perhaps a partial explanation why anarchism was so important in the Jewish ghettos of New York City’s Lower East Side and London’s East End before World War I, and why the New Left of the 1960s, which had a disproportionate number of Jews in influential positions, saw authority, any authority, as its enemy. Today the Jewish attitude toward state authority and individual power has clearly manifested itself in support for civil liberties and freedom of choice concerning abortion. Some American Jews have even argued that this estrangement from authority and distrust of power is what being Jewish is all about. The essence of Judaism, Michael Selzer wrote, “involved a revolution to radicalize the world through Jewish powerlessness and suffering.” This political love affair of American Jews with the Left has persisted despite rapid economic and social mobility, suburbanization, and the changing focus of the Left from economic issues involving taxes and the regulation of business to cultural issues concerning status and identity. In a famous comment on Jewish voting patterns voiced five decades ago, Milton Himmelfarb said that Jews continued to vote like Puerto Ricans even though they were now living like Episcopalians. Jewish political attitudes have not changed very much since then, even

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though the Jewish advance up the economic and social ladder has continued. Jews, the sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz wrote, “have proven to be a unique force in American politics in that, despite their class backgrounds or interests, they have exhibited the capacity to vote and act beyond their class and interest group constraints.” This has befuddled observers, and there is a cottage industry of sociologists, historians, and political scientists researching this seeming “paradoxical,” “dissonant,” “peculiar,” “strange,” “curious,” “contradictory,” and “idiosyncratic” anomaly. Things were not always perceived this way. In the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli remarked about the political conservatism of Jews. In his novel Coningsby, the character Sidonia says the Jews “are a race essentially monarchical, deeply religious . . . and even anxious to see the religious systems of the countries in which they live flourish. . . . [T]he Jews . . . are essentially Tories.” And in his novel Lord George Bentinck, Disraeli described Jews as “the trustees of tradition, and the conservators of the religious element. . . . Thus it will be seen that all the tendencies of the Jewish race are conservative. Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy; and it should be the interest of statesmen that this bias of a great race should be encouraged and their energies and creative powers enlisted in the cause of existing society.” Modern conservatives have eagerly anticipated the day when Jews would give up their abnormal attachment to the Left and return to their supposed natural abode on the right. Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1954), a landmark work in the post-war conservative revival in America, claimed that, had it not been for antisemitism, Jews would have been staunch conservatives. “The traditions of race and religion, the Jewish devotion to family, old usage, and spiritual continuity,” Kirk wrote, “all incline the Jew toward conservatism. It is exclusion from society which provokes the Jewish social revolutionary.” Jews on the right have continually predicted the imminent rightward political shift of Jews to comport with their higher social and economic status and the decline in antisemitism in Europe and the United States. Thus in his 1982 book The Left, the Right and the Jews, W. D. Rubinstein, an Australian political scientist, said that “the familiar left-liberal stance of most American Jews is undergoing a significant shift. . . . It may well be that American Jews are at last moving—as elsewhere in the West—to their natural political home.” Irving Kristol also continually prophesied the imminent political metamorphosis of American Jews, but Jewish political behavior consistently confounded such predictions. This most important contemporary manifestation of the addiction of American Jews to liberal politics has been their attachment to the left wing of the

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Democratic Party. By the 1960s Jews were a major source of its funds and, along with African Americans, its most dependable source of votes. In 1960, a higher percentage of Jews than Roman Catholics voted for John F. Kennedy, himself a Catholic, and in 1988 a higher percentage of Jews than Greeks voted for Michael Dukakis, a second-generation Greek-American. Not surprisingly, Jews on the left have virtually conflated Jewish identity with liberalism. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg warned Jews in the 1980s that they could vote for Ronald Reagan only by forsaking their Jewish political souls. Jews, he declared, knew instinctively that politics involved strengthening “democracy,” creating “a world of justice,” and opposing “selfishness,” and they also knew (or should know) that Republicans were unsympathetic to such concerns. Jewish spokesmen for political conservatism, he avowed, reduce “the meaning of the Jewish struggle in America to a quest for success and abandon those who are still friendless and foreign to fend for themselves.” This belief that Jewish interests lay with the Left and not with the Right was reinforced by the popular interpretation of politics as a spectrum stretching from the far right to the far left. On the far right, according to this view, were reactionary and antisemitic elements, including Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. On the left were the socialists and liberals. Hence the journey along the political spectrum from right to left was a passage from depravity to virtue. This belief that Nazism was an extremist conservative movement ignored the fact that the word itself meant national socialism, that the Nazis sought to overturn the traditional social and political order in Europe, and that spokesmen for traditional European conservatism opposed the Nazis. The popular interpretation of Nazism also elided the similarities emphasized by Hannah Arendt and other students of totalitarianism between the various forms of fascism, including Nazism and communism. In any case, the description of Nazism as a rightist movement made it uncomfortable for Jews to identify as conservatives. It was thus not surprising that when in the 1960s a group of right-wing Jewish intellectuals appeared, their version of conservatism would reflect the dominant liberal assumptions and values of the religious and ethnic community from which they came, or that some in this camp would abjure the term ‘conservative’’ and prefer to describe themselves as “liberals.” They came to be known as the “neoconservatives,” and they dominated the neoconservative movement, editing its most important journals, particularly Commentary and The Public Interest, and writing its most significant books. For the first time in American history, wrote the historian Seth Forman, “an identifiable group of well placed and influential Jewish thinkers had exhibited

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a willingness to reorder the priorities of American Jews and to suggest in the strongest terms that Jewish well-being might not necessarily be tied to . . . progressive social and political forces of any kind.” Some conservatives welcomed this infusion of new blood. Jeffrey Hart, a literature professor at Dartmouth College, predicted in his 1966 book, The American Dissent, published during the heyday of the Great Society, the New Left, and the counterculture, that liberalism was on the verge of fragmenting. “Many liberals will move to the left, jettisoning their remaining western cultural attachments. Others, just as inevitable, will move to the right, becoming more conservative.” In a March 9, 1971 editorial titled “C’mon In, the Water’s Fine,” in William F. Buckley’s National Review, the closest thing the conservative movement had to an official journal, neoconservatives in general and Commentary in particular were welcomed into the conservative ranks. There were good reasons, however, for the Jewish neocons to be reluctant at first to identify themselves as conservatives. If persons such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were being described in the 1970s as “conservatives,” it was not, they claimed, because they had changed but because liberalism itself had moved considerably to the left beginning in the 1960s. As John Ehrman, a student of neoconservatism wrote, the conservatism of Podhoretz “was rooted in its break with liberalism, not in the Burkean thinking that informs much of modern conservative thought.” Jews had once been aided by a liberalism that stressed merit and individualism. They were now menaced by a new liberalism that, contrary to its predecessor, believed that considerations of race and ethnicity should be factored into political, economic, and social decision-making in both the private and public sectors. This new liberal dispensation included affirmative action timetables, quotas, and other race-conscious policies. The Jewish neoconservatives had prospered economically and socially through ambition and hard work, and they assumed that African Americans and other minorities could succeed in the same manner. The neocons vigorously supported the efforts of the civil rights movement to eliminate racial barriers in voting and employment, but they opposed affirmative action as un-American because it assumed that the most important thing about individuals was not their unique talents but the racial or ethnic group to which they belonged. This divided the population into hostile groups competing for the favors doled out by government and the private sector and inevitably led to quotas. There were few specific public issues that gave such an unambiguous answer to the classic question “Is it good for the Jews?” as did affirmative action.

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This “affirmative discrimination,” to use Nathan Glazer’s apt term, struck directly at Jews, who were an upwardly mobile population, skilled at test taking and oriented toward higher education. Quotas, Podhoretz said at the time, “are the most serious threat to Jews since World War II.” Affirmative action evoked memories among Jews of the quotas that had limited their economic, social, and educational opportunities in Europe and America. Because of their overrepresentation in academia, Jewish neoconservative intellectuals were particularly concerned with the impact that affirmative action would have on academic standards and hiring practices, and they were among the founders of the Campus Coalition for Democracy, an organization dedicated to defending the merit principle and opposing political correctness in academia. Jewish professors remembered the 1930s when German universities were transformed from intellectual oases dedicated to the search for truth into auxiliaries of the Nazi regime, and they feared that American universities of the 1960s would likewise be unwilling or unable to withstand political pressures and to defend academic freedom. “The problems of American society,” Glazer said in 1969, “do not require—indeed, would in no way be advanced by—the destruction of those fragile institutions which have been developed over centuries to transmit and expand knowledge. . . . [M]y first reaction to student disruption . . . is to consider how the disrupters can be isolated and weakened . . . and how they can finally be moved from a community they wish to destroy.” The Jewish neocons were also moved to rethink their political affiliations as a result of attacks on Israel and antisemitism emanating from the Left. At one time liberals had staunchly defended the state of Israel. After the Six-Day War of 1967, however, some liberals now described the Jewish state as militaristic, imperialistic, capitalistic, and racist. Jews had also once been in the forefront of the civil rights movement, and had believed that Jews and African Americans comprised a holy brotherhood of the oppressed. By the late 1960s, however, antisemitism had become an important staple of the rhetoric of Black radicals, as for example, in Harold Cruse’s 1967 book The Crisis of the Black Intellectual, and liberals seemed to be willing to overlook or excuse such talk out of fear of lending aid and comfort to the Right. “Whatever the case may have been yesterday, and whatever the case may be tomorrow,” Podhoretz said, “the case today is that the most active enemies of the Jews are located not in the precincts of the ideological Right but in the Radical Left.” In a perceptive 1988 Commentary essay, Dan Himmelfarb, the managing editor of The Public Interest, stressed the differences between the traditionalist conservatives, or paleoconservatives as they came to be called, and the

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neoconservatives, a group comprised largely of Jews disaffected from contemporary liberalism. The traditionalists, Himmelfarb claimed, were part of the classic conservative tradition dating back to Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, a tradition that valued religion, social hierarchy, and status. The neoconservatives, by contrast, were heirs to the liberal tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which favored free markets, democracy, individualism, and equality of opportunity. Himmelfarb doubted whether these neoconservatives should even be called conservatives. A better name for them, he said, would be “paleoliberals.” But since liberal democracy was “the” American political tradition, these paleoliberals were actually America’s most authentic conservatives. “Indeed,” Himmelfarb wrote, “it might with some justification be argued that it is neoconservatism, and not paleoconservatism, that is both genuinely American and genuinely conservative.” The historian George H. Nash in his comprehensive history of the postWorld War II conservative intellectual movement described neoconservatism as “right-wing liberalism,” and the historian Richard H. King said it was initially “less a new ideological departure than a hardening of mood within the liberal consensus.” This was confirmed by the neoconservatives themselves. The neoconservatives, Kristol claimed in his 1983 book Reflections of a Neoconservative, merely wanted “to return to the original sources of liberal vision and liberal energy so as to correct the warped version of liberalism that is today’s orthodoxy.” The neocons, Kristol stated, were “liberals who had been mugged by reality.” In his 1996 Commentary essay “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Podhoretz said that the neocons, at least in their own eyes, never became conservatives. “So far as they were concerned, they were indeed still liberals, fighting to reclaim the traditional principles of liberalism from the leftists who had hijacked and corrupted it.” And Glazer avowed that the differences between liberals and the neoconservatives did not have “anything to do with deep underlying philosophical positions. They have to do with fact and common sense. Very often the people we disagree with, or who disagree with us, don’t seem to have the facts.” The non-ideological bent of the Jewish neoconservatives was reflected in The Public Interest, the magazine founded by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol in 1965. It soon became, along with Commentary, the leading voice of neoconservatism. “The Public Interest,” the quarterly declared at its founding, “is not some kind of preexisting, platonic idea; rather it emerges out of differences of opinion, reasonably propounded.” It provided a rationale based on social science research for opposing the expansion of government during the 1960s, rather than elucidating the philosophic and theological principles of conservatism. The

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magazine was born during the political ferment of the Great Society, and while striving to maintain an aura of objectivity suitable for an organ of social science, its major role was challenging the conventional liberal wisdom on crime, housing, race relations, welfare, health, education, the environment, and other public policy issues. In contrast to traditionalist conservative thinkers, or paleoconservatives as they came to be known, the contributors to The Public Interest argued that the Left were naive and misguided, not evil, and that their proposals were counterproductive, rather than philosophically flawed. Economists wrote more articles for the magazine than any other group of social scientists, and this is not surprising since, as Kristol maintained, economics “is the social science par excellence of modernity.” This modernist bent did not prevent the journal from publishing articles on pornography, feminism, and sex education from a socially conservative perspective. But the arguments of these essays were derived from social science and not from the tenets of religion or traditionalist conservatism. Throughout, in Kristol’s words, the tone of the magazine was “skeptical, pragmatic, meliorist.” Leading traditionalist intellectuals agreed with Himmelfarb that in crucial respects the neoconservatives were aliens to conservative orthodoxy. Kirk, a revered figure within the American Right, described them as a “little sect, distrusted and reproached by many leaders of what we may call mainline conservatives, who now and again declare that most of the neoconservatives are seeking place and preferment chiefly.” The neoconservatives, he stated, were deficient “in the understanding of the human condition, and in the apprehension of the accumulated wisdom of our civilization.” They preferred instead “to engage in ideological sloganizing, the death of political imagination.” Kirk was correct that there were deep differences between the paleos and the neocons. The traditionalists argued that these differences did in fact involve underlying philosophical positions regarding human nature, the nature of society, and the role of government. It was precisely the refusal of Jewish neoconservatives to break from the mindset of liberalism that, more than anything else, was responsible for the doubts of Kirk and other conservative true believers about the conservative credentials of their new associates. For them, the neoconservatives were simply chastened liberals. A good example of this paleo fear was the complaint in 1986 of Clyde Wilson, an historian at the University of South Carolina, regarding a supposed attempt by neoconservatives to seize leadership of the American conservative movement. “The offensives of radicalism have driven vast herds of liberals across the border into our territories,” he said. “These refugees now speak in our name, but the language they speak is the same one they

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always spoke. We have grown familiar with it, have learned to tolerate it, but it is tolerable only by contrast to the harsh syllables of the barbarians over the border. It contains no words for the things that we value. Our estate has been taken over by an imposter, just as we were about to inherit.” For the traditionalists, the neoconservatives were the catbirds of the conservative movement, hatching the eggs that had been laid by the traditionalists during their many years in the political wilderness. George A. Panichas, a paleoconservative professor of literature at the University of Maryland and the editor of the traditionalist journal Modern Age, protested that “the sanctities of tradition and the values of order” were being overwhelmed by the “tinsel, opportunistic, and hedonistic conservatism” of neoconservatism. The neoconservatives, he charged, “lack a basic apprehension of the ‘permanent things’ and are responsive to the empirical ambitions that reflect the tastes and power-drives of a technologico-Benthamite world.” Their conservatism “belongs almost exclusively to the world and is impervious to the primacy of God as the measure of the soul.” To counter the modernity of neoconservatism, conservatism needed to be “lean, ascetical, disciplined, prophetic, unswerving in its censorial task, strenuous in its mission, strong in its faith, faithful in its dogma, pure in its metaphysic.” Panichas’s words indicated the high value the traditionalists placed on religion. In Kirk’s list of the six canons of conservative thought in his The Conservative Mind, the first is “the belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead. . . . Politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature.” The Jewish neoconservatives disagreed. Perhaps their most important role within the American conservative movement was reminding conservatives that politics and religion were two separate categories, and that conservatism should welcome those who looked askance at religion in general and Christianity in particular. The neocons, by and large, did not share the reverence of Edmund Burke and his modern acolytes such as Kirk for the pre-modern social order and its historic institutions, which included the Church, nor did they share their misgivings for such modern developments as capitalism, democracy, and bourgeois society. Jews did not need reminding of the Jewish condition in pre-modern Europe, and they were not nostalgic for preindustrial and pre-democratic values and institutions. Two essays by Charles Krauthammer and Jerry Z. Muller in The Public Interest illustrate the tendency of conservative Jews to sever conservatism from religion. Krauthammer, a political columnist, argued in “A Social Conservative

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Credo” (fall 1995) that religion was too weak a foundation on which to base a socially conservative revival, and that our age of affluence and science was unsympathetic to the religious message. To reverse social decay and revitalize civil society depended upon “the more coercive and less reliable agency of politics— a politics crucially capable of articulating cultural with structural reform.” Muller, a historian of European conservatism at Catholic University, noted in “Dilemmas of Conservatism” (spring 2000) that a schism existed within American conservatism. On the one hand were those whom he called the “orthodox,” who stressed that affirming the existence of a transcendent moral order was a fundamental tenet of conservatism. Opposing the orthodox were those he called the “conservatives.” The conservatives defended existing institutions not because they conformed to ultimate theological or metaphysical truth, but because they had worked well in the past and were preferable to any untried alternatives. Muller argued that there was no necessary link between conservatism and religion. He emphasized that many conservative thinkers had been agnostics and atheists, and that conservatives have continually defended the existing social order against the revolutionary intentions of religious enthusiasts. (A good example of this is the sociologist Robert A. Nisbet’s opposition to the anti-abortion movement.) The true conservative, Muller avowed, was concerned not with the truths of religion, but with its usefulness in preserving traditional institutions and values. While conservatives are aware of the “partial contingency of moral norms,” the orthodox, by contrast, believe “the admission of such contingency may seem tantamount to nihilism, if not heresy.” Jewish neoconservatives were concerned that so many of the traditionalist conservatives sought to infuse conservatism with a Christian religiosity, and they wondered what role there would be for Jews in such a conservatism. Their response to the symposium “The End of Democracy” in the November 1996 issue of John Neuhaus’s magazine First Things exhibited the neoconservatives’ fear that religious zeal could cause religion to overstep its proper bounds. The symposium was prompted by the failure of the political system to prevent the spread of abortion and its devaluing of life, which the magazine considered to be the great moral question of the day. The symposium’s contributors included Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Several speculated on the propriety of civil disobedience and the need to deny legitimacy to a judiciary that seemingly sanctioned the murder of the unborn. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb was horrified by what she saw as the reckless and inaccurate rhetoric of the symposium, and she resigned from the

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magazine’s editorial advisory board. The symposium, she claimed, has undermined the efforts of conservatives such as herself to introduce moral considerations into public discourse. “It can only confirm many Americans in their suspicion that cultural conservatism is outside the ‘mainstream’ of American politics, that it is ‘extremist,’ even subversive.” Norman Podhoretz agreed. “I did not become a conservative,” he wrote Father Neuhaus, “in order to become a radical, let alone to support the preaching of revolution against this country.” The First Things symposium prompted Commentary to run its own symposium, “On the Future of Conservatism,” which appeared in its February 1997 issue. Here the economist Irwin M. Seltzer warned his fellow neoconservatives of the impossibility of working closely with the First Things crowd. The contributors to “The End of Democracy,” he contended, yearned for a society “that derives its legitimacy solely from their divinely informed approval. . . . Jewish intellectuals may be useful exponents of some of the positions of First Things Catholics, but they should not expect to be partners in a governing theocracy.” If for First Things the U.S. constitution was a religious document embodying the principles of natural law, for neoconservatives such as Seltzer it was a secular document embodying the principles of classical liberalism and democracy. And if for the paleoconservatives the most fundamental conflict of modern life was between secularism and religion, for the neoconservatives it was between freedom and totalitarianism. “The End of Democracy,” the neoconservatives believed, exhibited a religious fervor that threatened time-honored American political institutions and practices and was hardly conservative. This is not to deny the existence of a small group of Jewish conservatives, including rabbis such as Daniel Lapin and academicians specializing in Jewish studies such as Jacob Neusner and David Novak, who sympathized with Neuhaus’s efforts to involve religion in the public square. The paleoconservative Neusner accused Jewish neoconservatives of being tone-deaf when it came to religion in general and Judaism in particular. Religion serves valid instrumental purposes, he asserted, but for Jewish neoconservatives “it forms no intellectual reality from which, or even against which, to mount sustained thought. . . . [W]hen it comes to the rich and sanctifying Judaic religious life, with its sophisticated intellectual heritage of reflection and rigorous thought, these people stand at one with the Left, in unity with the learned despisers of religion. Their conservatism has not yet fulfilled itself.” Such thinking received an increasingly more respectful hearing among those who feared that increases in rates of illegitimacy, divorce, sexual deviancy, and pornography indicated that America was in the midst of a pervasive moral

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breakdown. Don Feder, a columnist for the Boston Herald, expressed such concerns in his 1993 book, A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America. America, he lamented, had ceased being a Judeo-Christian nation, much less a Christian nation. Its reigning ethos in fact was paganism. “The gods of late twentieth century America,” he said, “include the doctrines of radical autonomy, of absolute rights divorced from responsibilities, of gender sameness, of self-expression which acknowledges no higher purpose, of moral relativism and sexual indulgence.” His own conservatism, Feder stated, was “God centered, premised on a passion to nurture the best in human nature, which flows from our acceptance of divine injunctions. It is based on the ethical world view of the patriarchs and prophets, grounded in the heritage of a people who first taught humanity to think in moral terms.” This religiously oriented conservatism, however, remained a minority position within the American Jewish intellectual Right. The Jewish neocons, not surprisingly, were also more pluralist regarding American identity, culture, and immigration than the paleos. The essence of America, traditionalists argued, was formed before the massive waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. America was not an experiment, and immigrants were desirable only to the extent that they assimilated to an already established AngloAmerican culture. America, asserted the paleoconservative Thomas Fleming, has “its own history, its own particular set of virtues and vices, its own special institutions,” and it was the responsibility of conservatives to preserve these. This essentialist view of immigration and American culture is indicated by the word “the” in the title of Immigration and the American Identity, a 1995 collection of essays which originally appeared in the paleo magazine Chronicles. Conservatives such as Fleming feared that if immigration from Western Europe did not increase and, conversely, immigration from the Third World did not diminish, America would increasingly come to resemble a third world country. It was irrelevant, paleoconservatives claimed, that immigration was an economic boon to the country or that immigrants could quote Jefferson. The most important question concerning immigration was its impact on the nation’s culture, religion, politics, language, and, most importantly, its values. “We have not lost control of our borders,” Clyde Wilson protested. “Rather in a sense we have lost control of our land.” This generation was bequeathing to its descendants “a society intolerably lacking in moral, religious, political and cultural cohesion.” Jewish conservatives, not surprisingly, disagreed. They came from an immigrant culture and religion that was hardly mainstream American, and they believed that the essence of America was not the particularist history, institutions,

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vices, and virtues emphasized by Fleming, but the universal political principles found in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. To them, American identity was less a matter of Anglo-American language and culture and biological descent than of civic values and political ideology. In contrast to the traditionalists, Jewish conservatives did not oppose immigration from Asia and Latin America, since it brought to America a culturally conservative and entrepreneurially oriented population. The threat to American culture, as Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary magazine repeatedly emphasized, came not from immigrants, but from a native liberal elite that sought to disseminate among immigrants a cult of victimization and ethnic entitlement. These differences between the paleoconservatives and the neoconservatives—with one group stressing culture and the other ideology—accounted for their differences over foreign policy. The traditionalists were heirs to the isolationism and noninterventionism that marked American conservatism during the 1930s and 1940s. They sought not to spread American values but to protect American culture and borders, and they had a narrow view of the national interest. The neoconservatives, by contrast, conflated Americanness with liberal and democratic political principles, and they contended that American foreign policy should seek to spread these beliefs. This explains their support for the National Endowment for Democracy and their talk about the need for a global democratic revolution to counter the Left. This was anathema to the traditionalists. To the paleos, this neoconservative clamor for a global democratic revolution was reminiscent of Leon Trotsky’s call for a worldwide communist revolution whereby the neocons sought to make the world over in the American image. The paleo historian Paul Gottfried accused the neoconservatives of seeking to create through land reform, democratic elections, and economic modernization “a worldwide, secular, politically egalitarian society with a mixed economy.” William Kauffman, a conservative sympathetic to libertarianism, was equally opposed to this neoconservative foreign agenda. “Today, under neoconservative sway,” he said, “the American Right is the bastion of Rooseveltian globalism; of moralistic-militaristic crusades, à la Woodrow Wilson, to bring state capitalism to the Third World; of Kennedyesque eagerness to ‘pay any price, bear any burden’ in the defense of regional powers like Japan and West Germany.” John Lukacs, another conservative historian, agreed. The neoconservatives, he wrote, “are not conservatives but global ideologues. What is Good for America is Good for the World. Indeed, America Must Rule the Heavens, no matter what the cost.”

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Paleoconservatives also found it difficult to sympathize with the reflexive support of neoconservatives for Israel. They viewed the Jewish state as simply another foreign country with its own distinctive interests, and these interests often and inevitably conflicted with those of the United States. Russell Kirk, in a notorious comment, complained that neoconservatives such as Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, frequently “mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” This statement deeply angered neoconservatives, particularly Decter, a staunch Zionist. By raising the old antisemitic canard of dual loyalty, Kirk fostered doubts among the neoconservatives as to whether the conservative movement was truly sympathetic to legitimate Jewish concerns and whether it welcomed committed Jews to its ranks. The final point of difference between Jewish neoconservative intellectuals and the traditionalists concerned the welfare state. The neocons did not share in that deep antipathy to the welfare state and Washington that united the American Right and which, more than anything else, was responsible for the emergence of the modern conservative movement after World War II. By contrast, the neoconservatives, Irving Kristol wrote, “felt a measure of loyalty to the spirit of the New Deal if not to all its programs and policies. Nor did we see it as representing any kind of ‘statist’ or socialist threat to the American democracy.” The Jewish neoconservatives, however, did oppose various aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society which, they believed, exacerbated urban ills and increased ethnic and racial tensions, and they welcomed many elements of Ronald Reagan’s administration which sought to curb big government. But this resulted from pragmatic rather than a priori reflexive reasoning. Kristol, for example, had no basic argument with the welfare state per se. He even suggested that conservatives should accept its inevitability, while working to shape it along less statist and paternalistic lines. A conservative welfare state, he said, would provide “the social and economic security a modern citizenry demands while minimizing governmental intrusion into individual liberties.” For paleoconservatives, the notion of a conservative welfare state was a contradiction in terms, and they were quick to decry any acceptance of income redistribution, egalitarianism, and centralized government. Gottfried described neoconservatives such as Kristol as “welfare state ideologues” dressed in conservative clothing, while Kirk noted that their creed “is no better than a latter-day Utilitarianism.” The traditionalist columnist Samuel Francis viewed the neocons as even worse than the utilitarians. They were, rather, proponents of the modern managerial state and were being used by the American political and economic elite to consolidate their power. Influenced by twentieth century social theorists such

Chapter 21. Jewish Intellectuals and the American Conservative Movement

as Gaetona Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, Francis argued that the historic role of the neoconservatives was to disarm potential critics of the elite by co-opting activists of the Right, convincing left-wing intellectuals of the soundness of the managerial system, and insuring that liberalism came out of the turmoil of the 1960s stronger than ever. “Moderation, gradualism, empiricism, pragmatism, centrism were their watchwords,” and the neocons worked to insure that “confrontation with the fundamental mechanisms and tendencies of the managerial system suggested by either the Right or Left were avoided.” From Francis’s perspective, the neoconservatives were the quislings of the American conservative movement. The basic reason for the divergence between the paleoconservatives and the neoconservatives was their respective intellectual starting points. The most important paleoconservatives were humanists—philosophers, historians, and students of literature and religion. Most of the leading neoconservatives, by contrast, were social scientists—sociologists, economists, and psychologists. This explained their differing evaluations of contemporary liberalism. If the traditionalists spoke in terms of right and wrong, eternal verities, and moral certitudes, the neoconservatives talked in terms of good and bad and of what worked and what didn’t. Neoconservatism, complained Melvin E. Bradford, a traditionalist professor of English at the University of Dallas, seemed to consist mainly of “opportunism, pop sociology, and a series of position papers.” These different starting points also helped account for the different perceptions of the two groups regarding human nature. The traditionalists took a much bleaker view of human nature, with believing Christians, such as Kirk and Buckley, accepting the doctrine of Original Sin. For them, attempts to remake the world and faith in human progress stemmed from a secular hubris. Jewish conservatives, by contrast, had a sunnier attitude. The subtitle of Podhoretz’s book My Love Affair with America is “The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative”. The term “cheerful conservative” struck some traditionalists as almost self-contradictory. The oftentimes bitter rift between the paleos and the neocons elided the fact that by the turn of the century the issues which divided the two groups were far less important than those on which they were in agreement. Midge Decter, for example, was an early eloquent critic of the feminists and gay movements, Commentary and the Public Interest published many essays extolling traditional conservative verities, and the neocons would frequently sprinkle their writings with such buzzwords as “civil order,” “authority,” and “tradition.” By the end of the century, both Kristol and Podhoretz, the two most important Jewish neoconservative intellectuals, emphasized that there were no longer any major differences

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Part Five. Politics

between the two groups. “Though the accents differ even to this day,” Kristol remarked, “there is more comity than friction.” Neoconservatism, he stated, was “a generational phenomenon, and has now been pretty much absorbed into a larger, more comprehensive conservatism.” In his 1996 essay “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Podhoretz also bid adieu to neoconservatism. Now that the neoconservative message had become absorbed within the greater conservative movement, there was no longer any need for neoconservatives to see themselves as a distinct group. They instead could take satisfaction in “a just war well fought, and a time for rejoicing in a series of victories that cleared the way and set the stage for other victories in the years to come.” But it was now time to move on. Midge Decter agreed. “I am a neocon no longer,” she said in 1999. “Since I can find no significant difference from the basic views of most serious conservatives, I have come to the conclusion that it is long since time for me to drop my original designation and call myself simply a conservative.” This atrophying of neoconservatism was perhaps best seen in the willingness of some Jewish neoconservative intellectuals to break with the Jewish consensus regarding the danger of religious involvement in public life. Elliott Abrams, the son-in-law of Decter and Podhoretz, even wrote a book titled Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America. It criticized the “high wall of separation” theory of church-state relations popular among Jews, praised Christian evangelicals, and asserted that believing Christians were not antisemitic and did not threaten Jewish interests. In fact, he claimed, Christians were now more respectful of Judaism than Jews were of Christianity. “Anti-Christian bias is apparently the only form of prejudice that remains respectable in the American Jewish community,” Abrams declared. “The notion that the more fervent a Christian’s belief the more danger he or she represents to Jews should be rejected outright.” Podhoretz echoed these sentiments. In his April 2000 National Review article titled “The Christian Right and Its Demonizers,” he claimed that Jews no longer had anything to fear from Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Such anxiety was “atavistic” and “paranoid.” Rather than being antisemites, Falwell and Robertson were actually highly supportive of Jewish causes such as Israel and Russian Jewry. It would be wise, Podhoretz suggested, for Jews to ally themselves with Christian conservatives and other Americans resisting cultural decadence, libertinism, hedonism, and moral relativism. One ingenious and provocative attempt to bridge the gap between the emphasis of neoconservatives on economics and sociology and the stress of paleos

Chapter 21. Jewish Intellectuals and the American Conservative Movement

and religious conservatives on culture and character was David Frum’s 1994 book, Dead Right. The most important enemy of all varieties of conservatism, Frum argued, was big government. Big government not only undermined economic growth and free markets; it also weakened the virtues of prudence, orderliness, thrift, and self-reliance. Dissension within the conservative ranks over immigration, feminism, foreign policy, and other issues diverted attention away from what should be conservatism’s major target, big government. Surely it was not accidental that increases in drug usage, crime, family dissolution, and illegitimacy had accompanied the sharp increase in governmental welfare programs during the 1960s. These emancipated “the individual appetite from the restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastrophe.” Big government was not the only source of America’s problems, “but without overweening government, none would rage as fiercely as it now does.” The essence of modern conservatism was “opposition to the extension of political power into the social order,” and it mattered little whether resistance to the intrusive modern state stemmed from philosophical and historical sources or from the social sciences. The influence of the Jewish neoconservatives on American conservatism and then the absorption of the neocons within the general conservative movement reflected the most important and fundamental fact of recent American Jewish history: the entry of Jews into the nation’s social, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual mainstream. A movement once seen as unsympathetic to Jews and to Jewish issues now included them within its highest ranks. It is true that Jews were present at the beginning of the post-war conservative renaissance. Of the thirty-one persons listed on the original masthead of William F. Buckley’s National Review in 1955, five were Jews. But there was a crucial difference between them and the Jewish conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s. The National Review conservatives were largely disaffected from Jewishness and Jewish affairs, and a few even converted to Christianity. The Jewish neoconservatives, by contrast, strongly identified as Jews and with Judaism, and some even sent their children to Jewish parochial schools. For them, being Jewish was not a barrier to being a conservative. Rather, they saw Jewishness and conservatism as symbiotic, much as Jews on the Left saw Jewishness and liberalism as mutually reinforcing. The new prominence of Jews in the conservative movement resulted from the same factors that led to the selection in 2000 of Senator Joseph Lieberman as Al Gore’s vice-presidential running mate. Should things continue along these lines, the expectations of conservatives during the past four decades of a rightward political turn among Jews might well come to pass. But don’t hold your breath!

373

Index Aaron, Hank, 303 ABC, 225 abortion, 267, 271, 323, 341–42, 358, 366 Abraham, Pearl, 292 Abrams, Elliott, 358, 372 Abramson, Harold J., 49 Adams, Henry, 39, 292 Adelson, Sheldon, 266, 285, 286 Adler, Cyrus, 172 Adler, Mortimer J., 32 Adorno, Theodor W., 148, 170 Advance, 162 affirmative action, 361–62 African American-Jewish relations, 13, 76, 201–3, 290–92, 354 affirmative action and, 361–62 civil rights movement and, 76, 124, 197, 203, 210, 213, 258, 289, 290, 343–49, 354, 362 Crown Heights riot and, 235–61, 351 liberation of concentration camp prisoners and, 351–53, 355 as natural alliance, 340–41, 345–46, 353–54, 362 African Americans, 49–50, 194, 219, 246, 250, 265, 267, 360, 361 affirmative action and, 361–62 antisemitism among, 341, 235–61, 362 Asians and, 254 Black nationalism and, 255–57 Italians and, 249 mayors, 325 sports and, 305, 307 in World War II, 60 see also civil rights movement; racism agnostics, see atheists and agnostics Agudat Israel, 332–33 Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob and David (AABJ&D), 113–22 Airborne Symphony, The (Blitzstein), 70 Airplane, 309 Albright, Madeline, 270 Alexander, Charles C., 57 Alexander, Leslie, 316 Allen, Woody, 335 All the Money in the World (Bernstein and Swan), 282

Alter, Henryk, 188n Alterman, Eric, 266 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 155, 162 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), 150, 152–55, 160, 161, 164, 166, 167 Ambivalent American Jew, The (Liebman), 15 America exceptionalism of, 40 identity of, x–xiv, 3, 59, 123–24, 369 as Judeo-Christian country, 14, 55, 63, 73, 368 nationality in, 44–45, 74, 140, 210 nativism in, 137–40, 144, 145, 148, 174 way of life of, 45, 50, 55 “America, Land of the Sad Millionaire” (Rosenfeld), 293 America First Committee, 175, 177, 179, 185 American, The ( James), x–xi “American Anti-Semitism Historically Reconsidered” (Higham), 143, 146 American Association of University Professors, 233 “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life” (Ellis), xii American Civil Liberties Union, 341, 349 American Communist Party, 155, 157 American Council for Judaism, 29 American Dental Association, 206 American Dilemma, An (Myrdal), 354 American Dissent, The (Hart), 361 American Experience, The, 351 American Federation of Labor, 151, 159 American Foundation, Inc., 178–79 American Grace (Putnam and Campbell), 267–69 American Jewish Committee (AJC), 32, 76–77, 136, 172, 229, 344, 347 American Jewish Congress, 76, 150, 209, 245, 323, 325, 344, 358 American Jewish Historical Society, 299n American Jewish identity, x–xv, 2–16, 123–25, 292, 354 and admiration for Jews in U.S., 267–69 antisemitism struggles as part of, 12, 34, 125, 267

Index



Catholic and Protestant identities compared with, xii, 8, 54–56 chaplains and, 72–74 charitable giving and fund-raising in, 13, 16, 54, 55, 125 compatibility of American identity and, 15, 37, 79 composers and, 65–71 democracy and, 22, 25–26, 32–35, 37 and entrance into mainstream, 74–79 as ethnic group, 6, 25, 26, 33, 56, 189, 266, 268, 282 food in, 12 in Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew, 35, 38–56, 76, 129 Holocaust remembrance in, 11–12 Hook’s contribution to debate over, 17, 21–37 immigrant experience in, see Jewish immigrants insecurity and insularity in, 61–63, 74, 76, 329 intermarriage and, 14–15, 79, 121, 132 Judaism and, xii–xiii, xv, 2, 3, 5–8, 13, 14, 25, 52–56, 62, 124–26, 129–33, 268, 330 lack of official constraints on, xii multi-faceted and changing nature of, xi, 266 mystery of, 2–16 name changing in, xi, xiii–xiv New Left and, 348 newness in, x–xiv, 3, 123–24 New York intellectuals and, 17–37 secularism and, xii–xiii, 8–9, 32, 34, 45, 53, 104, 110, 111, 123–33, 161, 266, 276, 304, 333, 354 self-perpetuation and, 16 and success and influence of Jews in U.S., 270–71, 314, 342 World War II and, 57–79 writers and, 64–65, 291–97 Yiddish culture in, see Yiddish culture Zionism and, see Zionism see also Jewish identity “American Jewish Secularism” (Kosmin and Keysar), 130–31 American Jewish Yearbook, 82n, 130 American Journal of Sociology, 39 American Judaism (Glazer), 86, 102, 109 American League Against War and Fascism, 158 American Newness, The (Howe), x

American Olympic Committee (AOC), 151–54 American Revolution, x, 15 “American Scholar, The” (Emerson), 3, 123 American Studies movement, 141 American Youth Congress, 158 Amlie, Tom, 193 Amsterdam News, 151 anarchism, 334, 358 Anderson, John, 323 Annenberg, Moe, 177 Annenberg, Walter, 285–86 “Another Look at Nativism” (Higham), 143, 145 “Anticapitalist Bias of American Historians, The” (Hacker), 274 Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL), 76, 136, 207, 225, 233, 248, 265, 344, 358 Antin, Mary, 353 Anti-Semite and Jew (Sartre), 34 antisemitism, xiii, 8, 14, 26, 27, 61–63, 127, 151, 290, 342, 353, 358–60 in African Americans, 341, 235–61, 362 American nativism and, 137–40, 144, 145, 148 anticapitalism and, 275 of Armstrong, 212–34 authoritarian personality and, 148 of Bilbo, 192–95, 197, 200–204, 207, 209–11, 213 of Brundage, 152, 166 chaplains and, 73 Christian, 139, 144, 145, 148, 271, 358, 372 cognitive dissonance of American Jews about, 262–71 in Congress, 169–90, 192–211 film industry and, 59 German, 31–32, 150–54, 172, 174, 175, 182; see also Nazi Germany Higham on, 136–48, 169 intermarriage and, 270 Jewish success and, 144–45, 169, 275, 276, 297 from the Left, 362 as marginal phenomenon in America, xiii, 12, 28–29, 127, 264–67, 275, 314 of Moseley, 207, 215, 218, 221–22, 233 populism and, 144, 169–70, 173, 174 post-World War I increase in, 138–40 post-World War II decline in, 59, 60, 137, 146, 314, 317

375

376

Index

Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 171, 172, 181, 217 of Rankin, 173, 182–89, 192–211, 213 rural and agrarian life and, 138, 143–44, 170, 173–77, 182–83, 189, 191, 204 in the South, 191–211, 213, 219 stereotypes and myths in, 138, 139, 145 struggles against, as part of Jewish identity, 12, 34, 125, 267 universities and, 78 World War II and, 59, 60 Zionism and, 9, 28 “Anti-Semitism and American Culture” (Higham), 146 Anti-Semitism in America (Dinnerstein), 212, 346 Anti-Semitism in American History (Gerber, ed.), 137 “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age” (Higham), 143 “Anti-Semitism’s Root in City Hatred” (Rose), 170 Antler, Joyce, xiii Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The (Richler), 293 Arab community, 11, 27, 28, 199, 210, 242, 257 Arab-Israeli conflict, 266, 346 Arafat, Yasser, 346 Arbeiter Ring, 128 Arcel, Ray, 306 Arendt, Hannah, 21, 28, 31, 39, 360 Argentina, 258 Arison, Mickey, 316 Arlen, Harold, 70 Armstrong, Allen Jack, 220, 221, 224, 227, 231 Armstrong, Christine Mitchell, 233–34 Armstrong, George W., 212–34 Armstrong Nickoll Foundation, 234 Arnold, William R., 73 ArtScroll, 114 Arum, Bob, 306 Ashton, T. S., 274 Asians, 138, 202, 216, 219, 223, 224, 226, 227, 254, 369 Asinof, Eliot, 300 Assistant, The (Malamud), 335 atheists and agnostics, xiii, 6, 8, 24, 25, 32, 43, 54, 72, 125, 126, 161, 197, 202, 209, 269, 349, 366 Atlantic Charter, 75 Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860, The (Hansen), 46

Audubon, John James, 214 Auerbach, Jerold S., 15 Auschwitz, 11 Authoritarian Personality, The (Adorno et al.), 148, 170 Avrich, Paul, 334 Awake and Sing! (Odets), 291 Axthelm, Peter M., 308 Baer, Max, 305–6 Bais Yaakov school, 90 Baker, W. Harrison, 230 Balaban, Barney, 176 Baldwin, James, 353 Balfour Declaration, 179 Bamberger, Louis, 283, 288 bankers, 171–74, 177, 178, 180–85, 187, 188, 196, 209, 216, 217 Bank of England, 171 Barcelona People’s Olympics, 154–55, 163 Baron, Salo W., 264, 276–77 Barrett, William, 17 Barth, Karl, 41 Baruch, Bernard, 171, 177, 218 Barzun, Jacques, 299 baseball, 60, 164, 167, 286, 299–303, 305, 308–9, 311–13, 316, 317 basketball, 164, 167, 286, 298, 299, 303, 305, 307–9, 312, 313, 315–17 Battle Cry (Uris), 64 Baum, Philip, 325 Beame, Abe, 337 Bean, Robert B., 201 Beard, Charles A., 141 Beaty, John, 205 Becker, Gary, 334 Beetham, Charles, 164 Begin, Menachem, 28, 30 Belhaven College, 224 Belkin, Steven, 315, 316 Bell, Daniel, 17, 24, 143–44, 363 Bellow, Saul, 292, 353 Ben-Gurion, David, 127, 346 Benjamin, Bennie, 70 Benjamin, Judah, 210 Bennett, Robert Russell, 66n Bensonhurst, 249 Berdyaev, Nicolas, 41–43 Berenbaum, Michael, 11, 339 Berger, Jay, 298 Bergman, Bernard, 187 Berlin, Irving, 353 Berlin Olympics, 149–55, 157–68

Index

Berlin Wall, 238 Bernays, J. L., 18 Bernstein, David, 176 Bernstein, Leonard, 346 Bernstein, Peter W., 282 Beth Elohim, 4 Bettman, Gary, 311 “Beyond Consensus” (Higham), 142 Biale, David, 131, 132, 321 Bible, 6, 79, 113, 198, 200, 216, 327, 328 Biddle, Francis, 151 Bilbo, Theodore G., 192–95, 197, 200–204, 207, 209–11, 213 Biloxi Blues (Simon), 74 Biltmore Conference, 29 Bing, Steven, 286 Birmingham, Stephen, 294 Birth Control Review, 289 Birth of Conservative Judaism, The (Cohen), 101 birth rates, 16, 83, 104, 121, 342 Black, Hugo, 193 Black-Jewish relations, see African AmericanJewish relations Blacks, see African Americans Blank, Arthur, 315 Blimstein, Whitney, 306 Blitzstein, Marc, 65, 68–70 Bloom, Alexander, 17, 18 Bloomberg, Michael, 294 Blum, Leon, 180 B’nai Brith Messenger, 160 B’nai Israel Congregation, 102–3 Boas, Franz, 151 Boca Raton, Fla., 85, 92, 93, 96 Bodner, Allen, 305, 306 Body and Soul, 306 Bogard, Harriet, 248 Boorstin, Daniel J., 50, 141, 142 Booth, John Wilkes, 217 Borowitz, Eugene, 327 Boston Globe, 225 Boston Herald, 368 Bowen, Hoyt E., 231–33 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 267 boxing, 299, 303, 305–6 Boys of Summer, The (Kahn), 300 Bradford, Melvin E., 371 Brandeis, Louis D., 9–10, 34, 346 Brandeis University, 77–78, 347, 348 Brander, Kenneth, 92 Braun, Ryan, 305 Breakers, The, 91

Breindel, Eric, 240–41, 254 Breines, Paul, 311 Brenner, Michael, 264 Breslin, Jimmy, 254–55 “Bridget Loves Bernie,” 48 Brin, Sergey, 284 Britain, British Empire, 110, 171, 183, 199, 200, 205, 217, 264, 265, 275, 281, 290, 325–26 Broad, Eli, 284, 285 Broadway, 59 Bronfman, Samuel, 317 Brookhiser, Richard, 258 Brooklyn, N.Y., 105, 108, 109, 234, 249, 308 Crown Heights, see Crown Heights Brooks, Mel, xi Broun, Heywood, 151 Browder, Earl, 184 Brown, Joseph E., 221 Brown, Lee, 236, 240 Bruce, Lenny, 335 Brundage, Avery, 152–55, 160, 164, 166 Brunner, Emil, 41 Bryan, William Jennings, 204 Bryant, Lena, 284 Buber, Martin, 41–43 Buchwald, Ephraim, 95 Buckley, William F., Jr., 40, 361, 371, 373 Buddhists, 47, 269 Bukiet, Melvin, 292 Bund, 331–33 Burke, Edmund, 363, 365 Burr, Aaron, 214 Burstein, Paul, 297 Bush, George H. W., 258, 315, 325, 328, 339, 342 Bush, George W., 286, 313 business, xi, 344, 358 entrepreneurs, 88–89, 93, 171, 277, 282, 286–91, 294, 296, 317, 369 government and, 296 historians and, 286–90 Judaism and, 8 moguls in, 281–97 retail, 283 sports team ownership, 286, 289, 298, 311–18 see also capitalism Butman, Shmuel, 238–39, 242 Cahan, Abraham, xiii, 7, 8, 109, 288, 292–94, 299 Cahn, Sammy, 70

377

378

Index

Caine Mutiny, The (Wouk), 64 Caldwell, Earl, 244 California, 317, 325 Los Angeles, 13, 82n, 87, 89, 252, 260 Campbell, David E., 267–69 Campus Coalition for Democracy, 362 Cantor, B. Gerald, 283 Cantor, Eddie, 208 capitalism, 45, 129, 257, 296, 356, 365 human progress and, 278, 279 Jewish historians and, 274–80 Jewish immigrants and, 278–80, 281–82 Judaism and, 275–76 sports and, 156, 167 state control conflated with, 278 sweatshop, 276–79, 290 see also business Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 39 Capitalism and the Historians (Hayek, ed.), 274 “Capitalism and the Jews” (Friedman), 274–75 Carew, Rod, 302 Caribbeans, West Indians, 237, 247–49, 253, 255, 260 Carlson, John Roy, 180, 188 Carlyle, Thomas, 363 Carson, Clayborne, 348 Carson, Sonny, 237, 252 Carter, Hodding, 187 Carter, Jimmy, 323, 324 Case, Clifford, 198–99 Cash, W. J., 191, 213 Castro, Fidel, 280 Catch-22 (Heller), 64 Catholics, 63, 130, 203, 219, 268, 269, 323, 360, 367 immigration and, 144 Irish, xii, 8, 329 Jewish identity compared with, xii, 8, 54–56 opposition to, 138, 139, 145, 219, 269 Protestant—Catholic—Jew (Herberg), 35, 38–56, 76, 129 Catholic War Veterans, 151 Cato, Gavin, 235, 255, 256, 261 Catskill resorts, 289, 335 Celler, Emanuel, 188n, 206, 210 Central Conference of American Rabbis, 4 Certain People, A (Silberman), 147 Chambers, Whittaker, 39 Chaney, James, 291, 344–47, 351

chaplains, 72–74 Chariots of Fire, 156 charitable giving and philanthropy, 10, 13, 16, 54, 55, 125, 127, 284–86, 317 Chattanooga News-Free Press, 186–87 Chavez, Hugo, 280 Chazon Ish, 295 Chen, Irving, 306 Chicago, Ill., 6, 260, 308 children’s books and magazines, 62, 65 China, 238, 265, 280 China Bistro, 94n Chosen Capital (Kobrin, ed.), 277 Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (Glock and Stark), 139 Christian Century, 151 “Christian Right and Its Demonizers, The” (Podhoretz), 372 Christians, Christianity, xii, 2, 13, 110, 132, 143, 144, 209, 281, 310, 371, 373 abortion and, 271 America as Judeo-Christian country, 14, 55, 63, 73, 368 antisemitism and, 139, 144, 145, 148, 271, 358, 372 Armstrong’s educational crusade and, 214, 219, 223, 224, 226–27, 230, 232 Catholic, see Catholics conservatism and, 51, 97, 110, 324, 328, 365, 366, 372 crucifixion in, 196, 198, 205, 218, 335 diversity among, xvn gay marriage and, 271 immigrants and, 144 Jewish bias against, 271, 372 Jews and Judaism as similar to, 14 Jews for Jesus, 4, 126 liberation theology in, 35 Protestant, see Protestants Protestant—Catholic—Jew (Herberg), 35, 38–56, 76, 129 Rankin on, 197–99, 202, 205, 206, 208, 213 secularization and, 125 World War II and, 182, 183, 195 Christmas, 125, 349 Chronicles, 368 Churchill, Winston, 39, 75, 219 Cieman, Henry, 164 City Limits, 247 City Sun, 244 civil liberties, 341, 358

Index

civil rights movement, 194, 204, 255, 347, 361 Civil Rights Act, 229 Jews’ involvement in, 76, 124, 197, 203, 210, 213, 258, 289, 290, 343–49, 354, 362 march from Selma to Montgomery, 346 Mississippi Freedom Summer, 344, 347 Civil War, The (Foote), 39 Clancy, Tom, 336–37 Clark, Bennett Champ, 175 Clark, Wesley, 270 Clinton, Bill, 325 Clinton, Hillary, 270 Coffin, Henry Sloane, 151 cognitive dissonance, 262–71 Cohen, Alan, 316 Cohen, Elliot E., 77 Cohen, Michael R., 101, 107 Cohen, Morris Raphael, 27–28 Cohen, Naomi W., 139 Cohen, Rich, 306 Cohen, Robert, 292 Cohen, Sasha, 305 Cohen, Steven (businessman), 283 Cohen, Steven M. (sociologist), 114, 115, 328–30, 357 Cohn, David, 210 Cohn, Harry and Jack, 176 Cohn, Werner, 330, 357 Cold War, 189 collectivism, 180, 224, 275, 280, 334 colleges, see universities and colleges Collegiate Learning Experience, 96 Columbus, Christopher, xi Comité Internationale pour le Respect de l’Esprit Olympique, 157 Commentary, 17, 61, 77, 105, 141, 293, 328, 341, 360–63, 367, 369, 371 Committee on Fair Play in Sports, 151, 152, 163 Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, 103 Commonweal, 151 Communications Act, 207 communication technology, 284 communism, Communist Party, 2, 22, 30, 31, 43, 127, 155, 157, 162, 172, 176–83, 280, 360, 369 Armstrong on, 218, 219 Bilbo on, 192, 201 Cold War and, 189 Communist International, 161

Herberg and, 40, 43 Jewish culture and, 161 Nazi Germany and, 152, 153 Olympics and, 158 Rankin on, 197–200, 205, 207–9 Red Scares, 140–41 sports and, 156, 157, 161–62 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 8 competition, 146 composers, 65–71 computers, 284 Congregation Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob and David (AABJ&D), 113–22 Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, 258 Congress, U.S., 193 antisemitism of Bilbo and Rankin in, 192–211 elections for, 325 isolationism and antisemitism in, in approach to World War II, 169–90 Jewish candidates for, 189 Congressional Record, 171, 178, 179, 181 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 207–8 Coningsby (Disraeli), 359 conservatism, 13, 141, 194, 258–59, 271, 291, 320–42, 356–73 big government and, 373 historians and, 141–42 Jewish intellectuals and, 356–73 morality and, 367–68 Nazis and, 360 neoconservatives, 17, 326–28, 360–73 paleoconservatives (traditionalists), 362–65, 367–73 religion and, 51, 97, 104, 110, 121, 324, 328, 365–68, 372 Republican Party, 215, 244, 271, 321–24 welfare state and, 370 Conservative Judaism (Sklare), 86–87, 102, 104–5, 108–9, 111 Conservative Mind, The (Kirk), 359, 365 Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma (Furman), 292 Contemporary Jewish Record, 32 Conway, Carole B., 253 Coolidge, Calvin, 295–96 Cooney, Terry A., 17, 18 Copland, Aaron, 65 Cosmopolitans and Parochials (Heilman and Cohen), 114, 115 Coubertin, Pierre de, 149

379

380

Index

Coughlin, Charles E., 151, 192, 218, 289 Coyote, Peter, xi Cradle Will Rock, The (Blitzstein), 69 Crevecoeur, J. Hector S. John de, x, 123 Crime of ‘20, The (Armstrong), 216 criminals, 284, 306–7 Crisis of the Black Intellectual, The (Cruse), 362 Crown, Lester, 316 Crown Heights, 237, 328 riot in, 235–61, 351 Crown Heights Emergency Fund, 242 Cruse, Harold, 362 Cuba, 280 Cuban, Mark, 284, 316 “Cult of the ‘American Consensus’, The” (Higham), 141 cultural pluralism, xiv, 25, 26, 36, 147 Cunningham, Glenn, 167 Curb Your Enthusiasm, 131 Curley, James M., 151 Curti, Merle, 137 Curtis, Tony, xi Daily Worker, 40, 157, 162, 304 Dalin, David D., 41, 55 Dancing in the Dark (Dickstein), 276 Dangerfield, Rodney, 335 Dangerous Games (MacMillan), 354–55 Daniel, 156 Danning, Harry, 300 Daughtry, Herbert, 237 Davidson, William, 312, 316, 317 Davis, Jefferson, 214 Davis, Marni, 277, 287 Dawidowicz, Lucy S., 30, 63, 287 Dead Right (Frum), 373 Dear, Noach, 241 Dearborn Independent, 171 Deatherage, George E., 181 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 291 Deborah, Golda, and Me (Pogrebin), 345 Decter, Midge, 370–72 Dell, Michael, 284 de los Santos, Valerio, 301 de Mille, Agnes, 67n democracy, 22, 25, 30, 32, 43, 45, 55, 62–63, 74, 75, 140, 143, 162, 185, 223, 224, 228, 339, 356, 360, 363, 365, 367, 370 American Jewish identity and, 22, 25–26, 32–35, 37 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 38, 141 “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot” (Kallen), xiv

Democratic Party, 179, 192, 194, 195, 215, 271, 286, 322–25, 327, 360 dental schools, 206 Depression, Great, 22, 26, 61, 192, 274, 276, 305, 344 Despite All Odds (Hoffman), 237 Detroit, Mich., 48–49, 247, 252, 260 Detroit Free Press, 186 Deutscher, Isaac, 19, 125 Dewey, John, 22, 24–26, 33, 34, 53–54, 132 diamond trade, 240, 255–56 Dickens, Charles, x Dickstein, Morris, 276 Dickstein, Samuel, 172, 185, 205–6 Dies, Martin, 195n, 231 dietary laws, 4, 7, 12, 83, 86, 89–97, 101, 109, 122, 126, 328, 329, 354 Diggins, John P., 40, 41 “Dilemmas of Conservatism” (Muller), 366 Dillon, Phyllis, 277 DiMaggio, Joe, 156, 300 Diner, Hasia R., 237 The Jews of the United States, 288–91, 346 Dinkins, David, 236, 240, 243–47, 256, 257 Dinnerstein, Leonard, 136–37, 170, 191, 212, 346 Disraeli, Benjamin, 359 Dissent, 17 Dobkowski, Michael, 139, 212, 340 Dole, Robert, 325 Dolkart, Andrew S., 277 Dorchester, SS, 72–73 Douglas, Melvyn, 208 Dream of Success, The (Lynn), 296 Dreiser, Theodore, 292, 296–97 Dreyfus Affair, 29 Drucker, Malka, 346 Dubinsky, David, 155, 158–60, 162, 165, 287, 288 Dubner, Stephen J., 352 Dukakis, Michael, 325, 360 Durkheim, Emile, 260 Dutch West India Company, 281 Eastern Orthodoxy, 48 Eban, Abba, 10, 127, 269, 342 economic justice, 26 economics, 364 EDAH, 113 Eddy, David, 232 Edelstein, M. Michael, 184–88, 196 Edmondson, Robert E., 181 education, 36, 49, 97, 100, 112, 121, 290

Index

higher, see universities and colleges on Holocaust, 265 yeshivas, 91, 105, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118–21, 295 Education of Henry Adams, The (Adams), 39 Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, The (Rosten), 6 Edwards, Jonathan, 43 Ehrman, John, 361 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 21, 31 Eichorn, David Max, 72n Eidelman, Jay M., 74 Eilberg, Amy, 103 Einstein, Albert, xiii, 8, 28, 126, 209, 346 Eisen, George, 303 Eisendrath, Maurice, 346 Eisenhower, Dwight, 141, 217, 322, 323 Elazar, Daniel J., 13, 326 Ellis, John Tracy, xii Ellison, Larry, 284 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, x, 3, 123, 353 Encyclopaedia Judaica, 290 “End of Democracy, The” (symposium), 366–67 Engel, David, 340 England, xi, 179, 183, 195, 199, 200, 260, 325–26 see also Britain, British Empire Enlightenment, 2, 125 entrepreneurs, 88–89, 93, 171, 277, 282, 286–91, 294, 296, 317, 369 Epstein, Theo, 311 Equal Rights Amendment, 97 Erlich, Victor, 188n Estrin, Bracha, 235 “Eternal Light, The” (radio program), 63 Ethiopia, 238 Ethnic Factor, The (Levy and Kramer), 322 ethnicity, 147–48, 361, 369 of Jews, 6, 25, 26, 33, 56, 189, 266, 268, 282 wealth and, 282 Europe, x–xi, 3, 27, 123 European Jews, x, 6, 9, 51, 110, 126–27, 290, 343, 365 athletic competition and, 309–10 authority and politics as viewed by, 329–42, 357–58 see also Jewish immigrants existentialism, 41–43, 53, 54, 56 Exodus (Uris), 11, 64–65 Ezekiel, Mordecai, 179

Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 217 Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), 205 Fair Play for American Athletes (Brundage), 152–53 Faith or Fear (Abrams), 372 Falwell, Jerry, 324, 372 “Famished for Justice” (Whitfield), 348 Fanfare for the Common Man (Copland), 65, 67 Farmer, James, 345 Farrakhan, Louis, 254 fascism, 30–31, 155, 158, 161–62, 181, 222, 360 Fast, Howard, 350 Feder, Don, 368 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 225 Federal Reserve System, 172, 215, 216, 271, 314, 342 Federation of Jewish Student Organizations of New York, 23 Fein, Leonard, 13, 36–37 Feingold, Henry L., 62, 188, 289, 290, 338 Feinstein, Edward, 100 Feinstein, Moshe, 83 feminism, 50, 54, 97, 103, 118–19, 121, 290, 292, 294, 364, 371, 373 see also women Ferdinand, Archduke, 217 Ferkauf, Eugene, 283 Ferris, Daniel T., 160 Festinger, Leon, 262–63, 269, 271 Feuer, Lewis, 24 Fiddler on the Roof, 12, 110, 126, 330, 333, 335, 344 Fifth Avenue Synagogue, 110 Fight for Freedom, Inc., 184 Filene, Abraham Lincoln, 283, 288–89 film industry, 59, 147, 174–76, 181, 183, 208, 236, 276 Finkelstein, Louis, 62–63 First New Nation, The (Lipset), x First Things, 366–67 Fisher, Max, 285 Fishman, William J., 334 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 292 Fleischer, Nat, 306 Fleming, Thomas, 368–69 Florida, 82–98, 317 Boca Raton, 85, 92, 93, 96 Miami, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 97 Miami Beach, 83, 84, 88–92, 96, 97, 337

381

382

Index

Florida Atlantic University, 96–97 Flynn, John T., 175 Fogelson, Robert, 250 football, 167, 286, 298, 299, 303, 305, 309, 311, 312 Foote, Shelby, 39 Forbes, 271, 282, 314 Ford, Henry, 139, 171, 217n, 218, 289, 296 foreign policy, 338–40, 369, 373 Forgosh, Linda, 288 Forman, Seth, 360–61 Fortune, 348 Forward (Jewish Daily Forward), 7, 8, 75, 128, 129, 155, 160, 161, 163, 168, 242, 290 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 151 Francis, Samuel, 370–71 Franco-Prussian War, 149 Frank, Jerome, 180 Frank, John, 303 Frank, Leo, 170, 191 Frank, Stanley, 307, 310 Frankel, Jonathan, 332 Frankfurter, Felix, 171, 197, 218, 219 Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, 170 Franklin, Benjamin, 217 Franklin, John Hope, 210 Freedman, Benjamin H., 200 Freedman, Samuel G., 357 Freiheit, 161 Freud, Sigmund, 8 Friedman, Benny, 305 Friedman, Milton, 274–75, 334 Friedman, Murray, 347 From Hegel to Marx (Hook), 22 “From Marxism to Judaism” (Herberg), 42 Frum, David, 373 Fuchs, Daniel, 292 Fuchs, Klaus, 205 Fuchs, Lawrence H., 275, 327 Fuld, Felix, 288 Furman, Andrew, 292 Future of American Politics, The (Lubell), 179 Gallico, Paul, 151, 307 Gans, Herbert, 86 Garber, Doug, 311 Garfield, John, 306 garment industry, 160, 277, 279, 282, 289, 290, 293, 323 Garrett, Leah, 64 Gates, Bill, 296 gay rights, see homosexuality Geffen, David, 284

gender issues, 97 see also homosexuality; women General Electric Corporation, xi General Jewish Workers Union (Bund), 331–33 Georgetown University, xii Gerard, James W., 151 Gerber, David A., 137, 140 German-American Bund, 153 German-Americans, 176 German Jews, 6, 31 Germany, Nazi, see Nazi Germany Gifter, Mordecai, 83 Gilbert, Brad, 298 Gilded Age, 139, 143 Gilje, Paul A., 260 Gillman, Neil, 41 Gilman, Neal, 106 Gingrich, Newt, 266, 286 Girgenti, Richard H., 254 Gittelsohn, Roland, 73–74 Giuliani, Rudy, 244, 245 Givat Haviva Educational Foundation, 350 Glazer, Malcolm, 312, 315 Glazer, Nathan, 2, 38, 39, 56, 86, 102, 109, 321, 330–31, 347–48, 358, 362, 363 Gleason, Philip, 56 Glengarry Glen Ross (Mamet), 291–92 Glock, Charles Y., 139 Gobineau, Arthur de, 201 God, 26, 45, 53, 130, 357 existence of, 8, 12, 24, 268 Jews’ covenant with, 12, 53 theodicy and, 24 see also religion Goddard, Paulette, xi Godley, Andrew, 277 Goebbels, Joseph, 186, 198 Going South (Schulz), 348 gold, 178, 181, 183, 196, 215, 216 Gold, Michael, 292 Goldberg, Guiseppe, 95 Goldberg, Marshall, 305 Golden, Harry, 191, 210 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 339 Goldman, Charley, 306 Goldman, Emma, 276, 288 Goldman Sachs, 276 Goldstein, Fred, 256–57 Goldstein, Jonah, 357 Goldstein, Rebecca, 292 Goldstein, Richard, 251, 261 Goldwater, Barry, 323

Index

Goldwyn, Samuel, 176 golf, 298, 299, 311 Goode, Alexander D., 72–73 Goodman, Allegra, 292 Goodman, Andrew, 124, 291, 344–51, 355 Goodman, Carolyn, 347, 349–50 Goodman, Jonathan, 350–51, 354 Goodman, Robert, 350 Goodman, Tamir, 309 Goodman, Walter, 195n Goor, Joel S., 234 Goossens, Eugene A., 67, 68 Gordis, Robert, 14–15 Gordon, Eddie, 164 Gordon, Eric A., 70 Gordon, Sid, 300 Gore, Al, 373 Gottfried, Paul, 369, 370 Gould, Morton, 65, 68–69 government big, and conservatism, 373 business and, 296 centralized, dangers of, 280 European Jews’ distrust of, 329–42, 357–58 foreign policy, 338–40, 369, 373 separation of church and state, 26, 28, 36, 271, 357, 372 see also politics Grade, Chaim, 295 Graham, Billy, 50 Grand Street Boys Association, 160 Grant, Madison, 201 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 71 Great Britain, see Britain, British Empire Great Depression, 22, 26, 61, 192, 274, 276, 305, 344 Great Jews in Sports (Slater), 310 Great Seal of the United States, xii Great Society, 361, 364, 370 Greeks, ancient, 344 Greeley, Horace, 59n Green, Gerald, 292 Green, Shawn, 301–3, 309 Green, William, 159 Greenberg, Adam, 301 Greenberg, Eliezer, 335 Greenberg, Eric Rolfe, 300 Greenberg, Hank, 300–303, 305, 308, 312, 346 Greenberg, Reuben, 337 Greenberg, Steven, 312 Greenglass, David, 205

Greenville Delta Democrat Times, 187 Gribetz, Judah, 242 Griffith, Clark, 103 Grill Time, 94 Grossinger, Jennie, 289 Grove, Andrew, 284 Grunfield, Ernie, 305 Gurock, Jeffrey S., 63, 116, 304 Gutnick, Joseph, 238 Guttmann, Allen, 292 Hacker, Louis M., 274 Hadassah Magazine, 95 Hafetz Hayyim, 109 halakhah, 106–7, 111, 117–20 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 256 Hamill, Pete, 241 Hamilton, Alexander, 142 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 59, 71, 353 Handler, Ruth, 284 Handlin, Oscar, 56, 289 Hansen, Marcus Lee, 46–47, 49 Hansen’s law, 46, 47, 51, 56 Hanukkah, 125, 349 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 351, 352 Harding, Warren G., 174, 217 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 17 Haredi Jews, 83 Harmonie Club, 6 Harris, Mark, 300 Hart, Jeffrey, 361 Hart, Merwin K., 231 Hartford Courant, 186 Hartz, Louis, 50 Hasidic Jews, 83, 102, 105, 109, 240, 244, 247, 253, 268, 292 Lubavitch, 84, 91–92, 96, 235–40, 247–49, 255–58, 263, 350 Hawkins, Yusuf, 246 Hayek, F. A., 274, 275 Hays, Will, 175 health care, 266–67 Hebrews, Hebrew culture, 6, 25 Hebrew University, 23, 126 Heilman, Samuel C., 15, 111–12, 114, 115, 119 Heine, Heinrich, 4, 126 Heller, Joseph, 64, 300 Hemingway, Ernest, 292 Herberg, Will, 17 early life of, 39–40 “From Marxism to Judaism,” 42 Judaism and Modern Man, 41–42, 55

383

384

Index

Protestant—Catholic—Jew, 35, 38–56, 76, 129 “Herberg as Sociologist” (Glazer), 39 Herrick, Robert, 292, 296 Hertzberg, Arthur, 30, 60–61, 289, 290, 360 Herut Party, 28 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 291, 344, 346 High, Stanley, 193 Higham, John, 136–48, 169, 293 Hill, Lister, 193 Hillman, Sidney, 155, 207–8, 210, 288 Hillquit, Morris, 288 Himmelfarb, Dan, 362–64 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 366–67 Himmelfarb, Milton, 321–22, 358 Hispanics, 130, 265, 267, 301, 321, 324 Hiss, Alger, 350 historians, historiography, x, 3, 55, 82, 123, 125, 127 consensus and, 142 conservatism and, 141–42 Higham’s examination of antisemitism, 136–48 Jewish, American capitalism as viewed by, 274–80 Jewish business moguls and, 286–90 leftist orientation of, 276, 287, 291 moralistic approach and, 142 and narratives of memory versus narratives of history, 236–37, 239, 343 Orthodoxy and, 82, 86, 87, 92 progressive, 141, 142, 148 “Historians, Politicians, and Morality” (Dobkowski), 340 History (Higham), 142 History of the Jews in America, A (Sachar), 289, 290, 346 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 344 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 31, 32, 75, 150, 161, 172, 174, 176, 178, 186, 187, 196, 198, 200, 209, 225, 340 Armstrong on, 218, 219 Crown Heights riot and, 240, 242, 250 see also Nazi Germany “Hitlerism” (Hook), 32 Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen), 339 hockey, 298, 303, 311, 313, 315, 316 Hoffman, Edward, 237 Hofstadter, Richard, 50, 143–44, 169–70 Hollander, Paul, 3 Hollinger, David, 297

Hollywood, 59, 147, 174–76, 181, 183, 208, 236, 276 Holman, Nat, 305, 307 Holman, Rufus, 178–79 Holmes, John Haynes, 151 Holocaust, 10, 12, 19–21, 24, 27, 29–31, 33, 53, 60, 125, 128, 137, 153, 189, 213, 243, 246, 264–65, 292, 342, 343, 348 American government’s response to, 339–40 Armstrong on, 218, 219 education on, 265 liberation of concentration camp prisoners, 351–53, 355 museums and memorials, 264–65, 339 survivors of, 112, 235, 239, 240, 242 “Holocaust” (television series), 68 Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, D.C.), 264, 339 homosexuality, 97, 99–100, 105, 106, 265, 267, 268, 294, 341, 371 gay clergy, 105, 106 same-sex marriage, 99, 100, 105, 106, 267, 270, 271 Hond, Paul, 292 Hong Kong, 278 Hook, Sidney, 8–9, 17, 21–37 Hoover, Herbert, 322 Hoover Institute, 23 Horkheimer, Max, 170 Horowitz, Irving Louis, 359 hospitals, 78 Host at Last, A (Sachar), 78 hotels, 93 House, Edward M., 182 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 208, 231 Howard Beach, 249 Howe, Irving, x, 17, 19–22, 25, 27, 30, 128, 287–88, 303–4, 335, 342 Hucker, Ham, 164 Huie, William Bradford, 350 Huizenga, Wayne, 312n humanism, 27, 54, 297, 341, 350, 371 humanistic Judaism, 6, 125, 268, 354 “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” (Park), 18–19 human nature, 364, 368, 371 humor, 335 Humphrey, Hubert, 323, 324 Hurricane Bob, 238 Hutt, W. H., 274

Index

Icahn, Carl, 283 Ickes, Harold, 195n identity American, x–xiv, 3, 59, 123–24, 369 Jewish, see American Jewish identity; Jewish identity “Ideological Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age” (Higham), 143 ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union), 40, 155, 158, 159, 162, 165, 287 Imagining Russian Jewry (Zipperstein), 236–37 immigrants, immigration, xiv, 2, 144, 343, 368–69, 373 Christianity and, 144 Hispanic, 130, 369 Hollywood and, 175, 176 melting pot and, xiv, 59 opposition to, 138, 140, 142, 143, 174, 178, 179, 183–84, 208–9 religion and, 47–49, 51–52 sports and, 167 see also Jewish immigrants Immigration and the American Identity (Fleming), 368 Imus, Don, 245 individualism, 3, 15, 45, 62, 89, 101, 109, 121, 167, 276, 280, 334, 353, 356, 361, 363 industrialization, 138, 144, 148, 170, 191, 276, 277, 279, 280, 304, 343, 356 In Search of American Jewish Culture (Whitfield), 129–30 Institute for Religious and Social Studies, 62–63 Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, 131 intellectuals, Jewish, 7, 336 conservatism and, 356–73 New York, 17–37 religious belief and, xii–xiii, 9 Intercollegiate Review, 39 intermarriage, 14–15, 48, 79, 121, 132, 270, 292, 326 Internal Revenue Service, 229–30 International Committee Against Racism, 257 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 40, 155, 158, 159, 162, 165, 287 International Workers’ Athletic Meet, 158 Interns for Peace, 350

Iran, 89, 238 Iraq, 238, 339 Irgun, 199–200 Irish, xii, 8, 329, 336 Iron Curtain over America (Beaty), 205 IRS, 229–30 isolationism, 140, 195, 369 in Congress in approach to World War II, 169–90 Israel, x, xiii, 2, 12, 13, 15, 20, 29–30, 53, 75, 89, 115, 120, 125, 130, 189, 210, 238, 242, 256, 257, 271, 292, 330, 339, 354, 357, 372 American support for, 323, 338, 339, 370 Arab conflict with, 266, 346 founding of state of, 10, 11, 27–30, 41–42, 127, 199, 200, 346 heroes of, 311 “Israelism,” 10–11 Knesset in, 357 Lebanon invaded by, 30 liberals and, 362 neoconservatives and, 370 secular Jews and, 126, 132, 133 in Six-Day War, 20, 30, 346, 362 see also Palestine Italian-Americans, 176, 203–4, 249, 268, 306, 313 Iwo Jima, 73–74 Jackson, Andrew, 214 Jackson Daily News, 187 Jacobs, Joe, 306 Jacobs, Mike, 301, 306 Jahncke, Ernest L., 166 Jakobovits, Immanuel, 110 James, Henry, x–xi, 124 James, William, 132 Japan, in World War II, 182, 202 Japanese-Americans and, 57, 202, 268 Pearl Harbor attack, 66, 68, 69, 72, 169, 189, 219 Javits, Jacob, 198 Jefferson, Thomas, 123, 136, 142, 213, 368 Jefferson Military College ( JMC), 212–15, 220–30 Jeffries, Leonard, 235–36 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 263 Jerusalem, 4, 9, 83 Jerusalem Post, 242 Jew in American Politics, The (Weyl), 326 Jew in American Sports, The (Ribalow), 310

385

386

Index

Jew in Sport, The (Frank), 310 Jewish American Fiction, 1917–1987 (Pinsker), 292 Jewish American Literature Since 1945 (Wade), 292–93 Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, 242 Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America, A (Feder), 368 Jewish Culture Foundation, 23 Jewish Daily Forward, see Forward Jewish diaspora, xii, 9, 55, 77, 127, 264, 331 “Jewish Educational and Economic Success in the United States” (Burstein), 297 Jewish Federation, 115, 116, 118 Jewish identity athletes and, 305 community in, 36, 53, 54, 101, 115, 132 compared with Catholics or Protestants, xii, 8, 54–56 defining and reinventing, 2–4, 9 food in, 12 Holocaust remembrance in, 11–12 Judaism and, xii–xiii, xv, 2, 3, 5–8, 13, 14, 25, 52–56, 62, 124–26, 129–33, 268, 330 left-wing politics in, 6–8, 13, 26, 27, 35, 54, 55, 127–29, 257, 266–67, 271, 275, 290, 326–30, 354, 356–60, 367, 373 memories involving, 237 powerlessness and victim orientation in, 264, 291, 334–35, 338, 340, 342, 358 values and causes in, 266–67, 329–30, 337, 354 Yiddish culture in, see Yiddish culture Zionism in, see Zionism see also American Jewish identity Jewish immigrants, xiv, 2, 5–8, 51, 62, 102, 110, 126–28, 131, 146, 281, 287–88, 290, 295, 332, 343, 344, 357, 368 capitalism and, 278–80, 281–82 acculturation of, xiii–xv, 2, 35, 52, 86, 102, 108, 111, 124, 126, 128, 129, 131, 147–48, 189, 266, 275–76, 291–93, 304, 326, 353 economic success of, 275, 282, 294; see also business; upward mobility in Florida, 83–85; see also Florida generations and, 47–49, 51–52, 86, 102, 189 Orthodoxy and, 86, 126–27, 343 refugees, 85, 175–77, 179, 183, 185, 189, 208, 221

socialism and, 127–29 sports and, 305, 309–10 see also immigrants, immigration Jewish Labor Committee ( JLC), 150, 155, 158–62, 166, 168 Jewish Lecture Bureau, 23 Jewish National Workers Alliance, 160 Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, 118 Jewish Press, 242, 300 Jewish Quarterly Review, 297 Jewish question, 9, 27 “Jewish Role in Student Activism, The” (Glazer), 347–48 Jewish Theological Seminary ( JTS), 5, 13, 41, 53, 62–63, 89, 101, 103–6, 317 Jewish Times, 160 “Jewish View of the Racial Crisis, A” (Silberman), 347 Jewish War Veterans of the United States, 209 Jewish Week, 238, 241–42 Jewish Welfare Board, 23, 154 Jewish Writer in America, The (Guttmann), 292 Jews and Booze (Davis), 287 Jews and Money (Krefetz), 286 Jews and the New American Scene (Lipset and Raab), 322 Jews for Jesus, 4, 126 Jews in America, The (Hertzberg), 289, 290 Jews in America, The (Learsi), 289, 290 Jews in World War II (Bureau of War Records), 58–59 Jews of the United States, The (Diner), 288–91, 346 Jews on the Left (Liebman), 124 Jews Without Mercy (Shorris), 328 Jew vs. Jew (Freedman), 357 Jobs, Steve, 296 Johnpoll, Bernard K., 331–32 Johnson, Cornelius, 167 Johnson, Lyndon, 252, 323, 370 Jones, Howard, 165 Joselit, Jenna Weissman, 4, 113, 125 Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 274 Joyce, James, 261 J. P. Morgan, 217 Judaism, xiii, 7, 24, 25, 27, 35 America as Judeo-Christian country, 14, 55, 63, 73, 368 American norms and, 4–5 capitalism and, 275–76 “Catholic Israel” philosophy of, 101, 107

Index



Christianity as similar to, 14 civil rights movement and, 347–49 dietary laws in, 4, 7, 12, 83, 86, 89–97, 101, 109, 122, 126, 328, 329, 354 generations and, 47–49, 51–52, 86, 102 halakhah in, 106–7, 111, 117–20 humanistic, 6, 125, 268, 354 Jewish identity and, xii–xiii, xv, 2, 3, 5–8, 13, 14, 25, 52–56, 62, 124–26, 129–33, 268, 330 Jewish intellectuals and, xii–xiii, 9 neoconservatism and, 373 new and diverse forms of, xv, 2, 125, 268, 354 politics and, 327–28 powerlessness and, 334–35, 338, 358 postwar resurgence in, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51 Protestant—Catholic—Jew (Herberg), 35, 38–56, 76, 129 Reconstructionist, 5–6, 53–54, 125, 268, 354 Reform, 4–6, 51, 100, 102, 104, 106–7, 110, 111, 124, 129, 132, 268, 270, 327 rejection of traditions of, 2, 7–8 Sabbath in, see Sabbath sports and, 304 Torah u-Madda philosophy of, 111, 112, 120 women’s roles in, 99, 103, 113, 117–19 Judaism, Conservative, 5, 6, 51, 52, 87, 108, 110–12, 124, 125, 129, 268, 354 crisis of, 99–107 Judaism, Hasidic, 83, 102, 105, 109, 240, 244, 247, 253, 268, 292 Lubavitch, 84, 91–92, 96, 235–40, 247–49, 255–58, 263, 350 Judaism, Orthodox, xi–xiii, 5, 7, 11, 33, 51, 52, 99, 101–4, 106, 107, 108–13, 124, 129, 133, 239, 268, 292, 300, 333 Congregation Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob and David (AABJ&D) and, 113–22 in Florida, 82–98 historians and, 82, 86, 87, 92 Holocaust survivors and, 112 immigrants and, 86, 126–27, 343 intermarriage and, 270 Modern or Centrist, 5, 52, 101, 105, 108–22, 125, 268 politics and, 97, 324, 328, 329, 331–33 revival of, 104–5 women in, 118–19 Zionism and, 9

Judaism and Modern Man (Herberg), 41–42, 55 Judaism as a Civilization (Kaplan), 5, 54 Judaism in a Christian World (Gordis), 14–15 Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Gurock), 304 Judge Armstrong Foundation, 227, 229–30 Justice, 158–60, 162 Kadar, Naomi Prawer, 65 Kahn, Roger, 300 Kallen, Horace M., xiv, 22, 25, 26, 33 Kaminetsky, Yaakov, 83 Kaplan, Mordecai M., 5, 53–54 Karelitz, Avrohom Y., 295 Karp, Abraham J., 3 Karp, Jonathan, 277 Katyn massacre, 199 Katz, Daniel, 277–78 Katz, Sam, 176 Kauffman, William, 369 Kaufmann, Myron, 292 Kaye, Danny, 208 Kazin, Alfred, 17, 19–22, 30 Kempton, Murray, 260 Kennedy, John F., 323, 360, 369 Kennedy, John S., 38 Kennedy, Martin J., 185–86 Kennedy, Ruby Joe, 39, 48 Kerner Commission, 252 Kerry, John, 286 Kertzer, Morris, 14, 15 Keysar, Ariela, 131 Khan, Gilbert N., 345 Khazars, 197, 200 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 238 Kierkegaard, Søren, 41, 43 King, Alan, 337 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 291, 346, 358 King, Richard H., 363 Kingdom of God in America, The (Niebuhr), 38 Kirk, Russell, 359, 364, 370, 371 Kirzner, Israel, 334 Kissinger, Henry, 61 Klein, Arthur G., 205 Klein, Menasheh, 94n Klein, Nathan J., 229 Knapp, Raymond, 71 Knox, Israel, 77 Kobrin, Rebecca, 277 Koch, Ed, 241, 243–44 Koffman, David S., 277

387

388

Index

Kohl, Herbert, 313, 315 Konvitz, Milton, 24 Kopplemann, Herman, 193, 201, 210 Korf, Abraham, 88, 91 kosher foods, kashrut, 4, 7, 12, 83, 86, 89–97, 101, 109, 122, 126, 328, 329, 354 Kosher Map and Guide, 86, 90 Kosmin, Barry A., 130–31 Kostelanetz, Andre, 67 Koufax, Sandy, 300–302, 309 Kovner, Bruce, 283, 286 Kovner, Victor A., 257–58 Kraft, Robert, 286, 312, 313, 316 Kraft family, 317 Kramer, Michael, 322 Krauthammer, Charles, 365–66 Krayzelburg, Lenny, 305 Krefetz, Gerald, 286 Krickstein, Aaron, 298, 299 Kristallnacht, 31, 242, 243, 351 Kristol, Irving, 327, 339, 359, 361, 363, 364, 370–72 Kronish, Leon, 88 Kuhn, Fritz, 181 Kuhn, Loeb & Company, 216, 218 Ku Klux Klan, 192, 208, 219, 243, 247, 289, 360 Kushner, Tony, 292 labor unions, 194, 207–8, 282, 290, 304 Lafayette, Marquis de, 214 LaFollette, Robert M., Sr., 173, 174 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 159, 160, 167 Lambertson, William P., 177–78, 182, 185 Lampert, Edward, 283 Lansky, Meyer, 284, 307 Lapin, Daniel, 367 Latin America, 83, 89, 96, 214, 223, 224, 369 Lauder, Estée, 284 Lauren, Ralph, xi Lazarus, Emma, xiv, 353 Learsi, Rufus, 289, 290 Lebanon, 30 LeBon, Gustave, 260 Lederhendler, Eli, 275, 330 Lee, Umphrey, 230 Lefebvre, Georges, 260 Lefkowitz, Jay P., 341 Lefkowitz, Louis, 184 Left, the Right and the Jews, The (Rubinstein), 326, 359 Legacy (Orden), 288 Lehman, Herbert, 159, 160, 165, 167

Lehman Brothers, 180, 233 Lehrman, Irving, 88 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 24 Lenski, Gerhard, 48–49, 55 Leonard, Benny, 305 Lerner, Randy, 312 Lerner, Sandra, 284 Lerner, Ted, 315 Lerner family, 312, 316 Letters from an American Farmer (Crevecoeur), x, 123 Levana, 95 Levey, Geoffrey Graham, 333 Levin, Meyer, 292 Levine, Peter, 299 Levine, Randy, 311 Levitt, Arthur, 289 Levitt family, 289–90 Levontin, Zalman David, 340–41 Levy, Leon, 177 Levy, Mark R., 322 Lewis, John, 347 Lewis, Peter, 286 Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling), 356 liberalism, 13, 34, 75, 129, 257–59, 286, 289, 320–42, 356, 360, 361, 364, 367, 371 Black antisemitism and, 341 Democratic Party, 179, 192, 194, 195, 215, 271, 286, 322–25, 327, 360 Israel and, 362 in Jewish identity, 6–8, 26, 27, 35, 54, 55, 127–29, 257, 266–67, 271, 275, 290, 326–30, 354, 356–60, 367, 373 neoconservatives and, 363, 364 Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, 351–53, 355 Liberators Commemoration Committee, 351 Liberia, 201 libertarianism, 334 Library of Congress, 22 Lieberman, Joseph, 373 Liebman, Arthur, 124 Liebman, Charles S., 15, 110, 111, 328, 330, 357 Liebman, Joshua Loth, 44 Life, 71 Lincoln, Abraham, 67–68, 74, 217 Lincoln Portrait, A (Copland), 67–68 Lindbergh, Charles, 177 Lippmann, Walter, 183, 196 Lipset, Seymour Martin, x, 45n, 322 literature and writers baseball and, 299–300

Index

Jewish, 64–65, 147, 291–97, 335 Southern, 17–18, 20 Yiddish, 294–95, 334–35 Litvinov, Maxim, 180 lobbying, 54, 75, 125, 147, 249 Loesser, Frank, 70 Loew, Arthur, 176 London, Jack, 292, 296 Long, Huey, 192, 217 Longest Day, The, 222n Look, 14, 16 Lord George Bentinck (Disraeli), 359 Loria, Jeffrey, 316–17 Los Angeles, Calif., 13, 82n, 87, 89, 252, 260 Los Angeles Dodgers, 302 Los Angeles Times, 329 Lou G. Siegel’s, 95n Louis, Joe, 305 Lovestone, Jay, 40 Lubavitch Hasidim, 84, 91–92, 96, 235–40, 247–49, 255–58, 263, 350 Lubell, Samuel, 179 Luckman, Sid, 305 Lukacs, John, 369 Lundeen, Ernest, 173, 177, 179 Luthin, Reinhard H., 193 lynching, 201, 246, 247, 254 Lynn, Kenneth S., 296 Maccabee, Samuel K., 155 MacMillan, Margaret, 354–55 Maddox, Alton, 237, 240 Madoff, Bernie, 263, 294 Madras Palace, 95 “Magic Barrel, The” (Malamud), 335 Magnes, Judah, 28 Magnin, Mary Ann, 284 Mahoney, Jeremiah T., 151, 152, 154, 155, 159, 160, 166, 167 Mailer, Norman, 64 Maimonides, 41, 130 Malamud, Bernard, 292, 299–300, 335, 341 Malcolm X, 256, 353 Mamet, David, 291–92 Marcantonio, Vito, 193, 203–4 March of Bolshevism, The (Armstrong), 218 Marcus, Joseph, 332 Marcus, Sol, 70 Margin of Hope, A (Howe), 19 Maritain, Jacques, 41–43 Markowitz, Martin, 260–61 Marks, Elaine, 125 Markson, Harry, 306

marriage, 121 intermarriage, 14–15, 48, 79, 121, 132, 270, 292, 326 same-sex, 99, 100, 105, 106, 267, 270, 271 Marshall Plan, 200 Marty, Martin E., 38 Marty, Walter, 164 Marx brothers, 335 Marxism, 19, 22, 26, 27, 35, 40, 42, 43, 126, 170, 257, 287 mass media, see media Maverick, Maury, 193 Mayer, Louis B., 176 McAlary, Mike, 241, 254 McCarthyism, 141 McClay, William M., 39 McCone Commission, 260 McConnell, E. G., 352 McFadden, Louis T., 171–73 McGovern, George, 323 McKinley, William, 217 McWilliams, Carey, 143 McWilliams, Joe, 181 Meadows, Earle, 165 media, 208, 210, 217–18, 236 movies, 59, 147, 174–76, 181, 183, 208, 236, 276 press, 181–83, 186–87 radio, 177, 181–83, 207, 350 Meir, Golda, 346 Meisels, Dov Berish, 357 Melting Pot, The (Zangwill), xiv, 353 Memphis Press-Scimitar, 187 Mencken, H. L., 297 Mendelsohn, Ezra, 333, 337 Menorah Journal, 23, 26, 276 Meridian Star, 187 Merman, Ethel, 217 messianism, 237–39, 263, 329, 331, 339, 357 Metcalf, Ralph, 165 Meyer, Marshall, 258 Meyer, Michael A., 8 Miami, Fla., 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 97 Miami Beach, Fla., 83, 84, 88–92, 96, 97, 337 Miami Dolphins, 312n Miami Herald, 312n Michener, James, 59 Middle East, 189–90, 200, 255, 256, 339, 342 Miles, Bill, 352 Milken, Michael, 283 Miller, Arthur, 291, 292

389

390

Index

Miller, Irving, 76 Miller, Leonard, 285 Millerites, 263 Millionaire Next Door, The (Stanley and Danko), 282 Mills, H. T., 178 Mind of the South, The (Cash), 191, 213 Minhag America, xii, 4 Mintz, Alan, 236 Mintz, Jerome R., 330 Mises, Ludwig von, 334 Miss America pageant, 78–79, 128 Mississippi, 182, 187, 192–93, 200–201, 204, 209–10, 213, 214, 222, 229, 344–45, 347–50 Mississippi Burning, 345 Mississippi Freedom Summer, 344, 347 Modern Age, 365 “Modern Capitalism and Jewish Fate” (Baron), 276–77 Mondale, Walter, 324 Money, Politics, and the Future (Mills), 178 Moore, Colin, 246–47 Moore, Deborah Dash, To the Golden Cities, 87–89, 97, 98 morality, 338–40, 367–68 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 41 Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 177, 179, 180, 219 Mormons, 268, 269 Morse, Wayne, 178 Mosca, Gaetona, 371 Moseley, George Van Horn, 181, 207, 215, 218, 221–22, 226, 231–33 Moseley, George Van Horn, Jr., 222n Moses, Robert, 159 Mostel, Zero, 350 “Mostly About Myself ” (Yezierska), xiii Mount Pelerin Society, 274 movie industry, 59, 147, 174–76, 181, 183, 208, 236, 276 Moynihan, Daniel P., 247 Muller, Jerry Z., 275, 279, 365–66 Multer, Abraham, 205 “Multicultural Front, The” (Katz), 277–78 multiculturalism, 258–59 Murder Incorporated, 284 Murphy, Stanley M., 220, 223, 227 Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 265 music, 65–71 Muslims, 47, 199, 269 Mussolini, Benito, 176

Myerson, Bess, 78–79, 128 My Love Affair with America (Podhoretz), 371 My Mantelpiece (Goodman), 349 Myrdal, Gunnar, 354 Nagel, Ernest, 24 Nagler, Isadore, 159 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 64 name changing, xi, xiii–xiv Narot, Joseph, 88 Nash, George H., 363 Natchez Democrat, 228–29 Nation, 17, 151, 266, 286 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 76, 151, 203 National Basketball Association (NBA), 298, 299, 307, 311, 312, 315, 317 National Brotherhood Day, 63 National Conference of Christians and Jews, 63 National Council of Jewish Women, 23, 29, 35–36 National Council of the Methodist Church, 151 National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, 349 National Endowment for Democracy, 369 National Football League (NFL), 298, 299, 303, 311, 312 National Hockey League (NHL), 298, 311 nationalism, 2, 27, 125, 140, 144 Jewish, see Zionism National Jewish Population Survey, 14, 100 National Jewish Welfare Board, 58–59 National Review, 40, 258, 361, 372, 373 Nation of Islam, 235 nativism, 137–40, 144, 145, 148, 174 Natural, The (Malamud), 299–300 Nature and Destiny of Man, The (Niebuhr), 39 Nazi Germany, 20, 26, 30–32, 61, 75, 154, 174, 178, 185, 189, 196, 209, 210, 225, 265, 280, 360 Brundage and, 153 conservatism and, 360 Kristallnacht in, 31, 242, 243, 351 Moseley and, 222, 231 Nuremberg trials of criminals of, 199, 219 Olympics in, 149–55, 157–68 persecution of Jews in, 31–32, 150–54, 172, 174, 175, 182; see also Holocaust Soviet Union and, 31, 68, 69, 161

Index

universities in, 362 see also Hitler, Adolf Navasky, Victor, 17 Nelson, Lemrick, 253, 256–57 “Neoconservatism” (Podhoretz), 363, 372 neoconservatives, 17, 326–28, 360–73 Neshoba: The Price of Freedom, 345 Neuhaus, John, 358, 366, 367 Neusner, Jacob, 367 Newark, N.J., 115, 252, 260, 288, 252, 260 “New Colossus, The” (Lazarus), xiv New Deal, 162, 171, 178, 179, 181, 192–94, 197, 215, 227, 290, 357, 370 New England Patriots, 286, 298 New Jersey Newark, 115, 252, 260, 288, 252, 260 West Orange, 113–22 New Leader, 31, 162, 165–66 New Left, 141, 290, 331, 348, 358, 361 New Republic, xi, 243, 286 newspapers, 181–83, 186–87 New York, N.Y., 6–8, 115, 184, 195, 200, 203, 204, 209, 213, 235, 308, 325, 336, 337 Brooklyn, see Brooklyn, N.Y. garment district in, 160, 277, 279, 282, 289, 290, 293, 323 intellectuals of, 17–37 Lower East Side, 108, 110, 172, 187, 196, 279, 288, 358 Randall’s Island, 150, 159–62, 163–67 New York American, 165 New York Athletic Club, 151 New York Daily News, 244, 254 New York Herald Tribune, 165, 186, 228 New York Intellectuals, The (Wald), 18 New York Jew (Kazin), 20 New York Mets, 302–3, 318 New York Newsday, 254 New York Post, 240–41, 254 New York Review of Books, 17 New York Times, 28, 68, 95, 151, 167, 186, 212, 233, 325, 351 Crown Heights riot and, 240, 242, 243n, 245, 251–54 New York University, 23 New York Yankees, 300, 311, 316 Nickoll, Benjamin Edward, 234 Nidetch, Jean, 284 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 38–41, 43, 53 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 42n, 151 Niger, Shmuel, 20 Nisbet, Robert A., 366 Nixon, Richard, 323

Noel, Peter, 249 Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, 150 Nordau, Max, 310 Norris, Frank, 292, 296 Norris, George W., 173, 193 Not in the Heavens (Biale), 131, 132 Novak, David, 367 nuclear weapons, 338 Nye, Gerald P., 173, 175–77, 183 Obama, Barack, 270, 286 O’Connor, John J., 351 Odets, Clifford, 291, 292, 320 Oklahoma!, 70–71, 353 Old World in the New, The (Ross), 309–10 O’Leary, James A., 186 Olshansky, Igor, 305 Olympics, 149, 152, 153, 156–58, 304, 309, 311 Berlin, 149–55, 157–68 Omaha Evening World-Herald, 186 O’Neill, Tip, 336 “On the Future of Conservatism” (symposium), 367 Orden, Christopher, 288 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 39 Orman, Suze, 284 Ornitz, Samuel, 292 Ornstein, Charles, 154, 155, 159, 160, 164, 166, 167 Oslo Peace Accord, 346 Other People’s Money (Sterner), 291–92 Otteson, James, 279 Out of Step (Hook), 23 Owens, Jesse, 164, 165, 305 Oxenhandler, Neal, 292 Ozick, Cynthia, 292, 353 Pacifica Foundation, 350 paganism, 368 Page, Larry, 284 paleoconservatives, 362–65, 367–73 Palestine, 27–30, 75, 127, 174, 179, 199– 200, 203, 213, 217, 256, 257, 332 Arab-Israeli conflict, 266, 346 see also Israel Paley, Grace, 292 Paley, William S., 294 Panichas, George A., 365 Pareto, Vilfredo, 260, 371 Park, Robert E., 18–19, 260 Parker, Dan, 151 Parker family, 289

391

392

Index

Parrington, Vernon Louis, 141 Parsons, Talcott, 260 Partisan Review, 17 Parzen, Herbert, 110, 343–44 Patriot Games (Clancy), 336–37 Patriotic Gore (Wilson), 39 Patton, George, 207 Paulson, John, 283 Pavin, Corey, 298 PBS, 351, 352 Peacock, Eulace, 164 Peale, Norman Vincent, 43–44 Pearl Harbor, 66, 68, 69, 72, 169, 189, 219 Pearson, Drew, 199, 225, 226 Pegler, Westbrook, 151 Pelley, William Dudley, 180–81, 218 People’s Olympics (Barcelona), 154–55, 163 Pepper, Claude, 193 Perot, Ross, 325 Pettigrew, Thomas F., 191 Petty, James, 234 Pew Research Center, 130 Pheiffer, William T., 186 Philadelphia, Pa., 177, 308 Philadelphia Eagles, 286, 298 philanthropy and charitable giving, 10, 13, 16, 54, 55, 125, 127, 284–86, 317 Phillips, David Graham, 292, 296 Phillips, William, 17 Piccolo, Josephine, 203–4 Piedmont College, 212, 231–33 Pilchik, Ely I., 42n Pincus, Mark, 284 Pinkett, Mary, 255 Pinsker, Sanford, 292 Pittsburgh Platform, 4–5 Podhoretz, Norman, 21, 30, 61, 327, 361–63, 367, 369–72 Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 345, 353 pogrom(s), 241, 245, 246, 278, 330, 353 Crown Heights riot as, 239–45, 254 Poland, 199, 331–33 Political Behavior of American Jews, The (Fuchs), 275, 327 politics, 2, 10, 284, 320–42, 357–59 careers and candidacies, 189, 267, 269, 337 communism, see communism conservatism, see conservatism Democratic Party, 179, 192, 194, 195, 215, 271, 286, 322–25, 327, 360 and European Jews’ distrust of authority, 329–42, 357–58



foreign policy, 338–40, 369, 373 funding, 321, 323, 360 Judaism and, 327–28 liberalism, see liberalism lobbying, 54, 75, 125, 147, 249 Marxism, 19, 22, 26, 27, 35, 40, 42, 43, 126, 170, 257, 287 morality and, 338–40, 367–68 neoconservatism, 17, 326–28, 360–73 New Left, 141, 290, 331, 348, 358, 361 newness in, xi, 123 Orthodoxy and, 97, 324, 328, 329, 331–33 Protestant divide in, 51 religion and, 51, 333, 358, 365–66 Republican Party, 215, 244, 271, 321–24 socialism, see socialism as spectrum, 360 Pollack, Howard, 67, 69 Pollack, Jonathan Z. S., 277 Pollin, Abe, 315, 317 Pomerance, Rocky, 337 Pool, David de Sola, 75 Popper, Martin, 350 populism, 141, 144, 169–70, 173, 174, 192, 195, 215, 216 Porter, Sylvia, 284 Portrait of American Jews (Heilman), 15 Portrait of Jewish Americans, A (Pew Research Center), 130 Portraits of Jewish-American Heroes (Drucker), 346 Posen, Felix, 131, 132 Posen Foundation, 131, 132 Potok, Chaim, 292, 300 Potter, Lou, 351, 352 poverty, 278, 279, 287, 344 Powls, John, 249 Poznanski, Gustavus, 4 prejudice, 138, 140, 148, 247 postwar decline in, 269 see also antisemitism; racism Preserve the Olympic Ideal, 151 presidential candidates, 269 press, 181–83, 186–87 Pressel, Morgan, 299 Pressman, Lee, 205 Price, Charles, 253 Prime Eighteen, 94 Prinz, Joachim, 323, 344 “Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant, The” (Hansen), 46 Prodigal Sons (Bloom), 18

Index

progressive historiography, 141, 142, 148 progressivism, 10, 139, 140, 173, 174, 216 Promised City, The (Rischin), 288 “Promise Without Dogma” (Hook), 23, 25 Prophets of the Past (Brenner), 264 Protestant—Catholic—Jew (Herberg), 35, 38–56, 76, 129 Protestants, 2, 4, 51, 63, 104, 130, 216, 257, 268, 269 antisemitism and, 139 evangelical, 50–51, 268, 269, 372 immigration and, 144 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The, 171, 172, 181, 217 Public Interest, 17, 360, 362–66, 371 Purnick, Joyce, 245 Putnam, Robert D., 267–69 Quindlen, Anna, 251–52 Quinnipiac University, 269 Raab, Earl, 322 Rabbinical Assembly, 101, 103, 105, 106 Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), 114, 121 Rabbis and Lawyers (Auerbach), 15 Rabin, Yitzhak, 317, 346 Races of Europe, The (Ripley), 310 racism, 75–76, 136, 138, 145, 146, 151, 246–47, 353, 361 affirmative action and, 361–62 African Americans as guilty of, 247 Armstrong’s educational crusade and, 212, 219, 220, 222–23, 226–29, 233 Bilbo and, 201 civil rights movement and, see civil rights movement Crown Heights riot and, 246–47, 250–56, 259 Rankin and, 201–2 riots and, 250–56, 259 segregation, 49, 60, 167, 195, 201, 205, 213, 219, 222, 229, 233, 353 slavery, 235–36, 345, 352, 353 in the South, 50, 60, 183, 186, 192–94, 202–3, 210, 213, 225, 247 white supremacy, 201, 203, 208, 210, 212, 215, 219, 222, 227, 228 World War II and, 60 radio, 177, 181–83, 207, 350 Rakeffet-Rothkoff, Aaron, 300 Rand, Ayn, 334 Randall’s Island, 150, 159–62, 163–67

Rand Eye Institute, 93 Rankin, Jeanette, 182 Rankin, John E., 173, 182–89, 192–211, 213 Rashi, 41 Ratner, Bruce, 315 Rauh, Joseph, 344 Rawidowicz, Simon, 15 Reagan, Ronald, 22, 258, 323–24, 360, 370 Red Sport International, 156 Reflections of a Neoconservative (Kristol), 363 “Reflections on the Jewish Question” (Hook), 23, 34 refugees, 85, 175–77, 179, 183, 185, 189, 208, 221 Reich, Tova, 292 Reinsdorf, Jerry, 312 religion, 7, 130 in American life, xiii, 4, 6, 43–45, 47–51, 56, 268 conservatism and, 51, 97, 104, 110, 121, 324, 328, 365–68, 372 immigrants and, 47–49, 51–52 intermarriage and, 14–15, 48, 79, 121, 132, 270, 326 politics and, 51, 333, 358, 365–66 postwar revival in, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51 Protestant—Catholic—Jew (Herberg), 35, 38–56, 76, 129 race and, 49–50 separation of church and state, 26, 28, 36, 271, 357, 372 see also Christians, Christianity; God; Judaism Religious Factor, The (Lenski), 48 Remnick, David, 245 Rennert, Ira, 283 Republican Party, 215, 244, 271, 321–24 restaurants, 94–96, 122 “Rest of Us, The” (Birmingham), 294 Restructuring of American Religion, The (Wuthnow), 39, 51 retail empires, 283 Revolutionary Age, 40 Revolutionary War, x, 15 Reynolds, Robert R., 178, 179 Ribalow, Harold, 310 “Rich, Powerful, and Smart” (Hollinger), 297 Richler, Mordecai, 293 Riecken, Henry W., 262–63 Rieder, Jonathan, 248–50 Ring Magazine, 306 riots, 115, 247, 250–52, 259, 260 Crown Heights, 235–61, 351

393

394

Index

racism and, 250–56, 259 as rational, 260 Ripley, William Z., 310 Rischin, Moses, 2–3, 288 Rise of David Levinsky, The (Cahan), xiii, 7, 109, 293–94 Rise of the New York Intellectuals, The (Cooney), 18 Rivers, Joan, 130 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 274 Robbins, Jerome, xi Robbins, Tim, 247 Robertson, Pat, 372 Robinson, Edward G., 208 Robinson, Elroy, 167 Robinson, Jackie, 60, 305 Rodeo (ballet), 67 Rodgers, Richard, 59, 66n, 71, 353 Roiphe, Anne, 292 Roman Catholics, see Catholics Roof, Wade Clark, 48 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 58 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 57–58, 63, 67, 75, 129, 151, 178, 180, 182, 183, 188–89, 196, 197, 215, 217, 218, 219, 270, 322, 357, 369 Roosevelt, Theodore, 310 Rose, Arnold, 170 Rosen, Al, 300 Rosen, Moshe, 83 Rosenbaum, Samuel, 177 Rosenbaum, Thane, 292 Rosenbaum, Yankel, 235, 236, 238, 239, 243, 245–47, 252–56, 351 Rosenberg, Bernard, 342 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 205, 276 Rosenblatt, Yossele, 277 Rosenbloom, William F., 357 Rosenblum, Nina, 352 Rosenfeld, Isaac, 19, 293 Rosenman, Samuel, 218 Rosenthal, A. M., 240 Rosenthal, Ida, 284 Rosenwald, Julius, 276, 283 Rosenzweig, Franz, 41 Ross, Barney, 305 Ross, Edward A., 309–10 Ross, Stephen M., 285, 312n Rossiter, Clinton, 356 Rosten, Leo, 6 Roth, Cecil, 264 Roth, Henry, 292, 353 Roth, Philip, 292, 300, 353

Rothschild family, 170, 174, 196, 217 Rothschild Money Trust, The (Armstrong), 218 Routtenberg, Max, 102 Rubenstein, David, 283 Rubinstein, Helena, 284 Rubinstein, Richard, 24 Rubinstein, W. D., 326, 359 Rude, George, 260 Ruderman, Yaakov, 83 rural and agrarian life, 18, 138, 143–45, 170, 173–77, 179, 182–83, 189, 191, 193, 204, 279 Russia, 278, 330, 331, 333, 372 Russian Revolution, 197, 218, 277–78 Sabath, Adolph, 186 Sabbath, 7, 8, 14, 96, 101, 103, 109, 115, 128, 161 elevators, 93 Sacco and Vanzetti, 197 Sachar, Abram L., 77–78 Sachar, Howard M., 289, 290, 346 Sacks, Leon, 177–78 Sacred Survival (Woocher), 10 St. John, Jill, xi St. Louis Dispatch, 225 Salita, Dimitriy, 305 Salomon, Haym, 346 “Samooborona” (Zangwill), 337–38 Samuel, Rebecca, 14 Samueli, Henry, 316 Sandler, Herbert and Marion, 286 San Francisco Jewish Bulletin, 23 Sanger, Margaret, 289 Sarna, Jonathan D., xii, 15–16, 61, 104, 277 Sarnoff, David, 294 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 34 Schachter, Stanley, 262–63 Schaefer, George J., 176 Schafer, John C., 179–80, 182, 183, 188 Schayes, Dolph, 308 Schechter, Solomon, 101, 107 Schectman, Ossie, 307 Schenck, Joseph, 176 Schenck, Nicholas, 176 Schiff, Jacob, 216 Schindler, Alexander, 327 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 22, 141 Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, 91, 238, 258, 263 Schneider, William, 324 Schorsch, Ismar, 105–6

Index

Schulberg, Budd, 276, 291 Schultz, Howard, 315 Schulz, Debra L., 348 Schumpeter, Joseph, 39 Schwartz, Barry, 67 Schwarzman, Stephen, 283 Schwarzschild, Henry, 243n Schwerner, Michael, 124, 291, 344–49, 351, 354, 355 Schwerner, Nathan, 349 science, 25, 26, 32, 33, 54, 366 Second World War, The (Churchill), 39 Secrest, Meryle, 66n Secret Relationships Between Blacks and Jews, The (Nation of Islam), 235 secularism, 45, 104, 125, 130, 358, 367, 371 Jewish, xii–xiii, 8–9, 32, 34, 45, 53, 104, 110, 111, 123–33, 161, 266, 276, 304, 333, 354 Seekers, 262–63 Seiler, Eddie, 70 Seinfeld, Jerry, 12, 130, 131, 335 Selengut, Charles, 120–21 Selig, Bud, 311 Seltzer, Irwin M., 367 Seltzer, Robert, 3, 16 Selzer, Michael, 334, 358 Send These to Me (Higham), 137, 143, 146, 148 separation of church and state, 26, 28, 36, 271, 357, 372 Shahn, Ben, 345, 347 Shandler, Jeffrey, 277 Shapiro, Dani, 292 Shapiro, Daryl, xv Shapiro, Marc, xv Shapp, Milton, xi Sharot, Stephen, 51–52 Sharpton, Al, 237, 240, 244, 247, 255–56 Shawn, Ted, 67n Sheftall, Mordecai, 15 Sheingold, Carl A., 342 “Sheldon Adelson and the End of American Anti-Semitism” (Alterman), 266 Shlaes, Amity, 259 Shorris, Earl, 328 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 70 Shreveport Journal, 187 Siebert, Muriel, 284 Siegel, Bugsy, 284 Siegman, Henry, 245 Silberman, Charles, 147, 347 Silberstein, Laurence J., 132

Silow-Carroll, Andrew, 133 silver, 171, 181 Silver, Daniel J., 11 Silverman, Sarah, 130 Silverstone, Murray, 176 Simmel, Georg, 260 Simon, Caroline Klein, 289 Simon, Melvin and Herbert, 315 Simon, Neil, 74 Simon family, 289 Simons, James, 283 Simon Wiesenthal Center, 264, 417 Sinatra, Frank, 59 Singer, David, 113 “Single or Triple Melting Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870–1940” (Kennedy), 39 Sirovich, William I., 184 Six-Day War, 20, 30, 346, 362 Sklare, Marshall, 38, 52, 86–87, 102, 104–5, 108–9, 111, 329, 354 Skulnik, Menashe, 335 Slater, Robert, 310 slavery, 235–36, 345, 352, 353 Smelser, Neil, 260 Smith, Adam, 146 Smith, Al, 151 Smith, Gerald L. K., 192, 215, 231 Snider, Ed, 315, 317 Snyder, Daniel, 315–16 “Social Conservative Credo, A” (Krauthammer), 365–66 Social Democratic Federation, 162 “Social Discrimination Against Jews in America, 1830–1930” (Higham), 143, 145 socialism, 2, 6–8, 17, 19, 26, 27, 31, 35, 40, 54, 125, 127, 161, 179, 277–78, 287, 327n, 331–34, 360, 370 in America, 127–29, 157, 162, 296 sports and, 156–57, 163 Socialist Call, 163 Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SWSI), 156–57 social sciences, 364, 371, 373 Society of Humanistic Judaism, 6 Sociological Perspectives, 297 Sollors, Werner, 47 Solomon Gursky Was Here (Richler), 293 Soloveitchik, Haym, 121 Soloveitchik, Joseph B., 114 Sone, Law, 231 Sorin, Gerald, 327n, 346

395

396

Index

Soros, George, 283, 286, 313 South, 62, 170, 173, 176, 179, 189, 194, 204, 224 antisemitism in, 191–211, 213, 219 press in, 186–87 racism in, 50, 60, 183, 186, 192–94, 202–3, 210, 213, 225, 247 writers of, 17–18, 20 South Africa, 255–56, 291 Southern Methodist University (SMU), 230 South Korea, 278 South Pacific, 59–60 Soviet Union, 30, 31, 43, 172, 179–81, 189, 196–99, 218, 238, 264, 265, 280 break-up of, 238 Nazi Germany and, 31, 68, 69, 161 Olympics and, 149, 157 Politburo of, 198 Spain, 264 civil war in, 163 People’s Olympics planned in, 154–55, 163 Spiegelman, Art, 292 Spinoza, Baruch, 8 Spitz, Mark, 309 Sport Call, 158 sports, 167–68, 298–318 African Americans in, 305, 307 baseball, 60, 164, 167, 286, 299–303, 305, 308–9, 311–13, 316, 317 basketball, 164, 167, 286, 298, 299, 303, 305, 307–9, 312, 313, 315–17 boxing, 299, 303, 305–6 Communists and, 156, 157, 161–62 football, 167, 286, 298, 299, 303, 305, 309, 311, 312 golf, 298, 299, 311 hockey, 298, 303, 311, 313, 315, 316 Judaism and, 304 Olympics, see Olympics participation in, 298–311, 317 socialists and, 156–57, 163 team ownership, 286, 289, 298, 311–18 tennis, 298, 299, 311 women in, 299 workers’ sports festival (1937), 166–68 workers’ sports movement, 155–64, 166–68 World Labor Athletic Carnival (1936), 149–68 Stalin, Joseph, 31, 40, 197–99, 218 Stanford University, 23 Stanislawski, Michael, 245

Stark, Rodney, 139 Statue of Liberty, xiv, 147 status rivalries, 145–46 Stein, Andrew, 244 Steinbeck, John, 71 Steinberg, Milton, 41 Steinbrink, Meier, 76 Sterling, Donald, 315 Stern, David, 177, 298, 311, 317 Stern, Fritz, 355 Stern, Leonard, 289 Stern, Marc D., 245–46 Stern, Max, 289 Sternberg, Stuart, 316 Sterner, Jerry, 291–92 Stern family, 289 Stoddard, Lothrop, 201 Stoller, Sam, 167 Stone, Abram, 289 Stone, Hannah and Abraham, 289 Stone, I. F., 289 Stone, Lucy, 289 Stone family, 289 Strangers in the Land (Higham), 137–43, 148 Strauss, Levi, 346 Stryker, Lloyd Paul, 184 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 347, 348 Study of History, A (Toynbee), 39 Stuyvesant, Peter, 281 Styne, Julie, 70 suburbs, 6, 51, 108–10, 113, 115, 122, 129, 140, 146, 201, 248, 252, 311, 317, 321, 358 Supreme Court, 9, 130 Brown decision of, 49, 213, 233 Swan, Annalyn, 282 sweatshops, 276–79, 290 Synagogue Life (Heilman), 119 synagogues, 96, 99, 103, 113, 268 Taborville, Ohio, 163 Taft, Robert A., 192–93 Take Your Choice (Bilbo), 201 Tales of the South Pacific (Michener), 59 Talmud, 5, 9, 16, 86, 92, 99, 101, 103, 112, 120, 133, 327n Tanenbaum, Larry, 315, 317 Tarnished Dream, The (Dobkowski), 212 Tate, Allen, 18 Temple Emanu-El (Dallas), 230 Temple Emanu-El (Miami Beach), 97 Tennessee Valley Authority, 193

Index

tennis, 298, 299, 311 Tepper, David A., 283, 285 Texas, 215, 216 Texas Educational Association (TEA), 231–33 Texas Wesleyan College (TWC), 224, 230–31 Thankless Persuasion, The (Rossiter), 356 Thatcher, Margaret, 326 theodicy, 24 Thomas, Norman, 151, 162, 163 Thompson, E. P., 260 Thorkelson, Jacob, 180–83, 188 Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By (Shahn), 345, 347 Three Lives for Mississippi (Huie), 350 Thucydides, 344 Tillich, Paul, 41–43 Tilly, Charles, 260 Tisch, Preston Robert, 315 Tisch family, 317 Tishman, Peggy, 352–53 Tocqueville, Alexis de, x, 38, 141 Torah, 8, 12, 101, 106, 112, 114, 117, 119, 289, 295, 346, 357, 119, 327n Torah u-Madda, 111, 112, 120 Toronto Blue Jays, 301–2 totalitarianism, 30–31, 33, 74, 187, 360, 367 To the Golden Cities (Moore), 87–89, 97, 98 Tough Jews (Breines), 311 Touro College, 97 Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (Hook), 22 Towns, Forrest, 167 Townsend Plan, 178 Toynbee, Arnold, 39 Tradition, 121 Tradition Transformed (Sorin), 346 “Tragedy of German Jewry, The” (Hook), 31 Treasury of Yiddish Stories, A (Howe and Greenberg, eds.), 335 Trilling, Lionel, 17, 356 Trimble, Elliott, 228 Trinity College, 131 Triumph of American Capitalism, The (Hacker), 274 Trollope, Frances, x Trotsky, Leon, 197, 369 Truman, Harry S., 60, 217, 227, 322 Truth About My Alleged $50,000,000 Donation, The (Armstrong), 226 Tulane University, 221 Tupelo Journal, 187

Tuvim, Abraham, 159 Twain, Mark, 124 Ulysses ( Joyce), 261 Uneasy at Home (Dinnerstein), 212 Union for Traditional Judaism, 103–4 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 4, 6 United Jewish Appeal, xv, 23, 317 United Nations, 200, 209, 339 United States, see America United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 11 United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 102 universities and colleges, 62, 78, 96, 110–12, 137, 285, 290, 344, 362 affirmative action and, 361–62 Armstrong’s crusade and, 212–34 in Nazi Germany, 362 University of Chicago Press, 274 University of Miami, 96 University of Southern California, 96 Untermeyer, Samuel T., 171 Up From Slavery (Washington), 39 upward mobility, 92, 102, 138–40, 143–45, 169, 282, 289, 306, 311, 321, 358–59, 362 urbanization and urban life, 49, 138, 140, 143–46, 148, 170, 191, 246, 252, 278, 304, 311, 341, 343 Uris, Leon, 11, 64–65 Valley Beth Shalom Synagogue, 100 values, 266–67 Van Cleave, A. R., 232 Vandervoort, Benjamin H., 222n Vardaman, James K., 192 Varieties of History, The (Stern, ed.), 355 Varoff, George, 164–65, 167 Venezuela, 280 Vernon, Lillian, 284 Versailles Conference, 27 Viereck, Peter, 143–44 Vietnam War, 21, 141, 190, 338–39 Village Voice, 251, 261 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 151 Vilna, 333 Vilna Gaon, 333 Vital, David, 330, 331 Vladeck, Baruch Charney, 155, 159 Volnick, Stacy, 97 Voorhis, Jerry, 193

397

398

Index

voting rights, 219 Wade, Richard, 247–48 Wade, Stephen, 293 Wagner-Rogers Bill, 177, 179 Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 320 Wald, Alan, 17, 18 Walker, Perrin, 165 Wallace, Henry, 322 Wallant, Edward Lewis, 292 Wall Street, 172, 173, 182, 192, 195, 196, 215, 284, 292, 294 Wall Street Journal, 146, 254, 259 Walsh, Patrick J., 166 Walter, James E., 232, 233 Walzer, Michael, 346, 357 Warburg, Felix M., 216 Warburg, James P., 171 Warmerdam, Cornelius, 167 Warner brothers, 176 Washington, Booker T., 39 Washington, Denzel, 351 Washington, George, xii, 217 Washington Monument, 264 WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants), 2 Wasserstein, Bruce, 283 Wasserstein, Wendy, 284 Watts riot, 260 wealth, 217, 271, 276, 281–88, 297, 310, 313–15, 323 Weber, Max, 260 Weberman, Phineas A., 88 “We Can Change Our Moses but Not Our Noses” (Yezierska), xiii–xiv Weidenbaum, Murray, 334 Weigel, Gustave, 38 Weill, Al, 306 Weill, Sandy and Joan, 284–85 Weiss, David Halivni, 103 welfare programs, 259, 370, 373 Wertheimer, Jack, 105, 114 West, Cornel, 252, 261 West Indians, Caribbeans, 237, 247–49, 253, 255, 260 West Orange, N.J., 113–22 Weyl, Nathaniel, 326 What Makes Sammy Run?, 276, 291 Wheeler, Burton K., 173–75, 177, 180, 183, 195 When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (Bodner), 306 When Prophecy Fails (Festinger et al.), 262–63, 269, 271

Where Are We? The Inner Life of America’s Jews (Fein), 13 Whitfield, Stephen J., xv–xvi, 89, 91, 129–30, 291, 300, 348 Whitman, Walt, xi, xv Why Are Jews Liberals? (Podhoretz), 61 Wiesel, Elie, 340 Wilf, Ziggy, 315 Wilf family, 317 Wilkins, Josephine, 233 Will, George, 356 Willis, Ellen, 334 Willkie, Wendell, 199, 322 Willowski, Jacob David, 7–8, 109 Wilpon, Fred, 315, 318 Wilson, Clyde, 364–65, 368 Wilson, Edmund, 39 Wilson, Woodrow, 217, 369 Winchell, Walter, 180, 206–7, 210, 225, 226 Wine, Sherwin, 6 Winkler, Sheldon, 70 Winrod, Gerald B., 180–81, 218 Wise, Isaac Mayer, xii, 4 Wise, Stephen S., 209, 357 Wisse, Ruth, 20 Witness (Chambers), 39 Wolff, Lewis, 315 Wolin, Sheldon, 356 women abortion rights and, 267, 271, 323, 341–42, 358, 366 athletes, 299 feminism and, 50, 54, 97, 103, 118–19, 121, 290, 292, 294, 364, 371, 373 Judaism and, 99, 103, 113, 117–19 moguls, 284 Orthodox, 93–94 Wonders of America, The ( Joselit), 125 Woocher, Jonathan W., 10 Woodruff, John, 167 Workers Sports League of America, 158, 163 workers’ sports movement, 155–64 workers’ sports festival (1937), 166–68 World Labor Athletic Carnival (1936), 149–68 Workers World, 256 Workmen’s Circle, 160 World Labor Athletic Carnival, 149–68 World of Our Fathers (Howe), 21, 25, 128, 287–88, 303–4 World War I, 65, 140, 166, 172–75, 179, 180, 217 antisemitism and, 138–40

Index

World War II, 20, 27, 34, 57–58, 195, 207, 217, 218, 231–32, 265, 268–69, 274, 276, 345 American Jews and, 57–79 antisemitism decline following, 59, 60, 137, 146, 314, 317 chaplains in, 72–74 composers and, 65–71 congressional isolationism and antisemitism in approach to, 169–90 D-Day landings in, 75 Hollywood and, 59, 174–76 Holocaust in, see Holocaust Japan in, see Japan, in World War II lend-lease in, 174 New York intellectuals and, 20 racial attitudes and, 60 social and economic changes following, 140, 317 writers and, 64–65 Wortmann, Dietrich, 154, 166 Wouk, Herman, 64 Wright, Fielding, 224 writers, see literature and writers Wuthnow, Robert, 39, 51 Yekl (Cahan), 293, 299 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 261 Yeshiva, The (Grade), 295 yeshivas, 91, 105, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118–21, 295 Yeshiva University, xii–xiii, 8, 13, 78, 101, 111, 112, 116, 118, 121, 126, 283

Yezierska, Anzia, xiii–xiv, 292 Yiddish culture, 6–8, 21, 25, 51, 54, 127, 128, 147, 198, 266, 329 children’s books and magazines, 62, 65 humor, 335 literature, 294–95, 334–35 Yom HaShoah, 11 Yom Kippur, 89, 302, 305n, 308–9 Young Lions (Garrett), 64 Zaitz, Dimitri, 167 Zakhor (Yerushalmi), 261 Zangwill, Israel, xiv, 337–38, 353 Zanuck, Darryl, 176 Zellner, Dorothy Miller, 348 Zion in America (Feingold), 289, 290 Zionism, xi, 2, 9–11, 22–24, 26–29, 33, 34, 51, 53–55, 77, 104, 127, 175, 181–82, 205, 219, 231, 264, 330–34, 354 Rankin on, 199–200 “Zionism” (Cohen), 27 Zionism Reconsidered (Selzer), 334 Zionists, The (Armstrong), 219 Zipperstein, Steven J., 236–37 Zuckerberg, Mark, 284 Zuckerman, Mortimer, 285 Zukor, Adolph, 176 Zwillenberg, Joe, 283 Zwillman, Longy, 284

399